MetaFilter posts tagged with Books and literature

JSBlog

brundlefly — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 18:42:29 -0800

JSblog: on varied topics inspired by working in a secondhand bookshop.

Tomes of ancient lore

Artw — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 16:13:37 -0800

Although it's commonplace nowadays to assume that J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings was the primary source of inspiration for Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax when they created the world's first tabletop roleplaying game, Dungeons & Dragons, a careful examination of the game suggests otherwise... James Maliszewski on The Books That Founded D&D. Some disagreement.

The crying of x^2 + xy + y^2 = 49

escabeche — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 22:00:24 -0800

"Pynchon, postmodern author, is commonly said to have a non-linear narrative style. No one seems to have taken seriously the possibility, to be explored in this essay, that his narrative style might in fact be quadratic." Number theorist Michael Harris on Pynchon and conic sections.

Novel Graphics

dersins — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 10:00:29 -0800

"A few months ago, I got an email from Paul Buckley, the wonderful art director at Penguin Classics, who asked if I wanted to illustrate a book cover for him..." Illustrator Michael Cho on designing a cover for Don Delillo's White Noise as part of the Penguin Graphic Classics series, in which prominent comic artists and illustrators create covers for literary classics. All the covers can be found in this flickr set, including Daniel Clowes’s Frankenstein, Candide illustrated by Chris Ware, and Frank Miller's (kind of disappointing) cover for Gravity's Rainbow.

The pictures and sketches of JRR Tolkien

nthdegx — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 12:01:53 -0800

The pictures and sketches of JRR Tolkien

The Immaculate Tirant

Iridic — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 15:18:12 -0800

"God save me!" quoth the priest, with a loud voice, "is Tirante the White there? Give me him here, neighbour; for I make account I have found in him a treasure of delight, and a mine of entertainment. Here we have Don Kyrieleison of Montalvan, a valorous knight, and his brother Thomas of Montalvan, and the knight Fonseca, and the combat in which the valiant Tirante fought with the mastiff, and the smart conceits of the damsel Plazerdemivida, with the amours and artifices of the widow Reposada; and madam the empress in love with her squire Hypolito. Verily, gossip, in its way, it is the best book in the world..."

-Don Quixote de la Mancha, Part I, Chapter 6 Tirant Lo Blanc, written in the late fifteenth century by the Valencians Martorell and Joan de Galba, combines a fictionalized history of the two-fisted mercenary general Roger de Flor with elements of The Decameron, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, and Ramon Llull's Book of the Order of Chivalry. A sense of life lifts the work above both its influences and the third-hand tropes of its contemporaries; as Cervantes writes, "here the knights eat and sleep, and die in their beds, and make their wills before their deaths; with several things which are wanting in other books of this kind." This realism was a revelation to Cervantes, whose own exploration of the border between high duty and base necessity inaugurated the Western novel. As such, Tirant the White is perhaps the most quietly influential book in all of literature. Bonus Cervantes Inspiration: Amadis of Gaul - in blog form!

Lame and trite and read all over

littlerobothead — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 07:37:32 -0800

Fired from The Canon. Classics that maybe aren't so classic. (kottke via secondpass)

...I didn't actually read the link...

Artw — Thu, 28 May 2009 21:06:48 -0800

It’s only natural that if you wish to present yourself as a well-read person, a certain degree of complete bullshit is required. There’s no shame in lying about what you’ve read. There’s only shame in getting caught. Then you look like a doofus, and an illiterate one at that... How to lie about books.

Infinite Summer

mattbucher — Thu, 21 May 2009 14:46:49 -0800

Infinite Summer - "The Challenge: Read Infinite Jest over the summer of 2009" "You've been meaning to do it for over a decade. Now join endurance bibliophiles from around the web as we tackle and comment upon David Foster Wallace's masterwork, June 21st to September 22nd. A thousand pages1 ÷ 93 days = 75 pages a week. No sweat." There is also a Twitter account, hashtag (#infsum), and a Facebook group.

1518 copy of Ovid

homunculus — Sun, 17 May 2009 09:45:29 -0800

Rebinding a 1518 printing of Ovid's Metamorphoses. [Via]

Classic Covers of Penguin Science Fiction Books

Kattullus — Thu, 07 May 2009 19:22:02 -0800

The Art of Penguin Science Fiction is a historical guide to the design of book jackets in the Penguin SF line by James Pardey. But before reading the essay I recommend looking at some of the wonderful cover designs, for example We, Deathworld, Rork!, The Drowned World, Star Maker, The Evolution Man, Fifth Planet and Alternating Currents. They certainly don't make SF book jackets like they used to. All hundred plus covers can also be browsed alphabetically by author. [via The Guardian Books Blog]

What are you reading, charming writer?

mattbucher — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 08:13:48 -0800

What are writers reading? An eclectic mix of authors answer the perennial question. A sampling of responses: George Packer Anne Fadiman Cass Sunstein Jane Smiley Lydia Millet Steven Zipperstein Abraham Verghese John Dunning Stephen Burt Tim Harford

A Temple of Texts

mattbucher — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 10:27:54 -0800

William Gass's personal library. The photos accompany this article by Gass about his love of books -- specifically about collecting them over his life and "living in a library." Now in my own home I am surrounded by nearly 20,000 books, few of them rare, many unread, none of them neglected. They are there, as libraries always are, to help when needed, and who knows what writer I shall have to write on next, what subject will become suddenly essential, or what request will arrive that requires the immediate assistance of books on—well—libraries, or the language of animals or the pronunciation of Melanesian pidgin, since my essays tend to be assigned, not simply solicited, and because I am easily seduced by new themes. I can actually say a few things in Melanesian pidgin, none of them polite.

In a work of art, omission is as vital as any contribution

permafrost — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 08:26:13 -0800

What is a lipogram? It's a book or short work of fiction that omits a particular scriptural symbol, commonly a vocalic sign, as a stylistic ploy to amplify a motif, or simply as a stimulating bit of wordplay. Skilful application of this form is shown in US and Gallic publications such as Gadsby: Champion of Youth and La Disparition (also known, in an award-winning translation, as A Void). Writing lipogrammatic works is, as you would fancy, not a straightforward or simplistic task (Wright, author of Gadsby, had to fall back on sabotaging his typing apparatus), but focusing your mind through constraining rubric can indubiously aid cogitation. Why not try following this with your own lipogrammatic posts?

The Giving Tree

the_bone — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 22:21:11 -0800

The Giving Tree (1973), animated short based on Shel Silverstein's 1964 children's story and narrated by the author. Once you're done crying, here are a few related links: The Giving Tree: A Symposium (a collection of thoughts on the story by some American religion scholars.) The Misgiving Tree (a parody) A couple of parody videos: "The Really, Really Giving Tree" and "The Taking Boy"

"The butchers never speak, and if they do, their words are hollow."

zoomorphic — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 09:49:52 -0800

Shockingly, a novel about a Nazi officer who abets murder squads, transports Jews to Auschwitz, has sex with his twin sister, possibly kills his parents and then dies rich, old and reflective has caused a trans-Atlantic controversy among literary critics. Published in the original French three years ago, the English translation of Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones hit American bookstores this week. Though French reviewers unanimously praised Jewish-American author Littell for his unscrupulously bare depiction of a pathological mass murderer, the British press is straddling the fence, and most American critics are just plain outraged. Kakutani brands the novel as "deliberately repellent," while Washington Post accuses Kindly Ones of shilling glorified "death porn." And for anyone jetting off to the bookstore this week to get their latest fix of controversial Holocaust renderings, be warned: the print in this gruesome 900-page brick is teeny.

Fetish of ambition

joseph conrad is fully awesome — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 10:05:15 -0800

"... many critics and editors, especially male ones, make a fetish of "ambition," by which they mean the contemporary equivalent of novels about men in boats ("Moby-Dick," "Huckleberry Finn") rather than women in houses ("House of Mirth"), and that as a result big novels by male writers get treated as major events while slender but equally accomplished books by women tend to make a smaller splash." A book review of Elaine Showalter's newly published book, A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx, contains a brief historical overview and discussion of the question, "Why can't a woman write the Great American novel?"

"The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog."

zoomorphic — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 10:09:20 -0800

"We could all do worse than to write like Saul Bellow. And when I say write like Saul Bellow, I mean be Saul Bellow. And when I say be Saul Bellow, I mean unzip the skin from his body and wear it as a sort of Saul Bellow suit so that we can get cozy in it and truly inhabit it and understand the Old Macher." Writer Colson Whitehead parodies formidable literary critic James Wood and his 2008 treatise, How Fiction Works. At this point in his increasingly controversial scholarship, Mr. Wood is probably used to such cheek from those kids writing books on his lawn. James Wood has applauded the study of literature as an ageless aesthetic rather than a reflection on contemporary culture, fractured selfhood, and globalization--a view cherished by older critics like Harold Bloom and lately eschewed by the 43-year old Harvard professor's newfangled contemporaries. Wood's hidebound distaste for identity politics marks a schism between late modernism and post-modernism, a rift best viewed from above in this infamous review of Zadie Smith's Booker Prize-winning White Teeth. Lamenting the new face of literature that revels in confusion, distortion, paranoia, and so-called hysterical realism, Wood not only wagged his finger at Smith, but also took literary giants Salman Rushdie, Thomas Pynchon, and David Foster Wallace to task for tampering with the novel's "delicate structure." Smith responded to Wood's eulogy for the novel with characteristically wry idiom: "The novel is not an immutable fact of human artistic life, after all, just a historically specific phenomenon that came and will go unless there are writers who have the heart, the brain and, crucially, the cojones to keep it alive." For now, Wood reigns comfortably as one of the most daunting critics of literature in English, even enjoying a few tentative fans from the under-40 crowd. But the success of writers like Colson Whitehead, a 31-year old, African-American, Pulitzer Prize-candidate who lists a Run DMC song as an "important plot point" in his upcoming novel Sag Harbor, marks yet one more step in literature's shift from the 20th century to the 21st.

Artists' Books Online

Kattullus — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 05:33:43 -0800

Artists' Books Online is a collection by the University of Virginia of artists' books. Artists' books are works of art that take the form of books and are often both text and visual art. Either way, they're awful interesting to look at. Here are some artbooks to get you started: How to Humiliate Your Peeping Tom by Susan Baker, The Word Made Flesh by Johanna Drucker, Life in a Book by Francois Deschamps, A.A.A.R.P. by Clifton Kirkpatrick Meador, opuntia is just another name for a prickly pear by Todd Walker and Black Dog White Bark by Erica Van Horn

'Where Forgotton Books are Remembered'

anastasiav — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 10:13:26 -0800

The Neglected Books Page

2666 reasons to find your library card.

zoomorphic — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 13:34:49 -0800

With the advent of December comes the annual ranking of the book industry's over-saturated market. Along with the garden variety Best Books of 2008 lists, niche critics weigh in on the best cookbooks (baking and regular), most trustworthy business publications, best children's book illustrations, safest bets for literary holiday gifts, and, of course, the prettiest book covers.

In case you were wondering

kliuless — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 05:38:37 -0800

Joyce explained. (via)

The Texture of Time

mattbucher — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 11:33:15 -0800

Nabokov and the Moment of Truth. VN talks about metaphors of time, great books, and reads the first line of Lolita. “I’ve been perplexed and amused by fabricated notions about so-called Great Books. That, for instance, Mann’s asinine Death in Venice, or Pasternak’s melodramatic, vilely written Doctor Zhivago, or Faulkner’s corncobby chronicles can be considered masterpieces, or at least what journalists term Great Books, is to me the same sort of absurd delusion as when a hypnotized person makes love to a chair.”

Don'tgive me no jibber-jabber

Artw — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 14:59:52 -0800

Man-up with Stephen King.

The Iron Heel

finite — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 15:17:03 -0800

The Iron Heel, published a century ago this year, is a novel by Jack London about socialist revolution in the United States. It is set mostly between 1912 and 1932, with a foreword and numerous footnotes written from the point of view of a historian who has just discovered the manuscript some 700 years later. Here is an excerpt (which is printed on the back cover of some editions) from chapter five:

"This, then, is our answer. We have no words to waste on you. When you reach out your vaunted strong hands for our palaces and purpled ease, we will show you what strength is. In roar of shell and shrapnel and in whine of machine-guns will our answer be couched. We will grind you revolutionists down under our heel, and we shall walk upon your faces. The world is ours, we are its lords, and ours it shall remain. As for the host of labor, it has been in the dirt since history began, and I read history aright. And in the dirt it shall remain so long as I and mine and those that come after us have the power. There is the word. It is the king of words--Power. Not God, not Mammon, but Power. Pour it over your tongue till it tingles with it. Power."