Tag: dialogue

Book Review: The Hard Way by Lee Child

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) The Hard Way is the quintessential Jack Reacher novel. When it was first published back in 2006, it was the tenth novel by Lee Child to feature the American ex-military policeman turned drifter and modern-day ‘knight errant’. Child’s publishing schedule had become as regular as Reacher’s inner clock (he […]

A Summary and Analysis of Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Sestina’

‘Sestina’ is a poem by the twentieth-century American poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911-79), first published in the New Yorker in 1956. The poem, which uses a very specific verse form, describes a grandmother and a child as they sit in a kitchen together, with a mysterious and unspecific air of grief or sadness haunting them both. […]

The Problem With Parents

Gary Clement Children’s books have long featured pint-size heroes overcoming fierce antagonists: ogres, witches and big bad wolves. So it comes as no surprise that a similar drama occurs in these three stories. Only here, children are up against something far more complex: their parents. These moms and pops — by turns cruel, overprotective, distracted […]

Finally, a Cure for Eldest Daughter Syndrome! On Alexandra Tanner’s “Worry”

Worry by Alexandra Tanner BIG SISTERS ARE bullies. Big sisters have trauma. Big sisters are tired. They’ve been diagnosed with “eldest daughter syndrome” —for which there is no known cure. Are you the eldest daughter of an immigrant household or are you normal? Take it from a certain corner of the internet and big sisters […]

A Summary and Analysis of ‘Dialogue with the Mirror’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Dialogue with the Mirror’ is a 1949 short story by the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez. Published when he was just twenty-two years old, it is an early work written when Márquez was still finding his way towards his mature style. In the story, a man looks at himself […]

Lisa Ko: How Writing a Novel is Like Wandering a Flea Market

This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter— sign up here . I never start a novel knowing where I’m going. I don’t write linearly, and not in clear, numbered drafts, from a beginning to an end. I gather and cut and gather some more. I call it the flea market process of […]

The Lifelike Illusions of A.I.

In January, 1999, the Washington Post reported that the National Security Agency had issued a memo on its intranet with the subject “Furby Alert.” According to the Post , the memo decreed that employees were prohibited from bringing to work any recording devices, including “toys, such as ‘Furbys,’ with built-in recorders that repeat the audio […]

Ask the Author | ‘Martyr!’ author Kaveh Akbar needs writing just as much as it needs him

The Iowa Writers’ Workshop professor and recent New York Times bestselling author of “Martyr!” spoke with the DI about his recovery from addiction and his subsequent necessity of writing. Avi Lapchick , Arts Editor Ethan McLaughlin Kaveh Akbar speaks during a panel on Leslie Jamison’s newest novel, Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story, at Prairie […]

Viewing the Ob-scene: On Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest”

A MAN IS being murdered outside a child’s window. A prisoner of Auschwitz, he was caught fighting with another captive. As punishment, he’s being drowned in a river. We can’t see the incident, but the child can. He moves over to the window and looks out beyond our field of vision. Almost immediately, he withdraws […]

A Conflict-Theatre Troupe Visits a Land of Strife (Columbia University)

The director and translator Bryan Doerries stood by the stage in Columbia University’s Miller Theatre the other night, watching an audience of students, faculty, and alumni file in. Since 2006, Doerries, who founded Theater of War Productions, has put on performances in locations riven by trauma and strife: military bases, prisons, gang-dominated neighborhoods, opioid-gripped towns. […]