Join the new ANS Facebook group – Special Interest in Literary Names

The American Name Society has launched four new Special Interest Groups on Facebook. Today we’re spotlighting the Literary Names group, run by Susan Behrens.

The SIG for Literary Names is a chatting/meeting place for readers who love to notice names of characters in fiction, and who also are fascinated by books in which naming is an integral plot device.

Susan Behrens has published many book reviews for Names (the ANS journal) detailing the theme of names in novels that on the surface are about other things. For the 50th anniversary of the publication of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, she found connections between fiction and real-life names in the Plath world, some of which even led to legal tangles.

Knowing that there are other such like-minded readers out there, we hope that the group can be a collection of all these “noticings.”

Please note that this is a closed group. The moderator will review your request to join, which includes a few simple questions. We look forward to seeing you there!