Bending Real Life into Fiction (06/16)
Clare Mackintosh's debut novel, I Let You Go, is inspired by an event – a hit-and-run accident – that happened early in the author's career as a police officer. Embarking on a work of fiction by using an actual event as inspiration is a common occurrence in books, movies and television. Note that this story is 'inspired by'...
Grief in Contemporary Literature (05/16)
Bill Clegg's Did You Ever Have A Family tells the story of different characters whose lives intersect as they deal with the struggles (and few successes) of life. One character stands out among the large cast: June Reid, a middle-aged woman, who is dealing with the loss of her entire family from a tragic fire.
As you might guess...
A Murderer's Point of View (05/16)
The Convictions of John Delahunt is narrated by a murderer. The technique of using a first-person account to bring readers into the world of the killer can certainly be effective. Here are some of the better-known novels written from the viewpoint of a murderer.
- Hyde by Daniel Levine (2014)
Levine flips the plot of Robert Louis ...
Unusual Literary Devices (03/16)
Olga Grushin's novel Forty Rooms is set in forty different rooms – from a childhood bathroom to her father's study in Russia, and on to a dorm room, and eventually the many rooms in her large suburban American home in which she lives with her husband and six children.
The number forty comes from the idea that the average...
A Montana Reading List (03/16)
Dog Run Moon is mostly set in Montana. Here is a selection of recommended books also set in Big Sky Country.
Winter: Notes from Montana by Rick Bass
This is a memoir of the author's first winter spent in Yaak Valley, Montana with his wife, the artist Elizabeth Hughes, whose line drawings illuminate the book. With their dogs and ...
Novels That Feature Close-Knit Friends (02/16)
One of the many astute portrayals in A Little Life is the closely knit group of friends to which Jude St. Francis, the haunted protagonist, belongs. While the literal coming-of-age happens during the teen years, it could be argued that college, for those who attend, is the real deal. It is a transformative experience for most people, and ...
Tim Johnston - A Carpenter Who Builds Houses and Stories (12/15)
In 2007, Tim Johnston's father asked him if he would go to his new house in the Rockies and do the finish work. Johnston made his living as a carpenter at the time, and since 2006 his father had been asking him to do the job. Johnston wasn't writing at the time; he was contemplating, instead, that he might never write again, and so he ...
Car Crashes in Middle Grade and Young Adult Literature (11/15)
In a controversial
article in
The Wall Street Journal in June 2011, 'Darkness Too Visible,' Meghan Cox Gurdon lamented that the world of young adult literature has become too dark – a forest thick with loss, pain, death, and the gruesome details that describe them all. She offered the suggestion that such books might introduce teens...
Troubles in Southern Memoirs (11/15)
Barry Moser's We Were Brothers presents his troubled relationship with the South. He shares his positive memories of his childhood filled with games and conversation, but what he seems to remember the most, now in his later adulthood, are the times of strife – those moments of conflict and bigotry.
Anyone familiar with ...
Coming of Autumn (04/15)
Autumn of Age. Isn't that a beautiful phrase? It conjures the image of magenta and orange leaves falling from trees, and the landscape preparing to take stock for a season, quietly hunkering down, stripping itself of the old, and getting ready for the new.
In the First Impressions Review of Mimi Malloy At Last, by Julia MacDonnell, ...
Famous Men – and the Women Next to Them (10/14)
Above All Things, Tanis Rideout's debut novel, is about a man, his wife and his other great love – a 29,000 foot mountain. Rideout explores Ruth Mallory's point of view in Above All Things; her love for George Mallory, her acceptance of his passion for Mount Everest and her deep grief at losing her husband to the hulking mountain. ...
Two Post-Apocolyptic Novels Set Outside of the US (10/14)
After I finished reading The Last Man Standing, I became curious about post-apocalyptic novels written by authors from countries outside of the United States. A rather lengthy and frustrating Internet search led me to science fiction conventions around the world, prizes awarded, and books that have been translated into English. It also ...
The American Road Trip Book (09/14)
Readers who wish to travel America without leaving the couch have always had a vast tradition from which to cull. While you may prefer to watch the mountains and the desert going by from the back of a horse (
Lonesome Dove) or atop a raft (
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn), the most common way to go is, of course, by car.
From Route 66 ...
Ten Classic Children's Novels for Winter (09/14)
The Twistrose Key is full of frozen landscapes inspired by Norwegian winters – sleighs, ice caves, and sled runs, plus a good place to take the chill off with a mug of hot mulled cider. Here is a list of ten other novels for children that will give readers a good dose of frost and snow, either as inspiration for getting through the ...
The Wonderful World of Fictional Settings (08/14)
In
Enon (as in his 2010 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel
Tinkers), Paul Harding constructs and describes the fictional New England town of Enon, complete with a chronicling of its multi-generational history, descriptions of its homes, woods and native plants, and stories of those buried in its cemetery.
Generally speaking, the setting of ...
Hardboiled Detective Fiction: Literary Greats (07/14)
Even if it does veer off into other categories, The Search could be essentially classified as hardboiled detective fiction.
In the 1920s and early 1930s, Dashiell Hammett became the preeminent writer in the field. Until this time, detective stories were lumped in with the rest of 'crime fiction,' with the focus being on a plot that ...
Linda Castillo's Kate Burkholder series (07/14)
Her Last Breath is the fifth book in the Kate Burkholder series. While readers have made it clear that it can be appreciated as a stand-alone book, story lines and character development are carried as threads running throughout the series. Here is a recap of the series for those who have read the other books, and a teaser for those who ...
Child Abduction Novels (07/14)
The sudden disappearance of a young child is certainly one of a parent's worst nightmares. It's probably no wonder, then, that the topic has been explored in a large number of novels, ranging from straightforward mysteries and thrillers to more literary approaches that use child abduction as a springboard for exploration of other topics. ...
A Discovery of African Literature (05/14)
How Emmanuel Sigauke Found African Literature and Founded a Magazine
A conversation between Naomi Benaron and Emmanuel Sigauke
Emmanuel Sigauke is a Zimbabwean writer. He is an English professor at Cosumnes River College in Sacramento California and is the editor of the on-line Munyori Literary Journal which has published the work...
Creating a Sense of Place (05/14)
In
Visitation Street Ivy Pochoda puts us smack in the middle of a place like few authors can.
'Music from Coffey Park is rolling down Visitation Street, signaling the kickoff of Old Timers Day on the backside of the neighborhood. Overnight, families from the projects have staked out plots of the park, jockeying to get prime real ...
Notable Novels About Hollywood (02/14)
In 'Illuminati,' one of the stories in Jim Gavin's short story collection, college dropout and writer, Sean, describes the experience of selling his first and only script. 'Two years ago, all my dumb ideas and tenuous connections came together. I sold a screenplay to a finance company that was developing a project for a pair of comedians&...
Pick Your Favorite Best Selling Self-Help Book Quote (01/14)
Each chapter of Peter Herman's fictional self-help book, Marriage Is a Canoe, ends with an aphorism such as 'Compromise keeps your canoe steady. Compromise and you'll never go in circles.'
Publications categorized as self-help or personal development books have been among the very best-selling books for decades. Here are some quotes ...
The Grotesque in Literature (01/14)
Although 'grotesque' has become a general adjective for the strange or disturbing, and can be seen in various art forms from literature to architecture, the term also refers to a sub-genre of
Southern Gothic literature. This literature utilizes themes of disturbing characters, haunting landscapes, and sinister events (all elements of ...
Animals in Contemporary Literary Fiction (11/13)
Even if the book might not quite be
about them,
Magnificence, like much of Millet's fiction, features animals prominently. When asked about her use of animals in her novels, Millet said, in an
interview with
Bookforum:
'We lose the subject of animals when we move out of childhood. In childhood animals are all around us, and then we ...
Body Swap Fiction for Younger Readers (09/13)
David Levithan might take an unusually philosophical approach to the idea of occupying someone else's body in
Every Day, but he's hardly the first person to explore it in fiction. Here are just a few other great examples, which run the gamut from light-hearted to more serious:
The classic book in the 'body swap' genre is, of course,
...
The Myths Series (04/13)
A. S. Byatt's
Ragnarok is the most recent addition to
The Myths series, published in the UK by Canongate and around the world by various publishers. Launched in 2005, The Myths series has brought together remarkably talented authors to put their own stamp on ancient myths from around the world, including many that are familiar to Western ...
Courtroom Drama (02/13)
The thrill of watching a trial unfold - the impassioned speeches, quick-witted lawyers, surprise witnesses, the piecing together of clues, not knowing if justice will prevail - it can all make for exciting, and in some cases legendary, storytelling. 'Courtroom drama', a subgenre of 'legal drama', is a term used to describe dramatic ...
Castaway Literature (01/13)
When human beings are torn from society and forced to fight for survival, our true nature is often revealed. With very clear threats to life and limb, and without any need to account for our actions when laws become irrelevant, we can revert to our primal instincts for personal survival. But to what extent is a person willing to go in ...
Quilting As Hobby and Metaphor (01/13)
In Home, Cee learns to quilt while recovering from a near-fatal run-in with a doctor who used poor, black women as experimental subjects in his research. After returning to her hometown, her neighbors keep her company in her sickroom and, with their help, she makes her first quilt. She also starts to put together the broken pieces of her ...
Recommended Reading on North Korea (12/12)
Adam Johnson's
The Orphan Master's Son introduces many readers to the complex history and multi-layered culture of North Korea. If you'd like to learn more about the political and social climate of this country, allow us to suggest the following books:
Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick: Demick's nonfiction work offers a remarkable ...
Polar Creepiness in Early Sci-Fi Novels (09/12)
Uncharted expanses of polar ice are blank pages for science fiction writers to drool over, and many frozen landmarks spring to mind when trolling the genre.
What better place to locate creepy caves, secret lairs, and unexplained phenomena? A closer look through the early literature of science fiction reveals that polar ...
Zombies in Literature (07/12)
They're the undead dreaded monsters that feast on the brains of the living. But what exactly is the origin of the zombie? No one knows for sure - perhaps it's the Haitian belief that animals can be brought back to life via witchcraft; or maybe it's the jiang shi (reanimated dead body) in Chinese folklore that lives off others' qi or life ...
Southern Gothic (07/12)
A number of reviewers describe A Good Hard Look as 'Southern Gothic'.
Gothic fiction generally combines elements of horror and romance, and might include, among many other features, psychological or physical terror, mystery, the supernatural, gothic architecture, darkness, death and madness.
One of, if not the earliest ...
Literature of the American South (07/12)
With her vivid descriptions of 'the old home place,' a hundred-acre farm in Arkansas in the 1950s, and her knack for capturing the local dialect in her writing, Jenny Wingfield's debut novel, The Homecoming of Samuel Lake, fits comfortably into the category of 'literature of the American South.'
This genre, also known as 'Southern ...
The Translation Issue (05/12)
Novels and bestsellers written in English often get translated into many languages, yet the reverse is seldom accomplished in equal volume. According to the founders of
Three Percent, a resource for international literature based at the University of Rochester, 'Unfortunately, only about 3% of all books published in the United States ...
Adultery in Literature (04/12)
The subject of Anne Enright's
The Forgotten Waltz is certainly not new to literature. Throughout the centuries, the concept of adultery has provided writers with rich fodder for wonderfully compelling stories.
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850):
After being abandoned by her husband, Hester Prynne has a secret affair...
The Unreliable Narrator (03/12)
In Julian Barnes's The Sense of an Ending, Tony Webster admits that he may not be a reliable narrator. He acknowledges that it's probably impossible to tell, objectively, the story of your own life, and that it's therefore up to the reader to question or validate his authority.
The idea of the unreliable narrator has long been ...
Books in Translation (11/11)
In a now-infamous statement preceding the awarding of the 2008 Nobel Prize in literature to French author Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio, Swedish Academy member Horace Engdahl remarked that the publishing climate in the United States had grown 'too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big ...
Mental Health and Memoir (11/11)
We live in a memoir-saturated era in which it often seems that nearly everyone has written a story about their experiences with substance abuse, parental neglect, the ravages of fame, and trips to the psychiatric ward. This glut makes it easy to dismiss memoirs as the overheated fabrications of narcissistic attention-seekers, and ...
Books about Midwives and Midwifery (06/11)
Blessing becomes her grandmother's apprentice midwife in Tiny Sunbirds Far Away, becoming part of a long and proud historical tradition in her family, and in the human family.
The word 'midwife,' is from Old English midwif, meaning 'with woman', which frames the idea of midwifery - to be with a woman during the birthing ...
The Inevitable (02/11)
If the subject of the Inevitable piques your interest, may we suggest...
If you're looking for funeral fiction, William Faulkner's
As I Lay Dying is the king of the canon. Its curious style creates a moving portrait of the Bundren Family attempting to bury its matriarch Addie Bundren. With almost sixty chapters and fifteen narrators, ...
Fiction about Women, Artists and Genius (11/10)
One of the key themes in The Swan Thieves is the challenge of male and female artists who form relationships and must navigate the storms of artistic ...
Banned and Challenged Books in America (03/10)
Some of the most memorable and painful moments in
Snow Falling in Spring involve the solace of reading and the loss and destruction of books.
American readers might be surprised to know that in America books are frequently
challenged and even banned.
The American Library Association explains the difference between a challenge ...
