The Essential Kate Atkinson “Surprising, versatile, dark and funny, the British writer has something for (almost) everyone.” Kate Atkinson’s 1995 novel Behind the Scenes at the Museum stands atop my list of Books to Reread, and I swear that some September (my traditional rereading month) I’m going to get to it. Just about everyone in […]
If you’re still looking for some short reads to hit your annual reading goal, here are some suggestions. 4 Novellas I’ve Come Across (Links are to the Goodreads description.) The Last Children of Tokyo by Yoko Tawada (138 pages) The Odd Woman and the City by Vivian Gornick (192 pages) Seascraper by Benjamin Wood (176
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Related Post: In addition to three works of nonfiction, I also listened to two novels this month. We learn about humanity from stories of individual lives. In A Calamity of Souls David Baldacci introduced us to two people fighting for civil rights during the Jim Crow era in the American South. The historical novel Strangers in
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What’s Real and What’s Not: Gish Jen on Writing Between the Factual Lines “Finding the sweet spot between memoir and fiction” Writer Gish Jen considers writing situations that fall somewhere between memoir—or nonfiction—and fiction: “Might the author hope that his or her account, to whatever genre it belongs, will move the reader in a way
Merriam-Webster, the country’s oldest dictionary publisher which is headquartered in Springfield, just released an updated Collegiate edition with 5,000 new entries. Source: Merriam-Webster goes old school with first new hardcover Collegiate dictionary in 22 years | WBUR News I guess it’s time to order a new dictionary.
The Best Literary Love Stories A satisfying literary love story doesn’t need to end happily ever after—but one does need to be left with a sense that two characters belong together, advises the novelist Lily King . . . Thomas Mallon’s Theory of the Diary “The New York writer and editor’s diaries of the AIDS
Related Post: I had a dismal reading month in terms of numbers: I finished only one audiobook. But that one was not dismal at all; in fact, I found it rewarding because it was written by Joy Fielding, a writer I was glad to have rediscovered. We meet Linda Davidson, our first-person narrator, as she
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Popular and critically acclaimed novelist Thomas Perry, best known for The Butcher’s Boy (1982) and the Jane Whitefield series, has died.
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Federal judge overturns part of Florida’s book ban law, drawing on nearly 100 years of precedent protecting First Amendment access to ideas James B. Blasingame is a professor of English at Arizona State University and a former high school English teacher who has “tried to learn as much as I can about the history of
#bookstodon #BookBlog #literature This Is Your Brain on Tropes: Why Readers are Addicted to the Familiar In the world of literature, a trope is: Monique Snyman explains that “tropes aren’t just lazy storytelling, as so many people like to say. Tropes are brain candy. And our brains are wired to crave them.” How Publishing Has
