February 2012
13 posts
4 tags
“We live in a time when many religious people feel fiercely threatened by...”
– Marilynne Robinson, Chronicle of Higher Education
3 tags
Marilynne Robinson on Humankind, Writing...
“But all we really know about what we are is what we do. There is a tendency to fit a tight and awkward carapace of definition over humankind, and to try to trim the living creature to fit the dead shell.
The advice I give my students is the same advice I give myself—forget definition, forget assumption, watch. We inhabit, we are part of, a reality for which explanation is much too poor and...
1 tag
“Last line: “Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it...”
– David Foster Wallace (via kadrey)
Love it.
(via harkaway)
QFT
(via jennirl)
“Dodie Bellamy: “An in-your-face owning of one’s vulnerability is a...”
– Dodie Bellamy via Emily Books (via rachelfershleiser)
“Paper books may be the only media remaining that don’t report your behavior back...”
– (via wwnorton)
3 tags
HAH!
“About the only positive development at court for which Charles could take some credit had occurred on July 3 [1423], when Yolande’s daughter Marie gave birth to the couple’s first child, a son, Louis, thereby establishing a line of succession, although even here Charles could not really be said to have done the heavy lifting.”
The Maid and the Queen (galley)
that Joan of...
January 2012
25 posts
One day left to sign up for World Book Night... →
wwnorton:
UPDATE: Deadline extended to 2/6/12.
Okay, slacker, so you got an extension. Lucky you. Now take advantage of it and apply to be a book giver on World Book Night and help drop an insane amount of free books on the unsuspecting masses.
“One attractive thing about me is that I’m never bored, because during any...”
– MATING by Norman Rush
National Book Award, 1991
which one do you prefer?
according to one commenter, “Looking at their facial expressions, #2 looks more like a fist-bump thing, whereas #1 definitely looks like she’s going Tyler Durden on you.”
3 tags
“ANNE CARSON: “But over the years of working at it, I came to think of...”
– NOX
James Baldwin = smart
“It is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be. One can give nothing whatever without giving oneself — that is to say, risking oneself. If one cannot risk oneself, then one is...
1 tag
3 tags
“IF WE HAD NOT LOVED EACH OTHER NONE OF US WOULD HAVE SURVIVED
“Well, you...”
– James Baldwin, My Dungeon Shook
3 tags
not your inferiority but their inhumanity and fear
“I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it. And I know, which is much worse, and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I or time or history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know...
“Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal,...”
– The Fault in Our Stars, John Green (via twenty4mixtapes)
[i think i feel the second more than i feel the first…]
3 tags
5 tags
“Between gasps William the Silent continues to speak, his voice hardly a whisper...”
– Mopus by Oisin Curran
Counterpath Press
“Years later, in Portland, their father began to tell them his stories. They...”
– from Glaciers by Alexis M. Smith
forthcoming soon from Tin House Books
hmmm, maybe there is some truth in this whole...
3 tags
all new learning looks at first like chaos
from adrienne rich’s latest, Tonight No Poetry Will Serve
powers of recuperation
iv.
bridges trajectories arched
in shelter rendezvous
two banks to every river two directions
to every bridge
twenty-eight chances
every built thing has its unmeant purpose
v.
all new learning looks at first
like chaos
“Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be...”
– bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions (via suzywire)
December 2011
9 posts
“Poems are rough notations for the music we are.”
– Rumi. The Big Red Book
“Pity the Elf Slaves of Online Shipping | Mother Jones
“So while I don’t...”
– Pity the Elf Slaves of Online Shipping | Mother Jones
every now and then, Mother Jones nails it.
(via jennirl)
15 tags
Emily's Baker's Dozen for 2011: Get Thee to a...
And why do I love my job? Because I got to meet more than half of these authors this year!
The Conference of the Birds by Peter Sis (illustrated Persian epic)
The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach (fiction)
Radioactive by Lauren Redniss (illustrated nonfiction)
Everything is its Own Reward by Paul Madonna (illustrated comics)
We The Animals by Justin Torres (fiction)
Hark! A Vagrant by Kate...
I have caught much of it on paper. But infinitely...
For my friends who write:
“There is always a moment when we must begin to write. There are always the hundreds, the thousands, of struggle, of getting up, of pacing about, of sitting down, of laborious uneven accomplishment. During the time of actual work, what else besides ourselves, can help us? Can we call to mind then the contents of 20,000 books? Can we depend on anything other than...
For fans of Judgmental Bookseller Ostrich and of...
towirr:
A gentleman named Farhad Manjoo just posted a proudly contrarian article on Slate explaining why independent bookstores are not only irrelevent but maybe even harmful. I work at an independent bookstore, so that’s an argument I’d be very very curious to see made well. Honestly, I know the failings of small booksellers as well as anyone, and it’d be good to see them articulated. But...
My friend Bookavore is SMART. She offers advice to... →
bookavore:
The more I think about the latest Amazon outrage, and filter through my lack of shock, then my sadness at my lack of shock, then my sadness at my sadness of my lack of shock, the thing that really bothers me is that Amazon seem to be obsessed with making decisions that make people angry at them….
“… body-time sang its song in slow dissolves. Gradual transformations, slow...”
– from [sic] by Joshua Cody
November 2011
12 posts
yes, maggie nelson's BLUETS still does it for...
“…blue is something of an ecstatic accident produced by void and fire…”
WANT
how cruel is it that it means both: to be necessary or needed, to desire, to have an inclination to and to wish for, to LACK? it means both to need and to not have. how can four such tiny letters contain such a staple of the human condition?
“…light is a liar, telling old truths…”
– ADEM “You and Moon”
Seriously, this guy is a drug I CANNOT STOP LISTENING TO HIM