The Book That Unleashed American Grief “John Gunther’s Death Be Not Proud defied a nation’s reluctance to describe personal loss.” Deborah Cohen discusses Death Be Not Proud, published in 1949, John Gunther’s account of the his son’s death at age 17 from a brain tumor. The publisher, Harper & Brothers, feared at the time that […]
Women’s History Month at New York Public Library “This March, The New York Public Library celebrates Women’s History Month with recommended reading, spotlights on significant women librarians from our 125 year history, events and programs, and more.” Categories: Literary History, Literary Criticism 13 Empowering Memoirs Written by Women In honor of Women’s History Month. Categories:
A Literary Guide to Understanding Ukraine, Past and Present Ukrainians have long-prepared for this moment. Their rich land has been invaded many times before and their people have suffered innumerable losses for generations. The Ukrainian language and culture has nearly been eradicated at multiple points in their long history, and they’ve been fighting an active
Poll Shows Majority Oppose Banning Books About History, Race “According to a recent CBS News/YouGov poll, a large majority of Americans don’t think books that discuss race, criticize America’s history of slavery, or share different political views should be banned from school libraries or classrooms.” Categories: Censorship Feminist Phantasms: Recent Haunted House Novels by Women
How Contemporary Literary Fiction Is Reclaiming the Insanity Arc and Humanizing Women Dee Das starts her essay with this premise: A hundred or so years ago, women were silenced into submission by psychiatry under the label of ‘insane’, every time they posed a threat to the models of domesticity. Any woman who didn’t conform to
Making Story Structure Your Own I’ve recently been working on reviews of two Big Books: All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr (530 pages) To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara (704 pages) Big Books contain so much that finding a way into discussing them is often a challenge. For both of these novels I’ve
I Needed to Know if My Favorite Books Were Products of Cultural Appropriation We hear the term cultural appropriation often in publishing circles, but what exactly does it mean? Filipino American writer Cindy Fazzi wanted to evaluate whether the novels she grew up loving were examples of cultural appropriation that gave her inaccurate or inadequate
How to Remember What You Read First of all, back in my pre-internet life I taught advanced composition at the college level, a course that included topics such as critical thinking and vetting research sources. That approach to information has become exponentially more important now, so it’s the first thing I do whenever I discover
Textual Healing: The Novel World of Bibliotherapy From The Walrus, a Canadian publication: “Though not a stand-alone clinical practice in Canada, clinical bibliotherapy is a method used by professionals who already have certification in counselling, therapy, and clinical therapy and want to help patients seeking an additional outlet.” But be certain to see also the
Why does experiencing ‘flow’ feel so good? A communication scientist explains I’ve written here about flow before (here and here). In this article Richard Huskey, an assistant professor of communication and cognitive science at the University of California, Davis, discusses how the concept of flow figures into his resolutions for 2022. He has been studying flow
