Literary Criticism

Monday Miscellany

How the literary female detective has changed In The Christian Science Monitor Randy Dotinga says of Scottish mystery writer Denise Mina: [she] has become one of the finest mystery writers of the 21st century. Her deeply perceptive grasp on the inner lives of crooks, cops, journalists, and their families has allowed her books to transcend […]

Monday Miscellany Read More »

Monday Miscellany

When novels change history As with so many concepts in literature, the French have an elegant word for it: uchronie. For Anglophone readers and writers, we have to make do with such unwieldy terms as “counterfactual novels”, “alternate timelines” and “allohistories” to describe these books. Uchronie is a neologism modelled on Utopia – a “no-time”

Monday Miscellany Read More »

Monday Miscellany

Books | Talking Book and Braille Library in Seattle is a volunteer wonder | Seattle Times Newspaper The Washington Talking Book and Braille Library serves more than 10,000 state residents and runs on the best efforts of 400 volunteers, providing recorded and Braille books for anyone with a disability that prevents them from reading books

Monday Miscellany Read More »

Monday Miscellany

Publishing Words: The Future of Books Writing in The Harvard Crimson, Sofie C. Brooks discusses how the rise of ebooks may change the publishing industry: What the publishing industry faces right now is a customer base that demands a digital product even as the technology that makes these products possible is still in its early

Monday Miscellany Read More »

Why is it so hard to review mediocre books?

It’s easy to talk about books that are either amazingly good or blatantly bad; we usually have no trouble articulating the points that we either love or loathe. But it’s often hard to find much of anything to say about a book that we think is just so-so, mediocre, ordinary—perhaps the nicest term is unremarkable.

Why is it so hard to review mediocre books? Read More »

Monday Miscellany

Why is dystopia so appealing to young adults? A dystopia is an imaginary world in which people live dehumanized lives of fear and subjugation; it’s the opposite of utopia. In this piece YA writer Moira Young examines why distopian novels such as Suzanne Collins’s recent Hunger Games trilogy are so popular with young people: Books

Monday Miscellany Read More »

Monday Miscellany

Book lovers rake in the reading as publishers release fall titles It’s time to trade in the beach reads for the usually longer and more serious fall reads. The Sacramento Bee‘s Allen Pierleoni lists upcoming new titles, some by big-name authors (think Joan Didion, Lee Child, Stephen King, Alice Hoffman, and Sue Grafton ) in

Monday Miscellany Read More »

Monday Miscellany

Nine seems to be this week’s lucky number. Nine Pilgrimages For the Lover of Western Literature A pilgrimage is the focal point around which a journey wraps, not the raison d’etre per se (that is the journey itself) but rather the pulley on the far end of the rope that ratchets you out of your

Monday Miscellany Read More »

Monday Miscellany

Weirdest Writer Deaths “Here are some of the most bizarre ways that writers have had their story end.” Rate This Article: What’s Wrong with the Culture of Critique The Internet-begotten abundance of absolutely everything has given rise to a parallel universe of stars, rankings, most-recommended lists, and other valuations designed to help us sort the

Monday Miscellany Read More »

Scroll to Top