Category: literature
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Disrespect Hard Copies of My Books, Please
Recently someone I care for witnessed their young child snatch this copy of Little Women I had on hand — they took it away from this child, reasoning that this child might disrespect hard copies of my books. My response, immediately, was, “It’s really okay.” This person said, “He’ll tear it.” I said, “That’s okay…
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Nebula Award Winners
Nebula Award winners are a bit difficult to find gathered all in one post on the SFWA site, no offense to them. If you go to the SFWA site — for whom I remain obviously grateful — it’s several extra clicks to get to the proper year, which makes it rather difficult to search by author. I…
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Braver Than You Think
When I sat down to write this reflection on the book Braver Than You Think by Maggie Downs, it seemed to me a really weird thing to do. I almost never review books on the site anymore and I’m not really reviewing one now. I almost never — in a decade of doing this stuff — do…
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Bad Intellectual: The Houellebecqian Case of Catherine Perez-Shakdam
Alors, les Français sont en train de flatter l’islam bien.Sadegh Hedayat Once, one of the Iranian politicians in the Parliament of Iran during his speech accounted a brief conversation with arteshbod Hossein Fardoust, some years after 1979. Fardoust was a friend of Shah and one of the most influential figures of SAVAK—in the last meeting…
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Blake’s Wilderness
Call it rehumanization that reabsorbs what was separated out. In this reunification the horrific becomes beatific; tygers and lions “sing, they seize the instruments of harmony” (FZ 124.17). Remetamorph, “further up and in,” as C.S. Lewis says in The Last Battle, reads like a salmon migration upstream, out of division into unity and not to…
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George MacDonald Universalism against Hans Urs von Balthasar on Universal Salvation
Many a wrong, and its curing song; Many a road, and many an inn; Room to roam, but only one home For all the world to win. (Eve, in MacDonald’s Lilith) I want to put two eschatologies in conversation, that of Hans Urs von Balthasar on Universal Salvation and that of George MacDonald Universalism. The…
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Tolkien’s Art Finds a Hobbit Hole
I stand in the rounded doorway of the entrance chamber. The wall to my right bears a calligraphed monogram in the form of a cross laid over a curl of ribbon. The gatekeeper, a man with a black suit and a walkie-talkie, cautions me against phone use. ‘We were trying to make it feel like…
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THE EVOLUTION OF ECOLOGICAL ATTITUDES AS REPRESENTED IN AMERICAN LITERATURE
ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS A comparative analysis of works in American literature reveals the evolving ecological attitudes of society as illustrated through the perceptions and values of characters in regards to the natural environment. Applying an ecocritical approach, elements from each work are examined in three categories to chart the evolution of ecological attitude; environmental…
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To Stand on the Shoulders of Giants You Must Climb their Legs
The great Coleridge quote (by way of Newton by way of Burton by way of Bernard of Chartes) that we see further because we stand on the shoulders of giants seems to be automatically assumed by the modern mind. We have “evolved” since the Greco Roman era. Even though clearly we are more barbaric. Even…
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Why the Movie is Always Worse than the Book
There seems to have arisen a sort of arrogance in our culture that if you’ve seen the movie, you’ve seen it all — that the movie is seldom truly worse than the book. But seeing is not understanding, not knowing, not believing – at least not the sort of seeing we normally mean. TV and Movies…
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Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver
Each time I teach a literature course, I ask my students some version of this question, “What is literature?” Often it’s a question they haven’t considered, and we usually end up discussing our class reading list versus some of the more popular novels they know of. This leads us to talk about why we are…
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Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
My good friend Krista regularly makes book recommendations to me and buys books for me, and I have loved every single one. That is remarkable to me. I don’t have that kind of success rate when buying gifts for my own husband and son. When I think about Krista selecting books for me, I am…