For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] What do we ask of art? How, indeed, can we know what it is? On this, the philosophers tend to disagree. At some level, we know it when we see it, as the Supreme Court once said about some other hard-to-define thing. In the twenty-first century, it is probably the most politic to say … Read more
[ad_1] Influences are strange things. They’re active, sought out, even entreated. But they’re also elusive, enigmatic, disguised. In art, in life, in social media, influences are all the rage, personified as nouns and stacked in neat Wikipedia sidebars. The bizarre nature of language, the way in which it follows patterns and shape-shifts into a facsimile … Read more
[ad_1] It’s an odd thing, about trends. A trend seems to take on a life of its own, morphing and consuming its way through the zeitgeist. How do they begin, why do they die? There’s something of Orwell’s groupthink, removed (usually) of its menace and totalitarian bent, but nonetheless reflective of the base human need … Read more
[ad_1] From the Latin ambitiō, by way of the Old French, across the Channel and the centuries through the Middle English, and finally to the modern day, comes to our protean patois that pleasant, well-groomed word ambition. To us, it is an unassuming noun, unusually simple, for English, to both pronounce and spell, invoking affirmation … Read more
[ad_1] In the protean landscape of contemporary fiction, the historical novel is among those having something of a moment. Given the literary world’s apparently endless quest for ever-marketable books placed within ever-tightening niches, this is on the whole not overly surprising. With access to real worlds that feel alien and actual characters lending themselves easily … Read more
[ad_1] There is a rather odd aversion to the “unlikeable” character in the novel, as if fiction is to cloak itself in the sunny vestments of children’s television and portray the world only through the lens of those protagonists that pass some illusory morality test. But if fiction is to be an authentic—and, to some … Read more
[ad_1] For all the antagonizing, ruminating, and even moralizing that comes with defining the parameters of literary fiction, perhaps the one point of (near-) universal agreement debators enjoy is over the notion that such a book should be in some way realistic, should faithfully reflect life and those who live it. How this is to … Read more
[ad_1] Among the most ancient and revered forms, which the amorphous siren known as prose may assume, is that of satire, used for millennia to critique, to side-eye and expose, to lay bare the ills of society in narrative or verse. From The Frogs of Aristophanes to Voltaire’s Candide, from James Joyce to Larry David, … Read more
[ad_1] Van Gogh’s self-portraits are among his most famous and beloved works; presidential autobiographies fly off the shelves when they inexorably appear a year out of office. For the novelist, however, no such allowances are made. A common refrain from that amorphous, ominous entity public opinion seems to be that novelists are far too interested … Read more
[ad_1] An interesting, if somewhat recondite, corner of the great novelistic universe is the study of literary ancestry:where a work comes from, what it grows from, and what grows from it—be it in theme, perspective, narrative, or technique. By studying the descendants and antecedents of a given novel, one can learn much about how the … Read more