Halloween reading season is upon us. Leila Siddiqui, declaring that “as readers, we love the sensation of being scared—it is adrenaline-inducing and addictive,” offers her list of reading material for the season.
This article from Smithsonian Magazine spotlights a show at the National Portrait Gallery that features “such literary giants as Toni Morrison, Anne Sexton, Sandra Cisneros, Ayn Rand, Jhumpa Lahiri, Marianne Moore and Jean Kerr. Collectively, the museum notes in a statement, the women represented have won every major writing prize of the 20th century.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2016 for his first novel, The Sympathizer. Now the Aerol Arnold Chair of English at the University of Southern California, he has been appointed to the Pulitzer Prize Board as the first Asian American in its 103-year history.
“In all the realms of artistic productions in this country, it’s really in literature that Asian Americans have been the most prolific and successful,” said Nguyen.
In this partial transcript of a podcast discussion, Rumaan Alam talks with Charles Finch, author of the Charles Lenox mystery novels and the literary novel The Last Enchantments.
A key part of the conversation is Finch’s notion of the purpose of literary criticism. He describes his job as a critic this way:
For me, books evoke a feeling first, and then you have to try to feel lucidly in words. When I read Ali Smith’s most recent book, it stirred up all these interesting and strange feelings in me. Then, as a critic, I had to go back and look at where I put an exclamation point in the margin, and I have to try to cobble together something lucid and intelligent and rational about that. That’s the art of criticism to me: trying to explain emotions, which, in a way, all art forms are trying to do through different means.
You’ll find a link for listening to the complete discussion if you’d like to hear more.
With Halloween coming up, there’s a lot of discussion in literary places about thrillers and horror books. But what’s the difference between the two genres? Anna Gooding-Call offers some advice on telling them apart.
Thrillers, she says, usually build incrementally toward a climax. “Thrillers tend to be rooted in reality, albeit a reality filled with psycho killers and murderous butlers. Plot is important in a thriller, as is a good, strong villain.” But what you don’t usually find in a thriller is a ghost.
But while a thriller “builds toward a scream,” she writes, “horror is all about the background moan”: “The goal of horror is to evoke existential terror, disgust, or revulsion.” Horror characteristically features “lots of supernatural goings-on and big metaphorical statements about society.”
Gooding-Call lists a few examples of each to illustrate the difference.
Here’s an interesting look at one reason why a writer might choose to publish under a pen name.
Charles McGrath describes Irish novelist John Banville as a perfectionist who typically takes “four or five painful years” to complete a novel. When, in 2005, Banville found himself writing a mystery novel, he was surprised at how quickly he was able to complete it. That novel, Christine Falls, was published under the pseudonym Benjamin Black. Banville didn’t try to hide his identity as the book’s author but used a pen name to indicate that “John Banville had a dark other half who was up to something different.”
The author has published ten more books as Benjamin Black, but when his most recent novel, Snow, a mystery, is published in the U.S. next month, its author will be named on the cover as John Banville.
“What happened, Banville says, is that in rereading some of the Black books, he decided they were better than he remembered.” When he realized that he liked the Black books, he decided he no longer needed “this rascal.”
© 2020 by Mary Daniels Brown
