Fiction

book review

“The Violin Conspiracy”

“ Ray McMillian loves playing the violin more than anything, and nothing will stop him from pursuing his dream of becoming a professional musician. Not his mother, who thinks he should get a real job, not the fact that he can’t afford a high-caliber violin, not the racism inherent in the classical music world. And […]

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book review

Review: “The Last Thing He Told Me”

“How well can you know anyone?” Hannah Hall, age 38, has been married to Owen Michaels for a little over a year. Hannah’s relationship with Owen’s 16-year-old daughter, Bailey, is still strained—after all, it had been just Owen and Bailey since her mother died when Bailey was about four—but Owen keeps assuring Hannah that things

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Last Week's Links

Literary Links

Authors Who Write Outstanding Mystery Series and Stellar Standalones One question that comes up periodically on book blogs is this: Do you prefer to read series or standalone novels? But this article by novelist Alicia Beckman reminded me that there’s also another side to this question: Do authors prefer to write series or standalone books?

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Book covers: Beach Read by Emily Henry; Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan; The Exiles by Christina Baker Kline; Exiles by Jane Harper; The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield; A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki; The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki

6 Degrees of Separation: A Very Short Journey

Beach Read by Emily Henry is this month’s starting point:  “ A romance writer who no longer believes in love and a literary writer stuck in a rut engage in a summer-long challenge that may just upend everything they believe about happily ever afters. Augustus Everett is an acclaimed author of literary fiction. January Andrews

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Celebrate National Science Fiction Day!

Today is National Science Fiction Day here in the United States. Science fiction touches so many different areas of literature that most people can find one area that they love. Science fiction can include stories based in space with aliens like E.T. or space battles like Star Wars. The genre also can include time travel,

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fireworks: Happy New Year

Literary Links

Happy New Year! Welcome to the first blog post of the year! NaJoWriMo Journal Writing Challenge Starts January 1st I know a lot of book bloggers are also writers. Many participate in NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, every November. Since I don’t write fiction, I’ve always been a little jealous. But, if you write in

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Last Week's Links

Literary Links

The dawn of AI has come, and its implications for education couldn’t be more significant The anxiety and questions about AI-generated writing continue: “t’s safe to say we can expect some challenging years ahead.” Vitomir Kovanovic, Senior Lecturer in Learning Analytics at the University of South Australia, speculates. Category: Writing Women Talking Embraces the Drama

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stack of 3 books plus open book with pen. Title: Top Ten Tuesday

#TopTenTuesday Books I Hope Santa Brings This Year

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr  Clark and Division by Naomi Hirahara  Best of Friends by Kamila Shamsie 1989 by Val McDermid Lessons by Ian McEwan The Hero of This Book, by Elizabeth McCracken Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng The Last Chairlift by John Irving Mercury Pictures Presents by Anthony

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Last Week's Links

Literary Links

We Need Diverse Books Launches #BooksSaveLives Initiative Against Censorship We Need Diverse Books, an organization formed in 2014 “to advocate for diversity and inclusion in the publishing industry,” has launched its #BooksSaveLives initiative with “as much as $10,000 in grants to schools and libraries in underserved communities so they can purchase challenged and banned books

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Last Week's Links

Literary Links

Atoms as They Fall Upon the Mind This article from The Point magazine extols James Joyce’s Ulysses as an example of the experimental literary technique of stream of consciousness: “When in prose carefully structured to imitate the patterns of the mind these aspects of consciousness reveal themselves to us as they do in life, through

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