For The Book Obsessed
[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] 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] 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] 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
[ad_1] A common refrain in the teaching of the craft of writing, to whatever extent that can in fact be done, is that one’s form and content, story and structure, should each be sculpted with the other in mind, a sort of mechanical drinking bird for the art of fiction, where the pressures of one … Read more
[ad_1] Among the great and hidden challenges of past tense, first-person narration—and one that, while seemingly omnipresent in contemporary fiction, is seldom discussed—is fixing the temporal distance between the act of the narrating and the fictive events themselves. It is a concern that asks, essentially, how far away in time is the protagonist from herself … Read more
[ad_1] For all the ink shed—in reviews, interviews, and criticism—about the trials and tribulations of navigating the literary world on the level of the individual novel, comparatively little space is provided to career-wide discussions. While this is understandable given the enormous challenge that writing and publishing just one book presents to the writer (not to … Read more