Mmy son came back from school a couple of weeks ago and told me that his teacher had said that “nonfiction was better than fiction,” because it talked about “real things,” and was therefore, presumably, more instructive.

Maybe I’m making too much of a second-hand comment, but I have to confess that my blood boiled for a moment. It sounded like something straight out of Common Core, which puts an emphasis on “informational texts” over storytelling, especially as students get older. Continue Reading →

Iit’s been said that J.R.R. Tolkien has divided the world’s population into two categories: those who’ve read The Lord of the Rings and those who have avoided doing so all their lives.

I admit that I’ve been in the latter category until recently. But my seven-year-old son has developed an obsession for the Peter Jackson film trilogy based on the novels, and I feel guilty talking like an expert about the story simply because I can quote movie dialogue in my sleep.

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Ooccasionally I’ll write about a novel on this blog, especially if it’s fantastic and different, and more likely to go under the radar of most conventional reviewers and booksellers.

The Subtlest Soul, a 2013 historical novel by NYU Professor of Italian Virginia Cox, is one such work. Cox has produced several award-winning studies of Renaissance women poets, but when I learned that she’d written (and self-published) a fictional project set in the time of Machiavelli, I was very curious to take a look.

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Ii recently reread one of my favorite tales, “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye” by A.S. Byatt. As the title piece of Byatt’s first collection of ‘fairy stories,’ it involves a modern-day academic named Gillian Perholt, an English woman of a certain age, who comes across a real, live genie (or djinn) while attending a conference in Istanbul.

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giulio-rosati-italian-1858-1917-bavardageTthe patisserie near my house has a sign: “No, we don’t have WiFi. Talk to each other.” When you sit down at one of their tables with your coffee and pastry, you actually do see people in conversation, which makes for a nice change from Starbucks, where you can work on a laptop for hours and never make eye contact with another human being.

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