October 19, 2026
Sarah Isgur is an attorney, political commentator, and former spokesman for the U.S. Justice Department. She appears regularly as a legal expert for ABC News. As editor of SCOTUS blog, she is considered one of the leading conservative legal voices in America.
Read more +October 12, 2026
Jodi Picoult ignores linear narrative structures in many of her novels, opting instead to make use of a braided narrative presentation. In that way, she uses her characters, timelines, and forms of narration to present a novel’s central story without simply advancing the plot chronologically. She has successfully created a series of bestsellers with variations of this structure. Among these are Mad Honey (with Jennifer Finney Boylan), My Sister’s Keeper, The Pact, and Nineteen Minutes. Another example is Small Great Things, where she presents her story with alternating first-person narrators that allows her to show the same conflict through very different experiences and attitudes.
Read more +October 5, 2026
Colson Whitehead showed us the power of metaphors as properly applied to works of fiction when he made masterful use of them in his recent novels: The Underground Railroad and The Intuitionist.
Read more +September 28, 2026
To understand the process Michael Cunningham uses when working with his characters, one must first have an appreciation of Virginia Woolf’s handling of characterization. To be more
precise, we can look at Woolf’s characterization techniques in her book, Mrs. Dalloway, to see her influence on Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Hours.
