Table of Contents

It can be hard to find things on this site. Here is a list of all articles organized by category.

Literary Analysis

• Gravity’s Rainbow Guide
• What is Lost in the Funhouse About?
• Passion Narrative of Mark and Luke
• Biblical Topos in Sanderson’s Mistborn
• Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way
• If on a winter’s night a traveler
• Second Section of Franzen’s Purity
• Wallace Steven’s Two Letters
• Barker’s Imajica
• Maybe Infinite Jest is About Addiction
• Infinite Jest Preparation Guide
• The Nativity in Matthew and Luke

Essays on Reading and Writing

• Literature is for the Other
• When Art is Meaningless
• The Literature of Exhaustion and Originality
• Is Twitter Our Penal Colony?
• Literature, Genre Fiction, and Pulp
• 8 Mystery Novels to Break into the Genre
• Social Media’s Negative Effect on Prose Style
• 10 Thing I Wish I Knew Before Self Publishing
• A Guide to Worldbuilding
• Horror: A Genre of Literary Importance
• Reading for Comfort, Reading for Pain
• Break into Poetry with Milton’s Sonnets
• On Artistic Pacing
• Creative Writing Strategies for Fiction Writers
• Tips for Writing a Persuasive Essay

Review Articles

Book Reviews

• Letham’s Ecstasy of Influence
• Roth’s American Pastoral
• John Ashbery’s The System
• Atwood’s Cat’s Eye
• The Stories of Cheever
• Don Quixote
• Moby Dick
• The Way of Kings
• Ulysses
• Seveneves
• 2666
• The Eye of the World
• The Awakening
• Breakfast at Tiffany’s
• The Call of Cthulhu
• Cosmicomics
• Interpreter of Maladies
• Tenth of December
• The Three Body Problem
• The Name of the Rose
• Middlesex
• Dune
• Daisy Miller
• The Red Pony

Film and TV Reviews

• Upstream Color
• Lynch’s Inland Empire
• Whiplash
• Swanberg’s Easy
• Synechdoche, New York
• Arrival
• Mother!
• The Romanoffs
• The OA

Required Reading

• The Grapes of Wrath: Should it be Required?
• Looking for Alaska: Should it be Required?
• To Kill a Mockingbird: Should it be Required?

Philosophy of Writing

• Barthes’ Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives
• Room 237 and Postmodern Problems
• Rorty’s Pragmatism
• On Validity in Interpretation
• Sontag’s Against Interpretation
• Barthes’ From Work to Text
• Against Against Theory
• Replies to Against Theory
• What is an Expert?
• Lyotard’s Postmodern Condition
• Baudrillard’s Implosion of the Social
• Derrida’s Differance
• Artificial Intelligence Risks are Already Here

Writing Advice

• Elements of Weak Writing
• Verbs of Being and the Present Progressive Tense
• Narrative Voice vs Narrative Perspective
• Tonal Consistency in Fantasy Writing
• The Difficulty of Invisible Description
• Structural Analysis of Bag of Bones
• Commonly Confused Words
• Reduce Wordiness
• Sentence Length
• Showing a Scene
• The Character Caricature Balance
• Are the Self Publishing Gurus Out of Touch?
• Don’t Sacrifice Prose for Voice
• Using Psychology Podcasts for Character Development

Examining Pro’s Prose

• Examining Ian McEwan’s Prose
• Examining John Cheever’s Prose
• Examining Nell Zink’s Prose
• Examining Jonathan Franzen’s Prose
• Examining Philip Roth’s Prose
• Examining Ethan Canin’s Prose
• Examining F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Prose
• Examining David Foster Wallace’s Prose
• Examining J.M. Coetzee’s Prose
• Examining John Irving’s Prose
• Examining Graham Greene’s Prose
• Examining J.K. Rowling’s Prose
• Examining Michael Chabon’s Prose

Why it Works Series

• Primer
• You’ve Got Mail
• The Lord of the Rings

Game Narratives

• Video Games as Solution to the One-Sided Problem of Art
• Why Play Roguelikes
• A Critique of Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons
• In Defense of Gaming
• Sirlin’s Codex

Book Recommendations

• Favorite Books from 2014
• 5 Best Places to Find New Books
• Best Books of 2018
• Contemporary Fiction Books that Changed My Life
• Best Books of 2016
• Best Books of 2017

Composer Hidden Gems

• Egon Wellesz
• Julia Wolfe
• Jennifer Higdon
• Aaron Jay Kernis