susan taylor chehak

Jonathan Gottschall "Why Fiction is Good For You":

"The more deeply we are cast under a story’s spell, the more potent its influence. In fact, fiction seems to be more effective at changing beliefs than nonfiction, which is designed to persuade through argument and evidence. Studies show that when we read nonfiction, weread with our shields up. We are critical and skeptical. But when we are absorbed in a story, we drop our intellectual guard. We are moved emotionally, and this seems to make us rubbery and easy to shape.

"But perhaps the most impressive finding is just how fiction shapes us: mainly for the better, not for the worse. Fiction enhances our ability to understand other people; it promotes a deep morality that cuts across religious and political creeds. More peculiarly, fiction’s happy endings seem to warp our sense of reality. They make us believe in a lie: that the world is more just than it actually is. But believing that lie has important effects for society—and it may even help explain why humans tell stories in the first place."
Read more here: http://tinyurl.com/79mz9kh

"As Tim O’Reilly famously said, books don’t have a piracy problem. They have an obscurity problem. I have never met an author who didn’t wish that more people would read her book. Never one." Seth Godin, on DRM for ebooks

Read the whole story here: http://www.thedominoproject.com/

Eduardo Porter in the New York Times: "It is only a matter of time before cheap e-books put an end to hardcover tomes selling for $25. And with Amazon pushing into publishing itself, some publishers could become victims as well. . . . If brick-and-mortar bookstores die, browsing will die with them. But writers and publishers will have plenty of other ways--think Amazon, Facebook or Google--of letting readers know about their books."

Read the whole article here: http://tinyurl.com/cxkt3tt

"Revolutions enable the impossible at the same time they destroy the perfect. There’s entirely too much handwringing about how the perfect book industry is no more. That’s true. It’s no longer perfect. What’s happening now, though, is the impossible." -Seth Godin for The Domino Project

Read the full post here: http://www.thedominoproject.com/2012/04/the-biggest-problem-facing-book-publishing.html

... asks Jennie Erdal in The Financial Times:

"The more novels I read at university, the more I felt that fiction was where truth was to be discovered. I seemed to experience Melville’s “shock of recognition”; which is to say re-cognition, for it was there already, waiting to be reawakened – the knowledge that somethings, not least what it is that makes us human, can never be adequately expressed in conventional philosophical prose.

"It is not immediately obvious why this should be. From ancient times, philosophers have addressed the question of how best to live; which is also, quintessentially, the concern of storytellers everywhere, especially those engaged in “serious fiction”. The pursuit of knowledge and truth – this too is common ground, and if only Plato had seen it that way, he might not have banned the poets from his Republic. But Plato regarded the poets – the forerunners of novelists – as troublesome and lacking in the right kind of knowledge (not pure enough). They dealt in dangerous emotions – fear, sorrow, pity – all of which weakened the character and led to moral degeneration. Philosophy and literature were set on different paths."

Read the whole essay here: http://tinyurl.com/83b7zml

Birth of a Book from Glen Milner on Vimeo.

Geoff Dyer: The Literary Establishment and Me (in the Guardian)

"[T]he [literary] establishment presumably comprises literary agencies and publishing houses, some of whom have more sway than others. In London these publishers would include Jonathan Cape and Faber; in New York, Knopf and FSG. At a human level there are the editors at these houses, and the literary editors of papers and periodicals (some of which wield more of what my late Italian publisher termed 'power-clout' than others), who decide which books to review and who to ask to review them. Then there are the people who get asked to sit on prize-giving panels, who decide which books to honour, and academics within the English departments at universities who decide which books to teach and canonise. Hang on, I feel sure I'm forgetting at least one other important category of person. Ah, right, stupid me … the writers!"

Read the whole thing here: http://tinyurl.com/6wwsy7x

From the New York Times:

"Brain scans are revealing what happens in our heads when we read a detailed description, an evocative metaphor or an emotional exchange between characters. Stories, this research is showing, stimulate the brain and even change how we act in life."

Yeah, that's what we're talkin' about...

Read the whole article here: http://tinyurl.com/7ptvdho

Q: What happens when fiction pretends to be fact?

A: Everybody gets mad.

But does that change the effect of the fiction?

"[A]lthough readers who were informed that the previously factual piece was actually fictional developed a negative opinion of the author, they did not change their opinions regarding the content of thestory. That is, attitudes and opinions that were changed as a result of reading a supposedly factual piece were not altered when that piece was revealed to be fictional. This... demonstrates the power of fiction, in that understanding a story often entails incorporating that information into our own beliefs and this process can be difficult to reverse."

Read the Keith Oatley's full blog post here: http://www.onfiction.ca/