THE SIMPLE JOY OF REREADING TO BREAK A READING SLUMP Julia Rittenberg has a confession to make: I used to have a great deal of anxiety around keeping up with others’ reading paces. Social media heightened my awareness of reading habits, and worries that my own were woefully behind. I would be unable to choose […]
OCTAVIA BUTLER AND AMERICA AS ONLY BLACK WOMEN SEE IT It is a rare writer who can use sci-fi not simply to chart an escape from reality, but as a pointed reflection of the most minute and magnified experiences that frame and determine the lives of those who live in black skin. Octavia E. Butler
Introduction to Reading Other Women At a time when female “others”—black, brown, and yellow—together constitute the largest block of the world’s population, their persistent invisibility to Westerners not only means they are overlooked in the present moment, but that they are consistently erased from the historical record. Rafia Zakaria reacts against “the challenges that arise
Awards Introduction: 6 Literary Prizes and a Few Winning Books We Love There are so many literary prizes that keeping them all straight becomes a problem. Who awards which ones, and what are the entry and judgment criteria? Here are descriptions of a few—Nobel Prize, National Book Award, Costa Award, Pulitzer Prize, Man Booker, Women’s
It’s only the middle of the month, so you’ve got some time to get into the Halloween book/film mood. Here are some suggestions. WOMEN, TRAUMA, AND HAUNTED HOUSES Sarah Smeltzer writes: The haunted house is a staple of the horror genre and it’s easy to see why. Your house should be familiar and it should
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The Oxford Book of Footnotes* If you’ve ever waded through a large academic tome wrangling with a sequence of footnotes at the bottom of nearly every page, you’ll appreciate this piece by Bruce McCall in The New Yorker. How Doctors Use Poetry A Harvard medical student describes how he is learning to both treat and
ARE WE ALL GASLIGHTERS? How Crime Fiction Helps Us Understand The Part Communities Play in Continuing Abuse The psychological concept of gaslighting takes its name from the film Gaslight starring Ingrid Bergman: Gaslighting is a common aspect of abusive relationships, both in fiction and in real life. An abuser uses a variety of methods to
A neuroscientist explains what tech does to the reading brain An interview with UCLA neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain and the recently released Reader, Come Home, which details “how technology is changing the brain, what we lose when we lose deep attention, and
The History and Future of the Western in 10 Books Part immigrant story, part adventure tale, and part allegory of truth and justice—the Western has been entertaining American readers for nearly two hundred years. Maybe we’re drawn to the setting: a frontier where mountains claw at the sunset and calamity is just around the corner.
Why Doctors Should Read Fiction Students in medical school and nursing traditionally study ethics through the use of case studies, short synopses of situations the students may face later in their careers. This article describes a recent paper from the journal Literature and Medicine that suggests replacing case studies with short stories that present ethical
