Reading With Imagination Novelist Lily Tuck calls fiction a creative act, “an act of the author’s imagination and likewise, ideally, it should be read with imagination.” Here’s how she hopes people will read her work: In my own writing, I have been accused of (or is it praised for?) being a minimalist, which I suppose […]
It’s time for The Classics Spin #9. For this exercise, Classics Club readers are to make a numbered list of 20 unread books on their original reading list. Then next Monday, April 6, the club will announce a number between 1 and 20, and by May 15 we are to read the book with that number
The Classics Spin #9 Read More »
Face it, book snobs, crime fiction is real literature – and Ian Rankin proves it On the occasion of Ian Rankin’s becoming a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Allan Massie discusses the author of the John Rebus novels and crime fiction in general. Massie bets that having been “received into Scotland’s intellectual elite
On Novels and Novelists Read More »
Anderson, Sherwood. Winesburg, Ohio Original publication date: 1919 Rpt. New York: Random House, 1947 Sherwood Anderson’s masterpiece, Winesburg, Ohio, is a collection of 23 interrelated sketches—Anderson calls them “tales”—that portray life in a Midwestern town in the early years of the twentieth century. The unifying thread throughout is the coming-of-age story of George Willard, an
Review: “Winesburg, Ohio” by Sherwood Anderson Read More »
Montgomery, Lucy Maud. Anne of Green Gables Original publication date: 1908 Like most young girl characters who appear in books written for girls, Anne Shirley of Anne of Green Gables functions for readers as a model of how to be a successful girl. These books communicate and reinforce to children the beliefs and behaviors that
On Rereading “Anne of Green Gables” Read More »
Julianne Moore on Forging a Bond With Alzheimer’s Patients Cara Buckley reports on how Julianne Moore prepared for her role in the film of Still Alice, a performance that won her an Oscar for best actress. Moore played Alice Howland, a Harvard cognifive psychologist with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. (Early-onset Alzheimer’s is defined as onset before
On Novels and Novelists Read More »
Related Posts: Flow Getting Lost in a Good Book: Scientific Research on Reading Flow and the Reading Process If you’ve ever had the experience of getting lost in a good book, you’ve experienced flow. Csikszentmihalyi’s general characteristics of flow describe this experience. The key to flow is complete absorption in an activity. For readers, the
Man in Hole: Turning novels’ plots into data points Dan Piepenbring reports for The Paris Review on an example of digital humanities, or the application of big-data crunching to literary analysis: Motherboard has a new article about Matthew Jockers, a University of Nebraska English professor who’s been studying what he calls “the relationship between sentiment
Harper Lee Lawyer Offers More Details on Discovery of New Book – NYTimes.com. Last week’s announcement that another novel by Harper Lee, author of the beloved classic To Kill a Mockingbird, had been discovered and would be published in July stirred up a lot of controversy and questions. The recently discovered novel is titled Go
Harper Lee Lawyer Offers More Details on Discovery of New Book – NYTimes.com Read More »
Hawkins, Paula. The Girl on the Train New York: Penguin Group, 2015 ISBN 978–1–59463–366–9 Rachel rides the same train every day on her commute to and from London, right past the street where she and her husband used to live. She’s still reeling with despair over the failure of her marriage two years earlier. Looking
Review: “The Girl on the Train,” Paula Hawkins Read More »
