Literary Criticism

Fictive Worlds and Real Brains: The Psychology of Reading

If you’ve ever gotten lost in a good book, you know the feeling of being transported into a different reality: Awareness of your surroundings melts away, time seems to stop, and you immerse yourself completely in the world of the book. Like daydreaming, this feeling of being carried into another world is an alternate state […]

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A Novel? Padgett Powell’s Book Defies Genre

A Novel? Padgett Powell’s Book Defies Genre : NPR: The question mark that accompanies the subtitle of author Padgett Powell’s new book, The Interrogative Mood: A Novel? might seem flippant. But Powell’s book earns that bit of punctuation. The Interrogative Mood is composed entirely of questions. Some of them are laugh out loud funny, some

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Robert Jordan, Hemingway’s Bipartisan Hero : NPR

Robert Jordan, Hemingway’s Bipartisan Hero : NPR: Barack Obama and John McCain don’t agree on much, but they apparently agree on this: They’re fierce political opponents, but it turns out that the presidential candidates do agree on a literary matter: Each man picks Ernest Hemingway’s 1940 novel For Whom the Bell Tolls as a favorite.

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Remembrances of David Foster Wallace

The Scout Report, a fine weekly newsletter from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin, offers this roundup of stories about the recent death of author David Foster Wallace: Friends and colleagues remember author David Foster Wallace David Foster Wallace, Influential Writer, Dies at 46 [Free registration may be required] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/15/books/15wallace.html Wallace

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Waterston gives insider’s view of L.M. Montgomery

Nova Scotia News – TheChronicleHerald.ca: In Nova Scotia’s The Chronicle Herald, Judith Meyrick reviews Magic Island: The Fictions of L. M. Montgomery by Elizabeth Waterston. Montgomery was the author of Anne of Green Gables and several subsequent best-selling novels. Montgomery kept journals and scrapbooks passionately and meticulously, preserving for us a picture of her daily

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Moving Beyond ‘Catcher’ On School Reading Lists : NPR

Moving Beyond ‘Catcher’ On School Reading Lists : NPR: “The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger’s beloved novel, once banned and full of frank four-letter words, will continue to be assigned to high school reading lists this year. But Anne Trubek, a professor of English at Oberlin College, argues that it’s time to update Salinger’s

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“How Fiction Works” | csmonitor.com

“How Fiction Works” | csmonitor.com: Matt Shaer reviews the recently published book How Fiction Works by James Wood: “Wood, a staff writer at The New Yorker and former chief literary critic at the Guardian and The New Republic, is often called America’s preeminent literary critic.” And, Shaer reports, that for the most part, Wood succeeds.

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Why Sci-Fi Is the Last Bastion of Philosophical Writing

Clive Thompson on Why Sci-Fi Is the Last Bastion of Philosophical Writing If you want to read books that tackle profound philosophical questions, then the best — and perhaps only — place to turn these days is sci-fi. Science fiction is the last great literature of ideas. In this short article in Wired magazine Clive

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