Literature & Psychology

Sci-Fi Film 'After Earth' Presents Dark Future for Humanity

Space.com

 

Although it might seem like a depressing fantasy, Whitta thinks that people are drawn to these kinds of apocalyptic movies for a reason.

 

"It's just kind of a strangely masochistic part of human nature where we seem to enjoy fantasizing about our own destruction," Whitta said.

With college-age women’s childhood stars growing up and posting half-naked photos to Twitter or blowing off rehab, female role models are hard to come by.

 

Young women sometimes turn to literature for guidance, yet experts warn these readers to consider the time and circumstance when choosing literary females to emulate.

 

Writer Ella Ceron, Fordham University graduate and Thought Catalog contributor, says The Great Gatsby’s Daisy Buchanan should not be admired as the flighty, flirty object of men’s affections that author F. Scott Fitzgerald portrays — but it isn’t Daisy’s fault.

 

“It’s not that Daisy’s a bad role model, necessarily,” Ceron says. “She’s a girl of her times and circumstance.”

Advocate.com
Op-ed: Gay Fiction Is Everybody's Fiction

 

If gay people are part of the human experience, then why are mainstream publishers and straight readers so quick to keep gay characters in the closet?

Nashville Scene
Kevin Powers, author of The Yellow Birds, discusses the delicate art of writing about war

 

Even though I experienced things that are in the same ballpark as the events in the book, the events themselves are imagined. I tried to create enough space in the book for readers to imagine themselves into it.

Publishers Seek Next College-Age Bestseller
Uloop News

 

A new genre of literature - New Adult Fiction - needs college-aged authors to tell its stories, and publishers such as HarperCollins are looking to give those authors voices.

 

Not to be mistaken as a euphemism for Young Adult (YA) fiction such as “The Hunger Games,” New Adult Fiction is a growing genre featuring college-aged protagonists who face struggles more realistic and engaging than those of high schoolers.

Storied Legacy: Children's Author Earns Ph.D. in Childhood Studies, Tenure ...

 

Even as an undergraduate student, Lara Saguisag was busy rereading Alice and Wonderland while her classmates were studying Shakespeare. It wasn’t long before she too was capturing children’s imaginations, authoring the books Children of Two Seasons: Poems for Young People and Cat Eyes in her native Philippines.

 

As she enjoyed literary success, Saguisag increasingly sought to understand children’s literature on a more fundamental level. Consequently, after earning master’s degrees from Hollins University and The New School, she enrolled at Rutgers–Camden in 2007 as a member of the inaugural class of the new Ph.D. in childhood studies program.

How Dante's 'Inferno' inspired Dan Brown's 'Inferno'

- USA Today

 

A decade ago, Dan Brown says, he got the idea for a novel that would use the Inferno, Dante's epic,14th-century poem envisioning the nine circles of Hell, as both "catalyst and inspiration."

WordandFilm.com
Casting Call: F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night

 

Welcome to Word & Fim’s Casting Call, where we exercise our creative muscles by focusing our attention on extraordinary characters from exceptional books – either fiction or nonfiction – and make the case for how we’d cast those roles if given the chance.

PLoS Blogs (blog)
Our Inner Voices

 

A pastiche of a post, putting together ideas and research on inner voices:

-How to document the conversations we carry on with ourselves most everyday (in the West at least)
-The importance of inner voices for rebuilding our notion of mental illness
-The role hearing voices (and working with those voices) can play in therapy for schizophrenia
-What it’s like to be without such an inner voice
-The inner voices in addiction.

BBC News
Five things prisoners' books show about life in prison

 

Vicky Pryce, the economist convicted of taking speeding points for disgraced cabinet minister Chris Huhne, is writing a book inspired by her time behind bars. What can people glean about life inside from books written by prisoners?

 

Pryce's book Prisonomics will explain the economics of imprisonment. She joins a long list of people who have squeezed a book out of their experience of life inside.

 

All have shown something about the nature of incarceration.

Telegraph.co.uk

Patrick McGrath: In the shadow of Broadmoor

 

"The criminally insane were very much a feature of my childhood,” says Patrick McGrath, from New York, where he has lived since the early Eighties writing elegantly airless novels that teem with madness and threat. Frequently hailed as the best contemporary inheritor of the Gothic tradition, McGrath has an appropriately Gothic backstory of his own; he grew up in the shadow of Broadmoor hospital, where his father worked as a forensic psychiatrist. “He treated people who’d drowned their children or thrown their father under a train and so forth,” McGrath says, “and I grew up with these stories. So when I started writing, my imagination was well stocked with the destructive aspect of human nature that arises out of mental illness.”

Yorkshire Post
Thriller that delves into the dark side of fairytales

 

Her [Alison Littlewood’s] second book Path of Needles was published last week and is a compelling read, focusing on a series of murders which, from the gruesome way in which the victims’ bodies are posed, appear to have a connection with fairytales. A young police officer, Cate Corbin, is part of the investigating team and on a hunch she calls in academic Alice Hyland, an expert in fairytales, to assist them on the case.

 

The book was, in part, inspired by Littlewood’s own fascination with folk tales, myth and legend. “I was thinking about the fairytales I had loved as a child,” she says.

 

“Then I started to think about some of the dark and gruesome things in fairytales that you maybe don’t really notice or understand as a child – and I thought ‘what if those things happened in the real world?’” She began by researching the different variants that exist of fairytales we have all heard of and think we know. “I did quite a lot of reading, but it wasn’t a chore,” she says. “It was interesting to learn about how stories were passed on and changed.”

Ottawa Citizen

Ian McEwan on why good spy novels should be considered literature

 

“In the end these things just dissolve,” he says. “The only question is how good a novel is, not whether it has spies or detectives or nurses marrying doctors. Take Conrad — we wouldn’t say of him that he’s merely a writer of seafaring yarns. What matters is whether a novelist can devise a particular and plausible world that holds us, and make a moral universe that has such a resonance that we can go back years later and find it still works. Then genre is transcended. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy holds up because it’s a brilliant novel.”

 

She's a successful law professor and a Sunday school teacher, with a host of family and friends. But her interpersonal calculus centers on how to manipulate and outmaneuver the many people in her life.

Chris J. Rudge, from Sydney, writes about literature, drugs, science-fiction, computers, language and philosophy. ...

LifeHealthPro
Master of puppets

 

Harryhausen’s legacy on the world of cinema was groundbreaking. Effects-driven filmmakers from George Lucas to Steven Spielberg to James Cameron all released statements acknowledging the deep influence Harryhausen’s special effects pioneering had on their own work. Lucas in particular said that were it not for Ray Harryhausen, there probably would never have been any “Star Wars” movies. Even today, many of Harryhausen’s films maintain a deep appeal with the young and old alike, which would seem counter-intuitive in an age of slick computer-generated effects where distinguishing between reality and fantasy can be almost impossible. In comparison, the monsters of Harryhausen’s work are obviously hand-crafted maquettes that move in a herky-jerky fashion.

The National
Stories from the streets with Gimbal

 

Downloading Gimbal means you can see the city through the eyes of fictitious characters, take imaginary journeys through literature, or experience an alternative view of familiar streets.

 

CBC.ca
Sookie Stackhouse author receiving death threats

 

Charlaine Harris's bestselling Sookie Stackhouse novels, the basis for the hugely popular HBO TV series True Blood, has inspired a legion of devoted fans, but some of those fans have turned on the author -- even threatened her life -- after the ending of the final book of the series was leaked.