Skilled fiction-writers can guide the imagination, cuing readers to use their senses so that they fantasize more richly than they could alone (Scarry 1999, 3-9). If it serves a storyteller's artistic aims, a writer can prompt readers to imagine a scene from several perspectives at once. Creative writers can accomplish this goal by blending appeals to readers' visual and somatosensory (bodily) senses.
It's a standard trope in portrayals of assimilated Jews to open with a scene built around a Christmas tree. That's how Tom Stoppard's " Leopoldstadt" and Alfred Uhry's " Last Night of Ballyhoo" begin, and also Ian Buruma's memoir about his grandparents, " Their Promised Land." The idea is, as soon as you show that, you've got the audience's full attention, especially if it's a Jewish audience, because it's so peculiar.
Outside, the Alabama Booksmith is so unassuming it's as if Reiss had forgotten that he was running a retail business: a two-story, nearly windowless structure, surrounded by office parks and parking lots, on a dead-end street in a suburb of Birmingham. Inside, the vibe is half 1970, half 1870, with wood panelling, rattan chairs, and a drop-tile ceiling-but also patterned tablecloths, cozy curtains, a functioning fireplace, and an oversized hourglass.
In these turbulent years, democracy was tested by war, pandemic, and violence driven by conflicts over race, immigration, and labor rights. In American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis, legendary historian Adam Hochschild brings this moment vividly to life, revealing both the repression that darkened the era and the Americans who struggled to repair a fractured nation.
Most of us think great ideas are conjured from within-some mysterious well of genius possessed by a special few. But if you listen closely to history's most celebrated creators, you'll hear something completely different. They describe their greatest work not as something they conjured or invented, but as something they found. Not creation, but discovery. Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite-read by George himself-below, or in the Next Big Idea App.
In The Last of Earth, she points her writerly compass towards the mountains of mid-19th-century Tibet a region then closed off to European imperialists to meditate on the chequered history of colonial exploration, cartography and the impermanence of human existence. It's in the nature of white men to believe they own the world, that no door should be shut to them.
The company announced on Wednesday an "immersion reading" feature in the Audible app, which allows readers who have both the ebook and audiobook versions of a title in their Audible and Kindle libraries to read the ebook's text while the audio plays. The feature also lets users switch between the different formats across devices. While in the "Read & Listen" mode, the text of the book is highlighted in real-time in sync with the narration.
Her ex-husband, Dominique, who will almost certainly be in jail for the rest of his life for drugging and raping his wife and recruiting 50 men over the internet to do likewise, takes his place among the monsters of our age. In his absence, the reader may experience a version of what happened in Gisele Pelicot's own family namely, the misdirection of anger towards her.
Excellent descriptions of trauma abound, including memoirs, but they are logical and descriptive, constrained by the conventions of straightforward narrative. But trauma itself upends the usual modes of narrative by which we think about our lives: out of sequence and unintegrated, traumatic memories defy the logic that guides our sense of our lives as stories with a past, present, and future. Literary tools such as symbol, allegory, and narrative structure can embody a visceral sense of the ways that trauma can disrupt and diminish a life.
The ghost of a previous lover is always a challenge, particularly if you (mistakenly) believe that she's actually dead. This is the unenviable situation for Lily, the protagonist of O'Farrell's second novel, who is swept off her feet by dashing architect Marcus and in short order moves in with him. Lily takes his assurances that her predecessor Sinead is no longer with us to mark a more permanent absence;
There's a particular energy to novels written from the point of view of small children. Humour, of course, in the things the child misinterprets; pathos in the things they feel they must keep hidden; jeopardy in the dangers we can see, and they cannot. As any relative or babysitter can attest, even the sweetest child can become mind-numbingly dull when they're all the company one has, so there's a skill to charm without boring.
A mentor once told me that, when writing a research statement for a professorship, I had to start with the most ambitious pitch I could imagine - and then go ten times bigger. It's tricky enough to do this as a cosmologist, given that the topic of study is the entire Universe. But there is a quest that is more ambitious still: to find out 'what are we doing here?'
Tropes, as these bullet-point ideas have come to be known, have taken over romance. Those who write, market and read romantic fiction use them to pinpoint exactly what to expect before the first page is turned. On Instagram, Amazon and bookshop posters you'll find covers annotated with arrows and faux-handwritten labels reading slow-burn or home-town boy/new girl in town. Turn over any romance title and they'll be there listed in the blurb.
From Do Ho Suh's ethereal architecture to Kimsooja's irridescent mirrors to Lauren Halsey's fringed tapestry, a new book from Monacelli celebrates a broad spectrum of light and color. Rainbow Dreams features more than 200 installations, sculptures, paintings, photographs, and more that revel in the possibilities of pigment. Bound in a smooth gradient that extends to the pages' edges, this vivid survey is a celebratory, playful object in itself.
Kimmerer proposes kindness as an act of resistance. We need to equip ourselves with a new language, she explains, something that affirms that this is what it means to be human. In a world where kindness breeds distrust or is scorned, kindness, she affirms, is becoming a militant gesture. When you're kind to someone, it's not universally expected that they'll respond with kindness, but if that seed is planted, both people feel better,
And by "Who-dom," I don't mean the Seussian variety but the taxonomy coined by 's Lindsey Weber and Bobby Finger: the vast, sub-stratospheric tier of celebrity occupied by figures whose fame is intensely meaningful to some and virtually nonexistent to everyone else. Whos are defined in opposition to Thems, the indisputable celebrities known to most except those living under a rock or who willingly reject the very notion of pop culture,
Subsequently, runaway children turned the valley into a fortress, surviving on food they could catch or grow, with occasional forays into the towns below. Riley has heard the rumours, but it is only when she sees a green-clad boy or is it a girl? hovering outside her bedroom window offering directions on how to find Nowhere that she realises this might be her chance to escape and save her little brother from their sadistic guardian.
A few years ago, sometime during the harrowing year of 2020 that would change everything, author Herve Le Tellier discovered that someone had written a name on the outer wall of his new house in the village of La Paillette, in southern France. When he later found that the same name appeared on the monument to the town's sons who died for the homeland, Le Tellier realized he had a story in his hands and that he wanted nothing more than to tell it.
She moved before the pandemic, when gentrification with its huge skyscrapers and condominiums forced her out of Dumbo, Brooklyn. Between the kitchen and the upstairs room, in one corner of which lie part of the 5,000 pages of notes she took while writing it, Desai finished The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, the monumental, 19thcenturystyle novel she has spent nearly two decades on.
Need a French poem to impress your date or S.O.? Love is in the air and here at Frenchly, we've got you covered. The French language has long been considered the language of romance, and French poetry is a beautiful way to say "je t'aime" to your love. Here are seven French love poems that will sweep anyone off their feet. We've included the original French version of each poem, along with their English translation.
The extended footage of Welsh in conversation is certainly engaging, as he discusses his writing and the movies it created, and his own youth in Edinburgh. Some of the rest of the interviewees aren't quite so gripping, however, and the film is padded out with a fair bit of redundant anecdotage from people on the subject of getting hilariously wasted in Irvine's company or at least his approximate vicinity.
