“First of all, writing is a way to find community with others, to discover whether you share judgment with them. Secondly, literary-critical debates are efforts to express what someone in a culture sees as urgent and important. Interpretation (or what I understand as simply “reading”) is where a culture comes to consciousness of itself. . […]
Quotation: Writing About Literature Read More »
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
Plotter, Pantser, Scribbler, Scribe Can we get rid of the “plotter vs. pantser” binary already? In light of last month’s quotations around NaNoWriMo, this piece seems like the logical introduction for the weekly links list. What If We’ve Been Misunderstanding Monsters? A history of how literary monsters have changed over the centuries. “Post-Enlightenment, literary monsters
What I Learned About My Writing By Seeing Only The Punctuation I’ve saved this piece until after NaNoWriMo so as not to distract you from the all-important task of writing. But once you’ve completed that draft of your novel, take a look at this article (which I find fascinating) and see if it can help
Indie Bookseller Panel Tackles Free Expression News items like this are becoming distressingly frequent. Publishers Weekly reports on a virtual discussion by regional independent bookselling associations. Powell’s Books Survived Amazon. Can It Reinvent Itself After the Pandemic? “As much as any city, Portland, Ore., has been through hell. Its landmark store, Powell’s Books, must finally
This month we begin with Sigrid Nunez’s What Are You Going Through. Here’s the description from Goodreads: A woman describes a series of encounters she has with various people in the ordinary course of her life: an ex she runs into by chance at a public forum, an Airbnb owner unsure how to interact with
6 Degrees of Separation: “Messy, messy lives” Read More »
The Book Review Turns 125 The New York Times is celebrating the 125th anniversary of its Book Review with a selection from its archives. Here you’ll find links to reviews of past books including The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston, Roots by Alex Haley, and The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, as well as
The great book shortage of 2021, explained Those exhortations you’ve heard about ordering holiday gifts early include books. My daughter reminded me just a couple of days ago to get my book requests to her soon. In defence of memoirs – a way to grip our story-shaped lives After studying life stories and their nonfiction
All Our Possible Lives: On Sylvia Plath, Matt Haig, and the Female Suicide Narrative “Savannah Marciezyk Compares Textual Interpretations of The Midnight Library and The Bell Jar” Sylvia Plath and Matt Haig have much in common, but the differences between their receptions and textual interpretations are remarkable. Plath’s novel is famously (and controversially) autobiographical. Haig
