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Posts Tagged: Book Riot

Are You the Woman Reader?

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It’s not that the books that get someone into the “serious reader” club are all or even mostly by men these days. But the books that get you kicked out of the club are almost exclusively written by women. Hannah Engler writes for Book Riot on “women’s literature” and the still-unevolved stereotype of the Woman Reader.

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Necessity of Truth

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Over at Book Riot, Hannah Engler discusses memoir, when the absolute truth is necessary, and why it is okay—even unavoidable—to fabricate facts: Fabrication is inherent in memoir writing. Number one, it’s impossible to have an unbiased view of your own life, period; number two, it’s impossible to write about something in the past tense and not […]

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Fanfiction Can Be Literary Too

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For Book Riot, Vanessa Willoughby explores the benefits of writing fan fiction, and how notable works are often imitations of timeless stories: Literature that is unforgettable incites a dialogue at the very least, and a conversation at its best. Novels can serve as responses to pre-existing literature. Some of the best pieces of literature are works […]

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On The Beauty of Words

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At Book Riot, Aram Mrjoian explores the question of what makes a sentence beautiful. He conjectures that our brain becomes overwhelmed when it sees words organized and used in a way that is beyond its imagination: Maybe, when words are amalgamated together into some combination that we could never imagine, our brains need a split second […]

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Let’s Talk About Abortion

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Book Riot discusses the lack of female protagonists who’ve had abortions in literature: For millions of women, abortion is not a statistic or a political platitude. Although public discourse around abortion tends to stick to abstractions, there is no one “abortion experience.” Women’s sexualities, pregnancies, and terminations are unique. Every woman has her own complex […]

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A Blurb of Beauty

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At Book Riot, Amanda Diehl brings an optimistic anecdote to the often-bleak conversation on the value of book blurbs (typically rife with accusations of corporatism, cronyism, and empty praise). If the form can rise to the artistry of Margaret Atwood’s one-line praise for Laline Paul’s The Bees—“[A] gripping Cinderella/Arthurian tale with lush Keatsian adjectives”—perhaps there’s […]

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The Women of YA

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S.E. Hinton, a woman, arguably pioneered the young adult genre of literature. So why is it that women are seen as secondary in this genre, and as less valuable as their male counterparts? Book Riot explores this question, and the powerful effects that narratives written for young women can have. Within the pages of these […]

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Ernest Hemingway Was…

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You may have seen the recent series of UN Women ads using screenshots of Google auto-complete suggestions to educate viewers about sexist stereotypes. This Book Riot post does the same thing but with famous authors—for example, when you type in “Ernest Hemingway was,” what does Google predict you’ll type next? According to Book Riot, “the takeaways […]

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Call This Playlist Ishmael

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Kick your summer off right with a different kind of beach read: Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. (Okay, it’s more of a sea read than a beach read.) To put you in the right mood, Liberty Hardy over at Book Riot took a stab (from hell’s heart) at a Moby-Dick playlist. From Tom Waits’s “Starving in the Belly of a […]

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Goodbye to Goodreads

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If you’re feeling a little queasy about Amazon’s buyout of Goodreads, Book Riot has compiled a list of alternative book-based social networks. A few of them seem defunct, and one is actually also owned by Amazon, but some, especially the ones still in beta, look very promising. Do you plan on quitting Goodreads, and if […]

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Strunk and White Strike Again

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Strunk and White’s Elements of Style has a soft spot in all our hearts, but some of its rules—no adverbs, an incorrect definition of passive voice—are a little…idiosyncratic. If, as Constance Hale says, the point of grammar is to produce better writing, rather than squeezing words into an airtight mathematical equation, Strunk and White aren’t always […]

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And In Some Perfumes Is There More Delight

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You know what Ernest Hemingway looked like and what his writing sounded like—but what did he smell like? Inspired by a perfume on Etsy called “Dead Writers,” Book Riot’s Amanda Nelson imagines scents named after various canonical authors. Our favorites include Flannery O’Connor (“Church incense, soap, vanilla, ginger”) and Edgar Allen Poe (“Poppies, absinthe, sandalwood, […]

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