An Experiment in Reading Elena Ferrante | The New Republic
How do you let others influence you while retaining your own ideas? Four literary critics tried to find out.| The New Republic
Contra the modernist aesthetes, he believed in “the interdependence of knowledge and virtue.”| Modern Age
Plan of a Novel according to Hints from Various Quarters [1816] by Jane Austen, in Catharine and Other Writings. The World’s Classics, Oxford University Press, 1993.¹ Silly Novels by Lady Novelists [1856] and other essaysby George Eliot. Renard Press, 2023.² “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists are a genus with many species, determined by the particular quality … Continue reading A genus with many species: #ReadingAusten2025| Calmgrove Books
How do you let others influence you while retaining your own ideas? Four literary critics tried to find out.| The New Republic
Oh, to read A Child’s Christmas in Wales over the holidays during a pandemic, with three of our four parents deceased, my 91-year-old mother-in-law in lockdown in her retirement village six hours away, and time on our hands to reminisce about our childhood Christmases, when our families were healthy and intact, and all was right with the world. How many such thoughts, such essays, has Dylan Thomas’s tender story prompted over the years? Does that make my thoughts, my essay a cliché? Mayb...| Legacy Book Press LLC
Humidity be damned, this month’s crop of books is sparking with exciting new premises and relationship dynamics. You’ve got robots-turned-cooks, an economy built entirely on mandatory memory collec…| Literary Hub
It’s funny to look back, ten years on, and realise I’m still just doing the stuff I was trained to do at university. It’s essentially just close reading – I like to pick up a game and look at one facet or another. It’s not a strict rule, but it’s pretty clearly my bread and […]| Death is a Whale
Last year I reviewed A Mirror of Dreams, Andrew Wild’s account of the early days of the 1980s neo-prog movement as seen through the careers of the bands he identifies as the “Big Six…| Jumbled Thoughts of a Fake Geek Boy
This is part two of a five-part series on the craft of writing by Matthew Clark Davison and Alice LaPlante. All too often, plot is taught as architecture, as per Freitig’s Triangle: rising action, …| Literary Hub
I’ve recently finished reading the Horus Heresy, a 64-book series set in the world of the tabletop wargame Warhammer 40,000. In reflecting on the series, and the theme of scale, I’ve wr…| Death is a Whale
In Gav Thorpe’s The First Wall, there’s an ongoing debate about whether religion is bad for you. On one side is Euphrati Keeler, incipient mystic and star of the rising cult of the God-…| Death is a Whale
by Xinyang Li, Comparative Literature As Dr. Myhre’s WIP Teaching Assistant this semester, I am responsible for grading and detailing feedback for undergraduate assignments, consulting with individuals when necessary, and solving as many of their writing problems and difficulties as possible. In this blog, I will detail strategies for setting assignments geared toward improving students’…Read More| The Writing Intensive Program
"The Spiral Staircase" is of a different order, truly a lapidary masterpiece. Even as I began it, the story sent me off on associative journeys--Borges "Library of Babel," Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle. And then the story brought me back to its own intention, which I believe to be an intensely lyrical exploration of presence and absence, in this case not only psychological but also metaphysical. Marvelous.| A Writing Life: Lâle Davidson
My writing has been disrupted these past few months. I like to be very regular – one essay on religion, one on video games, alternating weeks. I’ve been doing that since 2022. But this …| Death is a Whale
“Arguments stand or fall to the degree to which the practice is done well.”| Public Books
Not rethinking realism, as in rethinking philosophy’s single, objective reality, hard as rocks and nails. No, I mean rethinking realism in the sense of questioning the elevation of literary realism over the many other forms of fiction. Realism has long been the go-to form in literature for telling a story a certain way. An entire […]| Jim Nelson
In her latest, Sheila Heti embarks on an inverted Oulipian experiment, producing content in a fundamentally unrestricted manner.| Public Books
“All Things Are Too Small” declares the title, borrowed from a 13th-century Dutch mystic, of the new collection of essays by Becca Rothfeld, one of the most prolific and versatile critics working today. The claim initially confused me. Too small? Casting a weary glance at the way we live now — visual excess blaring from […] The post Reimagining Excess first appeared on The Smart Set.| The Smart Set
This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here. How do you become a writer? Answer: you write. It’s amazing how much resentment and disgust and evasion this answer can ar…| Literary Hub
