Writing About Yourself Isn’t Inherently Selfish Novelist Tope Folarin examines the work of French novelist Édouard Louis. But first, Folarin quotes from The Good Story, a 2015 book by the Nobel Prize–winning novelist J. M. Coetzee, co-authored with Arabella Kurtz, a clinical psychologist. Folarin calls The Good Story “a searching, erudite treatise about the stories […]
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25 Books Your High School English Teacher Was Right to Assign Veronica Booth, a lifestyle and culture writer from Boston, MA, explains that “reading important literary works at a young age can shape your perspective of the world, your empathy toward others, and your beliefs.” Her list of books that underscore her point includes The
How Two Rebel Physicists Changed Quantum Theory Quantum physics has permeated popular culture to the extent that we often see some of its complex concepts used as metaphors to explain life (e.g., the concept of parallel universes in science fiction novels like Dark Matter [2016] and the title of Ellen Gilchrist’s 1989 story collection, Light
How the first National Book Awards reflected 1950s America “In the start of a new series reflecting on 75 years of the awards, Viet Thanh Nguyen writes about how societies and juries read and recognize literature” The National Book Awards will celebrate its 75th anniversary at this year’s ceremony, on Nov. 20. To mark the
The Secrets of Suspense “We love churning apprehension in fiction; we hate it in life. But understanding the most fundamental technique of storytelling can teach us something about being alive.” Kathryn Schulz explains the nature of suspense, the process of “making the audience want to know what happens next.” Inside Alice Munro’s Notebooks Benjamin Hedin,
Against the objectification of books (or, some thoughts on The Discourse). Brittany Allen addresses the tendency of readers who brag about how fast they read and how very many books they read in a given amount of time. (Examples of this trend most often pop up in those end-of-year reading statistics that Goodreads reports.) “Why
Discover the Top Edgar® Award-Winning Mysteries of 2024 One of the flagship productions of PBS (public broadcasting in the U.S.) is MASTERPIECE Mystery! It’s therefore not surprising that PBS recommends that we consider adding to our summer reading lists the books that won this year’s Edgar Awards. American Writers Festival Ultimate Reading List Next Sunday,
Between the Book Club and BookTok: Community Reading in Montreal Adam Christopher Hill tells the story of Page Break, a weekly gathering at De Stiil bookstore in Montreal. Page Break is a time when readers come together, give up their phones, and read silently for an hour. This approach to reading differs from most book
“A Nation of Lunatics.” What Oscar Wilde Thought About America “Rob Marland on the Irish Writer’s Grand Tour of the Gilded Age United States” This article caught my eye because I had just finished catching up on the second season of the HBO series The Gilded Age, which includes a trip to the opera by
Betty Smith enchanted a generation of readers with ‘A Tree Grows in Brooklyn’ − even as she groused that she hoped Williamsburg would be flattened Rachel Gordan, assistant professor of religion and Jewish studies at the University of Florida, discloses that Betty Smith herself had a different experience of life in Brooklyn than does the
