Alan Dershowitz claims a fictional lawyer defamed him. The implications for novelists are very real. on Charles of the Washington Post reports that Alan Dershowitz, a real-life attorney, claims that he was defamed by a fictional attorney on the CBS All Access show The Good Fight. This may sound comic, “But his complaint, if successful, […]
Many writers say they can actually hear the voices of their characters – here’s why I don’t write fiction, but I read a lot about and talk with people who do. I’m always fascinated when fiction writers say that a character either appeared and demanded to be written about or appeared to object when the
Looking at Epic Poetry Through 21st-Century Eyes “New translations of the ‘Aeneid,’ ‘Beowulf’ and other ancient stories challenge some of our modern-day ideas.” Classical epic poetry has been the basis of the Western literary canon for centuries and has helped shape social values and political identities as well as literary history. But new translations of
Here’s a question that comes up periodically on literary sites: I’m having trouble reading books with unreliable narrators. How exactly do you know a narrator is unreliable? When I saw the question again recently, I realized that, although the question gets asked a lot, I don’t think I’ve ever seen an answer. It’s a hard
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Viewing Literature as a Lab for Community Ethics The COVID-19 pandemic has brought to the forefront many bioethical questions, such as, when resources are limited, which lives should be saved and which sacrificed? Maren Tova Linett, author of Literary Bioethics, argues that fiction, with its ability to present imagined worlds, offers the chance to explore
I’ve been jealously eyeing people’s Instagram and Facebook posts showing off their book hauls from their library’s curbside pickup service. A lot of libraries opened for pickup while I’ve been not-so-patiently waiting for announcements from both my city and county libraries. Now my county library has finally figured out how to handle pickup service. They’re
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Crime Fiction Trains Us for Crisis Writer Sulari Gentill says that, since crime fiction “essentially tells the story of a crisis,” is has helped to prepare us for the world we all now find ourselves in. This year we have already faced fire, flood and pandemic. We had fled our homes and been confined to
Recently I came across the article “The Psychology of a Book Hangover” by Clare Barnett, who describes a book hangover this way: A “book hangover” is the slangy shortcut for the feeling when a reader finishes a book—usually fiction—and they can’t stop thinking about the fictional world that has run out of pages. The story
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Time Is Not Real: Books That Play with the Art of Time Vivienne Woodward looks at some books that manipulate our sense of time. The inspiration for this essay is the way COVID-19 lockdown has affected her perception of time: One of the things reading fiction makes clear is how many ways there are to
