Man in Hole: Turning novels’ plots into data points Dan Piepenbring reports for The Paris Review on an example of digital humanities, or the application of big-data crunching to literary analysis: Motherboard has a new article about Matthew Jockers, a University of Nebraska English professor who’s been studying what he calls “the relationship between sentiment […]
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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I love Mark Zuckerberg’s book club: Unpacking his quest for literary meaning I had seen references to Mark Zuckerberg’s book club but, despite being a fan of both books and book clubs, I wasn’t much interested in learning about it. But Laura Miller, senior writer for Salon and a self-described “book-recommender,” was. Most of the
Related Post: CLASSICS CLUB SPIN #8 Yates, Richard. Revolutionary Road Original publication date: 1961 Rpt. Random House, 2008 eISBN 978–0–307–45627–4 This novel is most often described as an anti-suburban tract, a condemnation of the life of conformity and veiled unhappiness that flourished in the U.S. after World War II. And it is that. But it’s
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I read 43 books this year, for a grand total of 12,695 pages. The longest was Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, which weighs in at 771 pages. Here, listed alphabetically by author, are the 10 best: Atkinson, Kate. Life After Life Fergus, Jim. One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd French, Tana. Faithful Place
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I woke up a couple of days ago with this thought: I should challenge myself to write a blog post every day during 2015. I dismissed this thought right away because such a huge commitment seems like setting myself up for failure. Why not just commit to writing a post a day for the month
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PD James: in quotes A list of quotations about writing and mysteries from British mystery novelist P. D. James, who died recentlyat the age of 94. Here’s my favorite from this list: I love the idea of bringing order out of disorder, which is what the mystery is about. I like the way in which
This post introduces a new category of entries here, On Novels and Novelists. This category features articles and interviews that focus on how writers create their fiction and on how critics interpret fictional works. Jodi Picoult discusses the facts of fiction In a recent lecture at Carnegie Mellon University, best-selling author Jodi Picoult described the
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For weeks we’ve been building up to Halloween with lists and tales about the spookiest and scariest stories ever written. The Turn of the Screw by Henry James is one of the best known ghost stories in the English language. Part of the reason this novella is so famous is that it leaves unspecified
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Aftel, Mandy. The Story of Your Life: Becoming the Author of Your Experience (Fireside, 1996) Atkinson, Robert. The Gift of Stories: Practical and Spiritual Applications of Autobiography, Life Stories, and Personal Mythmaking (Bergin and Garvey, 1995) Estrade, Patrick. You Are What You Remember: A Pathbreaking Guide to Understanding and Interpreting Your Childhood Memories (Da
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