literary criticism

Immediately after finishing the downloadable audiobook of Bad Feminist, crisply narrated by the inestimable Bahni Turpin, I placed the print book on hold. There are just too many interesting, important and often hilarious moments to absorb in one go. Turpin's reading is too good to pass up, so I wholeheartedly recommend the audiobook, but on this second time through, I'd like the luxury of reading and then rereading those paragraphs that give me the most to think about.

Roxane Gay is both a fiction writer and an essayist, as well as a social media cultural commentator. Bad Feminist was my

I read How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read with my book club and, full disclosure, I was the only one who liked it.  Which made for a rousing discussion!

Author Pierre Bayard is a professor of French literature at a French university.  So, he’s French and his book has been translated into English for our reading pleasure.  Professor Bayard’s prose is academic.  He uses well-cited excerpts from classical literature to defend his points.  He talks about Themes and The Other and the ways readers interact with The Other, internally and externally.  While I generally read for diversion, I

I don’t know about you, but when I think of early novels the books that come to mind include Cervantes’s Don Quixote or Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.  Boy was I wrong.  Steven Moore’s first volume—what he describes as an alternative history—is a history of the novel from the earliest days of writing.  It includes a descriptive history of the novel from the ancient, medieval and Renaissance eras.  But Moore doesn’t just describe the novel in the West.  It is in the East, in particular the Far East, that readers begin to discover some of the earliest gems in novel writing including works such as