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This week, a new story, a short story, Mavis Gallant’s Voices Lost In Snow, first published in the New Yorker in March of 1976. It is...

A lot of contemporary fiction can be viewed as a confluence of plot and character. An important concept is the character arc—the...

A strong thread in the episodic stream of threads in Primeval and Other Times concerns Squire Popielski and the Game. In mid-life, the...

The title—Primeval and Other Times—refers to a central concept in fiction, time, although the word can have more than one meaning. Each...

This week, a new story, Olga Tokarchuk’s 1996 Primeval and Other Times, originally written in Polish and translated to English by Antonia...

Coincidence plays a significant role in Station Eleven. We’ve talked about coincidence before in regard to other novels—let’s plunge in...

Narrative Magazine has agreed to publish my story "The Vaccination" as part of their story of the week series. It's a story set during...

Last time, I said that the Dr. Eleven graphic comic, created by Miranda, is so central to Station Eleven that it deserves its own post....

Narratives are a balance of mimetic, thematic, and synthetic threads. Mimetic threads are those that present convincing characters and...

How is time handled in Station Eleven? I can say straight off that time is discontinuous and episodic, two terms we’ve looked at before....

One of the central questions Station Eleven asks its readers is: what would you do in a world without technology? No electricity, no...

This week, a new novel, Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven. This acclaimed book was published in 2014 and has been adapted into a...

This week, I want to finish looking at Normal People, although this rich book could easily yield more discussion. However, certain...

Sex is an integral part of Normal People. Let’s get a definition. (Wait…what? A definition of sex?) Yes, we all “know” what sex is, but I...

This week, let’s look at one of two major themes in Normal People, social class. I realize that last time, I left off with the threat to...

We’ve talked about how, at times, the locus of narration in Normal People can be hard to determine. That first sentence, “Marianne...

This week, let’s look more closely at the role of the narrator in Normal People. A definition, please. A person who narrates something,...

Normal People, I’m going to say, is a book of recollection. A story of two people, told from a future vantage point and ending in a way...

As we continue our exploration of Sally Rooney’s Normal People, let’s take a look at some structural issues. The story concerns two main...

This week, a new story, my friends, Irish author Sally Rooney’s 2018 novel, Normal People. Normal People was a bestseller in the United...