“[C]hildren often prefer the factual over the fantastical. And a growing body of work suggests that when it comes to storybooks, they also learn better from stories that are realistic. For example, preschool-aged children are more likely to learn new facts about animals when the animals are portrayed realistically as opposed to anthropomorphically.” Two new studies suggest that where learning is concerned, realism trumps fantasy in children’s books. Which is as good a time as any to ask our own Jacob Lambert‘s question: Are picture books leading our children astray?
Rabbit Run
Lolita, in the Margins
When Vladimir Nabokov developed a screen adaptation for Lolita, his director Stanley Kubrick declared it the “best ever written in Hollywood”–meaning, it seems, most gorgeously novelistic, evocative, readable. Here’s a short excerpt of his screenplay with original margin notes.
“I learned to look outward more”
“There are dangers for an artist in any academic environment,” says former Poetry editor Christian Wiman, who now teaches at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. “Academia rewards people who know their own minds and have developed an ironclad confidence in speaking them. That kind of assurance is death for an artist.”
All the Beginnings Have Endings
“Every story I have ever told has a kind of breach to it, I think. You could say that my writing isn’t quite right. That all the beginnings have endings in them.” Lidia Yuknavitch, who recently published an essay, “There is No Map for Grief,” in the Millions, now has an essay on violence, beauty and and storytelling in Guernica.
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Dictionary Don
He grew up in Edinburgh, wears sharp suits, and added the entry for “phat” to the Oxford English Dictionary. Meet the new editor in chief of the OED, Michael Proffitt. Tom Rachman profiles him at The New York Times.
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On Lispector’s Humanity
“If rats then represent terror and chickens innocent striving for something approaching authenticity, humans, for Lispector, are strangely in the middle, often stricken with fear, or handing out terror, but ready also to soar or break loose or achieve some freedom or be fully alert to their fate in a time short enough for one of her stories to be enacted.” Colm Tóibín writes about Clarice Lispector’s The Complete Stories. You could also check out a Year in Reading by Katrina Dodson, translator of the collection and our review of the book.
Book Readin’
A new Pew Research Center survey finds that the share of Americans who have read a book in the last 12 months – 73% – has remained largely unchanged since 2012. And when people do reach for a book, it is much more likely to be a traditional print book than a digital product. See also our essay on the persistence of physical books and, of course, The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books, edited by our own C. Max Magee.
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….ok but isn’t this “learn new facts about animals when the animals are portrayed” a sort of syllogism? Facts in the context of what the study purports appear to be of the strictly scientific (aka realist) variety. Realistically, none of the animals in the children’s book would speak thus any fable-type children’s book, strictly adhering to the logic of the argument, would devolve into a textfree, photorealistic portrayal of animals. To be fair, it seems highly implausible that such a children’s book [though the term naturalistic wildlife photo-story would seem more apt] would be able to convey any sort of moral content characteristic of primary socialization. In other words, while children’s zoological, biological and even botanical knowledge might experience an uptick, they would be deprived of the very cultural essence of what fables are about. …which in turn seems very much in line w the neolib ideal of producing technocratic factoid-mongers….