This month we start with “a (frightening) short story,” “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson. This is probably the story Jackson is best known for. It appeared in The New Yorker in 1948. What I love about Shirley Jackson’s work is the way she gradually makes the reader realize that things are not always what they […]
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“But reading is actually the opposite of escape. No story can live without the reader’s emotional participation. The writer’s words are but directions to a place within the reader where sadness and joy and grief and curiosity and boredom and hope and despair reside. The words alone are a skeleton; the reader’s felt responses to
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Each year the U.S. celebrates National Hispanic Heritage Month from September 15 to October 15. The holiday was started by President Lyndon Johnson as Hispanic Heritage Week in 1968 and was expanded to a month by President Ronald Reagan in 1988. The observation begins on September 15 because that date is the anniversary of independence
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“When I embark on a writing project, my characters come to tell me their backstory. Very little of it—perhaps none—might be referred to in the final draft, but it’s there nonetheless, hiding in the decisions that each character makes, driving their reaction to every event. They tell me, these characters, of past incidents, big and
Quotation: “characters come to tell me their backstory” Read More »
Censorship on the Rise Worldwide A report from Publishers Weekly: “Since the start of the Covid pandemic, there’s been a rise in instances of government censorship of books around the world.” 3 Things to Know About the Ending of a Story I see a lot of discussion in literature-related posts about fictional introductions, but not
In this month’s 6 Degrees of Separation I expressed my love for big, sprawling family sagas. I think that love is one part of my motivation for choosing We Are the Brennans as my July 2021 Book of the Month book. Another motivator was Joyce Carol Oates’s memorable novel We Were the Mulvaneys (scroll down
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Related Post: Announcing Life Stories in Literature Back in May when I worked at pulling together all the many threads of appreciating life stories in literature, I wrote that once I realized how life stories function in fiction, I began to see them everywhere in the novels I read. But my realization didn’t end with
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THE GREAT RIGHT-WING PUBLISHING DIVIDE WIDENS If you’re still keeping up with the publishing hubbub, here’s another story on the formation of a new publishing company being started by a couple of conservative industry executives, “Louise Burke, a former top publisher at Simon & Schuster, and Kate Hartson, the former editorial director at Hachette Book
Cyberpunk: Everything You Did (and Maybe Didn’t) Want to Know I don’t know about you, but I have trouble keeping up with the terminology used to describe some of the new kinds of literature. Here Caitlin Hobbs explains that the term cyberpunk, which has its roots in science fiction, “didn’t gain traction as a recognized
Hard Times: Mental Health Books 2021 From Publishers Weekly: The tumult of the past 15 months has exacerbated common mental health concerns, among them trauma, anxiety, grief, and isolation. PW spoke with authors and editors about the emotional scars of the pandemic, and how their forthcoming books offer empathy, community, and guidance. Unforgettable reads focusing
