A (hopefully premature) obituary for Bookforum and the magazines that connect us David L. Ulin laments the closing of Bookforum, a review journal “positioned in the middle territory between service journalism and the academy”: To engage with an issue has long felt to me like going to a fabulous party where the guests are not […]
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
Why I teach a course connecting Taylor Swift’s songs to the works of Shakespeare, Hitchcock and Plath Elizabeth Scala, professor of English at The University of Texas at Austin, explains how and why she created the course “The Taylor Swift Songbook,” an introductory English course. Categories: Literary Criticism, Literary History, Reading Why read old books?
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
On the End of the Canon Wars This think piece by John Michael Colón examines the question of whether and, if so, how a “liberal education” (which really means study across the humanities) benefits students. Categories: Literary Criticism, Literary History, Literature & Culture, Reading A dinosaur is a story “in science as in fiction, the
The Dreariness of Book Club Discussions Novelist and critic Naomi Kanakia, who belongs to two book clubs, uses the context of her book group discussions to examine why we read fiction. The point of novels, she writes, “is that something happened. Something was at stake in this story. Characters made decisions. Those decisions had consequences.
PEN America Rejects Calls to Cancel Coney Barrett Book Last week’s Literary Links included an article about Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s book advance as well as an article about PEN America’s report on diversity in the publishing industry. This week we have a link to Publishers Weekly’s news that PEN America has condemned the
Book Banners Are Weaponizing Legitimate Resources: Book Censorship News, October 28, 2022 Danika Ellis writes, “One of the strategies book banners are using that makes me nervous is that they are weaponizing resources that were never meant to defend book banning.” She’s particularly concerned about “resources that were specifically made to help teachers and parents
How Do the Books We Read Change Our Brains? “Gregory Berns on Measuring the Effects of a Really Good Story” In this article, adapted from his book The Self Delusion: The New Neuroscience of How We Invent—and Reinvent—Our Identities, Emory University psychology professor Gregory Berns describes a neuroimaging experiment he devised to measure whether reading
8 Cozy Books That Will Make You Think Sharon Van Meter writes: “I have discovered a whole subgenre of books that propose hard-hitting philosophical questions while enveloping readers in a homey, inviting atmosphere. It’s the best of both worlds, a cozy read that will make you think!” Read her list to discover what books she
