Why fiction is good for you Jonathan Gottschall is getting a lot of mileage from the recent publication of his book The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human. In this piece he addresses the issue of whether fiction in all its forms—TV shows and commercials, religious beliefs, and social commentary as well as novels, […]
“writing and reading can allow people to live other lives and to try things out symbolically so that we can make better decisions about what we value and do. There is no guarantee, of course, that reading and writing make people act more wisely. But, writing and reading, by expanding our experience and repertoire of
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The Truth Versus Twilight This site, a collaboration between the Burke Museum and the Quileute Tribe, aims to set the record straight about the culture that forms the backdrop for Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight saga. Made famous by the recent pop-culture phenomenon Twilight, the Quileute people have found themselves thrust into the global spotlight. Their reservation,
“I’m conscious of writing as a living, breathing practice, not as something in a textbook or something you do for a grade in a 10-week course. It’s living a life. And particularly for women, it’s living a struggle to claim artistic practice as a viable and socially relevant activity. So as a writer I teach
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Why teens should read ‘adult’ fiction – and vice-versa Sheila Heti doesn’t understand why so many adults are reading YA (young adult) literature such as The Hunger Games: What surprises me most about YA books is not that adults are reading them in mass numbers (as with Hunger Games appearing on bestseller lists everywhere); it’s
Athena’s Library, The Quirky Pillar Of Providence NPR offers a look at the Providence Athenaeum in Providence, RI, USA: With a bit of reverence, librarians carefully wind an antique library clock near the circulation desk in a temple of learning called the Providence Athenaeum. This is one of the oldest libraries in the United States,
Breakfast with Dr. Seuss In honor of the upcoming movie The Lorax, green eggs and ham at IHOP Dmitri Nabokov, Steward of Father’s Literary Legacy, Dies at 77 Dmitri Nabokov, the son of Vladimir Nabokov, who tended to the legacy of his father with
World Read Aloud Day: March 7, 2012 — Register Now! Change the world, story by story There are at least 793 MILLION people in the world today who cannot read; of those, about 539 million are women. LitWorld seeks to change that by using stories to support experiences of reading & writing among the world’s
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Because I was sick for much of last week, this week’s entry is short. Stories don’t need morals or messages Salon’s Laura Miller caused a flurry of comments recently with this article about a post on the New York Times education blog. In that post the parents of twins talked about taking their kids’ third-grade
America’s Most Literate Cities, 2011 Drawing from a variety of available data resources, the America’s Most Literate Cities study ranks the largest cities (population 250,000 and above) in the United States. This study focuses on six key indicators of literacy: newspaper circulation, number of bookstores, library resources, periodical publishing resources, educational attainment, and Internet resources.
