The Influence of King Solomon's Mines on The Creation of Half-Broken People (04/25)
King Solomon's Mines, a novel by H. Rider Haggard, is referenced throughout Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu's African gothic historical fiction work The Creation of Half-Broken People.
After Henry Rider Haggard (1856–1925) had returned to England from a stint as an administrator in South Africa, his brother suggested a wager: he would...
Queen Marguerite of Navarre (04/25)
Allegra Goodman's novel Isola concerns Marguerite de la Rocque de Roberval (born c. 1515), a French noblewoman who was marooned on a deserted island with her lover while on a voyage to New France (Canada). Marguerite was eventually rescued and upon her return to France was treated as a celebrity; her tale became widely known very quickly....
Oliver Twist Adaptations (03/25)
Charles Dickens' works have been adapted and retold in countless forms. In the case of Oliver Twist, the most notable adaptations have been straightforward retellings of the original storyline. For example, the West End musical adaptation Oliver! largely adheres to Dickens' plot, although it omits the events before Oliver ends up at the ...
Spotlight on a Banned Author: Maia Kobabe (03/25)
When speaking about book bans, it rarely takes long for the 2019 graphic memoir
Gender Queer to enter the conversation. Its author Maia Kobabe, who is also the first contributing author to
Banned Together, never imagined that writing a memoir about eir experience growing up and coming out as nonbinary and asexual would lead to national ...
Emily J. Taylor's Inspirations (03/25)
Emily J. Taylor's sophomore novel,
The Otherwhere Post, is an academic young adult fantasy filled with haunting secrets, a fascinating magic system, and a sweet slow-burn romance. Taylor has
shared that the idea for the story struck in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. Between quarantining and the sleep deprivation that ...
New Journalism (03/25)
In 1963, Jimmy Breslin chronicled the death of John F. Kennedy from the point of view of the man who dug his grave. Instead of joining the big names in journalism in awaiting statements of grief from world leaders, he went to the cemetery where the US president was to be buried in order to write '
It's an Honor,' a piece that told the ...
Madame Sosostris in T.S. Eliot's Poetry (03/25)
In Madame Sosostris and the Festival for the Brokenhearted, Londoner Viv meets the infamous clairvoyant Madame Sosostris while she is giving readings at the Cholmondeley Room of the House of Lords. Guests are frightened and awed by the accuracy of her gift, calling her "the most dependable clairvoyant in the country," as she has...
Virginia Woolf's The Years, British Empire, and Narrative Form (03/25)
The Years is the last of Virginia Woolf's novels to be published during her lifetime, in 1937. Beginning in 1880 and following three generations of the Pargiter family across five decades to the 'present day,' it captures intimate moments between characters and internal monologues against the backdrop of historical events and changes in ...
Authorial Pseudonyms (02/25)
I've joked on more than one occasion that, should I ever write a novel of my own, it will have to be under a pseudonym to save myself from the ire of all the real people I'll be turning into fiction. Many famous and acclaimed writers have used a pseudonym (also known as a pen name, nom de guerre, and nom de plume). The name Mark Twain is ...
Toni Morrison & The Bluest Eye (01/25)
Toni Morrison is the author of 11 works of fiction as well as a number of books and essays. She's best known for her novel Beloved, which won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Morrison received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 (the first Black woman to win the award) and was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom —...
TikTok's Impact on Book Sales (01/25)
In 2024, Dostoevsky's short story White Nights became popular on BookTok, the corner of TikTok populated by readers. BookTok users post videos of themselves recommending books, discussing books, crying at the endings of books, and showing off their color-coordinated bookshelves, tagging these videos with the hashtag #BookTok. BookTok ...
The Golden Age of Detective Fiction & Agatha Christie's Legacy (01/25)
In the interwar period of the 1920s and 1930s, people sought comfort and escapism in a world marked by chaos and uncertainty. Detective fiction offered a perfect outlet, with meticulously plotted mysteries that allowed the reader to regain a sense of control. After all, aren't detectives in these stories trying to restore the status quo, ...
Modern Perspectives on Giovanni's Room (01/25)
While rereading and reviewing Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin, a book that has stayed with me for many years, I wanted to see what others have taken away from the novel, an early work of queer literature and a mid-century story of an American confronting his Americanness overseas. It was interesting to see recurrent themes and references...
The Publication History of The Price of Salt, or Carol (01/25)
When Patricia Highsmith finished The Price of Salt in 1951, the manuscript was rejected by her publisher, Harper Bros., who had just put out her first hit novel Strangers on a Train. She sent the manuscript on to Coward-McCann (then an imprint of G.P. Putnam's Sons) using a pseudonym, Claire Morgan, and it was accepted for publication. (...
Daphne du Maurier: A Brief History (01/25)
Author Daphne du Maurier belonged to a rich dynasty of storytellers and creatives. Her parents, Gerald du Maurier and Muriel Beaumont, both led successful acting careers. Her grandfather, George du Maurier, was a celebrated novelist and illustrator, while her uncle Guy de Maurier was a playwright. Du Maurier was the middle of three ...
The Work of Heather O'Neill (01/25)
Novelist, essayist, and contributor to NPR's This American Life, Heather O'Neill is a literary powerhouse in Canada, where she was born and raised and lives today. Her debut novel Lullabies for Little Criminals was published first in the US (Harper Perennial, 2006) before going on to win notable Canadian literary awards Canada Reads and ...
Abu al-Ala al-Ma'arri and The Epistle of Forgiveness (01/25)
In My Friends by Hisham Matar, the classical Arabic poem The Epistle of Forgiveness (Risalat al-Ghufran) by the Syrian writer Abu al-Ala al-Ma'arri makes multiple appearances. Main character Khaled refers to his copy of the work, given to him by his father when he left Libya for university in Scotland, as 'the most precious object I ...
A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry (12/24)
In Rivers Solomon's novel Model Home, main character Ezri Maxwell reflects on Lorraine Hansberry's 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun — about a Black family living in Chicago after World War II, the Youngers, who make plans to move to an all-white neighborhood. Ezri's Aunt Jacqueline compares the situation of the Youngers to Ezri's ...
Real-Life Inspirations for Daughters of Shandong (12/24)
Eve J. Chung's debut novel Daughters of Shandong focuses on the mother and daughters of a landowning family who flee China for Taiwan as a result of the Communist revolution in the late 1940s. Chung has spoken about how she was motivated to write the book by her maternal grandmother's experiences of that period of history.
However...
George Oppen (12/24)
In Garth Greenwell's novel Small Rain, the unnamed protagonist—facing a difficult and uncertain medical diagnosis—finds solace in a poem by the poet George Oppen. The poem is only a few simple lines, but the protagonist marvels at how much unfolds when one sits with Oppen's work and lets it quietly speak. 'I loved how, among ...
How to Read Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar (11/24)
In Jessica Zhan Mei Yu's novel But the Girl, the main character and first-person narrator is writing her PhD thesis on the work of Sylvia Plath. Plath is an iconic writer whose poetry is considered canonical by many but who is also sometimes dismissed as being a mere preoccupation for disillusioned teenage girls and young women. It seems ...
Writers' Experiences with Aphasia (11/24)
In
Linguaphile: A Life of Language Love, a combination of popular science and memoir, linguist Julie Sedivy shares that one of her worst fears is that an illness or injury will cause her to
develop aphasia, a type of disorder that impacts a person's ability to use both spoken and written language. After this confession, she goes on to ...
Book Tours Behind the Scenes (11/24)
In The Sequel by Jean Hanff Korelitz, readers get a taste of what authors go through in the rite of publishing passage known as 'the book tour.' For new or established authors, a book tour usually includes an (often hectic) travel schedule to bookstores, schools, and writing conferences; book signings; and readings from their work. For ...
The Picaresque (11/24)
In The Book of George, Kate Greathead covers the life of her eponymous hero in 14 chapters depicting key moments from his first 40 years. In doing so, she draws on elements of the picaresque, an episodic literary genre in which an outsider moves from adventure to adventure while satirizing the society of the day.
The picaresque is ...
Playwright John Webster (11/24)
In her memoir My Good Bright Wolf, Sarah Moss conjures up an imaginary wolf spirit to support her childhood self. She claims the idea came from a line in one of the first poems she memorized, "A Dirge" by English dramatist John Webster, widely regarded as the last of the great Elizabethan playwrights, second only to William ...
Graphic Memoirs Exploring Physical and Mental Health Struggles (10/24)
In her graphic memoir Something, Not Nothing, cartoonist Sarah Leavitt chronicles her partner's declining health, her eventual death, and the immense grief that followed. The medium of graphic memoir—in which the author documents their experiences using a combination of text and artwork—can be particularly powerful when used ...
Sally Rooney Reads from Intermezzo in Dublin (10/24)
On Saturday, September 21, 2024, more than 500 people gathered at the National Concert Hall in Dublin, located a few meters from St. Stephen's Green, a setting in Sally Rooney's new novel Intermezzo. The Irish author, one of the most influential figures on the contemporary literary scene, greeted the audience with a warm smile and a hand ...
Grove Press (10/24)
Grove Press, the publisher of Betsy Lerner's Shred Sisters, formed in New York City in 1947. Four years later, it was purchased by Barnet Lee 'Barney' Rosset, Jr., who took chances by publishing books that were considered edgy: the Beats, modern plays, and sexually explicit literature and works with gay themes that had been banned ...
George Orwell and 1984 (10/24)
Sandra Newman's novel Julia is based on George Orwell's classic work of fiction 1984, retold from the point of view of the protagonist's lover. Who, though, was George Orwell, and how did 1984 come to be?
Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair on June 25, 1903, in Bengal, India. His father, Richard, was employed in the India ...
Poets Turned Novelists (09/24)
Yr Dead is
author Sam Sax's debut novel, but not their first published work; they have previously published four chapbooks and three full collections of poetry, one of which won the James Laughlin Award and another of which won the National Poetry Series. Many other well-established poets have also turned to fiction with great success. A ...
Rejected Authors (09/24)
The final, titular story of Tony Tulathimutte's collection Rejection is styled as a letter from a publisher explaining to the author why they will not be publishing the book. This form is used as a means of exploring the stories within from the perspective of a potential critic, and is used to humorous effect as the author considers his ...
Author Homes in Massachusetts (09/24)
One of the topics explored in Dayswork by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel is Herman Melville's home in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, Arrowhead, which he went into significant debt to purchase but where he spent what seem to have been the happiest and most productive years of his life. Dayswork additionally mentions the homes of Nathaniel ...
David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens (09/24)
Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Demon Copperhead is largely based on Charles Dickens' novel David Copperfield.
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) wrote 15 novels during his career, the eighth of which he ponderously dubbed The Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone ...
Displacement and Migration as a Theme in Speculative Fiction (09/24)
In Ruben Reyes Jr.'s short story collection There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven, speculative fiction is a way to rediscover the experiences of first- and second-generation Latinx immigrants. Alternative history might commemorate the devastating effects of genocide or alienation while at the same time offering imaginative escape from them. ...
The Women's National Book Association (09/24)
In The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore, Evan Friss talks about one of the few women in the book trade in the early 20th century: Madge Jenison, who opened The Sunwise Turn bookshop in Manhattan in 1916. A year later, she joined 20,000 other women in a protest for women's suffrage, marching with her fellow female booksellers....
Sarah Manguso: The Fragment and the Aphorism (08/24)
Sarah Manguso is a poet, essayist, and novelist who is known for, among other things, her short compositional units: all of her non-poetry books are made up of short sections—sometimes just a line; sometimes a longish paragraph—separated by the white space of a line break. Her first few books take the form of a series of ...
Mark Twain's Publication of Ulysses S. Grant's Memoirs (08/24)
As recounted in Jon Clinch's The General and Julia, Samuel Clemens (who wrote under the alias Mark Twain) met President Ulysses S. Grant in the White House, introduced by a senator from Nevada. When the men crossed paths again after the end of Grant's presidency, they developed a friendship. Clemens frequently encouraged Grant to ...
Literary Late Bloomers and Prizes Honoring Their Achievement (08/24)
Tessa Hadley, author of After the Funeral and Other Stories, did not have a book published until age 46. In interviews, she has been frank about the fact that her first four or five novels, written in her twenties and long since discarded, didn't measure up. 'I am so glad I didn't publish a debut novel at 25, because [the books] were dead...
"The Goose Girl," Dorothea Viehmann, and the Brothers Grimm (08/24)
'The Goose Girl' tells the story of a princess who is sent by her mother to a faraway land to marry. The queen gives her daughter a magical talking horse and talisman, telling her to care for both, as they will protect her from harm. But when the princess loses the talisman, the waiting maid she is traveling with forces her to change ...
Hippos in Literature (08/24)
In Mina's Matchbox, a book filled with quirky characters, Yōko Ogawa introduces one of her most memorable creations yet: Pochiko, a 35-year-old pygmy hippopotamus. Flying in the face of the species' reputation as aggressors, Pochiko has a sweet temperament, charming the novel's protagonist and the readers alike. But she is far from ...
Graphic Novels in Translation (07/24)
Our Beautiful Darkness by Ondjaki has been translated into English from the original Portuguese by Lyn Miller-Lachmann. The process of translating a graphic novel differs somewhat from that of a more traditional prose novel. This is due to the importance of the interaction between the text and images, with each component needing to work ...
New Perspectives in 21st-Century Arthuriana (07/24)
Since the earliest texts of the 11th and 12th centuries (which in turn are based on much older narratives), Arthurian legend has been one of the richest sources of material available to authors. Over centuries, the tales, characters, and concepts of Arthuriana have lent themselves to a seemingly inexhaustible wealth of adaptations, ...
Cover Art for Young Adult Fantasy Novels (07/24)
The cover of the young adult fantasy novel Nightbirds by Kate J. Armstrong reliably hints at the promise and magic of the story that lies within while also seeking to differentiate itself in a saturated market. Not only is the artwork attractively rendered, but it shows the emotion and supernatural abilities of the character Matilde with ...
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson (06/24)
The power of a book is unquantifiable, depending on who reads it. When the character Margo Finch in Laura Sims's How Can I Help You catches her new colleague, Patricia Delmarco, fondly touching a particular title on the shelf at the Carlyle Public Library, it pulls her deep into a world where fantasy and reality often overlap.
Fans of ...
An Interview with Carvell Wallace (06/24)
Carvell Wallace's debut memoir, Another Word for Love, explores how spirituality and embracing his queer identity helped him heal from childhood trauma. The journalist and podcaster is known for co-writing basketball player Andre Iguodala's 2019 memoir The Sixth Man and for his Peabody Award–nominated podcast series Finding ...
Book Translation (06/24)
In Maud Ventura's novel My Husband, we get a glimpse into the main character's work as a book translator. Translated books give readers the chance to step into the shoes of characters living in different countries and cultures. When it comes to American books in translation (like this English-language version of Ventura's novel, ...
Shakespeare's Henriad (06/24)
Allen Bratton's Henry Henry is a retelling of Shakespeare's "Henriad," a term used in Shakespearean scholarship to refer to the four plays chronicling the rise of Henry V, or Prince Hal, to the throne.
These four plays begin, chronologically, with Richard II, based on the life of King Richard II, who ruled from 1377 ...
Eat a Bowl of Tea by Louis Chu (06/24)
In her book Orphan Bachelors, Fae Myenne Ng recalls her life-changing discovery of Louis Chu's 'defiant, subversive novel' Eat a Bowl of Tea (1961), now considered a classic of Asian American literature, which depicts Manhattan Chinatown bachelor society in the late 1940s.
The novel begins with two friends living in this milieu, Wang ...
Librarians-Turned-Novelists (05/24)
Douglas Westerbeke, author of the debut novel
A Short Walk Through a Wide World, did not start his career as an author. In fact, he is a librarian in Ohio, at one of the largest libraries in the United States. After spending the last decade on the local panel of the International Dublin Literary Award, he decided to try his hand at ...
Miranda July: The Essential Works (05/24)
Miranda July is an artist who works successfully in multiple mediums, perhaps equally well-known for her films and her fiction. Born in 1974 in Barre, Vermont, and raised in Berkeley, California, July dropped out of college in her early twenties and moved to Portland, Oregon, where she began exploring performance art before becoming a ...
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