Story

bookshelves: Literature and Psychology

What Your Favorite Books Tell You About Your Writing

My major life activities are reading (usually fiction) and writing (always nonfiction). So I’m delighted when I come across something that combines the two: something like Marcy McKay’s writing challenge What Your Favorite Books Tell You About Your Writing. Marcy runs The Write Practice, a web site and newsletter aimed at fiction writers, but even […]

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“Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close”

I finally got around to watching the film Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2012), based on Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel of the same title. Our book group read the novel several years ago and loved it, so I’ve been looking forward to seeing the film adaptation. The story involves 10-year-old Oskar Schell, whose father died

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Monday Miscellany

LeBron James, open book The NBA championship, recently won by the Miami Heat, was big news in the sports world. But a secondary story was the focus on Heat star LeBron James, who focused before games by reading. Yes, reading—all kinds of books, fiction and nonfiction. And lots of sports reporters, including ESPN’s Michael Wilbon here,

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book review

“The Storytelling Animal” by Jonathan Gottschall

Gottschall, Jonathan. The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012ISBN 978-0-547-39140-3 Recommended “We are, as a species, addicted to story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories,” declares Jonathan Gottschall in the preface to his recent book The Storytelling Animal. Gottschall, a member

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