The best book I read this month is Buckeye by Patrick Ryan. Here are the other two. When you’ve been in the writing business as long as I have, the one thing you need to constantly search for are stories that will challenge you as a novelist . . . This is probably the most […]
Reading Notes: December Read More »
I don’t write fiction, but I do read a lot of it. All that reading has made me think that the very first question fiction writers must ask themselves is Whose story is this to tell? Writer Elaine Hsieh Chou suggests a similar thought in a recent interview: And Chou’s quotation further suggests that examining
“The Transcendence of Writing Your Fears” Read More »
What’s Real and What’s Not: Gish Jen on Writing Between the Factual Lines “Finding the sweet spot between memoir and fiction” Writer Gish Jen considers writing situations that fall somewhere between memoir—or nonfiction—and fiction: “Might the author hope that his or her account, to whatever genre it belongs, will move the reader in a way
The Best Literary Love Stories A satisfying literary love story doesn’t need to end happily ever after—but one does need to be left with a sense that two characters belong together, advises the novelist Lily King . . . Thomas Mallon’s Theory of the Diary “The New York writer and editor’s diaries of the AIDS
The Making of America’s Frontier Mythology Was the Making of America Just as individuals have life stories, so do nations, ethnic groups, and other collective aspects of culture and society. In this excerpt from the book The Undiscovered Country: Triumph, Tragedy, and the Shaping of the American West, Paul Andrew Hutton examines how, beginning in
Literary Links: Life Stories in Literature Read More »
A Harvard Professor Breaks Down the Real Rules of Writing Jason Hellerman summarizes an interview with Harvard linguist and cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker about “what makes great writing and how you can command attention in the modern era.” The target audience for this piece is writers interested in producing fiction and screenwriting for the general
Reviewing The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus by Emma Knight got me thinking about the use of metaphors as novel titles. Metaphor is the use of indirect comparison to describe or define something else: metaphor —Source: Oxford English Dictionary Metaphors associate two things or concepts without the use of like or as. (Comparisons that
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The Real Cognitive Neuroscience Behind Severance I haven’t caught up with the second season of Severance yet, but I will because I’m interested in both the dichotomy of inside vs. outside stories and the use of science fiction elements to portray aspects of human existence. In this article two neuroscientists explore the question “Can a
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To read or not to read: Does COVID-19 belong in our books? Logan Brown, an arts writer for The Michigan Daily, writes the “ability to escape into another world is an essential requirement for me to like a book — when I am reminded of my own reality that escape is often broken.” She then
Related Posts: Trust by Hernan Diaz © 2022 Date read: 1/31/2023 The four-part structure was initially what drew me to Trust. By the time I got to this novel, I was used to novels divided into sections that presented either various points of view or various time periods. But Trust was different from other novels
#12 “Trust” by Hernan Diaz Read More »
