Literature and Poetry
CultureWatch: Talking About Detective Fiction and The Museum of Innocence
This section covers everything from technical developments; to scientific advances like DNA which provide new investigative methods; to movie and television links; to new access to detective fiction from foreign countries (e.g. the Swedish Wallander series); to new avenues of research (she still prefers to do her own). Anent the latter, that there is a nifty little bibliography and list of suggested reading at the end of the book. more »
Hiding Another Story in a Story: There's A Mystery There; Sendak on Sendak
"That’s the best fun in all of this – the layers of meaning, the layers of storytelling," Sendak said in a 2007 interview. "When you hide another story in a story, that’s the story I am telling the children." more »
Book Review: The Education of a Black Radical: A Southern Civil Rights Activist’s Journey 1959-1964
Jo Freeman writes: Colleges and universities were a major source of civil rights activists in the Sixties. Whether black or white, as long as they did their activism after leaving school, they were heralded as heroes. But if they were active while still students, even off-campus, they were troublemakers. This was particularly true for state supported schools. Legislators often wanted the schools they funded to keep their students off the streets. When campus administrators couldn’t control student activists, someone suffered. more »
December 2009 CultureWatch
Abigail & John: Portrait of a Marriage is important because it helps to regender early American history which remains overly focused on generals and male political leaders. Lori Hahnel’s collection of short fiction, Nothing Sacred, is spare, subtle and literary but not pretentious in any way, and very pleasing. Now in paperback, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Olive Kitteridge, give the reader a deep sense of the connectedness of the small town and its inhabitants, and of Olive’s place in the scheme of things. more »