Penguin Classics and Others Work to Diversify Offerings From the Canon “Across the industry, publishers are releasing titles by authors who were previously marginalized or entirely lost to history.” The critical and commercial success of these titles is a result of a combination of factors: initiative on the part of writers’ families or estates; changing […]
The Curious Creation of Anna Kavan Although I’ve heard of Anna Kavan—mostly through occasional references to her works—I know nothing about her. But I’ll have to change that, after reading this profile in the New Yorker. She examined the nature of identity, both in her writing and in her personal life. Not long after being
I’m Not Feeling Good at All “The perplexingly alienated women of recent American fiction” Jess Bergman writes, “the new heroines of contemporary fiction possess a kind of anhedonic equanimity, more numb than overwhelmed.” Doing No Harm: A Look at Writing Suicide and Self-Harm in Fiction Alice Nuttall makes the case that “Suicide and self-harm are
“What Do I Know To Be True?”: Emma Copley Eisenberg on Truth in Nonfiction, Writing Trauma, and The Dead Girl Newsroom Jacqueline Alnes talks with Emma Copley Eisenberg, author of true-crime book The Third Rainbow Girl, “about what it means to seek truth in nonfiction, and how writing the personal can allow for more complicated
My mistress Melancholy Mary Ann Lund, associate professor in Renaissance English literature at the University of Leicester in the UK, discusses Robert Burton (1577-1640) and his The Anatomy of Melancholy, “the most pervasive and elusive of Renaissance diseases.” “One of the great achievements of The Anatomy of Melancholy is to draw together the collective wisdom
Top 10 books of eco-fiction A blog challenge that I’m working on for next month includes a novel about climate fiction. This challenge made me realize that I haven’t read many works in which this topic figures prominently. I was therefore glad to come across this list by Michael Christie, whose recent novel Greenwood, set
HOME SWEET HO…MAYBE NOT: THE HAUNTED HOUSE IN FICTION So what is it about the haunted house that spans media types? What is it about the concept that transfixes both audience in the land of imagination, and truth seekers in the science world? Why is this one of those subjects that bridges the gap between
American Dirt Starts An Important Conversation But Not The One Author Intended I avoided the recent brouhaha over Jeanine Cummins’ novel American Dirt while it was developing, but most of the dust seems to have settled now. If you looking for a summary of the situation, this article provides a good overview. It also contains
The Subjective Mood Adam O’Fallon Price describes Muriel Spark’s novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie like this: “The novel does not settle for merely telling a story and telling it well; it also on some level considers that story and frames it, in doing so giving the narrative a greater dimensionality, what we might
The Million Basic Plots Novelist and screenwriter Ned Beauman laments the existence of the website TV Tropes, which breaks down the plots of all forms of popular-culture storytelling into such minute parts as to prevent him from coming up with any original plot elements. I don’t write fiction but I love reading it, and I
