Against the objectification of books (or, some thoughts on The Discourse). Brittany Allen addresses the tendency of readers who brag about how fast they read and how very many books they read in a given amount of time. (Examples of this trend most often pop up in those end-of-year reading statistics that Goodreads reports.) “Why […]
Discover the Top Edgar® Award-Winning Mysteries of 2024 One of the flagship productions of PBS (public broadcasting in the U.S.) is MASTERPIECE Mystery! It’s therefore not surprising that PBS recommends that we consider adding to our summer reading lists the books that won this year’s Edgar Awards. American Writers Festival Ultimate Reading List Next Sunday,
Related Posts: #9 Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn © 2012 Date read: 7/10/2012 I read this book the year after I got my psychology degree focusing on life stories. Life story writing is nonfiction, but in Gone Girl I immediately realized that Flynn uses life story elements to build the characterization of her two main
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Between the Book Club and BookTok: Community Reading in Montreal Adam Christopher Hill tells the story of Page Break, a weekly gathering at De Stiil bookstore in Montreal. Page Break is a time when readers come together, give up their phones, and read silently for an hour. This approach to reading differs from most book
The Real Science Behind Dark Matter Will Melt Your Gray Matter The multiverse is a compelling image for Life Stories in Literature because it offers the possibilities of multiple lives. The first novel I remember that used this concept is Dark Matter by Blake Crouch. The novel is now being made into a series for
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What Fiction Writing Shares With Psychotherapy “Emily Howes Considers the Similarities Between Two Therapeutic Practices” I have a curious double professional identity. I am both a novelist and a therapist; both a teller of tales, and a listener to them. I spend my days in my own imagination or settling into the deepest corners of
For this month’s starting point we were told to look on our shelves for a travel guide. I have a bunch of badly outdated travel guides, but the most recent one added to the shelf is Lonely Planet’s Pocket Rome: Top Experiences – Local Life. There’s a reason why this book is on the shelf:
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The Forgotten Women Who Shaped the Roman Empire Kudos to Atlas Obscura for their series She Was There, in which female scholars participate in “writing long-forgotten women back into history.” I find the movement to give voice to marginalized people who have been erased from history one of the most interesting and vital elements within
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Set in the Kensington section of Philadelphia, Long Bright River humanizes the problems U.S. cities and their residents struggle with. Formerly a center of business and industry, Kensington is now home to abandoned and decaying former warehouses and factories, remnants of an earlier era when commerce and industry flourished. As the novel opens, a police
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‘God forbid that a dog should die’: when Goodreads reviews go bad “I’m a professional critic, and an author of a literary novel. I’m a snob. I care about my book, and the authors I feel are my competitors,” writes Lauren Oyler. In this piece, another chapter in the continuous Goodreads controversy, she states that
