The Horror Writers Association announced the winners of the 2012 Bram Stoker Awards June 15 in New Orleans. The winners were:

via Bram Stoker Winners Announced.

A couple days ago, Ann Aguirre wrote a stirring blog exposing the ugly beast that resides in the science fiction field.  According to Ann’s blog:

I’ve held my silence when I probably shouldn’t have. But I was in the minority, a woman writing SF, and I was afraid of career backlash. I was afraid of being excluded or losing opportunities if I didn’t play nice.

I don’t care about that anymore.

And she takes this issue very seriously, folks. You go, girl!

Author Guterson heckled for gloomy speech at Roosevelt graduation

The Seattle Times reports that David Guterson ruffled some feathers with his graduation speech at Seattle’s Roosevelt High School, his alma mater (class of 1974).

The speech, which most people who were asked said “was far from uplifting,” produced heckling from some parents and one student.

Awesome Bookish Flooring

For a welcome change of mood, Bookriot offers photos of some literally literary floors.

They really are awesome.

Ally of Scoop.it (the curation service that I use for Literature & Psychology) describes how she went about learning to read for deep meaning. She based her strategy on an article by Maryanne Wolf, the John DiBiaggio Professor in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development at Tufts, and author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.

Although Ally focused on reading nonfiction, the process would be similar for someone wanting to explore a particular topic in literary texts—for example, fiction that deals with the relationships between mothers and daughters.

Do We Need to Be Told How to Read? 

Also in the category of learning how to read, academic cultural critic Terry Eagleton has a new book out, How to Read Literature.

I haven’t read Eagleton’s book yet, though I have bought it and look forward to finding out what he has to say. But novelist William Giraldi has read How to Read Literature, and in this article he offers an unsympathetic evaluation. In their symbiotic relationship, such clashes between practitioners (writers) and theorists (critics) are often more informative than anything either alone has to say.

Can books make us better people?

And why do we want to read, anyway? One reason might be that literature makes us better people. Or does it?

This question has been another hot topic of debate recently in the literary world. In this article in the Christian Science Monitor Husna Haq recaps the argument and provides links to many of the articles she discusses. She concludes:

Nonetheless, the question remains – does literature make us better?

If we turn to literature itself and the nuanced messages it conveys, we may find that the answer, unlike the question, is not nearly so clear-cut and precise. Literature, after all, deals with the messy, the ambiguous, the muddled, and, we suspect, that’s just what we have on our hands with that deceivingly straightforward question.

Empathy-Free Entertainment

Noah Berlatsky tackles the same issue over at The Atlantic:

Art, we’re often told, encourages empathy. By watching or reading about different people, or different situations, we become able to understand and sympathize with a broader range of perspectives. Fiction connects you to other people—or as Chuck Klosterman said, “Art and love are the same thing: It’s the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you.” There was even a study last year that found that “experience-taking changes us by allowing us to merge our own lives with those of the characters we read about, which can lead to good outcomes.” Literature broadens you; science says so.

But he bases his argument on recent movies (and, in some cases, on the comics that inspired those movies) rather than on just literary texts. And in those works he finds a bleak message:

What matters are these soulless, hollow, fungible icons, and the assurance that they will continue forever as around them all the mere humans effervesce like ghosts. This art isn’t about empathy or love. Instead, it’s about worship, about pledging fealty to our invented, charismatically uncaring, gods. Our corporate fictions offer the blank joy of not caring, whether about creators, actors, strangers, or ourselves.

Book Domino World Record: Seattle Public Library Launches Summer Reading In Style (VIDEO)

On a much happier note:

Seattle Public Library just set an unusual world record in its incredible flagship building: the world’s longest book domino chain.

Created to launch its summer reading program, 2,131 books were used in the service of this magical video that you can watch above, filmed on May 31st. Our favorite part? The silent summer readers sitting among the books as they quietly fell around them.

A.M. Homes’s novel May We Be Forgiven won the award, which featured an array of top-notch nominees.

But the controversy over whether a prize for fiction written by women should exist at all continues. Read that story here, too.

Zocalo Public Square is a not-for-profit daily ideas exchange that blends live events and humanities journalism. The entire initiative is a project of the Center for Social Cohesion at Arizona State University and the New America Foundation, and its goal is to “explore connection, place, big ideas, and what it means to be a citizen, be it locally, regionally, nationally, or globally.” Visitors should look at the Ideas area to read meditations on subjects like “Do I have Any Business Being a Doctor?” and “Why We Keep Coming Back to Gatsby.” The Books area is a real pip, featuring omnibus reviews (The Six-Point Inspection) and “Squaring Off,” in which authors answer five questions about the essence of their books. Visitors shouldn’t miss the Viewings area, which includes beautiful photographic essays on the Salton Sea, polling places, and the places where Americans gather.

From The Scout Report, Copyright Internet Scout 1994-2013. https://www.scout.wisc.edu/

The Chicagoan

In the wake of The New Yorker’s creation, a group of Chicagoans decided to create a like-minded publication for the Windy City. With that in mind, The Chicagoan was born in 1926. This jaunty publication, which lasted until 1935, aimed “to portray the city as a cultural hub and counter its image as a place of violence and vice.” This remarkable website created by the University of Chicago Library brings together the near-complete run contained within the library’s collection for general consideration. Visitors can start by browsing through some of the historic covers on the site, and then move on to perform a full text search of every issue. New users may wish to start by looking at the April 9, 1927 issue, which contains a number of humorous illustrations and a profile of the editor of Poetry, Henry Blake Fuller.

From The Scout Report, Copyright Internet Scout 1994-2013. https://www.scout.wisc.edu/

7 Compulsively Readable Mysteries (for the Crazy-Smart Reader)

In these intelligent, totally compelling new reads, savvy women detectives (and one exceptional man) not only save the day but also save themselves.

Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Big recent literary news is the discovery of a final novel by Pearl S. Buck, the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The manuscript was discovered in a storage unit in Texas. Buck’s son, Edgar S. Walsh, believes that Buck completed the manuscript for the book, The Eternal Wonder, shortly before her death from cancer in 1973.

Peter Conn, a professor of English and education at the University of Pennsylvania who wrote “Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography,” said that of Buck’s contributions, she most notably commanded the imagination of American readers with her descriptions of China.

“Pearl Buck strongly shaped Western and specifically American perceptions of China to an extent that had not been seen in the past,” he said. “She actually can make claim to a unique kind of cultural achievement, which is to prepare Americans for the increasingly tangled relationship we were going to have with China for the next 70 or 80 years.”

I Like Likable Characters

Novelist Jennifer Weiner participates in the latest dust-up among women writers:

Quick: What’s the most unforgivable sin a writer can commit in fiction? A writerly crime so awful that major, award-winning novelists are condemning it on the pages of Publishers Weekly and inveighing against it in The New Yorker? If you said lazy plotting, dull language, or cardboard-thin characters, well, shame on you. Currently, the most gauche thing a modern-day writer can do is write protagonist who is—-oh, the horror—-likable.

Why is likable worse than, say, boring, or predictable, or hackneyed or obscure? When did beloved become a bad thing? And, now that likable has become the latest code employed by literary authors to tell their best-selling brethren that their work sucks, is there any hope for the few, the shamed, the creators and consumers of likable female protagonists?

In this piece Weiner takes on both Claire Messud, author of The Woman Upstairs, and Meg Wolitzer, author of The Interestings.

Apparently Weiner chooses to fight the stereotype that girls should play nice.

Beware of book blurbs

Warning: You can’t judge a book by the blurb on its back cover:

The Washington Post did not review Martin Amis’ latest novel favorably, but the book blurb suggests otherwise

New Research Tools Kick Up Dust in Archives

Read how smartphones and computers have changed the face of archival research.

The pros: Researchers have become more productive and can easily make their findings widely available.

The cons: Use of these tools raise issues of intellectual property protection and deprive institutions of income from document copying.

If you’ve hung around Notes in the Margin for a while, you probably know that I usually don’t review fiction about vampires, werewolves, or zombies. I understand that lots of people see these entities as metaphors for society, or for the human condition, or perhaps for political and cultural decay, but I just don’t care to read about them.

Here, however, is a thoughtful consideration by Roxane Gay of Red Moon by Benjamin Percy:

By using allegory, Percy both engages and sidesteps difficult questions. Red Moon is the consummate post-9/11 novel, set in an alternate reality where a blood-borne infection turns about 5 percent of the U.S. population into part human, part werewolf beings. These “lycans” live among humans, look like them, can transform into wolves, and they have been persecuted throughout their history.

What writers see in life, language and literature

Roy Peter Clark knows that writers don’t merely look at things; they truly see:

I once heard of a clever writing prompt given to school children: “If you had a third eye, what could you see?” Writers, I would argue, already have a third eye. They use it to see life, language and literature in special ways.

This third eye has a number of different names. It’s called vision (and then revision), curiosity, inspiration, imagination, visitation of the muse. When an ordinary person says “I see,” she usually means “I understand.” If she’s a writer, she means that and much more. For the writer, seeing is a synecdochic and synesthetic gerund. It stands for all the senses, all the ways of knowing.

Take a look at his list of 50 “things I think writers see in life, language and literature.”

Thriller that delves into the dark side of fairytales

Fairy tales fascinate novelist Alison Littlewood:

Her second book Path of Needles was published last week and is a compelling read, focusing on a series of murders which, from the gruesome way in which the victims’ bodies are posed, appear to have a connection with fairytales. A young police officer, Cate Corbin, is part of the investigating team and on a hunch she calls in academic Alice Hyland, an expert in fairytales, to assist them on the case.

Fairy tales are enduring stories that deal with some of the more unsavory aspects of human nature. Says Littlewood, “I tend to write about things that personally scare me and I’m also fascinated by the fact that, despite all the technological advances we have made, there are still things we can’t explain.”

Does Prozac help artists be creative?

More than 40 million people globally take an SSRI antidepressant, among them many writers and musicians. But do they hamper the creative process, extinguishing the spark that produces great art, or do they enhance artistic endeavour?

In The Guardian, novelist Alex Preston takes an in-depth look at the question of whether psychiatric drugs help or hinder artistic creativity.

The opening of the latest film version of The Great Gatsby has focused interest on adaptations of books into movies. Here authors Dennis Lehane, Chuck Palahniuk, Judy Blume, Bret Easton Ellis, Warren Adler, and Kelly Oxford discuss “the times Hollywood got it right.”

A Nigerian-’Americanah’ Novel About Love, Race And Hair

An interview with Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie about her latest novel, Americanah.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has much of interest to say in this interview, especially about the immigration of Nigeians into the United States and the United Kingdom. But I found particularly eye-opening her own experience with stereotyping:

“I sometimes wonder whether we should change the terminology and instead of talking about race, maybe just talk about skin color, because Ifemelu didn’t really think of herself in terms of her skin color when she was in Nigeria. So coming to the U.S. and discovering that she was black was an entirely new thing. And it’s quite different from being in Nigeria and knowing that there are tensions between Igbo and Yoruba and Hausa. It’s a very different thing. But you know, what’s, I think, particularly absurd about race is how immediate it is. That it doesn’t matter what your history is, what your — it’s really about how you look.

“And I’ll tell you a story. So when I first came to the U.S., much like Ifemelu, I just didn’t think of myself as black. And I wrote an essay in class, and my professor wanted to know who ‘A-dee-chee’ was — Americans often call me ‘A-dee-chee,’ and often tell me that my name makes them imagine that I might be Italian. And so when I raised my hand, because, you know, ‘Who wrote the best essay? This is the best essay; who’s A-dee-chee?’ I raised my hand. And on his face, for a fleeting moment, was surprise. And I realized that the person who wrote the best essay in the class was not supposed to look like me. And it was quite early on in my time in the U.S., but it was just sort of that very tiny moment where I realize, ‘Oh, right, so that’s what this is about.’ “

Sookie Stackhouse author receiving death threats

In a case of life imitating the art of Stephen King’s Misery, CBC Books reports that author Charlaine Harris has been receiving death threats:

Charlaine Harris’s bestselling Sookie Stackhouse novels, the basis for the hugely popular HBO TV series True Blood, has inspired a legion of devoted fans, but some of those fans have turned on the author — even threatened her life — after the ending of the final book of the series was leaked.

Dead Ever After, the 13th and final novel in the series, was released this week, but one reader in Germany managed to receive an advance copy and posted major spoilers on Amazon in April.

Southland, one of the best dramas on TV, deserves to be renewed

We could all stand to purge a few cop shows from the nation’s collective television diet, but TNT’s Southland isn’t one of them.

I couldn’t agree more.

Choice Critical for Promoting Reading, Says Canadian Study

Publishers Weekly reports on a study commissioned by the National Reading Campaign in Canada. The study focused “on ways to build a nation of people who love to read, as opposed to literacy strategies to ensure that the population can read.”

Study results, released last week, were “that giving people choice and control over what they read as well as in related social interactions are key factors in instilling a love of reading.” Working in groups is particularly important for developing literacy among teens, the study found. Sharon Murphy, associate professor of education at York University in Toronto and author of the study report, wrote that there are “many long-term societal benefits associated with being a nation of avid readers, including increased civic engagement, empathy for others, and improved cognitive and academic development.”

Do Readers Judge Female Characters More Harshly Than Male Characters?

In an April 29 interview with Claire Messud, Publisher Weekly’s Annasue McCleave Wilson wondered whether Messud would want to be friends with her protagonist, Nora. Nora was, after all, just so very angry, “almost unbearably grim.”

“For heaven’s sake, what kind of a question is that?” Messud shot back (understandably), proceeding to rattle off any number of unpleasant male protagonists, from Philip Roth’s Mickey Sabbath to Dostoyevsky’s Roskolnikov, about whom, one presumes, no one would even think to ask such a question. “If it’s unseemly and possibly dangerous for a man to be angry,” Messud says, “It’s totally unacceptable for a woman to be angry.”

On the basis of this interview, Maria Konnikova examines two key questions:

First, do people treat male and female literary characters differently? That is, are readers actually more inclined to evaluate female, as opposed to male, protagonists on the basis of their potential as friendship material? And second, gender issues aside, what kind of a question is that, anyway—a legitimate one, or, in essence, a fairly dumb one? Should we be going to literature to look for potential friends in the first place?

The latest adaptation of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is garnering most of the attention in this category right now, but there’s other news as well. Here’s some news on upcoming films:

Will Baz Luhrmann’s noise dampen ‘Great Gatsby’s’ joys?

“Seattle Times movie critic Moira Macdonald revisits the book’s melancholy beauty prior to the movie’s release.”

The Confidence Index: What Maisie Knew

Henry James’s What Maisie Knew (1897/1898) is one of my favorite novels. Jennifer Paull has news about the upcoming film version.

Frances McDormand and Director Lisa Cholodenko Team Up for HBO’s Olive Kitteridge Adaptation

Before it became a Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller, McDormand fell hard for Elizabeth Strout’s interwoven collection of vignettes set in a backwater town along the coast of Maine connected by the titular plainspoken protagonist who reveals deep reserves of humanity and empathy (even for the most jagged and broken characters) as the novel unfolds.

Salman Rushdie bequeaths ‘Midnight’s Children’ to film

This article provides an overview of Rushdie’s life and career along with news about the film adaptation of his most famous novel.

Parents, Children, and Libraries

The Pew Internet and American Life Project studies many aspects of American life, including attitudes toward and uses of books and libraries. Here are some of the latest research findings:

• Parents, Children, Libraries, and Reading
• The 10 Most Important Insights from Pew Internet’s Library Research

Research in the Digital Age: It’s More Than Finding Information…

Two middle school teachers offer advice on how to teach students to evaluate information they find on the internet. This information may seem elementary, but it’s advice all of us can use.

Gillian Flynn on her bestseller Gone Girl and accusations of misogyny

Gone Girl has taken the publishing world by storm with its disturbing portrayal of a relationship gone badly wrong. Author Gillian Flynn talks about how she portrays women, her childhood love of horror – and how her marriage inspired the book