Pat Barker on Briseis, the main character of the novel The Silence of the Girls, based on the women from Homer’s Iliad: “You can sometimes struggle for months to get the voice of a new character, but Briseis’s voice was there from the beginning, as if she was impatient to make herself heard. If I […]
Quotation: Pat Barker on “The Silence of the Girls” Read More »
Censorship on the Rise Worldwide A report from Publishers Weekly: “Since the start of the Covid pandemic, there’s been a rise in instances of government censorship of books around the world.” 3 Things to Know About the Ending of a Story I see a lot of discussion in literature-related posts about fictional introductions, but not
A Reading List for Women in Translation Month 2021 Women in Translation Month is celebrated every August. Here are quite a few reading suggestions from independent literary presses and magazines. Women are leading the new Latin American literature boom Appropriate for Women in Translation Month, here’s a short article about how women are leading the
Oral History Through the Ages Oral history is older than written history. Homer’s early epics the Iliad and the Odyssey were transmitted orally long before they were written down. Here Sarah Rahman describes how oral history has progressed into the present. For centuries the important stories of marginalized peoples have been transmitted orally in the
What Our Biggest Best-Sellers Tell Us About a Nation’s Soul “Reading America through more than two centuries of its favorite books.” In The New Yorker, Louis Menand takes on Jess McHugh’s book Americanon, which discusses “thirteen American books, from ‘The Old Farmer’s Almanac,’ first published in 1792, to Stephen R. Covey’s ‘The 7 Habits of
The 2021 Pride Reading List: 75 New Books to Read Now I’m leading with this list because June is Pride month “in honor of the LGBTQ+ community.” Greenwood author’s first-person history of 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre published 100 years later The 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre rightly generated a lot of press coverage.
Hard Times: Mental Health Books 2021 From Publishers Weekly: The tumult of the past 15 months has exacerbated common mental health concerns, among them trauma, anxiety, grief, and isolation. PW spoke with authors and editors about the emotional scars of the pandemic, and how their forthcoming books offer empathy, community, and guidance. Unforgettable reads focusing
Three New Books Find Drama in the Scandals and Controversies of the Publishing World These stories about concerns over the publishing industry aren’t going away any time soon—nor should they: “the business of books has increasingly become a hothouse, generating controversies, Twitter feuds and scrambles to save face as existing power structures are challenged.” Here
How Reading Ebooks Changes Our Perception (and Reviews) Addison Rizer, a self-declared “avid Kindle reader,” writes, “I am curious about the ways reading ebooks changes the way we interact, and review, the novels we consume.” The article contains lots of references, with links, to both scientific studies and popular sources. However, the discussion is unfocused;
How to Read a Book, According to Virginia Woolf Ellen Gutoskey discusses Virginia Woolf’s essay “How Should One Read a Book?” Gutoskey begins by noting that the title is a question, not a prescriptive statement: “The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your
