How Contemporary Literary Fiction Is Reclaiming the Insanity Arc and Humanizing Women Dee Das starts her essay with this premise: A hundred or so years ago, women were silenced into submission by psychiatry under the label of ‘insane’, every time they posed a threat to the models of domesticity. Any woman who didn’t conform to […]
Making Story Structure Your Own I’ve recently been working on reviews of two Big Books: All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr (530 pages) To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara (704 pages) Big Books contain so much that finding a way into discussing them is often a challenge. For both of these novels I’ve
I Needed to Know if My Favorite Books Were Products of Cultural Appropriation We hear the term cultural appropriation often in publishing circles, but what exactly does it mean? Filipino American writer Cindy Fazzi wanted to evaluate whether the novels she grew up loving were examples of cultural appropriation that gave her inaccurate or inadequate
How to Remember What You Read First of all, back in my pre-internet life I taught advanced composition at the college level, a course that included topics such as critical thinking and vetting research sources. That approach to information has become exponentially more important now, so it’s the first thing I do whenever I discover
Textual Healing: The Novel World of Bibliotherapy From The Walrus, a Canadian publication: “Though not a stand-alone clinical practice in Canada, clinical bibliotherapy is a method used by professionals who already have certification in counselling, therapy, and clinical therapy and want to help patients seeking an additional outlet.” But be certain to see also the
Why does experiencing ‘flow’ feel so good? A communication scientist explains I’ve written here about flow before (here and here). In this article Richard Huskey, an assistant professor of communication and cognitive science at the University of California, Davis, discusses how the concept of flow figures into his resolutions for 2022. He has been studying flow
How to Read the Dune Book Series in Order “21 novels with no obvious road map. Let’s dive in!” Adrienne Westenfeld, assistant editor at Esquire, offers some guidelines on how the navigate the Dune oeuvre, “21 novels with no obvious road map.” The Novelist Who Saw Middle America as It Really Was Sinclair Lewis captured
When Aldous Huxley Opened the Doors of Perception An excerpt from the book American Trip: Set, Setting, and the Psychedelic Experience in the Twentieth Century by Ido Hartogsohn, assistant professor in the Graduate Program in Science, Technology, and Society at Bar Ilan University. To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be
Here’s an abbreviated version of Literary Links for the holiday weekend. The Joy of Writing by Hand Writer Nicholas Russell says, “During quarantine, drowning in screen time and desperate for any reminder that I had a physical form, I took up writing by hand once again. This time, it was less about keeping up correspondences
Plotter, Pantser, Scribbler, Scribe Can we get rid of the “plotter vs. pantser” binary already? In light of last month’s quotations around NaNoWriMo, this piece seems like the logical introduction for the weekly links list. What If We’ve Been Misunderstanding Monsters? A history of how literary monsters have changed over the centuries. “Post-Enlightenment, literary monsters
