Authors Who Write Outstanding Mystery Series and Stellar Standalones One question that comes up periodically on book blogs is this: Do you prefer to read series or standalone novels? But this article by novelist Alicia Beckman reminded me that there’s also another side to this question: Do authors prefer to write series or standalone books? […]
Happy New Year! Welcome to the first blog post of the year! NaJoWriMo Journal Writing Challenge Starts January 1st I know a lot of book bloggers are also writers. Many participate in NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, every November. Since I don’t write fiction, I’ve always been a little jealous. But, if you write in
The dawn of AI has come, and its implications for education couldn’t be more significant The anxiety and questions about AI-generated writing continue: “t’s safe to say we can expect some challenging years ahead.” Vitomir Kovanovic, Senior Lecturer in Learning Analytics at the University of South Australia, speculates. Category: Writing Women Talking Embraces the Drama
A (hopefully premature) obituary for Bookforum and the magazines that connect us David L. Ulin laments the closing of Bookforum, a review journal “positioned in the middle territory between service journalism and the academy”: To engage with an issue has long felt to me like going to a fabulous party where the guests are not
We Need Diverse Books Launches #BooksSaveLives Initiative Against Censorship We Need Diverse Books, an organization formed in 2014 “to advocate for diversity and inclusion in the publishing industry,” has launched its #BooksSaveLives initiative with “as much as $10,000 in grants to schools and libraries in underserved communities so they can purchase challenged and banned books
Why I teach a course connecting Taylor Swift’s songs to the works of Shakespeare, Hitchcock and Plath Elizabeth Scala, professor of English at The University of Texas at Austin, explains how and why she created the course “The Taylor Swift Songbook,” an introductory English course. Categories: Literary Criticism, Literary History, Reading Why read old books?
Atoms as They Fall Upon the Mind This article from The Point magazine extols James Joyce’s Ulysses as an example of the experimental literary technique of stream of consciousness: “When in prose carefully structured to imitate the patterns of the mind these aspects of consciousness reveal themselves to us as they do in life, through
On the End of the Canon Wars This think piece by John Michael Colón examines the question of whether and, if so, how a “liberal education” (which really means study across the humanities) benefits students. Categories: Literary Criticism, Literary History, Literature & Culture, Reading A dinosaur is a story “in science as in fiction, the
The Dreariness of Book Club Discussions Novelist and critic Naomi Kanakia, who belongs to two book clubs, uses the context of her book group discussions to examine why we read fiction. The point of novels, she writes, “is that something happened. Something was at stake in this story. Characters made decisions. Those decisions had consequences.
PEN America Rejects Calls to Cancel Coney Barrett Book Last week’s Literary Links included an article about Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s book advance as well as an article about PEN America’s report on diversity in the publishing industry. This week we have a link to Publishers Weekly’s news that PEN America has condemned the
