Last Week's Links

Literary Links

Here are some of the articles about the world of literature that caught my eye recently. The New York Review of Books  “Truth, Beauty, and Oliver Sacks” Simon Callow reviews Everything in Its Place: First Loves and Last Tales by Oliver Sacks, the second posthumous collection of Sacks’s essays, most of which were published in […]

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Books to Read for World Refugee Awareness Month | Bookish

June is World Refugee Awareness Month. To bring insight into the diverse experiences of refugees, we’ve rounded up some of the best books by and about refugees. Whether you’re interested in reading a memoir, a reported work of nonfiction, a novel, or sharing a story with a young reader, there’s a book here for everyone.

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Pride Flag from Bookish

Bookish and Proud: A Literary Pride Month Flag

The editors at Bookish have created a literary flag in honor of Pride Month. Check out the article to see a larger version of the flag and the list of nearly 350 book covers used to create it: “Each book used in this collage is either written by an author or features a character who

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6 Degrees of Separation: From “Murmur” to “Eat, Pray, Love”

Here’s my second entry in Kate’s 6 Degrees of Separation Meme from her blog, Books Are My Favourite and Best. Here’s how it works: Books can be linked in obvious ways – for example, books by the same authors, from the same era or genre, or books with similar themes or settings. Or, you may

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Books I Read in May

May proved to be a success. I hit my unofficial monthly quota of books completed (5), including one for my classics club list. Better yet, three of the five reads get the recommended rating. Sometimes I Lie by Alice Feeney text © 2017   Macmillan Audio, 2018   Narrated by: Stephanie Racine Here’s how the

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The Classics Club

CC Spin: Review, “The Iceman Cometh” by Eugene O’Neill

Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953) O’Neill, nevertheless, remains all but unique in his persistent and increasingly more nearly exclusive attempt to deal with modern life in such a way as to achieve the effect of classic tragedy. . . . Certainly no other significant playwright has so persisted in the conviction that, if a drama is to

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Quotation: Elena Ferrante: Storytelling as Power

There is one form of power that has fascinated me ever since I was a girl, even though it has been widely colonized by men: the power of storytelling. Telling stories really is a kind of power, and not an insignificant one. Stories give shape to experience, sometimes by accommodating traditional literary forms, sometimes by

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girl reading

15 Novels: Learning History through Reading Fiction

Novels Mentioned The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, translated by Berliani M. Nugrahani The Light Between Oceans by M.L. Stedman My Brilliant Friend (and 3 companion novels) by by Elena Ferrante, translated by Ann Goldstein The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin, translated by Ken Liu Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier The Book Thief by Markus

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Quotation: Susan Sontag Was a Monster

“She took things too seriously. She was difficult and unyielding. That’s why Susan Sontag’s work matters so much even now.” This is how I see her monstrosity: residing not in whether she was or was not likeable, but in her relentlessness, and her refusal to pander. The word ‘monster’ comes from the Latin monere, to

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Close Reading: A Pivotal Scene in “The Silent Patient”

When I posted about The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides, I wondered how many people actually engage with the text of mysteries or thrillers instead of just skimming to find out how the story ends. Michaelides leads the reader along so scintillatingly that a large part of the pleasure of reading this novel lies in

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