#character-depth-and-agency

#character-depth-and-agency

The concept album is a response to the brutal murder of Breedlove's father and stepmother at the hands of his stepbrother. The frame—the first song and the last—of the album is about the murders and their aftermath. But this is not a true crime record.

The point of cinematic realism is the inner life, and the miracle of movies is their power to portray subjectivity, though few filmmakers manage to attain that power—even despite their best efforts.

Deborah Green, a frail 71-year-old woman, was the self-described general of the Aggressive Christianity Missions Training Corps, a cult that operated for decades.

The illicit thrill of hidden desires definitely propels Night Stage, a riveting queer noir about an up-and-coming actor Matias and an aspiring politician Rafael who begin hooking up in public spaces.

To deny one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul. The concept I stick to - my core principle - is simple: I write in plain English, and only when I actually have something to say.

When the people who are after me get here, they'll arrest me and put me on trial, or they'll disappear me to some black site. Or they won't bother with any of that and they'll just kill me. All of these seem like plausible outcomes, but in the novel's prologue, the narrator seems much more confident of her success: I am a fucking genius, a gorgeous fucking genius, and the only thing left to do is sit down and write.

Sophia Stewart poses a choice that many biographers struggle with: "what to do with the boring bits."

After finding this seam of gold, miner Michael dreams that his son will be able to go to school, rather than join the other children who work in the mine, like blind, bald rodents unearthing themselves in search of scraps of candlelight. In the novel, which won the 2023 Betty Trask prize, everything closes in on Michael: lungs clog, tunnels collapse, horse-drawn narrowboats are attacked by robbers in the sooty dusk. It's a vivid reminder of the cost, in bodily suffering, of resource extraction.

Following some of the arguments in Ernest Becker's 1973 study The Denial of Death, he proposes that such crises are at least partly the result of the western reluctance to face mortality. In Britain, we eschew open coffins, for instance. When our relatives die, as my mother did two years ago, they die in a hospital rather than at home. We can hardly even bring ourselves to say die, preferring euphemisms such as pass away.