How the first National Book Awards reflected 1950s America “In the start of a new series reflecting on 75 years of the awards, Viet Thanh Nguyen writes about how societies and juries read and recognize literature” The National Book Awards will celebrate its 75th anniversary at this year’s ceremony, on Nov. 20. To mark the […]
The Secrets of Suspense “We love churning apprehension in fiction; we hate it in life. But understanding the most fundamental technique of storytelling can teach us something about being alive.” Kathryn Schulz explains the nature of suspense, the process of “making the audience want to know what happens next.” Inside Alice Munro’s Notebooks Benjamin Hedin,
Between the Book Club and BookTok: Community Reading in Montreal Adam Christopher Hill tells the story of Page Break, a weekly gathering at De Stiil bookstore in Montreal. Page Break is a time when readers come together, give up their phones, and read silently for an hour. This approach to reading differs from most book
What Fiction Writing Shares With Psychotherapy “Emily Howes Considers the Similarities Between Two Therapeutic Practices” I have a curious double professional identity. I am both a novelist and a therapist; both a teller of tales, and a listener to them. I spend my days in my own imagination or settling into the deepest corners of
‘I will defeat Richard Osman!’: Holly Jackson on being Britain’s top selling female crime author Lucy Knight interviews YA novelist Holly Jackson, whose book series A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder is currently being adapted into a BBC TV series. According to Knight, “Jackson’s books are some of the most recommended among the #BookTok community.”
The Dinner Party That Started the Harlem Renaissance “A century ago, a dinner party in New York set in motion one of the most influential cultural movements of the 20th century.” Staff members of The New York Times have “explored archival material and have reconstructed much of” what happened on March 21, 1924, at a
The Forgotten Women Who Shaped the Roman Empire Kudos to Atlas Obscura for their series She Was There, in which female scholars participate in “writing long-forgotten women back into history.” I find the movement to give voice to marginalized people who have been erased from history one of the most interesting and vital elements within
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When Consciousness Itself is the Protagonist: A Reading List I’ll let River Halen themselves describe the origin of this list of “books that bend reality and the self”: As I was writing my book Dream Rooms, a book about the years that led up to my coming out as trans, I found myself fascinated by
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Too Enjoyable to Be Literature What a wonderful short piece! It’s only four paragraphs long (one of which is a block quotation), but it so aptly expresses a reader’s joy of recognizing and appreciating a literary work. That literary work is Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald. And Helen Garner has the same
Introducing the 2024 Reading Log! I’ve been keeping track of the books I’ve read since May 1, 1991, when we got our first computer. I started with a database program, but, over that many years, software has changed multiple times. Every time a program would bite the dust, I’d export my data, then import it
