Fiction

On Novels and Novelists

On Novels and Novelists

Julianne Moore on Forging a Bond With Alzheimer’s Patients Cara Buckley reports on how Julianne Moore prepared for her role in the film of Still Alice, a performance that won her an Oscar for best actress. Moore played Alice Howland, a Harvard cognifive psychologist with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. (Early-onset Alzheimer’s is defined as onset before […]

On Novels and Novelists Read More »

bookshelves: Literature and Psychology

Reading in Flow

Related Posts: Flow Getting Lost in a Good Book: Scientific Research on Reading Flow and the Reading Process If you’ve ever had the experience of getting lost in a good book, you’ve experienced flow. Csikszentmihalyi’s general characteristics of flow describe this experience. The key to flow is complete absorption in an activity. For readers, the

Reading in Flow Read More »

On Novels and Novelists

Harper Lee, Margaret Atwood, Jonathan Franzen, Marilynne Robinson, Richard Ford, Anne Tyler

Man in Hole: Turning novels’ plots into data points Dan Piepenbring reports for The Paris Review on an example of digital humanities, or the application of big-data crunching to literary analysis: Motherboard has a new article about Matthew Jockers, a University of Nebraska English professor who’s been studying what he calls “the relationship between sentiment

Harper Lee, Margaret Atwood, Jonathan Franzen, Marilynne Robinson, Richard Ford, Anne Tyler Read More »

Harper Lee Lawyer Offers More Details on Discovery of New Book – NYTimes.com

Harper Lee Lawyer Offers More Details on Discovery of New Book – NYTimes.com. Last week’s announcement that another novel by Harper Lee, author of the beloved classic To Kill a Mockingbird, had been discovered and would be published in July stirred up a lot of controversy and questions. The recently discovered novel is titled Go

Harper Lee Lawyer Offers More Details on Discovery of New Book – NYTimes.com Read More »

bookshelves: Literature and Psychology

Review: “The Girl on the Train,” Paula Hawkins

Hawkins, Paula. The Girl on the Train New York: Penguin Group, 2015 ISBN 978–1–59463–366–9 Rachel rides the same train every day on her commute to and from London, right past the street where she and her husband used to live. She’s still reeling with despair over the failure of her marriage two years earlier. Looking

Review: “The Girl on the Train,” Paula Hawkins Read More »

The Classics Club

Classics Club Spin #8: “Revolutionary Road”

Related Post: CLASSICS CLUB SPIN #8 Yates, Richard. Revolutionary Road Original publication date: 1961 Rpt. Random House, 2008 eISBN 978–0–307–45627–4 This novel is most often described as an anti-suburban tract, a condemnation of the life of conformity and veiled unhappiness that flourished in the U.S. after World War II. And it is that. But it’s

Classics Club Spin #8: “Revolutionary Road” Read More »

Novels That Feature a Character’s Diary or Journal

In Gillian Flynn’s novel Gone Girl, Amy creates a fake diary to cast suspicion about her disappearance on her husband. Although Amy’s diary is only one piece in this novel’s central puzzle, some other works of fiction feature a diary format as their primary structure. Here are some fictional works that incorporate a character’s diary

Novels That Feature a Character’s Diary or Journal Read More »

bookshelves: Literature and Psychology

Ghosts and Other Literary Horrors

  For weeks we’ve been building up to Halloween with lists and tales about the spookiest and scariest stories ever written. The Turn of the Screw by Henry James is one of the best known ghost stories in the English language. Part of the reason this novella is so famous is that it leaves unspecified

Ghosts and Other Literary Horrors Read More »

The Classics Club

Gothic Elements in Shirley Jackson’s “We Have Always Lived in the Castle”

Gothic literature features characteristics such as magic, mystery, chivalry, horror, clanking chains, ghosts, and dark castles to create a spooky atmosphere rife with foreboding and possibility. Over time Gothic emphasis changed from reliance on these external trappings for their own sake to a focus on the inner workings of the human psyche that the Gothic

Gothic Elements in Shirley Jackson’s “We Have Always Lived in the Castle” Read More »

Monday Miscellany

Open Library Open Library is an open, editable library catalog with an attractive facade and a lofty mission. The mission? To build an online catalog with a web page for every book ever published. The best part? You can help. From the homepage, click Sign Up, then create a free Open Library account in two

Monday Miscellany Read More »

Scroll to Top