Six Trick Novels That Play with Form
One of my favorite kind of fiction is a book that plays with form. Here Gareth Rubin, writer of both fiction and nonfiction, discusses 6 novels that do just that. His list includes one of my all-time favorites, The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle (2018) by Stuart Turton.
Why We Tell the Same Stories Over and Over Again (And Get Something Different Each Time)
“. . . telling stories has been a way for people to understand one another since long before Gutenberg’s press brought books to the masses,” writes Isa Arsén. She turns to what she calls “the era of peak or prestige [American] TV,” the early 2000s, for illustrations of how stories repeat over time:
The Sopranos is a factional drama to rival top shelf Athenian tragedy, and became a perfect time capsule of how the zeitgeist tipped into overwhelming anxiety in the wake of 9/11. The Wire, Deadwood, and Breaking Bad are patently Homeric polemics examining the cyclical madness of unequal systems, the generational anguish of crying AI AI to the gods and hearing no response. The West Wing and Succession and their ilk have been told again and again about every generation of the ruling class . . .
Diversity Syndrome: On Publishing’s Relentless Pigeonholing of Black Writers
“Naomi Day Examines What It’s Like to Be a Black Writer of Speculative Fiction”
“Diversity syndrome is a cultural condition where the ‘otherness’ of an author is elevated over the impact of their work, to the detriment of the author, their work, and their audiences,” writes Naomi Day. She continues, “I think both Black authors of any genre and speculative fiction authors of any race have two of the most glaringly obvious experiences of diversity syndrome.”
She examines the work of three Black writers of speculative fiction: Octavia E. Butler, Samuel R. Delany, and N.K. Jemisin in this context.
18 Novels Celebrating the Stories of Older Main Characters
I definitely agree with this statement from the Women’s Fiction Writers Association: “So many stories are written for young people that we often forget to turn our eyes toward the enriched lives of the middle-aged and elderly — especially women.” If you also agree, here are some reading suggestions to help expand your horizons.
The Politics of Place: A Conversation Between Shze-Hui Tjoa and Farah Ali
“What roles do place and memory play in the construction of a narrative?”
Shze-Hui Tjoa wrote The Story Game (2024), and Farah Ali wrote The River, The Town (2023). In this interview the two authors discuss “how their characters experience the effects of place on their psychology, and the complex ethics of re-imagining those places as diasporic writers so as to capture them on the page.”
How the literature of fire can help readers find hope among the ashes
“Works about fire often emphasize recovery and resolution, while also offering a space to work through complex emotions.”
As wild fires are racing through southern California, Grace Moore, associate professor of English at the University of Otago, writes about how “literature can help readers learn how to survive, cope and keep hope alive.”
Signature moves: are we losing the ability to write by hand?
“We are far more likely to use our hands to type or swipe than pick up a pen. But in the process we are in danger of losing cognitive skills, sensory experience – and a connection to history”
“The human way of doing things imposes limits, depending on our tools,” writes Christine Rosen. “Ten fingers can fly across a keyboard, but the experience of writing with a pen or pencil in one hand requires more patience.”
Going to Great Lengths — Five Big Books Easy to Escape In
I’ve said it before, but not recently, so let me say it again here and now: I love Big Books. My personal definition of a Big Book is one of 500 or more pages. In this article Diane Parrish doesn’t use a page number but rather a description for her definition: “big, long books . . . allow us to escape to worlds where we lose ourselves in stories that take a while to tell.” However, all the books she lists here would fit my definition as well.
© 2025 by Mary Daniels Brown
My hands lost their muscle memory for cursive writing years ago, and I have no problem with that!
I read Bonfire of the Vanities, but I don’t remember it as particularly long.
Bonfire was pretty long. My husband and I listened to it many years ago on a road trip. Unfortunately, the quality of the work was inversely proportional to the size. All these years later, we still occasionally make a joke of quoting one of the often repeated lines from the book.
I must have read it at a time in my life when I was reading longer books.