he better be wearing hemingway’s wig during it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
omg
Excellent.
“The past guards its secrets, this novel reminds us, and the horror behind the quotidian is time itself.”
—New York Times Book Review, who named 11/22/63 one of the 10 Best Books of 2011
“Another editor. That thing behind his ear is his pencil. Whenever he finds a bright thing in your manuscript he strikes it out with that. That does him good, and makes him smile and show his teeth, the way he is doing in the picture. This one has just been striking out a smart thing, and now he is sitting there with his thumbs in his vest-holes, gloating. They are full of envy and malice, editors are.”
—from “How to Make History Dates Stick,” an essay written by Twain in 1899, not published until after his death in Harper’s Monthly Magazine in December 1914. The essay was about using pictures as memory devices.
[via]
5. Poets go to bed earliest, followed by short story writers, then novelists. The habits of playwrights are unknown.
[via Book Bench blog]
7. Writers wear atrocious clothes when writing. So terrible that I have been asked, by the UPS man, “Are you all right?”
—from the New Yorker’s Book Bench blog to mark the publication of her new book, Mrs. Nixon
“If you’ve tried reading Don DeLillo’s fiction in the past and found it the literary equivalent of being whacked in the head with a sack full of quarters, his new short story collection, The Angel Esmeralda, is an ideal way to give him another chance.”
We have a rich literature. But sometimes it’s a literature too ready to be neutralized, to be incorporated into the ambient noise. This is why we need the writer in opposition, the novelist who writes against power, who writes against the corporation or the state or the whole apparatus of assimilation. We’re all one beat away from becoming elevator music.
Adam Begley,Don DeLillo | The Paris Review | Fall 1993
Instant reblog!
We second that! This is truth here, people.
In Gabby Giffords’ Voiceby Trent Gilliss, senior editor
Listen to the first 80 seconds of Melissa Block’s piece on last night’s All Things Considered. And then fast forward to the final 67 seconds of the audio. What a powerful message, a powerful couple minutes of radio. To hear the contrast of the fluid voice of the Congresswoman before her brain was penetrated by a bullet in January of this year, and then witness the powerful will of her language several months later rages with hope.
Now, listen to the full ten-minute piece with Block’s interview with Representative Giffords’ husband, Mark Kelly, which is bookended with Gabby’s voice. The context makes her readings all the more powerful. Non?
Yes, even those of us who work in public radio are not immune to those “driveway moments” in the darkness of the early evening. What a gift.
Yes, yes.
“Tonight at 6:00 writers and readers from across New York City will gather in Liberty Plaza to reoccupy the space and rebuild the People’s Library. Authors will bring their books, readers will bring their favorite books to donate and together we will rebuild to create the revolution this country needs.”
—
Occupy Wall Street Library | The People’s Library at Liberty Plaza
We’ll be there, with a vanload of books to help rebuild the library.
Rebuilding.
Whether or not these books were actually thrown away, as the Mayor’s office is belatedly revealing, we applaud the resulting efforts by writers and readers to rebuild the library. Right on.
Christopher Hitchens was asked by 8-year old, Mason Crumpacker (!!!) what she should read.
He suggested Greek & Roman myths, particularly those by Robert Graves, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Richard Dawkins’ “The Magic of Reality,” Ayaan Hirsi Ali, PG Wodehouse, David Hume, and Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities.”
[via Galleycat]
We love this list, and Mason Crumpacker sounds like a name straight from a Wodehouse novel.
