"There is no self-pity here, not a striving for effects. She takes hold of reality as it is and renders it faithfully...She easily catches the pathos of petty destinies; the whimper of the wounded."
-Richard Wright on Gwendolyn Brooks
Many elements combine to make for a deeply affecting children’s book.As in most any writing, story and characters are major factors in the success or failure of a children’s book. Likewise, an aesthetic is essential, one that is both captivating to children and palatable to the adults who often purchase and read the books aloud. While there’s no denying the importance of these elements, it seems likely that for many the most crucial element of a good children’s book is its artwork.Artwork, after all, is what imbues the plot, the characters, and the aesthetics with a sense of life, enriching them simultaneously with equal parts reality and imagination.This, in a nutshell, is how we can account for the success of Peter Spier.
It may (or may not) shock some of you to know that Alice Munro, who won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature, was the first Canadian writer to achieve Nobel laureate-status. Still others, while in the process of reading these sentences, may be equally shocked to realize that they can hardly name any Canadian authors. Munro, Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje; for many the list stops there. Though Canada’s most populous cities are often mere hours of travel from the literary hubs of the lower 48, a deep awareness of our northern neighbor’s literary output rarely seems to make it through customs.
Lately, much has been said about whether the Catholic Church should canonize prolific 19th and 20th Century thinker and writer G.K. Chesterton. He was, proponents insist, one of the most vocal lay-supporters of the Catholic faith in the last two centuries. His arguments for the church’s doctrines were imaginative and seemingly boundless. Whether or not the beloved crafter of fairy tales and treatises stands a real chance of sainthood, the speculation does make one wonder: where are the sainthood campaigns for other great Catholic authors? Where is the push to canonize Flannery O’Connor? Gerard Manly Hopkins? Graham Greene? Where, most relevantly, is the sainthood campaign for Walker Percy?
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s name is synonymous with mystery. The creator of Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle’s impact on the world of detective and mystery genre remains too great to measure. With an uncanny sense of detail and a keen eye for inimitable characters, Conan Doyle has riveted and delighted millions of readers over the course of the last century. Here are five interesting facts about him.
“Well, I've worried some about, you know, why write books … why are we teaching people to write books when presidents and senators do not read them, and generals do not read them. And it's been the university experience that taught me that there is a very good reason, that you catch people before they become generals and presidents and so forth and you poison their minds with … humanity." -Kurt Vonnegut, 1976
The past is never dead. It's not even past. -William Faulkner, 1951
While Faulkner could sometimes be cryptic, this quote seems easy enough to grasp. After all, if the past were really past, why would we read so much historical fiction? Hardly the sole purview of trashy paperback enthusiasts and Civil War reenactors, historical fiction has held a distinguished place in literary history for centuries. It stretches back to the famed 16th Century poet Sir Walter Raleigh and continues through to contemporary authors like Hilary Mantel. Between these two, the legacy of historical fiction makes another notable stop with Nobel Prize-winning author Henryk Sienkiewicz.
Most writers only dream of making the same lasting indent in American cultural consciousness that Joseph Heller did. Even famed novelist John Updike, who didn’t consider Heller to be a ‘top of the chart’ writer, deemed the author’s 1961 satirical behemoth Catch-22 to be “important.” ‘Importance,’ however, isn’t even the half of it. Heller’s inimitable brand of black humor, his keen eye for the absurdity of bureaucracy, and his deep antiwar sentiments combined to form a perfect storm of satirical perfection. Not only did he earn a place in the canon that stretches from Mark Twain to Kurt Vonnegut, but he must also be heralded as a guardian of the deepest absurdity and cynicism that belie the American experience. Here are five facts about him.
At a certain point, it seems unusual that any writer should ply his trade in Ireland. Of the small nation’s four Nobel Prize winners in literature, two, Samuel Beckett and George Bernard Shaw, conducted most of their literary careers abroad in France and England, respectively. And, of course, that pair barely scratches the surface of Irish writers’ propensity, as a group, to work in self-imposed exile. Where literary titans like James Joyce and Oscar Wilde could scarcely abscond from the Emerald Isle quickly enough, the Hibernian countryside proved an ideal starting-point for one of England’s most idiosyncratic novelists: Anthony Trollope.
For many years it was believed that Immanuel Kant never made it more than ten miles outside of Konigsberg. Even though this is demonstrably false (he spent some years working as a tutor in Russia) public perception of the father of modern philosophy has not changed. Thousands of freshman philosophy students each year will happily speculate about Kant’s fussiness, his cloistered lifestyle, and what many diagnose as a desperate need to get out of the house more. The grumblings of would-be thinkers notwithstanding, it’s hard to gripe too much about the man who redefined philosophy in the 18th Century, forever altering the trajectory of human thought. It can, however, still be hard to envision the great thinker coming into contact with anything downright bizarre.
