An Innocent Abroad: Joan Didion’s Midlife Crisis Novelist, short story writer, critic and retired English professor Scott Bradfield grew up in California but had difficulty “[l]earning how to write fictions set in California”: California is filled with so many vivid pleasures, smells, textures, and absurdities of human character that it feels difficult, or even impossible, […]
Students Protest Book Bans in Pennsylvania School District Last week’s Literary Links included an article about censorship in a Pennsylvania school. Here’s a follow-up: “students have spoken up, demanding that materials by Black and Brown authors be reinstated in the classroom.” Becoming the Thing That Haunts the House: Gothic Fiction and the Fear of Change
Dread, War and Ambivalence: Literature Since the Towers Fell The events of 9/11 irrevocably changed the course of global affairs. They also changed culture. It will likely be easier to say how a century from now. But with 20 years’ hindsight, The Times’s book critics reflect below on some of the influence of that day
The Man Behind the Myth: Should We Question the Hero’s Journey? Sarah E. Bond and Joel Christensen dispute Joseph Campbell’s well-known theory “which proposed the existence of a singular ‘hero’s journey’ (also known as the Monomyth), as experienced by ancient heroes such as Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey.” How Extortion Scams and Review Bombing Trolls Turned
Censorship on the Rise Worldwide A report from Publishers Weekly: “Since the start of the Covid pandemic, there’s been a rise in instances of government censorship of books around the world.” 3 Things to Know About the Ending of a Story I see a lot of discussion in literature-related posts about fictional introductions, but not
11 Translated Books by Asian Women Writers to Read This #WITMonth More suggestions in honor of Women in Translation Month. The Buffoonery of White Supremacy Trying to Disguise Itself as Literature “Tracing the history of white supremacy storytelling back to William Faulkner” Taking note of the items worn by the insurrectionists at the U.S. Capital
A Reading List for Women in Translation Month 2021 Women in Translation Month is celebrated every August. Here are quite a few reading suggestions from independent literary presses and magazines. Women are leading the new Latin American literature boom Appropriate for Women in Translation Month, here’s a short article about how women are leading the
Oral History Through the Ages Oral history is older than written history. Homer’s early epics the Iliad and the Odyssey were transmitted orally long before they were written down. Here Sarah Rahman describes how oral history has progressed into the present. For centuries the important stories of marginalized peoples have been transmitted orally in the
The Sound of My Inbox “The financial promise of email newsletters has launched countless micropublications — and created a new literary genre.” I admit that I receive a number of these newsletters every day, although I stick to the free versions. But many of them also offer a paid version that promises to be even
Related Post: Announcing Life Stories in Literature Back in May when I worked at pulling together all the many threads of appreciating life stories in literature, I wrote that once I realized how life stories function in fiction, I began to see them everywhere in the novels I read. But my realization didn’t end with
Literary Links: Life Stories in Literature Edition Read More »
