The Real Lolita
Here at Broad Street we love reading about the true-life stories that have inspired some of our favorite fiction. That’s why we recommend a recent piece over at Hazlitt investigating the 1948 abduction of Sally Horner, a New Jersey fifth-grader whose kidnapping at the hands of Frank La Salle, along with the trip Horner made...
The Real People Behind Characters
It’s common literary practice to use the people around you as inspiration for fictional characters. Sometimes, truth can be more interesting than fiction, and, as writers, we come across people who give us inspiration for a story to tell. These truths might mean more than what one can think up from scratch. Many authors have used the facts of the...
“In Defiance of Genre: on Octavia Butler,” by Jamal Stone.
by Jamal Stone Kindred, Octavia Butler’s 1979 best-seller, defies genre conventions. It is an intensely emotional novel that blends elements of sci-fi time travel with an antebellum first-person slave narrative. The novel takes African American protagonist Dana back to slave times at seemingly random intervals, leaving her to survive in a cruel world as she tries...
