“A literary culture whose tough-mindedness 20 years ago often verged on outright cruelty, has turned horribly emollient, to the point where it sometimes seems that books are not so much criticised, favourably or unfavourably, as simply endorsed.”
Category: words
Why Do We Believe Fictional Stories When We Know They’re Not True?
“Feeling a range of real emotions for fictional events is so commonplace we don’t often think to question it. But why should we get emotionally involved with characters and situations that we know are not real? Why should we get scared by something we know is only a movie? This is the paradox of fiction.”
Poetry Isn’t Dying. Poets, On The Other Hand…
“Not only is it not endangered, it will outlast any number of species of living things on the face of the earth. It will only perish with our own. I worry about journalism. I don’t worry about Poetry. Being a poet is a more complicated matter.”
If Dylan Can Win The Nobel Prize For Literature, Let’s Move These Authors Onto The Music Stage
Tom Gauld’s cartoon posits entirely new opening acts to get concertgoers stoked for the musicians.
How A Technical Writer Created The Award-Winning Short Story That The Movie ‘Arrival’ Is Based On
Ted Chiang writes so slowly that he spent five years researching linguistics before coming out with “Story of Your Life.”
Why Write About The Nastiness Of Humanity? Ask This Zimbabwean Author
Petina Gappah, winner of the Guardian First Book Award several years ago, Has a new book of short stories out. And the people in them experience quite a lot of painful challenges. Why? “The criminal justice system links everyone together, from the top politicians to the street vendors – it cuts across the boundaries of race and class.”
Fiction Podcasts Are Here To Stay, And Here’s A List Of Some Of The Best
You probably already know about “Welcome to Night Vale,” but there’s so much more than that, including dramas with Catherine Keener and Oscar Isaac, stories conceived by Issa Rae, and an alternate universe old-time variety show with Mandy Patinkin and Tim Robbins.
LitHub Doubles Down On Its Commitments To Equity And Diversity Because ‘The Literary Is Political’
LitHub’s editor writes, “Literary Hub will use its platform (as we have tried to thus far) as a space for bearing witness and calling to action, for testimony and prosecution, for lamentation and, when possible, celebration. A space for the many and wonderful literary voices that make up our real America.”
Literary Analysis Teaches Us To Take The Feelings Out In Favor Of The Brain. That’s A Mistake
“One of the terrible secrets about attending graduate school in literature is that it can ruin your ability to read for pleasure; pick up a book, and a nasty voice whispers that you should be reading something serious – or reading something seriously. So in the classroom, I learned to put away my body. Outside of the academy, however, specifically through fanfiction, I was learning to read with it.”
The ‘Greatest Literary Prize You’ve Never Heard Of’? The ‘American Nobel’? Possibly
“Over its 45 year history, 32 of the winners, jurors, and finalists have gone on to win the Nobel Prize” – among them Gabriel García Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Tomas Tranströmer, Czesław Miłosz, Doris Lessing, and Svetlana Alexievich. Editor and literary publisher Chad Post pays a visit to Norman, Oklahoma to check out the Neustadt Prize and this year’s winner, Dubravka Ugrešić.