How to Make an Animal Speak

by Jack Martin on January 24, 2012

Charlotte spins her web, Wilbur shows up the other pigs at the County Fair, and young readers rejoice. They don’t even seem to care that animals can’t talk. Why do kids get to have all the fun? After spending week after week writing online book reviews on stories about normal people that speak to other [...]

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7 Memoirs You Must Read Before You Die

by The Reader on January 9, 2012

Edgar Allan Poe judged the greatest tragedy of existence to be humanity’s innate loneliness – our inescapable singularity. As close as one might feel to another, we largely live and die alone, sharing mere slivers of ourselves – our thoughts, fears, loves and hopes – with the outside world. Art, however, can sometimes transcend this [...]

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Marriage and Middlemarch: The Timeliness and Timelessness of George Eliot’s Writing

December 20, 2011

The other night I pulled my 800 page copy of Middlemarch out of my denim hobo bag and set it down on the table where those I was hanging out with promptly marveled at its heft.  I told my friends that I had recently decided to read Middlemarch once a year and was in the [...]

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Hot Scribble: 10 Greatest First Lines of Literature

December 8, 2011

Whenever I’m on the fence about buying a book, I turn to page 1 and read its opening line. Considering the amount of time authors spend obsessing over the first words of their tome, you’d think all openings would be amazing. And yet, they’re not. Constructing an original, provocative opening sentence is eons harder than [...]

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10 Top Villains of Literature

November 30, 2011

Sinister villains often make good books – after all, it is frequently in the defeat of such adversaries that heroes prove heroic. For this reason, one could make a Top 10 Heroes List that closely mirrors that of the villains – and wind up including Pip, Hamlet, Charles Darnay and Uncle Tom among others. A [...]

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