Search Results

Writing courses and MFA programs make it easy to talk about a story if it proceeds in a way that is demonstrably similar to stories past. This means the really […]

The mysterious Jonathan Franzen is unraveled in an imagined conversation between himself, Ernest Hemingway and Virginia Woolf. The author’s new book ‘Freedom’ is the talk of the town.

“Even within the seemingly homogeneous sphere of the university English department, a schism has opened up between literary scholarship and creative writing.”

The latest issue of the American Journal of Bioethics features an important study on the effects of viewing medical dramas on the ethical reasoning of medical and nursing students. From […]

Big Think interviewed an array of luminaries in a variety of fields this week, including several world leaders and giants in the arts. Bolivian President Evo Morales, in New York […]

A novelist and two neuroscientists came by Big Think’s offices this past week. Jonathan Safran Foer, one of the most acclaimed young novelists of the past decade, spoke to us […]

“Either you and everyone you love are going to be killed by robots; or you are going to live forever.” A.I. guru Michael Vassar on what future technology has in store for humans.

The novelist relies on improvisation as his fiction develops. “The fictional characters have their own volition … and are capable of proposing new ideas about how they want to live […]

Controlling other people’s dreams may be science fiction, but there are ways to control our own dreams, Harris says.

A misconception fuelled by a literary fiction

While I was out of town last week I got a lot of reading done. One of the books I picked up was the paperback version of Palace Council by […]

A thought occurred to me last night as I watched one of the BBC’s Diplomatic Correspondents, Mark Urban on the channel’s flagship current affairs programmes. Newsnight.  And it was that […]

“Instead of the vast expanses of leisure time imagined by science fiction writers, we now get one hour less sleep per night than our parents’ generation did.”

Each state has its own state bird; why not a state movie? 

Columbia professor of philosophy Akeel Bilgrami asks why we read literature when it contains information more readily found in non-fiction journals. The answer is in the medium’s pathos.

Do you have any bad memories? Traumatic memories come in all shapes and sizes. Some are terrible gut-wrenching ones like being raped, beaten, or shot during combat. Others are based […]

Blogging has changed the art of non-fiction writing, says Andrew Sullivan, one of the first political commentators to embrace the form in 2000. When you blog “everything you write is […]

Those decrying the death of the intellect, and the book, at the hands of the nefarious Internet would do well to recall that the printed page itself was once called the destroyer of education.

Fiction writers are more desperate than ever, says the novelist. Scared that they’re not going to get published, they’re trying to shoehorn themselves into rigid—”sellable”—formats.

Writing a novel isn’t a practical, logical thing to do. The author starts by writing an outline from an “emotional place” and then becomes a “cool technician” to shape it […]

Let’s be honest: when we think about the futuristic scenarios, we don’t think of Tom Hanks. Most frequently associated with his brilliant portrayal of Forrest Gump, Hanks exudes the kind […]

Bright sunny Wednesday here in Ohio made all the better upon hearing that the miners trapped in the Chilean mine have started to make their way – one by one […]

The idea that knowledge produces fact while imagination produces fiction is wrong, says a professor of logic at Oxford. Imagination is crucial to fundamental cognitive abilities.

Self justification, we are told, is an unhealthy preoccupation. But just for a change – and considering the enormity of the issues that are and have been at stake, I […]

No one knows monsters better than Guillermo del Toro. The director of “Pan’s Labyrinth” and the “Hellboy” franchise is renowned for creating fantastical beasts like the terrifying Pale Man, with […]

The economic recession of the past few years has had a real effect on the way fiction writers are writing, says novelist Rick Moody. Writers are more “desperate” than they […]

Metropolis, Illinois, a tiny town with a grand name, is a distant echo of this area’s planned greatness

Vanity Fair has the clues and the reader is left to connect the dots: Film is set in 1957 (ten years after crash at Roswell), was shot in New Mexico, […]

As rapid prototyping technologies become more affordable and accessible, we could be creating more and more of the products we use every day in our homes. 

“One of the main developments in recent American literature has got to be a newly self-conscious traditionalism.” A report on this decade’s fiction finds a rebirth of classical values.