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 […]
#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
I was surprised recently to learn that Joy Fielding has a new book that came out this month (August 2025), Jenny Cooper Has a Secret. About 30 years ago I read and enjoyed several of Fielding’s novels: That was before my book-blogging days. Then life got busier, and I lost track of Joy Fielding—another case
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In a decision that will widely impact small newspapers, the Associated Press announced it will discontinue its longtime weekly book reviews beginning September 1. Source: AP to Slash Weekly Book Reviews
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The 20 In-Flight Crime Movie Options on This Airplane, Ranked This article amused me because, by the time you read this, I will have spent some huge number of hours flying from the West Coast of the U.S. to Amsterdam to embark on a 6-week cruise. As much as I enjoy traveling, I hate these
A Deep Dive into the Mind of the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson “The rise and fall of the Beach Boys leader shows how crucial the brain’s executive function is to creativity” Occasioned by the death of Brian Wilson on June 11, 2025, Scientific American has updated this article from 2017 (which was itself an update
Linwood Barclay on the Art of Making Everyday Things Terrifying “Making people fear things in their everyday lives in ways they never did before, that’s the dream of every writer of suspenseful tales,” prolific thriller author Linwood Barclay tells us. How the far right seeks to spread its ideology through the publishing world Jason Wilson,
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
Discussion These are some of the many books I remember carrying around and reading in mass-market paperback format. Since my late adolescence and early adulthood (my late teens, 20s, and 30s) coincided with the height of the mass market age, I felt a twinge of nostalgia when I read that mass-market paperbacks will no longer
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The 30 best nonfiction books of the last 30 years The Los Angeles Times is compiling a series of “30 Best” lists in honor of this year’s celebration of the 30th anniversary of its annual Festival of Books. Here are its top nonfiction titles. The Age of Genre Bending, Blending, and Juxtaposing Novelist and essayist
