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Monday Miscellany

Publishing Words: The Future of Books Writing in The Harvard Crimson, Sofie C. Brooks discusses how the rise of ebooks may change the publishing industry: What the publishing industry faces right now is a customer base that demands a digital product even as the technology that makes these products possible is still in its early […]

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Monday Miscellany

Why is dystopia so appealing to young adults? A dystopia is an imaginary world in which people live dehumanized lives of fear and subjugation; it’s the opposite of utopia. In this piece YA writer Moira Young examines why distopian novels such as Suzanne Collins’s recent Hunger Games trilogy are so popular with young people: Books

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Monday Miscellany

Vashon Great Books club one of oldest in U.S. The Seattle Times spotlights 92-year-old Grace Crecelius: For 61 years, Grace Crecelius has cracked the books. Not just any books, mind you, but the works of Plato, Descartes and Kant, Shakespeare, Marx and Freud. At 92, Crecelius is the oldest member of what may be one

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Monday Miscellany

The greatest death scenes in literature Five judges of the 2012 Wellcome Trust book prize for medicine in literature ponder the question “What makes for a great literary death scene?” Tim Lott calls their choices “eclectic.” Take a look, and see if you have other favorite death scenes to add to the list. The 10

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Monday Miscellany

2012 Stamp Preview: A Stamp a Day The United States Postal Service will be issuing some new literature-related stamps in 2012. Click on the numbers to see more information about these: #2 Edgar Rice Burroughs #11 O. Henry #31 Twentieth-Century Poets: Elizabeth Bishop, Joseph Brodsky, Gwendolyn Brooks, E. E. Cummings, Robert Hayden, Denise Levertov, Sylvia

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book review

“The Reader, the Text, the Poem” by Louise M. Rosenblatt

Rosenblatt, Louise M. The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work  Carbondale, Ill., 1978Hardcover, 196 pagesISBN 0-8093-0883-5 Highly Recommended Rosenblatt is one of the proponents of the reader-response theory of literary criticism, a concept that emerged in the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s as a reaction to New Criticism, which treated

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book review

Review: “Studying the Novel” by Jeremy Hawthorn

Hawthorn, Jeremy. Studying the Novel: An IntroductionEdward Arnold, 2nd edition (1992, reprinted 1996)Paperback, 146 pages ISBN 0-340-56403-2 This slim volume is a good choice for book-discussion group members who appreciate good books but want to sharpen their reading and discussion skills. The premise of Hawthorn’s book is that “in the course of studying novels we must

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