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 I have a bunch of badly outdated travel guides, but the most recent one added to the shelf is Lonely Planet’s Pocket Rome: Top Experiences – Local Life.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
In honor of International Women’s Day today, here are two novels that feature strong women. I reread the first 11 pages of this paperback to refresh my memory before writing this review. And immediately, I was right back as a passenger on the wild ride of this fictional world. The first clue to the nature
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When Consciousness Itself is the Protagonist: A Reading List I’ll let River Halen themselves describe the origin of this list of “books that bend reality and the self”: As I was writing my book Dream Rooms, a book about the years that led up to my coming out as trans, I found myself fascinated by
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Related Post: This week I offer two selections because there’s not much I can say about #3 without giving away the whole point. #2 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce © 1916 Date read: ca. 1966 or 1967 While I now credit Gillian Flynn’s novel Gone Girl with opening
