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What 'The Great Gatsby' Copyright Expiration Means for Its Legacy
Between the glitzy parties, secret backstories and climactic murder in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel The Great Gatsby, there’s a tiny detail that readers may have missed: right before he gets in a car with antagonist Tom Buchanan—the ride that kicks off the novel’s tragic end—narrator Nick Carraway realizes he’s forgotten his own birthday. It’s a detail that stuck with author Michael Farris Smith when he re-read the novel in his 40s, and sparked a lingering question: What makes a man so detached from himself that he doesn’t remember his own birthday?
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Fictional starships size comparison
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'Sopranos' memes are having a real moment in 2020
A look into why fans can't seem to let "The Sopranos" go.
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Pandemic practice: Horror fans and morbidly curious individuals are more psychologically resilient during the COVID-19 pandemic
One explanation for why people engage in frightening fictional experiences is that these experiences can act as simulations of actual experiences from…
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Why reading fiction creates good leaders
Val Mc Dermid’s comments (Fiction readers have made best leaders in Covid-19 crisis, says Val McDermid, 16 August) struck a chord with me. Once, decades ago, I was sent on a work-based software engineering course. Most of those attending, myself included, were bemused by the course leader spending half of the first day on what felt like literary criticism.
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Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Shirley Ann Grau dies at 91
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Shirley Ann Grau, a Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction writer whose stories and novels told of both the dark secrets and the beauty of the Deep South, has died. She was...
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Terror and Power: Is Gothic Horror Poised for 21st Century Revival?
In Bram Stoker’s iconic vampire novel Dracula, the eponymous count warns his pursuers, “My revenge is just begun! I spread it over centuries, and time is on my side.” Those who have read the novel or watched one of its countless adaptations will know that the count’s threat was empty. His revenge, and the count himself, were literally cut short. But while Dracula the character was killed, Dracula the book remains immortal, with horror readers and authors of all eras since genuflecting to its example.
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Majority of authors 'hear' their characters speak, finds study
Some writers have always claimed they can hear their characters speaking, with Enid Blyton suggesting she could “watch and hear everything” and Alice Walker describing how her characters would “come for a visit ... and talk”. But a new study has shown this uncanny experience is very widespread, with almost two-thirds of authors reporting that they hear their characters’ voices while they work.
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A Plague of Giants (Seven Kennings #1) by Kevin Hearne
From the east came the Bone Giants, from the south, the fire-wielding Hathrim – an invasion that sparked war across the six nations of Teldwen. The kingdom’s only hope is the discovery of a new form of magic that calls the world’s wondrous beasts to fight by the side of humankind.
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How Aldous Huxley prophesied the Big Data nightmare
In 1958 the journalist Mike Wallace interviewed Aldous Huxley, the British author best known for writing "Brave New World." This dystopian sci-fi novel, published in 1932, takes place in the fictional and future World State society, where human beings are produced in laboratories and assigned to different classes based on their intelligence and physical gifts.
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David Mitchell announces Utopia Avenue, his first novel in five years
Cloud Atlas author David Mitchell is to tackle the story of “the strangest British band you’ve never heard of” in his first novel for five years, Utopia Avenue. Announcing the book, which will be released next June, Mitchell quoted the maxim that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture”, saying that Utopia Avenue stemmed from it.
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Why Lafcadio Hearn’s Ghost Stories Still Haunt Us
In his fifty-four years among the living, Patrick Lafcadio Hearn wrote twenty-nine books in just about every conceivable genre—folktales, travelogues, novels, cookbooks, translations, dictionaries of proverbs—none of which can compete, in terms of sheer Dickensian horror and pluck, with the story of his own life. He was born in 1850 on the Greek island of Lefkáda (one of the Ionian Islands, at the time still under British control), to an Ionian mother named Rosa and an Irish father, Charles, who was stationed there as a staff surgeon in the British Army.
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Creepy reading to prep for ‘Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark’
Ghoulish reads to finish out the summer.
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When Crime Authors Write Non-Crime Books
Everyone admires the crime writer who turns out a terrific book every year. Whether it’s a series or a standalone, we marvel at their taut plotting, sense of place, and compelling characters. But …
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The Best HP Lovecraft Books That'll Give You NIGHTMARES!
You won’t have to venture far into classic horror literature to hear the name Howard Phillips Lovecraft – or “Howie’, as some fans affectionately call him. Rightly so, since he’s among a small handful of authors credited for shaping the very landscape of modern horror. Today, new readers continue to seek out the best HP Lovecraft books, losing themselves amid his cosmic worlds.
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'It sickens me': Gillian Flynn slams Gone Girl theory in missing woman case
Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn has said an estranged husband’s claim that his missing wife may have faked her disappearance in the manner of Flynn’s bestselling novel “absolutely sickens” her.
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'A Clockwork Orange' Follow-Up Found in Burgess Archives
A literature professor at Manchester Metropolitan University recently unearthed a legendary manuscript: a 200-page work titled The Clockwork Condition by A Clockwork Orange’s Anthony Burgess. Don’t get too excited, Droog lovers. Colin Dwyer at NPR reports that Condition is not a sequel to the cult novel, but rather a meditation on the “condition of modern man” that was to be structured similarly to Dante’s Inferno. The manuscript was also something of a cash grab. After the release and success of Stanley Kubrick’s film version of book in 1971, a publisher reached out to Burgess...
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Poorly Researched Men’s Fiction
I had a whole gaggle of 100-point bucks in my sights, sleeping peacefully on their feet, like cows... By Evan Allgood.
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Why Harry Potter and Paddington Bear are essential reading … for grown-ups
By day, she researches the poetry of John Donne as a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. But in the evening, when Dr Katherine Rundell wants a bit of comfort, she reads Paddington. “As an adult, the thing I love about Paddington is that the structure Michael Bond has built into his books is one of hope. Things which appear to be negative turn out to be just cogs in the greater machine. I think Bond sees life as miraculous – and that’s in the structure of the book.”
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In T.C. Boyle’s Trippy New Novel, Characters Turn On, Tune In and Drop Lots of Acid
As a kid growing up in southwestern Virginia, I lived down the street from a cloistered visionary named Greg, an older boy who read books and spoke in zealous declarations. One day of summer vacation when I was 9, Greg declared that we would build a monorail. This was an era of global oil shocks and nuclear meltdowns, and Greg was of the fervent belief that the monorail might save us all. It’s true that monorails at this point did not figure prominently into the rural imagination, and certainly not mine. But I knew there was one at Disney World and so I was, for a time, all in.
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