Students Protest Book Bans in Pennsylvania School District Last week’s Literary Links included an article about censorship in a Pennsylvania school. Here’s a follow-up: “students have spoken up, demanding that materials by Black and Brown authors be reinstated in the classroom.” Becoming the Thing That Haunts the House: Gothic Fiction and the Fear of Change […]
Pat Barker on Briseis, the main character of the novel The Silence of the Girls, based on the women from Homer’s Iliad: “You can sometimes struggle for months to get the voice of a new character, but Briseis’s voice was there from the beginning, as if she was impatient to make herself heard. If I
Quotation: Pat Barker on “The Silence of the Girls” Read More »
Which one will you pull from the shelf?
It’s National Read a Book Day! Read More »
Dread, War and Ambivalence: Literature Since the Towers Fell The events of 9/11 irrevocably changed the course of global affairs. They also changed culture. It will likely be easier to say how a century from now. But with 20 years’ hindsight, The Times’s book critics reflect below on some of the influence of that day
This month we start with 2021 Booker Prize nominee, Second Place by Rachel Cusk. Here’s the book description from Goodreads: A woman invites a famed artist to visit the remote coastal region where she lives, in the belief that his vision will penetrate the mystery of her life and landscape. His provocative presence provides the
6 Degrees of Separation: Prize-Worthy Coming-of-Age Novels Read More »
“It’s a strange moment in the culture, rootless and atomized, and we’ve stopped buying into a lot of the default older structures for making sense of the world—the family unit, large-scale religion, duties to some larger moral order. It does feel like the responsibility for meaning has been shifted onto the individual, so I think
Quotation: Emma Cline Read More »
The Man Behind the Myth: Should We Question the Hero’s Journey? Sarah E. Bond and Joel Christensen dispute Joseph Campbell’s well-known theory “which proposed the existence of a singular ‘hero’s journey’ (also known as the Monomyth), as experienced by ancient heroes such as Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey.” How Extortion Scams and Review Bombing Trolls Turned
“the actual process of writing a novel is very much like doing a huge jigsaw puzzle. You can’t always see the whole thing at the same time. The more you work, the more it becomes clear. A lot of putting together a jigsaw puzzle is just patience, and looking around for the right pieces. It’s
Quotation: Steph Cha Read More »
Censorship on the Rise Worldwide A report from Publishers Weekly: “Since the start of the Covid pandemic, there’s been a rise in instances of government censorship of books around the world.” 3 Things to Know About the Ending of a Story I see a lot of discussion in literature-related posts about fictional introductions, but not
In this month’s 6 Degrees of Separation I expressed my love for big, sprawling family sagas. I think that love is one part of my motivation for choosing We Are the Brennans as my July 2021 Book of the Month book. Another motivator was Joyce Carol Oates’s memorable novel We Were the Mulvaneys (scroll down
Review: “We Are the Brennans” Read More »
