Blog

Tag: literature

  • January 31st, 2013 11:48pm

    Imagine being sentient but not alive. Seeing and even knowing, but not alive. Just looking out. Recognizing but not being alive. A person can die and still go on.

    Philip K. Dick – A Scanner Darkly (via bieberssi)

  • January 15th, 2013 1:07am

    In university courses we do exercises. Term papers, quizzes, final examinations are not meant for publication. We move through a course on Dostoevsky or Poe as we move through a mildly good cocktail party, picking up the good bits of food or conversation, bearing with the rest, going home when it comes to seem the reasonable thing to do. Art, at those moments when it feels most like art — when we feel most alive, most alert, most triumphant — is less like a cocktail party than a tank full of sharks.

    — John Gardner, The Art of Fiction  (via villa-rosie)

  • January 8th, 2013 12:45pm


    Look what just came in the mail! #scottsnyder #voodooheart

    Scott Snyder’s Voodoo Heart just blew me away. These dispatches from disaffected but strangely likeable American oddities have much the same effect as good American roots music: their simplicity is deceptive, their emotional power considerable. And at some point between the mystery-blimp of Blue Yodel and the World War I-era Curtis Jenny of The Star Attraction of 1919, you may discover that Snyder’s plain folks have stolen your heart. I think what impressed me most about these stories—even the ones in which terrible things happen—was their warmth and humanity. Even when his characters are at their worst, Scott Snyder never abandons them. These are stories that welcome the reader in, and fully reward his interest. Sometimes horrifying, often absurd, full of characters afraid to commit (and who sometimes commit anyway), this is a debut worthy of T. Coraghessan Boyle’s If The River Was Whiskey. I couldn’t put it down.“ –Stephen King


  • January 3rd, 2013 12:59pm

    A man is a fool to die slow if he does not have to. And I will know when to do it, too, Hostetler said I would. There will come a day. On that day I will take care of it. I am damned John Bernard Books will go out screaming.

    He put his right hand on the congenial steel of the gun under his pillow, his left on that of the one at his side under the covers. He had slept with his guns for years. He wondered which of them he would use.

    Books thought: No matter.
    He thought: Both are friends of mine.

    The Shootist by Glendon Swarthout