The Essential Kate Atkinson “Surprising, versatile, dark and funny, the British writer has something for (almost) everyone.” Kate Atkinson’s 1995 novel Behind the Scenes at the Museum stands atop my list of Books to Reread, and I swear that some September (my traditional rereading month) I’m going to get to it. Just about everyone in […]
The Best Literary Love Stories A satisfying literary love story doesn’t need to end happily ever after—but one does need to be left with a sense that two characters belong together, advises the novelist Lily King . . . Thomas Mallon’s Theory of the Diary “The New York writer and editor’s diaries of the AIDS
How to Be a Good Literary Citizen (in Seven Easy Steps) Maris Kreizman writes about “literary citizenship . . . an amorphous kind of concept, often changing with the moment, but needed more than ever today when corporate interests have a stranglehold on the arts, literary institutions are being devastated by the cancellation of NEA
The Ultimate Fall 2025 Reading List “95 BOOKS THE CRITICS THINK YOU SHOULD READ THIS SEASON” LitHub’s annual list, prepared by Emily Temple: This season, I processed 28 lists, which collectively recommended a total of 466 books. 95 of these were included 3 times or more, and these I present to you in descending order
The Making of America’s Frontier Mythology Was the Making of America Just as individuals have life stories, so do nations, ethnic groups, and other collective aspects of culture and society. In this excerpt from the book The Undiscovered Country: Triumph, Tragedy, and the Shaping of the American West, Paul Andrew Hutton examines how, beginning in
Literary Links: Life Stories in Literature Read More »
Federal judge overturns part of Florida’s book ban law, drawing on nearly 100 years of precedent protecting First Amendment access to ideas James B. Blasingame is a professor of English at Arizona State University and a former high school English teacher who has “tried to learn as much as I can about the history of
#bookstodon #BookBlog #literature This Is Your Brain on Tropes: Why Readers are Addicted to the Familiar In the world of literature, a trope is: Monique Snyman explains that “tropes aren’t just lazy storytelling, as so many people like to say. Tropes are brain candy. And our brains are wired to crave them.” How Publishing Has
After the Deluge: What Future for Climate Fiction? Keith Woodhouse discusses “an emerging subgenre that we might call the ‘climate assessment drama.’ These books are vast in size and scope and, at the same time, narrowly concerned with the particular political, ethical, and technical conundrums of the world climate change has wrought.” Why Do Doctors
Brain oscillations reveal dynamic shifts in creative thought during metaphor generation Since I’ve written earlier about metaphors as novel titles, this article fascinated me. It reports on recent research into “the neural mechanisms behind metaphor generation, a creative skill that plays an important role in how people understand complex concepts and communicate abstract ideas.” The
The Extreme Life and Philosophy of Hunter S. Thompson: Gonzo Journalism and the American Condition A short introduction, with lots of related links, to the life and work of Hunter S. Thompson, commonly known as the father of “gonzo journalism”: Gonzo journalism . . . actually has a serious question to ask: “Are not the
