It’s hard to develop empathy when you only read a tweet by someone; but a book-length immersion in someone’s world creates the opportunity for understanding. The act of reading a book is literally the act of being “quick to listen, slow to speak.” In literary fiction, we develop empathy by getting inside characters’ minds. We may love or hate them, but to the extent that we listen to and live with them for a time, we can learn from the particularity of their existence. Research shows that literary fiction especially helps readers develop empathy—a better understanding of the complexity of what
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