By Madeleine Higgins Is sixteen years too late to say it’s not you, it’s me? Trite, I know. But oddly, for something that is (was) meant to be a symbol of fertility, You were so dead already— Literally So (scientifically), but also deadened By the spindly fingers of my mother, Straightening you for years until …
By Madeleine Higgins Barnes & Noble, A.K.A. the world’s biggest retail bookseller, has undergone a virtual revolution in the past few years, image-wise. Competition with Amazon and e-books transformed the company into an underdog in the broader bookselling market. However, pre-pandemic book-buying nostalgia has provided just the right boost to physical bookstores which Barnes & …
By Madeleine Higgins There are some grammar rules that you never notice until somebody points them out, and then you can’t stop noticing them. One of my favorites is the specific rules about the order of adjectives when multiple of them are used to modify one noun. There is some flimsiness to the categories, but …
By Madeleine Higgins In recent years, a new genre has taken the book world by storm – “New Adult”, or NA for short. NA novels, as their name suggests, are targeted towards people in their late teens and early 20s who have aged out of the Young Adult category. Although it is typically viewed as …
By Madeleine Higgins In this article, I will be exploring one of the most famously difficult poetic forms of all time – the abhorred triolet. This literary monstrosity follows an 8-line structure – the first line is repeated exactly thrice, and the second line is repeated twice. The other three lines have a very specific …
The Young Adult Literature Lovers Festival, or YALLFest, is an annual two-day book festival in Charleston, South Carolina focused on YA books and authors. It involves mainly signings, book giveaways, and panels with a wide variety of YA authors from all different genres. All the panels and signings at YALLFest, with the exception of the …
Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao tells the story of 18-year-old Wu Zetian, and if you didn’t pick up on the name, her story is meant to faintly echo that of the historical Wu Zetian, China’s only female emperor. The novel itself isn’t meant to be a historical retelling; it is set in a futuristic …
By Maddy Higgins Why don’t poems rhyme anymore? Chances are if you’ve glanced at a poem written anytime after 1900, it’s probably not going to follow rigid rhyme structures or have any kind of rhyme at all. Indeed, most modern poetry falls under the category of “free verse”, or “open form”, meaning that it does …
By Maddy Higgins The issue of personal pronouns and tense structures, which make up the semantic design of a piece of writing, in fiction has been a point of contention for a long time. In the 16th century, the Spanish picaresque adventure genre was one of the few of the era that told stories from …
By Maddy Higgins So, I haven’t gotten the chance to write about Jane Austen yet, which is a shame, because I cannot express how much I love all things Jane Austen. While there are so many things I could write about involving her books, in this article, I want to focus on one aspect that …
