Broken Colors Michelle Zackheim (2007) Broken Colors is a beautiful love story. It is about the love between two people, a beautiful and lifelike look at how love plays out. But the love and the beauty of the novel is so much deeper than that. Tragedy and pain permeates everything, and shapes the characters. This book, […]
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A Map of Tulsa, Benjamin Lytal (2013) New York: Penguin. Ostensibly a story about young love, A Map of Tulsa is a beautiful telling of the long, slow, painful birth of a writer. An artistic young man grows up with a limited view, yet a calling for something greater. Early experiences sear into his brain,
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Probably the greatest writer’s crush I have ever had on anyone has been on Virginia Woolf. She combines a poetic sensibility with a modern point of view; she celebrates the small moments in life by painting with a very large brush. All of her novels are basically explorations of the same extended metaphor, the tide
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“Dora Greenfield left her husband because she was afraid of him. She decided six months later to return to him for the same reason. The absent Paul, haunting her with letters and telephone bells and imagined footsteps on the stairs had begun to be the greater torment. Dora suffered from guilt, and with guilt came
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Apuleius. Metamorphoses:The Transformations of Lucius, aka The Golden Ass. Robert Graves, trans. As the only Latin novel that has survived in its entirety, it merits study as a representation of a whole ancient culture that has profoundly inspired so many modern writers. It is especially compelling because the novel has its own quirky style, blending elements of what
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Petronius wrote The Satyricon in Latin during the first century A.D., and it is one of only two surviving examples of what literary scholars call the roman novel. This “roman novel” form is not exactly the same thing as a modern novel, as it combined both poetic and prose writing to tell a story. Continuity was not as important,
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Defoe, Daniel. A Journal of the Plague Year (1722). A novel disguised as an account of a public health scare that happened sixty years before the book was published. I would expect a book on this subject to be full of emotional appeals and specific fleshed- out characters suffering and being generally emotional. First, because we have gotten
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This past week the Scripps National Spelling Bee featured 275 spellers from age 8 to 15, spelling words most of us cannot even begin to imagine. The winner was Sukanya Roy of Scranton, PA who correctly spelled cymotrichous. The final nine words in the competition are listed below, with their meanings and correct spellings. (Even the
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The Bay Psalm Book was the first book printed in the New World, in 1640. Its working of the Psalms into English metrical form, while not exactly praised by poets and critics today, shows something interesting about poetics in English, and the great potential for English poetics in terms of syntax. I also find that
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While Americans observe Memorial Day today, a holiday commemorating U.S. men and women who died while in military service, I thought I would share eight of my favorite poems on the subject of war and loss. The Links on the poem titles will open a new window with the text of the poem. 8. “Soldier,
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