literary device
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The Twin Paradox
By running two lives that started from the same point off along divergent tracks, they throw up questions about our uniqueness, and the chances and choices that make us who we are. From Shakespeare to Stephen King, identical twins have played…
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The Way You Write
Using the second person is a tricky but effective writing device, though its use is pretty uncommon. Over at the Ploughshares blog, E.V. De Cleyre offers some clever examples of writing in the second person.
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Detecting Genre
Like a detective novel, these books are characterized by a central mystery and the process of detection that leads to solving that mystery. The mystery, however, is not a crime—it’s a life. A person, usually only tangentially related to the…
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Against Allegory
Don’t you hate allegory? Seems to me that allegory was created to separate readers into two groups: people that understand allegory, and people who don’t. Over at Huffington Post, Lisa K. Friedman explores allegory and other literary devices and wonders if…
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When It Rains, It Pours
Whether you’re singing, dancing, or making out with Spiderman, there’s something different about doing things in the rain. In an excerpt from her book Rain: A Cultural and National History published at Salon, Cynthia Barnett analyzes rain as a narrative…