Amit Majmudar
Neureligion
There is very little (if any) variability in the brains of human beings regarding cortical localization. That is, the motor cortex responsible for, say, left arm movement, is reliably located on the right side of the brain, and in…
Goodreads Review of Reality’s New Thriller, THE PRESSURE COOKERS
One way to understand the fundamental difference between nonfiction and fiction is to consider how what works in one doesn’t work in the other. There are elements of structure, pacing, and–paradoxically enough–believability that reality is free to ignore, but a fiction…
Why I Don’t Teach Poetry Writing
What are we teaching when we teach the writing of poetry? Much of what we call the “teaching” of poetry is actually the teaching of contemporary conventions governing poetry. There are fewer truths in this art than poets like…
The Economics of Literary Fame
This may be the nature of any widely sought desireable thing in limited supply, but in America, literary fame behaves like money. The most obvious similarity is that, like money, literary fame clusters. It gathers itself to itself. Naturally,…
A Note on Sentimentality
One of the underdiscussed aspects of literary taste is the principle of exclusion: Not what is welcomed in a work, but what is disallowed. In the world of contemporary fiction, one of the biggest no-no’s is what goes by the…
