I study, teach, and write about things that non-English professors also encounter every day: words and images. Yet when English profs teach these materials in the classroom, and especially when we write about them in academic journals or scholarly books, we sound different.
The Son is a novel that is an epic in the truest sense of the word: massive in scope, replete with transformations in fortune and fate, and drenched in the blood of war.
A Derangement show is the perfect intro to a New York evening. Starting at 7:30 and running until around 10, there's no cover, a good bar, and plenty of places to sit, lean, or sway around to get caught up in the show.
As a reader I am always reading one non-fiction and one fiction book at the same time.
Dan Chaon was recently taken to task in Salon for suggesting that young writers read literary fiction. Why? Because it's "terrible." But Chaon wasn't recommending that young writers read only literary fiction. His advice was actually more specific than that.
I hear this complaint a lot, and it's just been repeated on Salon.com. Is it true?
In this blog, I highlight passages that I've found in my travels through books. I hope readers will post quotes of their own, or comment on those they see here.
While writers may welcome the Oulipian challenge of crafting prose fit for a tweet, Twitter isn't the first outlet for experimental publishing. And it likely isn't the last.
Coming to this event reminded me of everything I love about PEN. The writers who make up PEN care passionately about the freedom to write whether it's in the classroom or for journalists abroad.
You can't be a great writer without being a great reader. We know why Nick Hornby is such a terrific novelist, screenwriter and columnist: it's not only what he reads, but how he reads.
There seems to be a consensus in publishing that literary fiction is in trouble, that it's something in need of nourishment and protection, and that the digital era is going to condemn it to oblivion.
Long before three w's together was a word, writers have been pushing the boundaries of fiction and reality on digital platforms. In 1976, readers expl...
Any distinction between genre and literary fiction matters less than it once did. For this, I'm glad. Yet as human beings, we need categories. With this in mind, I offer a simple graph
There are many other aspects to being a woman -- to being human -- that can't be expressed through memoir. For an alternate narrative experience, read the novel The Salt God's Daughter by Ilie Ruby -- a lyrical, luxuriantly mystical meditation on being female.
The madman, Dr. William Chester Minor, improbably, became one of the most important and prolific contributors to the laborious construction of the Oxford English Dictionary.
This wildly original novel careens from one crisp scene to another, combining dry wit, narrative verve, and an abiding melancholy. It's hard to believe such an entertaining, enjoyable novel bears the "literary fiction" stamp of highbrow approval.
Give us escape-craving readers a break, I say. Since when did fiction -- whether on a screen or in a ream of pages -- hinge on the quality of its imitation?
Stories of animals behaving badly is not a new trend in literature and I am not the first author to venture into this territory. Here are 9 other not-so-cute animal books.
From Sugar, I learned that our most vital development happens through commitment to the work, even if that work comes out misshapen or in terrible need of a copyedit. Even in the flaws, there is a buried truth -- it's that second beating heart that you needed to see for yourself.
Fans of the young adult genre will spot this as a spin on A Bridge To Terabithia and other tales of bittersweet childhood -- instead of escaping to a fantasy world, our heroine and her doomed first love are trapped in an end of the world scenario.
"The Red House" by Mark Haddon Doubleday, $25.95 Published on June 12, 2012 What is it about? The novel tells the story of a family through ...
Spurious seems committed to solving the paradox of one who has committed his life to thinking, to understanding, but on any given day would rather play Doom on his cellphone.
This tragic coming-of-age story chronicles the parallel disintegrations of the world and the life and family of Julia, a sensitive 12-year-old girl living in a sleepy suburb of California.
"You're my mother, of course you think I'm great. I need to hear it from someone else," my daughter told me.
It's an odd animal: women's literary fiction -- NOT erotica -- with a brazen, sensual and deeply flawed main character. Carmen is perpetually concerned with, touching and baring her body. Yet the sex never becomes the story; it isn't that sort of book.
