A Literary Guide to Combat Anti-Asian Racism in America
“Anti-Asian violence and discrimination has increased precipitously, but it has a long history in the United States”
Jae-Yeon Yoo and Stefani Kuo offer a reading list to help readers in the U.S. better understand racism against Asian Americans:
We’ve compiled this list as a way to better understand the deep roots of Asian American discrimination in the U.S. We hope we can help amplify the urgent need to acknowledge anti-Asian racism and the complexity of Asian American identity today. Staying silent exacerbates the portrayal of Asian Americans as the “model minority,” ignoring the violent and potentially fatal consequences of anti-Asian racism.
What Sets a Good Audiobook Apart
“Award-winning narrator Abby Craden has recorded nearly 400 books. Here’s how she does it.”
You just read the book into a microphone, right? It’s a little more complicated than that.
Want to borrow that e-book from the library? Sorry, Amazon won’t let you.
“Its monopoly is stopping public libraries from lending e-books and audiobooks from Mindy Kaling, Dean Koontz, Dr. Ruth Westheimer, Trevor Noah, Andy Weir, Michael Pollan and a whole lot more”
“The case of the vanishing e-books shows how tech monopolies hurt us not just as consumers, but as citizens,” writes Geoffrey A. Fowler, technology columnist for the Washington Post.
Kaia, Kendall and EmRata Are Taking a Page From Oprah
“The book-club business is booming online, led by actresses and, increasingly, fashion models.”
This article in the New York Times finds that celebrity-led online book clubs have thrived in quarantine.
The People We Know Best
“Readers love fictional characters almost as if they were real people. Literary scholars are just starting to take them more seriously.”
Evan Kindley writes, “How to transition from a naive identification with characters to a critical analysis of texts is supposed to be one of the fundamental lessons that literary studies imparts.” Despite more than a century of critical literary thinking that taught fictional characters are nothing more than an abstraction in the mind of the reader, “literary characters are finally getting scholarly attention again.” Here Kindley reviews three volumes of literary criticism that focus on characters.
How Octavia E. Butler Reimagines Sex and Survival
“The parasites, hybrids, and vampires of her science fiction make the price of persisting viscerally real.”
Julian Lucas writes:
Butler’s great subject was intimate power, of the kind that transforms relationships into fulcrums of collective destiny. She explored the ways that bodies could be made instruments of alien intentions, a motif that recurs throughout her fiction in ever more fantastic guises: mind control, gene modification, body-snatching, motherhood. Her protagonists often begin as fugitives or captives, but emerge as prodigies of survival, improvising their way through unprecedented situations only to find that adaptation exacts hidden costs.
Murder, but gentler: ‘Cozy’ mysteries a pandemic-era balm
“For those who find their dreams in books, there’s a group of readers who are hungrily consuming a particular style of narrative to escape from the past year’s reality: “cozy” mysteries,” writes Tamara Lush for the Associated Press.
An A to Z Guide to Literary Devices and Tools
Kelly Jensen writes, “let’s take a look at various literary devices and tools used by authors to write. Many of these tools are valuable for readers to think about because they offer insight into what it is that makes a book memorable or effective.”
© 2021 by Mary Daniels Brown
Who among us who love reading fiction have not asked ourselves these questions: