American novelist Patricia Highsmith was born on this day 100 years ago (January 19, 1921) in Fort Worth, Texas. She died on February 4, 1995. In between, her life was marked by chronic cycles of depression, anorexia, and alcoholism. She was a misanthrope who preferred the company of animals to that of people. She was […]
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TIMES NEW ROMAN, ARIAL, AND HELVETICA: THE FONT FAVORITES, BUT WHY? Melissa Baron looks into why, with hundreds of thousands of fonts in existence, Times New Roman, Arial, and Helvetica have become :the most widely used fonts ever.” Old Novels as Therapy “In these incredibly dark days, I’ve found solace talking to people I’ve known
Related Post: My Reading & Writing Goals for 2021 Do you have a reading plan for 2021? If you’ve never put a reading plan together, the task can seem overwhelming. Here are some resources I’ve collected that can help. But you don’t have to develop a formal reading plan to find these articles useful. Maybe
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Reading, That Strange and Uniquely Human Thing “How we evolved to read is a story of one creative species.” Lydia Wilson explains how writing developed from a system to record the ownership of particular goods to one capable of creating great works of literature. Turning the Page on the Year “If ever there were a
What I Learned from COVID-19 I keep reading things like “I can’t wait to be done with 2020 and move on to 2021.” Do most people truly believe that merely taking one calendar off the wall and hanging up another one is going to change their day-to-day existence? Such magical thinking. Reality doesn’t work that
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Which Book Should You Read First in 2021? This quiz from Book Riot can help you answer the question. “Personally, I’m usually looking for something I think will be a 5-star read to start off the year,” writes quizster Rachel Brittain. 13 New Books to Watch For in January News flash! There’s a new book
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Overlooked No More: Clarice Lispector, Novelist Who Captivated Brazil “Critics lauded her stream-of-consciousness style and described her as glamorous and mysterious. But she didn’t always welcome the attention she received.” “This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.” From the
For this first 6 Degrees of 2021, we start with the winner of the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction, Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell. This book is next up on my to-read list. I understand from reading about this highly praised novel that it portrays the death of Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, at age 11 in the
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We’ve all been waiting for 2021, and finally it’s here! And to get this new year started off right, The Guardian has put together The 31-Day Literary Diet for January: “From a Shirley Jackson short story to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 30-minute Ted talk, nourish your mind with our one-a-day selection of literary treats.”
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Notable Literary Deaths in 2020 Lit Hub has compiled this “Incomplete List of the Writers, Editors, and Great Literary Minds We Lost This Year.” Among the many unhappinesses of this year, we lost what seems like an unusually large number of members of the literary community, from poets to novelists to editors to critics to
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