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Literary Links

A History of the Lambda Literary Awards

“a look back to the origins of the awards, the judging process, and the main controversies that have come up over the years”

All about the Lambda Literary Awards.

Category: Literature & Culture

A List of Feminist Thrillers

“To me, a feminist thriller explores the experiences of women in the real world,” writes Nora Murphy. She hopes that her debut novel, The Favor, does just that: “My goal with the book was to explore the endemic nature of intimate partner violence, to demonstrate that intimate partner violence can reach women with any level of education or affluence.”

Categories: Literature & Psychology, Literature & Culture, Life Stories in Literature

Politician and Seattle Pride director Krystal Marx recommends books for Pride month

Krystal Marx, director of Seattle Pride and a writer herself, has some book recommendations comprising both fiction and nonfiction.

Categories: Book Recommendations, Life Stories in Literature

Is StoryGraph a Good Alternative to Goodreads?

I’ve heard about The StoryGraph, which aims to be an alternative to Goodreads, but have never taken the time to check it out. Here, Mara Franzen does just that: She compares the two services and comes to the conclusion that “StoryGraph is a great alternative to Goodreads! It’s less cluttered, intuitive, data-driven, and ready to help you find your next favorite book. It’s also updated much more regularly so new features are rolling out all the time.” At the bottom of the page you’ll find a link to a more in-depth review of StoryGraph.

How About You?

Have you tried StoryGraph? If you have, let us know your reaction in the comments.

Category: Reading

Wallace Stegner and the Trap of Using Other People’s Writing

“The novelist copied Mary Hallock Foote’s memoirs and letters for “Angle of Repose”—an act that mars his legacy.”

Plagiarism is an issue that the advent of the internet glosses over by making copying and pasting, without attribution of the original source, incredibly easy. Yet plagiarism is still a big deal in literary circles. Roxana Robinson here looks at a case involving one of the greats of 20th century American literature—a case that occurred well before the internet.

Category: Author News, Book News, Writing

20 books everyone should read before they’re 60

“Our fifties may be the first time many of us start to really reflect on life, but it’s a time to look forward, too. Here are some great books to spur us on.”

I’m always resentful towards article titles that use the word should. But this article is about an issue central to the study of Life Stories in Literature, the concept of self-reflection, so I’ll give Matt Blake a pass here in order to present his list of books featuring characters who self-reflect. 

Categories: Book Recommendations, Life Stories in Literature

Why We Need Memoirs

Psychologist Liz Scott writes that we need memoirs because they “remind us that we are all flawed and complicated, all doing the best we can, none of us free from suffering.”

Category: Memoir

The Best Books of 2022 So Far

Time magazine has spoken. How many of these have you read? I have three of them on my TBR shelf but haven’t read any yet.

Category: Book Recommendations

Global reads: Rest of World’s 2022 book list

“24 books from around the world”

If you’re trying to be more global in your reading, here are some book suggestions, both fiction and nonfiction.

Category: Book Recommendations

A history of punctuation

“How we came to represent (through inky marks) the vagaries of the mind, inflections of the voice, and intensity of feeling”

Florence Hazratis of the School of English at the University of Sheffield asks:

Are prescribed grammar rules necessary . . . or a relic of some fussy conservatism and elitist era? Do we really need apostrophes (or any other mark of punctuation for that matter) or could we get rid of them for the sake of brevity?

Categories: Reading, Writing

10 Essential Reads for Men, by Women 

10 Essential Reads for Men, by Women 

The folks at Women’s Prize for Fiction carried out a “campaign aimed to encourage more men to read novels by women born out of statistical research in Mary Ann Sieghart’s bestselling book The Authority Gap. Mary Ann’s research demonstrated that whilst women read novels by men and women almost equally, fiction written by women is rarely read by men.”

Categories: Book Recommendations, Reading, Writing, Publishing

© 2022 by Mary Daniels Brown

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