OnFiction

The Awakening,  published by Kate Chopin when she was 49 years old, has become a literary classic, and an influential feminist novella.  Her...

I’ll postpone reviewing another television series until next week, in favour of a book of essays by Ross Day. Alright, these are not fict...

I n Stratford on Avon, in 1582, William Shakespeare, at the age of 18, married Anne Hathaway, who was 26, probably because she was pregna...

Imagine you are given this photograph, and asked to write a fictional character sketch of the man depicted here. This is the task that Ma...

Do writers who feel themselves to be inspired enable their readers to feel the same way? This is the question that Todd Thrash and his co...

A lovely idea of Miranda Hill was to start and continue to administer Project Bookmark Canada. (We had a Quick Hit on the Project in Apri...

Those of us who love to read books almost inevitably have a visceral reaction to the physical presence of books. We not only love to read...

How are we affected by poetry, by evocative prose, and by more ordinary prose? Adam Zeman and his colleagues (Zeman et al., 2013) of the ...

First I waited for the sounds that cleave the silence. Then I waited for the silence that cleaves me. But the chatter spread, and grew,...

On a visit for a conference at the University of Limerick, in Ireland, I was charmed by the Aer Lingus cabin crew on the flight from Heat...

Maja and I have a project: to try and glimpse the inner core of poetry. So this is a follow-up to my recent post on Chinese poetry (click he...

Here is Helen Vendler, an English Professor from Harvard, discussing an anthology of American poetry in the NYRB: “Printing something in ...

I am trying to understand some more about Chinese poetry of the Tang period. I haven't got very far, but what I have picked up is so int...

The question of why people read literature continues to perplex. The usual assumption is that people read for pleasure and, of course, re...

Creative writers care very much about dreams. Perhaps because of what dreams might impart to them about human consciousness, themselves, ...

Two eyes decapitate me. Headless, full of joy, I wonder, Are they my own? I can no longer tell. Long strong bones they br...

In November last year we did a post on IGEL, an acronym for the German translation of the International Society for Empirical Research on Li...

Research that I carried out revealed that young adults, that is, students of 17 to 18 years, respond to a text very differently when it is ...