March 2012
thebarrovian asked: Stumbled across your tumblr - thoroughly enjoyed it. Enjoyed it so much I trawled through all 488 pages of it. Bloody marvellous. Thank you.
February 2012
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“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been....”
– Isaac Asimov
10 Novels That Will Sharpen Your Mind →
bricabracart:
Yay! Books ARE good for you! Hooray for books!
(this article is from Scientific American)
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It's 5:40 in the morning. I don't think I'm going...
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“Life is not something at which you succeed or fail. Life is life. It just is....”
– TBV
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“If we are going to be kind, let it be out of simple generosity, not because we...”
– J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace
23 Free Essays & Stories by David Foster Wallace... →
“9/11: The View From the Midwest” (Rolling Stone, October 25, 2001)
“All That” (New Yorker, December 14, 2009)
“An Interval” – (New Yorker, January 30, 1995)
“Asset” - (New Yorker, January 30, 1995)
“Backbone,” An Excerpt from The Pale King (New Yorker, March 7, 2011)
“Brief Interviews with Hideous Men” (The Paris Review, Fall 1997)
“Consider the Lobster” (Gourmet, August 2004)
“David...
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Crazy Customers
Customer: My husband has an Amazon gift card, can he use it here?
Me: Ma'am, this is a Barnes & Noble.
Customer: Right, so can he use it here?
Me Wanting To Say: Sure, we always take our competitor's gift cards. Our goal is to go out of business.
“So that art, which consumes enormous amounts of human labour and of human lives,...”
– Leo Tolstoy, What is Art? (via distantheartbeats)
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I've had company all weekend and have not been...
“Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only...”
– Henry David Thoreau
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“There is an enormous redundancy in every well-written book. With a well-written...”
– Marshall McLuhan
The Greatest (Fiction) Books of All Time, As Voted... →
lifeworldsanddreamscapes:
Great list … but unsurprisingly, overwhelmingly reflects male authors. It will be wonderful when female literary fiction authors are given equal recognition to male authors. I wonder what a 21st century list will reveal? Will time be enough to change this trend?
Many have argued that the issue of recognition of female literary fiction authors is more deeply structural...
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“Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and...”
– Anne Lamott; Bird by Bird
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“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”
– Philip K. Dick; I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon
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“No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a...”
– Ishmael Reed; Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down
“I saw a lovely analogy recently. Somebody said that writers are like otters. And...”
– Neil Gaiman (via writersrelief)
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“Here are the two states in which you may exist: person who writes, or person who...”
– 25 Things I Want To Say To So-Called “Aspiring” Writers (via kholinar)
Interesting, true, disturbing, and did I say interesting?
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The Unfinished: David Foster Wallace’s Struggle to... →
… His novels were overstuffed with facts, humor, digressions, silence, and sadness. He conjured the world in two-hundred-word sentences that mixed formal diction and street slang, technicalese and plain speech; his prose slid forward with a controlled lack of control that mimed thought itself.”
[Click the link above to read the whole article.]
Watchnathanenglander:
powells:
Ann Patchett, author of Bel Canto and State of Wonder and champion of independent bookstores, rocks on the Colbert Report.
Support your local bookstore!
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“I do things like get in a taxi and say, “The library, and step on it.”
– David Foster Wallace; Infinite Jest
[I’ve posted this before, but since today is his birthday, I’ll re-post it.] 