Classics, Nonfiction, and Children's Literature
Writers and Their Teachers edited by Dale Salwak (Bloomsbury, May 2023) is an enlightening collection of essays by 20 different world-renowned authors, delving into the influential figures who shaped their writing journeys. The book gives a diverse range of perspectives, allowing for an anthology that many will enjoy reading. The anthology contains contributions from twenty
When I started blogging about books, I didn’t know what “graphic novel” meant. In fact, in June 2008, I wrote a post explaining my confusion. But at Dewey’s urging, I gave some of them a try. Since then, I’ve read a few graphic novels. But I admit that I still hadn’t completely understood the concepts
How many times have you reread the same story? Exercises in Style by Raymond Queneau is a collection of the same story, written 99 different ways. Some of the stories are fascinating retellings in various styles. Some are stereotypes (feminine, cockney, Gallacism, exclamations), some are in different perspectives (past, present, blurb, ignorance), some are different
Ficcciones by Jorge Luis Borges is about 170 pages in Spanish; the English translation of the same book is about 120 pages (within Borges’ Collected Fictions). Why, then, has this book taken weeks to get through? Borges’ writing style is powerful. In some sense, I’m glad I struggled through Borges just to get a feel
In my mind, Edgar Allan Poe is the most well-known Halloween-ish short story writer. To keep up with the season, I reread some of Poe’s short stories. I enjoyed his stories when I was younger – I even rewrote “The Fall of the House of Usher” as a play for my high school’s Halloween “one-act
After reading, in the past months, the short stories of Turgenev, Chekhov, Maupassant, James Joyce, and Hemingway, I found O. Henry‘s stories to be remarkably different. They were refreshingly delightful, poignant, and easy to read, and yet, I was struck by the inferiority of O. Henry’s actual writing in comparison to the others. In the
Hemingway’s stories are poetry: that is my first and lasting impression of Ernest Hemingway’s short stories. In his short stories, Hemingway treats words as sparsely as do poets. I don’t usually understand or enjoy poetry because it feels like so much must be inferred or interpreted. (After I finish reading the HTR&W short stories, I’m
If Guy de Maupassant lived and wrote stories or novels today, his name would appear on The New York Times best-seller lists many weeks out of a year. As it was, in the late 1800s, his stories were best-sellers from the time the first one, “Boule de Suif,” appeared in a collection with five other previously
My writing teachers have always instructed to “show not tell.” I didn’t understand it, really, until I began to read John Steinbeck’s East of Eden last month. I thought “showing” meant describing the character in a context: hair color, quirks, and personality traits are mentioned as the story unfolds. Here’s a silly example I just
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