A Classic Chronicle of Korean America: On Kim Ronyoung’s Clay Walls “David S. Cho Explores Ideas of Homeland, Belonging and Identity in a Pioneering Contribution to Asian American Literature” Novels that introduce us to people from cultures other than our own contribute to human understanding in a global context. Clay Walls is a truly pioneering […]
Literary Links: Life Stories in Literature Read More »
What We Learn About Our World by Imagining Its End Arthur Krystal ponders the stories humans have devised about when and how the world will end: “Having to come to terms with this eventuality [the end of the world] is the price we pay for being able to imagine it in the first place.” Tash
I’ve long been a fan of audiobooks. (You can read about my experience with them here.) But they complicate book discussions by muddying the waters of the standard terminology of literary criticism. In fact, just creating a title for this post took me a long time; according to my notes, I’ve been contemplating this question since
What Should We Call the Person Recorded Reading an Audiobook? Read More »
Six Trick Novels That Play with Form One of my favorite kind of fiction is a book that plays with form. Here Gareth Rubin, writer of both fiction and nonfiction, discusses 6 novels that do just that. His list includes one of my all-time favorites, The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle (2018) by Stuart Turton.
BookLooks, RatedBooks, and Other Unprofessional Book “Review” Sites to Know: Book Censorship News, January 10, 2025 “One of the trends we’ll see in book censorship over 2025 is the increased use of unprofessional, politically-driven book review websites like BookLooks to make decisions in professional library and educational settings,” writes Kelly Jensen for Book Riot. I
How AI is unlocking ancient texts — and could rewrite history “From deciphering burnt Roman scrolls to reading crumbling cuneiform tablets, neural networks could give researchers more data than they’ve had in centuries.” As ominous as the threat of generative AI replacing writers is, there are some kinds of things that AI can be legitimately
Jimmy Carter: Poet, Novelist, Memoirist, Philosopher “He wasn’t just prolific, publishing 32 books. His output also showed an unusual range that included memoirs and forays into historical fiction and even poetry.” The New York Times eulogizes President Jimmy Carter with emphasis on his writing: “Publishing 32 books over the course of his life, he wasn’t
Update on Comments Glitch The cause of the problem has been traced to Jetpack. Jetpack support has informed me that “this is an issue that our development team is aware of and working to resolve. It will likely be fixed in the next version of Jetpack in early January.” So that’s where we are. In
My Continued Apologies The comment glitch on this blog continues. My hosting provider has been helpful in trying to track down the cause. In the meantime, here’s a work-around that may may work: If you type a comment and hit the “post comment” button, you’ll get the message “submitting comment,” followed by nothing. But, if
My Apologies After the migration to a new computer, I now find myself unable to reply to comments on my own blog. This pertains to all posts over the last couple of weeks. Please know that I do appreciate your comments and read every one of them. I won’t be able to start trying to
Books New to My TBR Read More »
