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 […]
Photo by Gunnar Ridderström on Unsplash Yes, it’s our annual special day, National Book Lovers Day! In honor of which, here are some reading suggestions. (Since I’ve been abroad for the past six weeks, these suggestions are heavily travel related.) 12 Literary Cities Every Book Lover Must Visit New Lives in New Lands: 5+ Journeys
National Book Lovers Day! Read More »
Refugee Lit Stakes Its Worthy Claim “In a refugee camp,” Iranian American author Dina Nayeri writes in her 2019 novelistic memoir, The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You, “stories are everything. Everyone has one, having just slipped out from the grip of a nightmare, [they] transported us out of our places of exile, to
Literary Links: Life Stories in Literature Read More »
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
Related Post: A look back at the archives reveals that I didn’t publish much content during June 2010. That doesn’t surprise me, since I was concentrating on finishing my dissertation so that I could graduate the following summer. Here’s the single substantive piece for that month, from June 5, 2010: The Psychology of Reading: A
15 Years Ago on Notes in the Margin Read More »
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,
#bookstodon #reading #CrimeFiction #mysteries #thrillers
On Crime Novels & Thrillers Read More »
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
What Mass-Market Paperbacks Do You Remember Reading? Read More »
