Samantha Allen's Reinterpretation of Shakespeare's Puck (06/26)
One of the most interesting choices in Samantha Allen's Puck is to not only turn Puck and Robyn into two separate characters, but a romantic pairing. It is almost like an inside joke about the original text between the author and readers, many of whom will know that in the source material, Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Puck and...
Spotlight on a Banned Author: Maia Kobabe (06/26)
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 ...
Dave Eggers, the Artist (06/26)
The protagonist of Dave Eggers's novel Contrapposto is Cricket Dibb, a talented young man who wants a career as an artist. Throughout the book he relays his sheer bliss in creating a work of art he knows is good. In spite of his ability, he runs into roadblocks; galleries won't hang his work because they don't feel it's ...
The Tibetan Book of the Dead (06/26)
In Ann Patchett's novel Whistler, a pivotal scene occurs between the primary character, Daphne Fuller, and her former stepfather, Eddie. In it, they discuss Eddie's beliefs about the afterlife, which he says he formed in part by reading The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
The Tibetan Book of the Dead is the English title for a ...
Short Stories in The New Yorker (06/26)
Four stories from Sarah Braunstein's
Baby in a Box were first published in
The New Yorker, a magazine with a 101-year history of showcasing excellent short fiction from the likes of John Cheever, Mavis Gallant, Jhumpa Lahiri, Alice Munro, Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Roth, and William Trevor.
While short stories can be difficult to ...
Veronica Roth: A Case Study in How Authors' Drafts Change (05/26)
Veronica Roth's latest novel,
Seek the Traitor's Son, is a dystopian fantasy featuring extensive character development, a mysterious prophecy, and deep explorations of grief and guilt. Roth is an old hand at writing dystopian novels: she began drafting the dystopian YA novel
Divergent in the early 2000s when she was a senior at ...
The Women's National Book Association (04/26)
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....
Publishing Industry Terminology (04/26)
The Ending Writes Itself is a murder mystery, but also a sharp satire of the publishing industry. In its final pages, a character observes: 'Publishing pretends that it cares about discovering talent, fostering talent, but it's just a machine, chewing people up, spitting out their work. If this weekend has taught me anything, it's that ...
Glasgow's Reputation in Literature (03/26)
A Bad, Bad Place, the excellent debut novel from Frances Crawford, is set in Glasgow, Scotland's biggest city. For those with any knowledge of the country and its literature, the title will seem like a knowing wink: over the past century, Glasgow has developed a literary reputation for being a very bad place indeed, one where ...
Cinderella Retellings with a Twist (03/26)
The most famous version of the Cinderella story is probably the one included in the Brothers Grimm's 1812 collection of fairy tales. But its roots as a folk tale go back far further, and stretch into many cultures. The ancient Greek story of Rhodopis tells of a king who finds a beautiful sandal and sends servants to search for the ...
Virginia Woolf's The Years, British Empire, and Narrative Form (03/26)
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 ...
José Revueltas (03/26)
In Autobiography of Cotton, Cristina Rivera Garza first introduces readers to her grandparents at the point where their lives intersected with that of José Revueltas, an influential Mexican writer and political activist. Though she doesn't know if they ever spoke to him, in 1934 they were among the cotton workers at Estación ...
Evil Genius and "The Five Forty-Eight" (02/26)
In the author's note for
Evil Genius, Claire Oshetsky writes that their novel "owes its existence" to John Cheever's short story "The Five Forty-Eight."
Published in
The New Yorker in 1954, "
The Five Forty-Eight" is a story about Blake, a businessman who has a coercive sexual encounter with a ...
Rewriting Aladdin: Storytelling, Power, and Cultural Adaptation (02/26)
Aladdin's Tale: Origins, Adaptations, and Reinterpretation
'Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp' is arguably the most beloved and well-known tale associated with The One Thousand and One Nights, yet it was not originally part of the collection. Its true origins are lost to time and scholars consider it one of the 'orphan tales' along with ...
The White Gaze and Toni Morrison's Beloved (02/26)
When I was in middle school my father sold a film to Columbia Pictures about his black Chicago childhood. He soon discovered the script had been changed. Chicago was replaced by a small Texas town. The black teenagers were now white. There was an unspoken understanding that what was missing from my father's script was a necessary feature ...
Authorial Pseudonyms (02/26)
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 ...
Patrice Nganang's Cameroon Trilogy (02/26)
In Scale Boy, author Patrice Nganang relates his colorful childhood in the evolving post-colonial world of Cameroon and his love of books, reading, and writing. Nganang left Cameroon to pursue a Ph.D. in Germany and now teaches comparative literature at Stony Brook University in New York. His most renowned novels are the Cameroon trilogy,...
Fables Old and New (02/26)
The premise of Jonathan Miles's darkly comic novel Eradication is fiendishly simple: a man is hired by a humanitarian foundation to sail to a desert island and, in the name of biodiversity, kill every goat he can find. To such an intriguing set-up, Miles attaches an equally intriguing subtitle: A Fable. It's a word that evokes ...
What Remains Unsaid: Analyzing an Author's Omissions (01/26)
Claire Keegan's slim novel, Small Things Like These, is in many ways about the things that people leave unsaid—the things they can't or won't say out of fear or, as it turns out, out of kindness.
In perhaps the most important example of this theme, towards the end of the novel, a passing comment from a neighbor about the ...
Literary Love Triangles: How Talking It Over Works Within and Subverts the Tropes (01/26)
Love triangles—stories in which one person must decide between two possible partners or embarks on a forbidden romance while bound to someone else—have been central to literature for millenia: In Greek mythology, Helen was married to King Menelaus of Sparta but, by some accounts, fell in love with Paris and joined him in Troy ...
Use of Stream of Consciousness in The Sound and the Fury (01/26)
William Faulkner's 1929 masterpiece, The Sound and the Fury, is a work of modernist literature, and one of the best examples of stream-of-consciousness narrative ever written. This technique attempts to mimic the way a person's mind works, with one thought flowing into another, often sparked by an external stimulus that brings up ...
Nelly Dean: The Only Adult in the Room (01/26)
Though I'm not really the kind of person who has a 'favorite book,' when people ask if I do, I have, since the first time I read it, told them Wuthering Heights. This first reading would have been when I was a deeply romantic and dramatic young teenager, and I was turned inside out by the unrequited passion between Heathcliff and ...
"The Only Good Indian": Reading Racism in Little House on the Prairie (01/26)
In Little House in the Big Woods, Laura Ingalls Wilder narrates a fictionalized version of her childhood in the Big Woods near Pepin, Wisconsin, in the 1870s. The first official book in the Little House series, Big Woods is less well-known than the third book, Little House on the Prairie, which has been read in countless classrooms across...
Rebutting Counterarguments in Nonfiction (01/26)
Throughout Superforecasting, Tetlock and Gardner seem to be aware they are fighting an uphill battle against skepticism. On one end of the spectrum, you have pundits committed to their ability to guess the future on intuition alone. On the other, you have an anti-intellectual rejection of the notion that experts can know anything at all. ...
Media vs. Death in Don DeLillo's White Noise (01/26)
Death is a central theme of
White Noise, stalking the narrative at every turn—one of DeLillo's working titles for the book was
The American Book of the Dead. Another major theme is the psychological consequences of a media-saturated society.
White Noise overlaps strongly with the ideas of
Jean Baudrillard, whose influential ...
The Carceral State in Billy-Ray Belcourt's A Minor Chorus (01/26)
Billy-Ray Belcourt's A Minor Chorus examines aspects of the human condition in a way that is deeply erudite but also intensely physical. Through this approach, Belcourt demonstrates how the problems and questions of existence don't reside in some nebulous realm of the mind, but are bound up in the politics of how we inhabit our bodies, ...
Hometown Anxiety in Naima Coster's Halsey Street (01/26)
Quite a few years ago my mother and I drove to Chicago for a wedding she was hired to officiate; she is an Episcopal priest. It was a four-hour road trip with most of it laughing and joking and singing to old school R&B (hip-hop horrifies my mother). But I noticed a change in her as we entered Chicago. Her face suddenly lost its color. ...
Emily J. Taylor's Inspirations (01/26)
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 ...
Morality and Authenticity in Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich (01/26)
The central question Tolstoy tries to answer with The Death of Ivan Ilyich is, what does it mean to live a moral life? His examination is presented directly, through Ivan's ruminations, and indirectly, through the juxtaposition of two opposing ways of living: that of Ivan and his peers, and that of his servant Gerasim.
Although the ...
Queen Marguerite of Navarre (01/26)
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....
Margaret Atwood's Poetry (01/26)
Margaret Atwood (b. 1939) is probably best known for her novels, such as 1985's The Handmaid's Tale and its Booker Prize–winning sequel, The Testaments (2019). Her first published works, however, were volumes of poetry—five collections before her first novel, The Edible Woman, hit the shelves in 1969.
Atwood spent ...
The Influence of King Solomon's Mines on The Creation of Half-Broken People (12/25)
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...
Who Was Elizabeth Gaskell? (12/25)
The first biographer of Charlotte Brontë was her fellow novelist and devoted friend, Elizabeth Gaskell. Born in London in 1810, Elizabeth Cleghorn spent her early years living in Cheshire, Stratford-upon-Avon, and northern England until she married the Unitarian minister William Gaskell in 1832. Elizabeth gave birth to four daughters...
Mary Oliver and "The Summer Day" (12/25)
Fredrik Backman's new novel,
My Friends, repeatedly quotes 'The Summer Day,' a well-known poem by poet Mary Oliver (1936-2019).
Oliver was born in Maple Heights, Ohio, a small, rural town less than 20 miles southeast of Cleveland. Her upbringing was 'chaotic' and she experienced sexual abuse at a young age, eventually finding ...
Playwright John Webster (11/25)
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 ...
The Unmaking of Atticus Finch: Go Set a Watchman as First Draft (11/25)
To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), set in the fictional town of Maycomb, Alabama, tells the story of Jean Louise 'Scout' Finch, a six-year-old girl growing up with her brother, Jem, and their widowed father, Atticus Finch, an upstanding lawyer who takes on the defense of a young Black man falsely accused of raping a white woman.
Go Set a ...
The Ocean as Metaphor, Symbol, and Motif in The Seas (11/25)
'That is how a small northern town in America works. It enlists one beautiful thing like the ocean or the mountains or the snow to keep people stuck and stagnant and staring out to sea forever. I watch the blue in the mirror. It is so beautiful that it is hard to look away,' muses the unnamed speaker of Samantha Hunt's The Seas. It's not ...
Timelines, Time Loops, and Memory in Ling Ma's Severance (11/25)
Many contemporary novels feature alternating dual or multiple timelines, and many make free use of flashbacks, weaving backstory into the main narrative as it progresses. Ling Ma's Severance employs both of these techniques, creating layered narratives that interact with one another and eventually intersect. This approach serves several ...
The Picaresque (11/25)
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 ...
Composite Narratives and Swann (11/25)
Carol Shields (1935–2003), a dual American and Canadian citizen, published ten novels and three short story collections, in addition to poetry, plays, and nonfiction. She won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for her novel
The Stone Diaries, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize twice.
Swann, her fifth novel, is a composite narrative ...
Class Tensions in We Have Always Lived in the Castle (11/25)
In We Have Always Lived in the Castle, the wealthy Blackwood family lives in a sort of tension with their working-class neighbors. Things reach a boiling point when daughter Constance Blackwood is accused of murdering several of her family members, with the neighbors feeling free to openly mock the now-orphaned Blackwood girls. But as the...
Utopia as Structure in Everything for Everyone (11/25)
A large number of contemporary American works of speculative fiction, if not the majority, could reasonably be classified as dystopian in some sense—imagining a future world in which the era-defining problems of our time like climate change, white supremacy, fascism, and the obscenely wide income gaps of late-stage capitalism have ...
The Music of Shadowbahn (11/25)
Laurie Anderson's 'O Superman' is a song caught between centuries. Released in 1981, it appears to have traces of postwar optimism—optimism about technology, about institutions, about one's own country—but those traces are weaponized, suffused with an icy dread for what's to come. 'Here come the planes,' Anderson warns, her ...
Storytelling and Interpretation in The Beauty (11/25)
Aliya Whiteley's The Beauty is a dystopian tale about the aftermath of a lethal infection that killed all women, and man's response to a new humanoid species that subsequently grows from the bodies of the dead. The book explores gender roles and human evolution; but running parallel to these themes is an equally fascinating thread about ...
Poet Luo Binwang and An Ode to the Goose (10/25)
The first part of Gish Jen's book Bad Bad Girl narrates her mother Agnes's life in China. Although Agnes was treated cruelly by her mother (Jen's grandmother), Agnes's father doted on her and encouraged her intellect. He had her reciting poetry almost as soon as she could talk, their joint favorite being An Ode to the Goose by Luo Binwang...
Book Tours Behind the Scenes (10/25)
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 ...
A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry (10/25)
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 ...
