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Betty Smith enchanted a generation of readers with ‘A Tree Grows in Brooklyn’ − even as she groused that she hoped Williamsburg would be flattened Rachel Gordan, assistant professor of religion and Jewish studies at the University of Florida, discloses that Betty Smith herself had a different experience of life in Brooklyn than does the […]

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‘God forbid that a dog should die’: when Goodreads reviews go bad “I’m a professional critic, and an author of a literary novel. I’m a snob. I care about my book, and the authors I feel are my competitors,” writes Lauren Oyler. In this piece, another chapter in the continuous Goodreads controversy, she states that

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A stack of 3 closed books (left); an open notebook with a pen on top (right). Title: 12 Novels Thata Changed How I Read Fiction

#5 “The Debt to Pleasure” by John Lanchester

Related Posts: #5 The Debt to Pleasure by John Lanchester © 1996 Date read: 7/12/1998 I don’t recall ever feeling the need to like fictional characters, yet this topic recurs periodically when readers condemn a book they’ve just finished because “I didn’t like any of the characters.” But if I ever did feel such a

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A stack of 3 closed books, next to an open notebook on which rests a ballpoint pen. Text: Literary Links: Life Stories in Literature

Literary Links: Life Stories in Literature

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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A stack of 3 closed books (left); an open notebook with a pen on top (right). Title: 12 Novels Thata Changed How I Read Fiction

#4 “The Church of Dead Girls” by Stephen Dobyns

Related Posts: #4 The Church of Dead Girls by Stephen Dobyns © 1997 Date read: 9/23/1997 I used to think that the most important consideration in any work of fiction is, hands down, point of view. But this novel made me realize that context is just as important. A first-person narrator tells this story, about

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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

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You May Be Surprised by What Scares You “Fear may be a linchpin of horror, but as a recent anthology attests, the true bedrock of the genre is mood.” Stephen Kearse writes, “even in my favorite works of the genre, horror scenarios generally intrigue rather than scare me; I’m more likely to ponder than to

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A stack of 3 closed books (left); an open notebook with a pen on top (right). Title: 12 Novels Thata Changed How I Read Fiction

#2 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce & #3 The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie

Related Post: This week I offer two selections because there’s not much I can say about #3 without giving away the whole point. #2 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce © 1916 Date read: ca. 1966 or 1967 While I now credit Gillian Flynn’s novel Gone Girl with opening

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Why is March 2024 the Best Month in Years For Books? “In Her Debut Column, Maris Kreizman Considers This Spring’s Flood of Great Books” Maris Kreizman describes the kinds of books she, as a critic, likes to cover: The books that move me aren’t the kinds that are written by celebrities; they’re often labors of

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Shane’s Lot: How a 1949 Gun-Toting Loner Still Rides Through American Literature Writer Maria Hummel examines how Shane, the gunslinger introduced in Jack Schaefer’s 1949 novel Rider from Nowhere, has lived on in American popular culture. Although Shane’s worldview is dated, the novel projects the timeless quest of innocence in our bloody world. Shane altered

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