Categories
Fiction Last Week's Links Life Stories in Literature Literature & Psychology Publishing Story

Literary Links

Last Week's Links

Cyberpunk: Everything You Did (and Maybe Didn’t) Want to Know

I don’t know about you, but I have trouble keeping up with the terminology used to describe some of the new kinds of literature. Here Caitlin Hobbs explains that the term cyberpunk, which has its roots in science fiction, “didn’t gain traction as a recognized genre, or even a literary movement, until the release of Neuromancer [by William Gibson] in 1984.” Since then, the term has expanded to include films and videogames in addition to books.

“For something to be considered cyberpunk it must be set in some futuristic setting, have advanced tech (like cybernetics) juxtaposed with a social order that’s either in the process of breaking down or has already done so.”

On the Evolutionary Uses of Storytelling

“How Counterfactual Realities Make Us Better Thinkers”

Books like Jonathan Gottschall’s The Storytelling Animal introduced the notion of storytelling as a survival technique humans developed over eons of evolution. This excerpt from Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil by Kenneth Cukier, Viktor Mayer-Scönberger, and Francis de Véricourt carries on that discussion:

Salt and sugar light up the human appetite in a primal way; stories do the same thing for our minds. They are a platform to contemplate scenarios of alternative realities and how humans act within them. They help us evaluate options and prepare decisions. In this way, they expand and improve our framing skills.

 Where Gender-Neutral Pronouns Come From

“People tend to think of they, Mx., and hir as relatively recent inventions. But English speakers have been looking for better ways to talk about gender for a very long time.”

Michael Waters offers a history of the long search for language that steps outside the traditional, normative binary of man/woman, his/her.

The Many Fictional Afterlives of Ethel Rosenberg

Anna Sebba considers how the fate of Ethel Rosenberg has continued to inform literature:

although the story of the Rosenbergs’ trial and execution has proved fertile ground for many other artists, composers, and playwrights, it is the conflicting images of Ethel herself that have made her so irresistible as a tragic figure. The way she continues to defy labeling as mother, wife, sister, daughter, Communist, or would-be opera singer has penetrated the American consciousness deeply. It is this complexity that has encouraged audiences to project her, more often than the dramatically less interesting, more predictable Julius, into works of fiction, even where she was originally absent from the script.

Bogus Social Media Outrage Is Making Authors Change Lines in Their Books Now

“The silly idea that a fictional character’s statements reflect an author’s actual beliefs is spreading.”

I don’t always agree with Laura Miller, but I always admire her boldness and audacity. Here she writes, “I know some will consider Hilderbrand’s and McQuiston’s obeisance to be a sign that the ‘toxic drama’ that prevails on YA Twitter—in which ambitious reviewers-cum-influencers revile authors for failing to toe extremely fine and perpetually changing lines on race, gender, and other sensitive issues—has spread to the world of commercial adult fiction.”

I’ve always been very careful about quotations since they’ve become frequent material for blogging and social media posts. Almost every time I come upon a quotation used this way, the author’s name is given but with no indication of the source of the exact words. If I can’t cite the exact source of a quotation, I don’t use it.

And I also know the difference between things writers say in their own voices, such as in interviews or bylined articles, and things they put in the mouths of their fictional creations to advance characterization. The fact that a character in a novel says something does NOT mean that the author believes the same thing.

But, as Miller here laments, “While it’s perplexing that people who are always rhapsodizing about how much they love reading can be so very bad at it, the truth is that the incentives for interpreting a book’s meaning in the worst possible light are high.”

Move Over, Poe—The Real Godfather of Gothic Horror Was Nathaniel Hawthorne

“The ‘Scarlet Letter’ author’s short stories are like a Puritan ‘Twin Peaks’”

A century before H.P. Lovecraft (inspired by Hawthorne’s novel The House of the Seven Gables) depicted New England as a realm of terror and dread, Nathaniel Hawthorne was on the case, mining the region’s history for insights into the mind’s darker corners. Chiefly remembered today for The Scarlet Letter, that bane of high school curricula, Hawthorne’s highest achievements are actually found in his short stories. There, he examines the supposed innocence of the early American character, finding the darkness that lies beneath. 

On the Evolution of Female-Driven Gothic Narratives: A Reading List

“Christine Mangan Recommends Fiction that Honors and Upholds the Genre’s Enduring Legacy”

The Gothic, then, has been a particularly significant place for women, as, erased from the pages of history by a patriarchal lens, this genre has served as a space for female writers to reclaim history, a space to examine such matters as marriage and subjugation, the female body and autonomy. Topics that remain relevant today and often find their ways into mysteries, thrillers, horror, all of which ultimately locate their roots in what Gothic was and continues to be—a place where marginalized voices have space to write their cultural anxieties, as tropes are borrowed and reinvented and repurposed for the changing era in which they are written.

The Unruly Genius of Joyce Carol Oates

“In an era that fetishizes form, Oates has become America’s preëminent fiction writer by doing everything you’re not supposed to do.”

Joyce Carol Oates, one of the most prolific of all contemporary authors, recently turned 83. In this New York Times profile Leo Robson writes:

Among contemporary American fiction writers—and, since the deaths of Philip Roth and Toni Morrison, she possesses a strong claim to preëminence—Oates most clearly displays what Henry James called “the imagination of disaster,” a faculty or frailty she often gives to her creations. 

New Book Publisher Caters to Conservative Voices It Says Are Being Silenced

“All Seasons Press, led by two industry veterans, backs right-wing authors as mainstream houses face growing disputes over editorial decisions.”

The reckoning within the publishing industry continues to roil: “Two veteran book-publishing executives have teamed up to launch a conservative publishing house called All Seasons Press LLC as ideological debates roil a book industry increasingly fueled by demand for political titles.”

© 2021 by Mary Daniels Brown

Categories
Obituaries

Janet Malcolm, Provocative Journalist With a Piercing Eye, Dies at 86 – The New York Times

[Katie] Roiphe put it this way: “She takes apart the official line, the accepted story, the court transcript like a mechanic takes apart a car engine and shows us how it works; she narrates how the stories we tell ourselves are made from the vanities and jealousies and weaknesses of their players. This is her obsession, and no one can do it on her level.”

Source: Janet Malcolm, Provocative Journalist With a Piercing Eye, Dies at 86 – The New York Times

Categories
Book News Book Recommendations

Pulitzer Prizes: A Guide to the Winning Books and Finalists – The New York Times

Louise Erdrich won the fiction prize for her novel “The Night Watchman.” Here are the 2021 contenders for fiction, nonfiction, poetry, history and biography.

Source: Pulitzer Prizes: A Guide to the Winning Books and Finalists – The New York Times

Categories
Book Groups Last Week's Links Literary History Literature & Psychology Writing

Literary Links

Last Week's Links

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 Highly Effective People,’ which came out in 1989.”

In looking at these thirteen self-help books, Menand writes:

In fact, McHugh disapproves of every one of the books she writes about. “Americanon” is, in effect, a critique of American society in the form of thirteen book reviews. It belongs to a critical strategy of attacking current inequities in American life by attacking prior representations of those inequities. This is an entry in the new culture wars.

According to Menand, McHugh “prefers, she says, ambiguity and change to the myth of a unified national narrative. But ambiguity and change are just the keywords in a different narrative.”

Susan Cole, Advocate for Traumatized Children, Dies at 72

Attorney Susan Cole recognized the toll that trauma can take on children:

She began a decades-long examination of the links between education and childhood trauma, using her accumulating experience to identify “broader systemic failures that could not be addressed on a case-by-case basis,” as her husband, David Eisen, put it.

Constant stress and fear were more than just a distraction for students; their effect, she learned, was neurological, activating the fight-or-flight survival instinct permanently.

A Guide To Gender Identity Terms

June is the annual celebration of Pride Month. Over the years I’ve sometimes been confused about how to use correctly the applicable terminology. I’m grateful to NPR for putting together this glossary of terms relating to gender identity.

Proper use of gender identity terms, including pronouns, is a crucial way to signal courtesy and acceptance. Alex Schmider, associate director of transgender representation at GLAAD, compares using someone’s correct pronouns to pronouncing their name correctly – “a way of respecting them and referring to them in a way that’s consistent and true to who they are.”

Creative Writing MFA Programs

Programs offering an MFA (master’s in fine arts) in writing have proliferated.

The Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing is a graduate-level degree earned by students who seek to pursue work as authors, editors, playwrights, or to teach at the college level.

The folks at BookBrowse have put together this discussion of the purpose of such programs. This article pertains to understanding the plot of the recently published novel The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz, but the content here is a general description and discussion for anyone who has ever wondered about these programs.

How to Jump-Start Your Post-Pandemic Writing Life

“The habit of not writing, it turns out, is sadly easy to acquire in a pandemic.”

I know I’m not the only person who had trouble focusing on reading and writing during the pandemic. With the arrival of the beginning of the end, Rachel Toor has some advice on how to get back into the swing of things. 

Toor herself is an academic, a professor of creative writing at Eastern Washington University in Spokane, WA, and her advice is directed toward other academics, whose professional lived are governed by the “publish or perish” mantra. However, I found her advice helpful also for a general audience, such as us book bloggers who may be struggling to get back to work.

The Book Club of My Dreams Was at the Library All Along

My first book group was organized by the local branch of the county public library where I lived. I participated in the group for about 12 years and found some of my closest friends there. It’s something I sorely miss since relocating for retirement.

© 2021 by Mary Daniels Brown

Categories
Author News Fiction Last Week's Links Publishing Writing

Literary Links

Last Week's Links

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. This article from The Oklahoman discusses the efforts of Mary Parrish to prevent the story of what happened from disappearing. 

Parrish was an African American journalist and teacher who in 1919 moved with her daughter Florence Mary from Rochester, New York, to Tulsa’s Greenwood. They fled their home and lost everything in the massacre, including her typing school in Greenwood.

Thanks to Mary Parrish’s great-granddaughter Anneliese Bruner, Parrish’s original account of the 1921 attack, The Nation Must Awake, is being republished.

Turning the Page: On Publishing’s Controversies and Challenges

There’s been a lot of recent press coverage about the various challenges currently facing the publishing industry. Aisling Twomey here summarizes some of the recent controversies and concludes:

It’s clear that publishing has a hard road ahead. The industry of gatekeepers needs to be accountable for the sustained inequality for authors. It also needs to address the ethics of its decisions around who to publish, and why. And along the way, it needs to treat its own workers better, too.

The Conservative Publishing Industry Has a Joe Biden Problem

McKay Coppins, a staff writer for The Atlantic, reports:

[publishing] insiders have told me in recent weeks that the market for anti-Biden books is ice cold. Authors have little interest in writing them, editors have little interest in publishing them, and—though the hypothesis has yet to be tested—it’s widely assumed that readers would have little interest in buying them. . . . Facing a new president whose relative dullness is his superpower, the American right has gone hunting for richer targets to elevate.

Against Conglomeration: Nonprofit Publishing and American Literature After 1980

This article takes quite a deep dive into the current state of the publishing industry:

We discovered that these two different ways of structuring publishers’ finances — conglomerate and nonprofit — created a split within literature, yielding two distinct modes of American writing after 1980. This essay characterizes the two modes, explains how the split between them happened, and illustrates the significance of this shift for the rise of multiculturalism.

‘Three Women’ author Lisa Taddeo’s debut novel is fearless. So what is she afraid of?

Lisa Taddeo’s debut publication was the widely hailed nonfiction work Three Women (2019). Her second book is the recently published novel Animal, which Taddeo believes “finally shows the world who she really is as a writer.”

Taddeo experiences anxiety brought on, the article says, by the deaths of her parents and her own medical scares.

“When my parents died, it utterly reconstructed me as a human being,” she says. “It turned me into an animal, in a sense. And not an animal that kills, but a scared, skittering mouse that is constantly driving from one place to another to try to hide from her brain.”

Exhausting the Vein of Realism: A Conversation with Lynne Sharon Schwartz

One of the best novels I’ve ever read is Disturbances in the Field (1983) by Lynne Sharon Schwartz.

Here Rachel Cline interviews Schwartz, with an emphasis on Schwartz’s 2020 work Truthtelling: Stories Fables, Glimpses, which Cline says “is full of invention, soul, and wit, and also marks a departure from Schwartz’s earlier fictional work, as it explores aspects of choice and behavior that verge on the fantastic and surreal.”

About writing this book Schwartz says:

Until then my fiction, both stories and novels, had used a traditional realistic mode. Now, suddenly strange and eerie things were intruding. The stories seemed to swerve into a not quite logical world. The odd things that appeared — forgetting the existence of one’s mother, having a fit of hysteria on a subway, being thrown into an existential panic by a wrong number on the phone — were not impossible, but extremely unlikely. So unlikely that the stories came to occupy a formerly unexplored space between reality and imagination, or nightmare.

“I see fiction as restoring to the world some of its actual complexity”: An Interview with Gish Jen

Here’s a third author interview that caught my eye this week: Carole Burns talks with Gish Jen:

For more than thirty years now, Gish Jen has been writing fiction that explores the American landscape while ranging across any boundaries expectations about literary fiction might try to impose: her five novels and many short stories are literary and entertaining; funny and serious; rich in characters with stories to tell. Whether she’s writing from the point of view of a Chinese American teenager in a primarily Jewish suburb, as in Mona in the Promised Land (1996), or the sharply observant and comic Hattie Wong in World and Town (2010), Jen creates characters who explore not just what it is to be American, but what it is to be human.

© 2021 by Mary Daniels Brown

Categories
6 Degrees of Separation Fiction

6 Degrees of Separation: From The Rock to the Institute

Book covers: The Bass Rock, Long Division, Three Junes, The Space Between Worlds, ho Will Run the Frog Hospital?, Coma, The Institute

It’s time for another adventure in Kate’s 6 Degrees of Separation Meme from her blog, Books Are My Favourite and Best. We are given a book to start with, and from there we free associate six books.

This month we start with the winner of the 2021 Stella Prize, The Bass Rock by Evie Wyld. I had hoped to finish the book before writing this post, but, you know, life intervenes. However, I’ve read enough to know that the novel presents the stories of three women in three different time periods. The shadow of the Bass Rock looms large over each woman’s life. 

1. As I was thinking about how to start this chain, I came across a description of Long Division by Kiese Laymon, published on June 1, which Lit Hub says depicts “One Mississippi town with two engaging stories in two very different decades.” Same place, different times.

2.Three Junes, Julia Glass’s debut novel (2002), takes place in the month of June in three different years over a 10-year span. Locations vary, but the time  of year is the same, so same time, different places. This novel has been sitting on my TBR shelf for probably about 10 years.

3. A recent debut novel that I loved is The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson. After receiving an MFA in writing, Johnson now studies American literature at Vanderbilt University.

4. The novel title Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? has always intrigued me; someday I must read it. Its author is Lorrie Moore, who is on the English faculty of Vanderbilt University.

5. Coma by Robin Cook, a novel set in a hospital, “kickstarted a new genre–the medical thriller” (according to Goodreads) on its publication in 1977. The protagonist of this novel discovers that patients are purposely being put into a vegetative state so that their organs can be used for transplants. The bodies are stored, suspended from the ceiling, at the Jefferson Institute, an isolated, heavily guarded offsite facility.

6. The Institute (2019) by Stephen King is a more recent portrayal of such an imposing medical facility. King’s Institute is a place for kids with “special talents” such as telekinesis and telepathy.

Of all these novels, I’ve only read two (The Space Between Worlds and Coma). I think I’ll pass on The Institute, but I’ll try to get to the remaining three—as soon as I finish The Bass Rock, that is.

a totally unrelated note

balloon that reads Happy Anniversary

Reader, 50 years ago today I married Mr. Notes in the Margin. Happy golden anniversary to the best guy in the world!

© 2021 by Mary Daniels Brown

Categories
Life Stories in Literature Literature & Psychology Publishing Reading Writing

Literary Links

Last Week's Links

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 on mental health

From Amazon Book Review: “To celebrate Mental Health Awareness Month, we’ve rounded up some of our favorite books dealing with mental health, and it’s no surprise that connection is the theme that runs through all of them.”

How Booksellers Were Complicit in the Resurgence of White Supremacy and the Rise of Donald Trump

“Josh Cook Considers the Relationship Between Bookselling, Politics, and Free Speech”

Literary critic, novelist, and poet Josh Cook is a bookseller at Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This piece is an excerpt from his book The Least We Can Do: White Supremacy, Free Speech, and Independent Bookstores (Biblioasis, 2021).

Like many industries and institutions, booksellers have done a lot of work in the last few years in response to the Trump administration, the Black Lives Matter Movement, the #MeToo movement, and other events and forces for social change in our society. We’ve formed committees, hosted panels, and held training sessions and though all of that is important, I have almost never seen booksellers grapple directly with the economic, social, and moral consequences of selling books by white supremacists, fascists, misogynists, and other believers in objectively dangerous ideologies.

Barry Jenkins On Avoiding The Exploitation Of Black Trauma In “The Underground Railroad”

Sagal Mohammed discusses Jenkins’s adaptation, currently streaming on Amazon Prime, of Colson Whitehead’s 2016 novel:

Thanks to Jenkins’ vigilantly balanced portrayal of excruciating racist violence and blissful joy, The Underground Railroad avoids accusations of exploiting Black trauma for which other shows — like Little Marvin’s Us-inspired horror series Them — have recently been criticized. But there’s no denying the emotional toll the show will take, particularly on its Black viewers.

Serious Trouble: Writing Character-Driven Thrillers

Novelist Elizabeth Brundage describes how finding characters and getting to know them comprises the process of producing her novels. I found her explanation informative because, although she doesn’t use precisely this terminology, what she’s really describing is learning (actually, creating) their life story: “I set out to write about a person at a particular time in their life when something happens to create a shift in their world-view.”

Did the Pandemic Change Summer Reading for Good? I Hope So.

“With our calendars cleared last year, many of us found more time to lose ourselves in books. Let’s hold onto that vibe this year.”

From Elisabeth Egan:

The summer of 2020 was a dud when it came to barbecues, vacations, family reunions, pedicures and swiping a lick from someone else’s ice cream cone. But there was one mainstay Covid couldn’t wreck: reading. For me, those empty, quiet nights were a reminder of the boredom that pushed me into the arms of books in the first place.

© 2021 by Mary Daniels Brown

Categories
Film Last Week's Links Publishing Television

Literary Links

Last Week's Links

Inside the Simon & Schuster Blowup Over Its Mike Pence Book Deal

This publishing dust-up just won’t go away. Here the Wall Street Journal takes on the business angle, of companies forced to “address employee demands.”

Philip Roth biography, pulled last month, has new publisher

And here’s an update on the other publishing story that won’t go away.

How women conquered the world of fiction

“From Sally Rooney to Raven Leilani, female novelists have captured the literary zeitgeist, with more buzz, prizes and bestsellers than men. But is this cultural shift something to celebrate or rectify?”

While a bit less immediate than the previous two stories, this is yet another pubishing issue that won’t go away.

Over the past 12 months, almost all of the buzz in fiction has been around young women: Patricia Lockwood, Yaa Gyasi, Raven Leilani, Avni Doshi, Lauren Oyler. Ask a novelist of any gender who they are reading and they will almost certainly mention one of Rachel Cusk, Ottessa Moshfegh, Rachel Kushner, Gwendoline Riley, Monique Roffey or Maria Stepanova. Or they will be finding new resonances in Anita Brookner, Zora Neale Hurston, Natalia Ginzburg, Octavia Butler, Ivy Compton-Burnett. The energy, as anyone in the publishing world will tell you, is with women.

When Is a Ghost Not a Ghost? Hauntings in Horror Literature

Jessica Avery declares, “a ghost is never just a ghost.” A ghost “always represents something more than itself. Something that you try not to think about. Something unpleasant you try to ignore or repress until you can’t any more and it rises up to — quite literally — haunt you.”

Follow Avery’s dive into the world of ghosts and haunted houses, including The Haunting of Hill House.

The StoryGraph Review: Is It Worth Replacing Goodreads?

Another literary issue I’ve been following recently is reader dissatisfaction with Goodreads and who or what might step up to replace it. StoryGraph had been in beta for a while as a possibility. Chris M. Arnone here reviews it for Book Riot.

The article includes directions on how to export your data from Goodreads and import it into StoryGraph, followed by discussion of its good points and shortcomings. 

Let us know in the comments if you’ve tried StoryGraph.

How Does a Book Get Adapted for TV or Film?

Have you ever wondered why your favorite book hasn’t yet been made into a film or TV series? Literary Hub recently conducted a virtual roundtable discussion with several writers from the film/TV industry about “a process that for many, is mysterious.”

© 2021 by Mary Daniels Brown

Categories
Author News Last Week's Links Publishing Reading Writing

Literary Links

Last Week's Links

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 Time magazine takes a look at three new novels that “navigate the thorny interior of the industry”:

  1. The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz
  2. Who Is Maud Dixon? by Alexandra Andrews
  3. The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris

Meet the romantic fiction novelists who switched to chilling thrillers

Since I love inventive fiction that bends or blends genres, this article about writers who started with romantic fiction and have branched into also writing mysteries, psychological thrillers, or domestic noir. Authors mentioned include Lisa Jewell, Tony Parsons, Paula Hawkins, Adele Parks, and Joanne Harris.

How a COVID-era Federal Writers Project went from wild idea to a proposed bill

The Los Angeles Times reports on “a revamped program for the COVID-19 era” for putting writers to work modeled after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration. The new program would “employ struggling writers and academics and create a national archive of work from our time.”

Bookstagrammers Demand Publishers Pay Up

“Bookstagrammers Demand Publishers Pay Up”

“Bookstagrammers” are people with book-focused Instagram accounts. After the New York Times published a story about the impact TikTok’s book community is having on the publishing industry, Bookstagrammers spoke up:

The literary community on Instagram, particularly readers of color, objected to the Times’ erasure of their hard work and the willingness for publishing representatives to say, on the record, that they pay TikTokers for their publicity.

Why we remember more by reading – especially print – than from audio or video

Prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic’s switch to digital texts for students, Naomi S. Baron, Professor of Linguistics Emerita at American University, has studied “how electronic communication compares to traditional print when it comes to learning.” Specifically: “Is comprehension the same whether a person reads a text onscreen or on paper? And are listening and viewing content as effective as reading the written word when covering the same material?”

The answers to both questions are often “no,” as I discuss in my book “How We Read Now,” released in March 2021. The reasons relate to a variety of factors, including diminished concentration, an entertainment mindset and a tendency to multitask while consuming digital content.

What Does Book Publishing Stand For?

Alex Shephard writes in The New Republic that publishers have for decades talked about themselves as “one of the most important protectors of speech in the country.” But now, he says, “Publishers have lost their grand narrative, and it’s not clear what will replace it.”

Shephard digs into the recent controversies involving publishers Simon & Schuster and W.W. Norton.

© 2021 by Mary Daniels Brown

Categories
Fiction Last Week's Links Reading

Literary Links

Last Week's Links

20 Great Works of Philosophical Fiction

Rebeca Hussey here defines philosophical fiction as fiction that “encourages the reader to ponder big questions. It purposely provokes thought and debate.” Her list of philosophical fiction includes both contemporary and classic books.

‘Never stupid to ask questions’: Rare Raymond Chandler essay gives writing, office tips

Here’s a reprint of “a rarely seen essay” that is “a wry set of instructions Chandler issued to his assistant in the 1950s.” 

“Assert your personal rights at all times,” he tells her, along with several other instructions that might sound strange but refreshing to most office workers today.

A Secret Feminist History of the Oxford English Dictionary

Pip Williams, author of The Dictionary of Lost Words, explains why and how she wrote this book, which examines the participation of women in the production of the daddy of dictionaries, The Oxford English Dictionary.

Tiberius, Imperial Detective

This is an excerpt from the recent book A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome by Emma Southon, PhD. In this episode she explains why there was no official investigation of the murder of a woman named Apronia until her husband asked the emperor to look into it:

There was no representative of the state of Rome who would get involved in this case until Apronius took it to the emperor because, as far as the Romans were concerned, the murder of wives, children, husbands, or really anyone at all was absolutely none of their business.

What Is the Best Way to Teach Reading? A Literacy Professor Weighs In

A professor “who teaches people to teach kids to read” takes us on a tour of the “reading wars.” She looks at political involvement in the various controversies that have produced a sobering statistic: “two-thirds of United States 4th graders are reading ‘below grade level.’”

House Hunters: Zillow and the Murder Mystery

Nora Caplan-Bricker takes a deep dive into how the novels of Tana French use “the lust for property” to embody “the half-formed fears that hover at the edge of any mundane existence.”  

“French’s fiction captures the talismanic power of a house as well as anything I’ve ever read,” she writes. 

Children read more challenging books in lockdowns, data reveals

Children read longer books of greater difficulty during lockdown periods last year, and reported that reading made them feel better while isolated from the wider world, according to new research.

This news surprised me, but also warmed the cockles of my heart!

The Mortifications of Beverly Cleary

“The author recognized that humiliation is a kind of trauma—and that gentle humor could help neutralize it.”

A beautiful appreciation by Sophie Gilbert of children’s author Beverly Cleary, who died recently at the age of 104. Gilbert lauds the way Cleary “captured—sweetly, and with humor—all the ordinary ups and downs of childhood: sibling rivalry, misunderstandings, having a teacher who you can sense doesn’t like you.”

© 2021 by Mary Daniels Brown