Literary History

Last Week's Links

Literary Links

SCI-FI DOESN’T HAVE TO BE DEPRESSING: WELCOME TO SOLARPUNK Welcome to solarpunk, a new genre within science fiction that is a reaction against the perceived pessimism of present-day sci-fi and hopes to bring optimistic stories about the future with the aim of encouraging people to change the present. The first book that explicitly identified as […]

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Last Week's Links

Literary Links

Lots of interesting literary-related articles this week. Crime writers react with fury to claim their books hinder rape trials The Staunch prize was founded in 2018 to honor a thriller ““in which no woman is beaten, stalked, sexually exploited, raped or murdered.” This article reports on the many writers, including Val McDermid and Sophie Hannah,

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Last Week's Links

Literary Links

I came across so many interesting articles this week that it’s hard to limit my list. Here are some of my favorites. On the Centennial of Iris Murdoch’s Birth, Remembering a 20th-Century Giant The intensity of Murdoch’s gaze, boring into you from the dust jackets of her many novels, seemed a promise of the books’

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Last Week's Links

Literary Links

These are some of the literature-related articles from around the web that caught my eye over the past week. Quartzy    HALF OF ALL TRANSLATED BOOKS IN THE US COME FROM JUST NINE COUNTRIES This one caught my eye because I’m trying to read more books translated from other languages this year.  The good news:

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Quotation: Susan Sontag Was a Monster

“She took things too seriously. She was difficult and unyielding. That’s why Susan Sontag’s work matters so much even now.” This is how I see her monstrosity: residing not in whether she was or was not likeable, but in her relentlessness, and her refusal to pander. The word ‘monster’ comes from the Latin monere, to

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New Life for Old Classics, as Their Copyrights Run Out

Source: New Life for Old Classics, as Their Copyrights Run Out – The New York Times This coming year marks the first time in two decades that a large body of copyrighted works will lose their protected status — a shift that will have profound consequences for publishers and literary estates, which stand to lose

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Last Week's Links

Internet reading that caught my eye over the past week. Megan Abbott’s Bloodthirsty Murderesses The thriller writer probes the psychological underpinnings of female rage. Because, Abbott says, “girls are darker than boys.” New Black Gothic Sheri-Marie Harrison, associate professor of English at the University of Missouri, explains what she calls the new black Gothic in

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The Classics Spin #12: “Darkness at Noon”

Related Post: The Classics Spin #12 Koestler, Arthur. Darkness at Noon Translated by Daphne Hardy Original publication date: 1940 Rpt. New York: Bantam Books, 1966 ISBN 0–553–26595–4   Originally written in German and translated into English by Koestler’s companion Daphne Hardy, Darkness at Noon was first published in 1940. Set in an unnamed country, the

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‘All the King’s Men,’ Now 70, Has a Touch of 2016 – The New York Times

I reread “All the King’s Men” recently, in the wake of the Ohio and Florida primaries. It remains a salty, living thing. There’s no need for literary or political pundits to bring in the defibrillators. It is also eerily prescient, in its portrait of the rise of a demagogue, about some of the dark uses

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On Novels and Novelists

On Novels and Novelists

Writing Tips: James Lee Burke Usually I would put writing tips from a big-time author under the heading “on writing” rather than “on novels and novelists.” But I’m including these tips from one of my favorite mystery writers, James Lee Burke, here because he has written them out as an essay rather than a list

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