New Report Explores ‘Engagement’ with Books, Digital Media A new report released this week is being billed as the first study to capture critical data about how consumers “engage” with books within a “connected media ecosystem” that includes video games, TV, and movies. According to Publishers Weekly, “The study’s focus on consumer ‘engagement’ with books—vs. […]
Writers’ Inner Voices Many writers report vivid experiences of ‘hearing’ the voices of the characters they create and having characters who talk back to them, rebel, and ‘do their own thing’. It’s an experience described by a wide range of authors from Enid Blyton, Alice Walker, Quentin Tarantino and Charles Dickens through to Samuel Beckett,
A Sickness in the Air “Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind imagines the world after a global disaster, but its real subject is white entitlement.” [Alam] has an interior barometer exquisitely calibrated to signifiers of social class: fashion houses, just-trendy-enough restaurants, interiors detailed with the loving eye of a copywriter for a high-end furniture catalog.
What’s Behind the Label ‘Domestic Fiction’? Soledad Fox Maura, professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at Williams College and soon-to-debut novelist, wonders why World Cat “(the biggest library search engine on the planet)” has classified her upcoming novel, Madrid Again, as domestic fiction: Why would my novel, about an itinerant bilingual mother and daughter who
Using Neuroscience to Understand Reading Slumps Joshua C. Craig, who spent an undergraduate year studying neuroscience, read up on the scientific literature to see what the current thinking is on the subject of reading slumps. He does a good job of making the subject accessible for those of us without a hefty science background. A
American novelist Patricia Highsmith was born on this day 100 years ago (January 19, 1921) in Fort Worth, Texas. She died on February 4, 1995. In between, her life was marked by chronic cycles of depression, anorexia, and alcoholism. She was a misanthrope who preferred the company of animals to that of people. She was
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Reading, That Strange and Uniquely Human Thing “How we evolved to read is a story of one creative species.” Lydia Wilson explains how writing developed from a system to record the ownership of particular goods to one capable of creating great works of literature. Turning the Page on the Year “If ever there were a
We Need More Dark Stories with Hopeful Endings Author Les Edgerton believes that dark novels needn’t have completely dark endings: “To endure page after page of never-ending pain and sorrow and to culminate in the same morass of tragedy would only be nihilism, and the best books don’t end like that.” Here he lists some
How Crime Writers Use Unreliable Narrators to Add Suspense Emily Martin uses the categories that William Riggan explores in his book Pícaros, Madmen, Naifs, and Clowns: The Unreliable First-Person Narrator to look at ways crime writers employ them to build suspense. The 2021 Tournament of Books Long List Next March’s Tournament of Books, something that
The 50 Greatest Apocalypse Novels “Apropos of . . . Nothing” I’m including this list here because, really, how could I not? How many of these have you read? I’ve read five, and I have two more on the top of my TBR pile. I think that’s pretty good, given that I usually avoid most
