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\"In post-NK3 Los Angeles, a sixty-foot-tall fence surrounds the hills where the rich used to live, but the mansions have been taken over by those with the only power that matters: the power of memory. Life for the community inside the Fence, ruled over by the new aristocracy, the Verified, is a perpetual party. Outside the Fence, in downtown Los Angeles, the Verified use an invented mythology to keep control over the mindless and nameless Drifters, Shamblers, and Bottle Bangers who serve the gift economy until no longer needed. The ruler, Chief, takes his guidance from gigantic effigies of a man and a woman in the heart of the Fence\"-- Provided by publisher.

Does reading fiction improve mental health and well-being? We present the results of five studies that evaluated the impact of five forms of exposure to fiction. These included the effects of recalling reading fiction, of being prescribed fiction, of discussing fiction relative to non-fiction, and of discussing literary fiction relative to best-seller fiction. The first three studies directly recruited participants; the final two relied on scraped social media data from Reddit and Twitter. Results show that fiction can have a positive impact on measures of mood and emotion, but that a process of mnemonic or cognitive consolidation is required first: exposure to fiction does not, on its own, have an immediate impact on well-being.

\"Memory is Copeland-Stark's business. Yet after months of reconsolidation treatments at their sleek new flagship facility, Hope Nakano still has no idea what happened to her lost year, or the life she was just beginning to build with Luke. When the procedures surface fragmented memories, Hope finds herself doubting what she knows, what she's been told, and the man she thought she loved. As inconsistencies mount, her search for answers reveals a much larger secret Copeland-Stark is determined to protect\" -- Back cover.

Turkish history is marked by the erasure of historical events, where the act of forgetting is a deliberate decision enacted by an individual or a community. Collective amnesia was institutionalized through a legal framework that penalized the recollection of events contradicting the official version of history. For instance, Article 301 of the Turkish penal code labels such acts as denigrating Turkishness. Many writers who wrestled with this official denialism have succumbed to the state’s authority. However, Elif Shafak and her writings stand apart, as they focus on domestic events that serve as microcosms of larger political and historical events. They demonstrate how quotidian interactions within the family are laden with political significance, serving to both reflect and perpetuate historical silences. Drawing inferences from The Bastard of Istanbul, this work argues that it uses female memory and agency to talk about a history that has often been subjected to erasure. Shafak’s mnemonic narrative challenges the culture of oblivion by confronting the lack of historical consciousness in Turkish society. Further, the article proposes that the novel can be classified as a feminist fiction of memory, as it articulates women’s micro-memories. The multivocality in the narrative enables her-story to resurface and counter the Pan-Turkish identity discourse. The article builds its conceptual framework from memory studies and feminist criticism, employing the works of Birgit Neumann, Gayle Greene, Cathy Caruth, Marianne Hirsch, and Maurice Halbwachs to examine collective memory, postmemory, and mnemonic reconstruction within a feminist historiographical reading of Shafak’s novel.

Hearing Hajime's story about the friendship he once shared with Kaori leads Yuuki to help reunite the pair. With a new old friend now in the mix, Kaori needs more than one diary to avoid starting every week from zero. But when Hajime and Kaori start to display a special bond that can be shared only by longtime friends, Yuuki is forced to wonder exactly what sort of relationship he wants with someone whose memory of him lasts only so long ...

The article relates the experience of teaching an undergraduate course based on novels by Daeninckx, Vázquez Montalbán, and Vichi that are as much a social history of their times as well as well-plotted and well-written crime fiction works. I have been engaged for many years in the teaching of an undergraduate crime-fiction course at University College London. Originally, this was to be an undergraduate course with an enormous latitude of content: Post-1945 European literature. The only requirements were that it had to expose students to a variety of literary traditions and introduce them to the methodology of comparative literary studies. My colleagues and I decided to focus on crime fiction with the intent of proving to the students that, far from being a subgenre tied to stereotypical characters, formats, and plot devices, modern crime fiction is an increasingly successful example of historical realism. The novels we chose link the investigation of a contemporary crime not to a family affair or individual guilt but to events of the recent historical past of a nation: they are Murder in Memoriam by Didier Daeninckx, Death in Florence by Marco Vichi, and Tattoo by Manuel Vazquez Montalban, all read in translation. We focus on two connections between crime fiction and history: the method of inquiry and the fact that detective fiction novels are often narratives connected to unexpiated historical crimes feeding current social anxieties. First, we draw the attention of our students to facts: what they are, how they can be established, how much reliance we can put on them. In this respect, the analogy between the work of a detective and that of an historian, suggested by Daeninckx, comes almost naturally, and is in fact utilized also by Marc Bloch (1934), who observes that the historian \"is in the predicament of a police magistrate who strives to reconstruct a crime he has not seen\" (40). Explanations cannot be accepted a priori: they must be proved. \"In history, as elsewhere, the causes cannot be assumed. They are to be looked for . . \" (Bloch 162-63). The \"witnesses\" a historian interrogates are documents, archaeological relics, reports by people who participated in the event or second-hand accounts drawn up later, but in all cases, they must be scrutinized with the utmost care and open-mindedness: cross examination of 'witnesses' (historical sources) \"is the prime necessity of well-conducted historical research\" (Bloch 53). Moreover, as E. H. Carr (1961) warns us, facts are never pure, because they \"are always refracted through the mind of the recorder\" and \"history means interpretation\" (22, 23). The historian starts from \"a provisional selection of facts\" and a provisional interpretation of them according to a hypothesis that explains that selection of facts, and then continues to be engaged in the process of \"moulding his facts to his interpretation and his interpretation to his facts. It is impossible to assign primacy to one over the other\" (Carr 29). This is not only an effective description of the modus operandi of our detectives but also a consideration that humanities students can usefully apply to their reading and their writing. Second, the novels chosen combine the allure of exciting plots to the uncovering of a bloody past or unexpiated historical crimes. The authors are all concerned with events marginalized or excluded in the hegemonic narratives that make up and control collective memory. The murders investigated by Inspector Cadin, private detective Pepe Carvalho, and Inspector Bordelli allow the authors to \"smuggle\" into the narratives profound reflections on forms of institutionalised amnesia that have corrupted the collective memory of France (\"Vichy syndrome\"), Italy (\"Togliatti's sponge\"), and Spain (\"pacto del olvido\"). In Murder in Memoriam, Cadin investigates the murder of a historian that turns out to have been committed by government minister André Viellut to prevent the discovery of his role in the rounding up French Jews, including children and babies, who were later deported to Auschwitz. Cadin also discovers the massacre of French Algerians during the demonstration of 31 October 1961, ordered by the same Viellut when prefect of the Paris Police. Viellut is the avatar for the real Maurice Papon, and with this novel Daeninckx brought to public attention two shameful episodes of France's recent past that the power of institutions had managed to cover up and erase from the collective memory. In Death in Florence, set in 1966, Inspector Bordelli's investigations on the rape and murder of a child discover that the perpetrators are a gang of fascist paedophiles who managed to escape punishment and to reintegrate themselves as respectable and powerful citizens of a Republic they despise. Bordelli, an ex-Resistance fighter, despises the Italians of the economic boom, who, frantically engaged in getting rich fast, and in denial regarding the historical responsibility of their country for the shameful and catastrophic World War II, are unconcerned by the presence of fascists in their midst and oblivious to the threat they pose to the democratic life of the new Italy. Tattoo, published and set in the year after the death of Francisco Franco, gives a portrait of a Spain engaged in a transition to democracy that implies forgetting the painful memories of the Civil War, at the cost, however, of allowing Francoism to impose its view of the past. As in the case of France and Italy, the refusal to look to the past openly and frankly can be unfair to the victims and jeopardize the solidity of democracy. The obliteration of historical memory proceeds even through the modification of the urban environment: the gentrification of Carvalho's beloved Barcelona deletes traces of its antifascist fight and means the disappearance of entire quarters in the old city, the dispersion of its lower-class inhabitants, and an irreparable loss of personal and collective identity. For these authors, detective fiction works are pretexts to question an opaque present. They show that, by exhuming the buried traces of historical past, we can restructure our experience of our present, better understand how it was moulded, and hopefully use this knowledge to formulate hypotheses for a better future. Because knowledge, as Carr wrote, is knowledge for a purpose.

A closer analysis of her autobiography reveals how these three elements, memory, truth, and fiction, are complexly knotted into a pattern in her writing. [...]despite the limits of the memory as caused by childhood amnesia, Lessing strives for alternative methods to revive her experience of early childhood. [...]after several attempts to refigure events of her early childhood and her parents' lives in Under My Skin and The Memoirs of a Survivor, in her final book, Alfred & Emily, Lessing again comes back to her childhood in Southern Rhodesia and her troubled relationship with her parents. Furthermore, an attempt to appraise her writing solely within an aesthetic framework is quite misleading. [...]beyond the aesthetic function Lessing's writing explores several intricacies within the area of self and writing (Vappala 179).

An amnesiac attempts to reconstruct her past by keeping a journal and discovers dangerous inconsistencies in the stories of her husband and her secret doctor.

[...]shame itself is a witness to the individual's denial of African ancestry and complicity with the amnesia of this history. According to a general theory propounded by John Clement Ball, satire is the practice of targeting social norms, including \"person, institution, or practice\" (2), in a way that sees the past \"nostalgically and conservatively\" (9). According to Ball, \"satiric modes can articulate internal disagreements within a culture, and also offer variously constituted connections between the satirized conditions located there and the colonial experience\" (13). According to Ahmed, the \"double play of concealment and exposure\" 1s thus pivotal in the rhetorical structure of shame (104; see also Charos 280). Shame itself can be a symptomatic clue for analysis, even while it diffuses and eludes mastery. Because shame juxtaposes antipodal notions and aesthetics, and thus creates ambivalence in terms of both form and content, this shame-enhanced ambivalence relates to the way Lamming rhetorically employs satire.