Philip Esler’s new book Sex, Wives, and Warriors: Reading Biblical Narrative with its Ancient Audience, reintroduces our culture to some of the Bible’s most dramatic narratives.
Reading Biblical Narrative
Once Upon A Time
Ignore films like Memento when writing, Steve Almond argues, and instead focus on old-fashioned devices like narrative, plot, and character development.
iDentity
“Up until very recently, I’d recount my online experiences with some degree of shame or sheepishness, but in this apocalyptic year of 2012, that embarrassment is beginning to fall by the wayside. I’ve been having more and more conversations with people grappling with what is gained and lost by how some of our most meaningful musical discoveries– not to mention life experiences– have happened in front of, or facilitated by, screens.” Over at Pitchfork, a new column dedicated to the intersections between digital and ordinary life – and the art these interactions can produce.
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Infinite Boston
Earlier this month William Beutler, a D.C. based writer, started a blog about the landmarks in Boston that inspired the landscape of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Beutler does a great job chronicling the real-life history of different buildings and explaining how DFW altered them to fit into his novel.
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You are Muriel Spark
“The voices you hear when you sit down to write lead you to believe that you’re a character in the novel you’re writing even though metafiction hasn’t been invented yet.” If this applies to you, you might be in a Muriel Spark novel according to Maud Newton’s article at The Toast. We aren’t surprised that Newton wrote this because Spark made her 2010 Year in Reading post.
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The Teenage Years are More Dystopian Than Ever
Led by Millions Top Tenner The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, dystopia is unseating vampires as the dominant theme in teen fiction, according to The Independent. The paper lists several other examples of the hot new trend, including Plague by Michael Grant and Matched by Ally Condie. (We’d argue that with dystopian classics like 1984 and Lord of the Flies on teen reading lists for decades, this is an old trend that’s new again.)