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Literary Links

What We Gain from a Good Bookstore

“It’s a place whose real boundaries and character are much more than its physical dimensions.”

“You may have heard that we’re experiencing a renaissance of the independent bookstore, but the situation is far from rosy,” writes Max Norman in this piece about how independent bookstores enhance communities.

Category: Bookstores

50 years of Half Price Books

“You don’t have to be an avid reader or comic book collector or vinyl shopper to appreciate the business savvy and staying power behind Half Price Books, which just celebrated its 50th birthday.” 

Category: Bookstores

The Philosophy of Crimes Without Memory

Michael Paul Kozlowsky, author of the novel Scarecrow Has a Gun, discusses the philosophical concept of memory and how it relates to guilt and responsibility.

Categories: Life Stories in Literature, Literature & Psychology

How Toxic Is Masculinity?

“A crop of new books reconsiders feminism’s stance toward men.”

In The New Yorker, Zoë Heller writes that over the past decade, “The general tone of feminist rhetoric has grown distinctly tougher and more cynical.” 

Here she examines two recent books: A History of Masculinity: From Patriarchy to Gender Justice by the French historian Ivan Jablonka, and What Do Men Want?: Masculinity and Its Discontents by Nina Power. Heller writes that both books “contend that the drift toward zero-sum war-of-the-sexes language is a bad thing for feminism.”

Categories: Literature & Culture, Literature & Psychology

A Template for Talking with School and Library Boards About Book Bans

Kelly Jensen provides a downloadable template, a shareable graphic for social media, and advice on how to respond to proposed book bans “for folks who want to do something but don’t know where to begin.”

Category: Censorship

Book bans are threatening American democracy. Here’s how to fight back.

More advice, from Margaret Sullivan, media columnist for The Washington Post.

Category: Censorship

My kids love detective stories – and, as I read with them, I can see why

Sophie Brickman writes about why she enjoys sharing children’s detective fiction with her two young kids:

Like any escape into fiction, it is a childish comfort, willfully ignoring the nuances and messiness of the world. The bad guys always get caught, the good guys always triumph, the loot is always returned to its rightful owner. But it’s a comfort we have sought for ages, across ages, and perhaps more now than ever before.

Categories: Fiction, Reading

10 Most Puzzling Impossible Crime Mysteries

Author Tom Mead expresses his love for the “old-fashioned Golden Age-style puzzle mystery,” also called “locked-room mystery or impossible crime.” He offers a list of “the most puzzling impossible crimes I have come across. These are the stories that made me fall in love with the genre, that made me desperate to devour as many as I could and gave me the impetus I needed to try my hand at writing them myself.”

Categories: Literary History, Writing

The Rise of the Speculative Novella

Lyndsie Manusos praises speculative novellas, a category that includes science fiction and fantasy, which “have a more solid distinction between novella and novel versus other genres.” The shortness of the form, Manusos writes, emphasizes the skill of writers who can create worlds within the form’s constraints. 

Read about some outstanding examples of speculative novellas here. 

Categories: Literature & Culture, Literary & Psychology, Literary Criticism, Writing

© 2022 by Mary Daniels Brown

1 thought on “Literary Links”

  1. All the book bans and calls for book bans (without their ever having read said books) seem to be a part of an anti-intellecutal movement that has swept over the US in the past several years.

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