MetaFilter posts tagged with Literature

Novel Chess

carsonb — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 16:49:40 -0800

Reading to the Endgame: Algorithmic translation of classic nineteenth century novels into chessboard slugfests. Select the opponents from a list of fifty-five novels in five languages, and watch each text maneuver across the battlefield.

Hey Oscar Wilde! It's Clobberin' Time!!!

marxchivist — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 13:06:02 -0800

Hey Oscar Wilde! It's Clobberin' Time!!! is a blog featuring gobs of drawings by comic book artists of their favorite literary authors or characters. [via] Ernest Hemingway by Eddie Campbell Walter Gibson by Alex Toth The Shadow by Michael Kaluta (natch) Wilfred Owen by George Pratt Algernon by Mike Choi Lots and lots more.

Enheduanna, the first poet we know by name

Kattullus — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 20:33:39 -0800

Enheduanna was a priestess and poet in the city of Ur in the 23rd century BC and supposedly the daughter of Sargon the Great of Akkad. She is the first author known by name. Here are a number of her poems in English translation, The Exaltation of Inana, Inana and Ebih, A Hymn to Inana, The Temple Hymns and A Balbale to Nanna. Here are two alternate translations of The Exaltation of Inana, one by James D. Pritchard and an English rendering of Dr. Annette Zgoll's German translation. If you want to learn more, go to The En-hedu-Ana Research Pages.

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.

Street Lit

trojanhorse — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 12:33:42 -0800

"It's urban, it's real, but is this literature? Controversy rages over a new genre whose sales are headed off the charts"

Examples of Urban Lit from Amazon:

Noble and magnificent creatures of the animal kingdom... humiliated again for our amusement. Yay!

taz — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 02:08:39 -0800

The New Yorker's "Critterati" contest invites you to "take a picture of your pet—dog, cat, ferret, iguana, or any other nonhuman member of the animal kingdom—dressed as a character from literature, and upload it to newyorker.com by October 25th." Gallery | About | Rules | Enter. MetaFilter's own Jessamyn happens to be a judge (so well-dressed chicken entries might just have an edge, amirite?). "There will be up to 5 winners. Winning submissions, along with the creator's name, will be featured in a slideshow on www.newyorker.com and each winner will receive a signed copy of the book 'Indognito'.” The contest is only open to U.S. and Canadian residents (except Quebec), sadly, but the rest of us can still enjoy the hilarious discomfiture of other people's pets dressed up like Hairy Potter, Oedipuss, Huckleberry Fins and Miss Havishamster.

Art by Alasdair Gray

Kattullus — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 09:37:19 -0800

Alasdair Gray is best known as a novelist but his illustrations of his own books have long fascinated and delighted. Here you can see hundreds of artworks by Alasdair Gray, including some book illustrations, from 1950 through 2009. Here are a few of his works that I like: unfinished Scottish Society of Playwrights poster, Nina Watching the Simpsons, Erics Watching Television, Ice Age and Babylonian Science, theatre poster for A Clockwork Orange and the Scots Hippo series. Also on the website there are a lot of articles about and by Alasdair Gray reposted from various publications. And finally, here's a podcast of a talk Alasdair Gray gave called The First Pictures I Enjoyed.

Two Chinese Brothers

escabeche — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 20:03:57 -0800

"This is a novel born out of the intersection of two eras. The first is a story of the Cultural Revolution, a time of fanaticism, repressed instincts, and tragic fates, similar to the European Middle Ages. The second is a story of today, a time of subverted ethics, fickle sensuality, and every kind of phenomena, even more like the Europe of today. A westerner would have to live four hundred years to experience the vast differences of the two eras, but a Chinese would only need forty years for the experience." Yu Hua's Brothers, a sprawling, foul-mouthed, comic-historical epic, and the best-selling novel in China's history, is available in English. (The quote above comes from the afterword to Brothers, not included in the US edition.) The New York Times didn't care for the translation, by Eileen Chow and Carlos Rojas; Chinese litblog Paper Republic criticized the review, leading to an interesting comment thread in which both Chow and the NYT reviewer participate. Yu got even tougher treatment from local critics, who were baffled by Yu's abandonment of his previous restrained, literary style. Cang Hang (translation via Paper Republic) calls the book "a 500,000 character trash heap." Read an excerpt from Brothers and listen to the relevant podcast at NPR.

Hermann the German

oldleada — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 17:08:40 -0800

Fans of Tacitus's Germania, meet Hermann.

Herta Müller is the 2009 Nobel Laureate in Literature

Kattullus — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 04:10:13 -0800

This year's Nobel Laureate in Literature is Romanian born author Herta Müller, who writes in German, as predicted yesterday by M. A. Orthofer of The Complete Review and Literary Saloon. Here's an interview with Herta Müller and a short bio.

Brindin Press, poetry translations

Kattullus — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 19:38:18 -0800

Brindin Press has lots of poetry translations into English online, concentrating on French, German, Italian and Spanish, though more than 40 other languages are represented as well. A boatload of translators is represented, from those toiling in obscurity to big literary names (e.g. there are translations of Catullus poems by Ben Jonson, Jonathan Swift, Louis Zukofsky, Aubrey Beardsley and Thomas Hardy). There is also a section of quirky poems. Finally, here's a rendition of Goethe's Der Erlkönig that substitutes the elfish king with a dalek.

More Web Magazines

netbros — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 16:35:28 -0800

The New York Review of Ideas is a web magazine reporting about New York commerce, literature and politics. The Manzine is actually £2 for the print version, but some of the its best is also online.

Ivana, the "Croatian Tolkien"

stbalbach — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 09:12:59 -0800

Fairy-tale author Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić (1874-1938) has been called the "Croatian Anderson", or more recently the "Croatian Tolkien", and twice nominated for a Nobel, in the 1930s, before she committed suicide. Her most famous fairy-tale collection, Croatian Tales of Long Ago (1916), was recently adapted as a flash animation, some of which can be viewed online (flash, pop-ups) in an award-winning site. The original book in English translation (1923) at Internet Archive includes some cool artwork.

Shakespeare in music

Matthias Rascher — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 12:25:12 -0800

Amazing to see how differently Shakespeare's work has been dealt with in music: there is Jerry Lee Lewis doing a blues on Othello. David Gilmour, former Pink Floyd lead singer, guitarist and songwriter, turned Sonnet 18 into a touchingly beautiful ballad. The Metal Shakespeare Company wrote a heavy metal song about Hamlet (III/1), "To bleed or not to bleed". And yes, there is Shakespeare rap, too: William Shatner (the very same!) raps about Caesar and British rapper Akala thinks he is a reincarnation of the bard. Last but not least, the Beatles tried their luck at Shakespeare, too (no music this time): they did a skit on the famous Pyramus and Thisbe scene from A Midsummer Night's Dream (very rare footage!).

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.

Big things have small beginnings

Joe Beese — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 09:20:38 -0800

Charlotte and Branwell Brontë wrote many of their stories of Angria on tiny sheets of paper in nearly microscopic handwriting. This particular example consists of four sheets of notepaper folded into sixteen pages. The individual sheets are approximately 4 ½ inches long and 3 5/8 inches wide, and the entire text contains about nineteen thousand words.

The pictures and sketches of JRR Tolkien

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

The pictures and sketches of JRR Tolkien

At the very edge

adamvasco — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 12:54:52 -0800

Island of Sorrows. On the far western tip of continental Europe lie The Blasket Islands, picturesque in the sunlight. Great Blasket produced a great wealth (scroll down) of oral and written folk history from personages such as Peig Sayers (photo); and Tomas O'Crohan and Maurice O'Sullivan.
Here's a brief , more recent of the Island and a bibliography of Blasket Literature.

Knut Hamsun.

hydatius — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 14:29:42 -0800

Street Time for Hamsun. This month marks 150 years since the birth of the Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun, Nobel laureate in 1920. As well as the opening of a new centre dedicated to the man and his work, a whole range of events have been held in relation to this anniversary. It has also been the occasion for academic conferences, commemorative coins, tourism campaigns, and stamps. A writer of brilliance; a deeply problematic legacy. Previously on mefi.

Thousands of poems by women writers of the British Isles in the Romantic era

Kattullus — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 19:28:33 -0800

British Women Romantic Poets Project is a collection of poetry written by women from the British Isles between 1789 and 1832. Over a hundred female poets are represented. Women rarely feature in literary histories of the Romantic period but there is treasure if you search (some poems are, frankly, terrible). A few places to start are Charlotte Turner Smith's Elegiac Sonnets, and Other Poems, Christian Ross Milne's Simple Poems on Simple Subjects and Mary Robinson's sonnet cycle Sappho and Phaon. The oddest works to modern readers may be Elizabeth Hitchener's Enigmas, Historical and Geographical and Marianne Curties' Classical Pastime, which are collections of verse riddles (the answers are at the end of the text).

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!

A conspiracy of theorists

Mr. Palomar — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 20:51:19 -0800

Several Twitter-based games were launched during the world's first Literary Twestival: Flash Fiction, Collective Nouns, Pass the Plot, and Project Twutenberg (via).

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin.

tiny crocodile — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 03:10:42 -0800

Fancy a coffee with Dominic West? Rather tasty British actors in slightly ridiculous soft focus sell instant coffee, using sexy literature. Take your pick. Dominic West reads an extract from Lady Chatterley's Lover, Dan Stevens reads Madame Bovary, Greg Wise reads Lust Caution. Pride and Prejudice, Les Deux Amants, and Middlemarch also feature. This might be aimed primarily at the ladies.

Bookworms with Ink

litterateur — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 15:05:13 -0800

We've seen tattooed librarians, but so-called literary tattoos are a growing trend. See the lively LiveJournal group, or the folks over at Contrariwise. Recently, "A couple of independent editors have decided to take the trend and invert it -- to put the literary tattoos back in a book." It appears the call for submissions is still on-going.

In writing this book my intention was to present, in the form of an interesting story, a faithful picture of working-class life...

hydatius — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 10:18:17 -0800

In August 1910, an Irish sign-painter and decorator named Robert Noonan left the town of Hastings on the south coast of England, and made his way north and west towards Liverpool, with the hope of emigrating to Canada. Already sick with tuberculosis, his condition worsened once he reached the city, and he was to die there in a workhouse hospital ward, in February 1911. He had, however, left in the care of his daughter Kathleen a package that was to change the political landscape of twentieth-century Britain. Composed between 1906 and 1910, and written under the pen-name of Robert Tressell, The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists told the story of a group of house-painters and craftsmen living and working in the appalling conditions of Edwardian provincial capitalism, in the fictional town of Mugsborough, a narrative based on Tressell's own working life in Hastings. The novel's central character, Peter Owen, preaches the socialist cause to try to convert his fellow working men (the titular characters, who seem content to 'donate' their labour to their capitalist masters). Tressell was to die without seeing his book in print, but it has now sold over a million copies in numerous languages and it has never been out of print since its eventual publication in 1914; its text can be found here, and Tressell's original manuscript can be scrolled through here. The Trades Union Council keeps detailed pages devoted to Tressell, as does Hastings Museum. The Robert Tressell Society runs an annual festival in the town in his honour. Although after his death in 1911, he was buried in a pauper's grave in Liverpool, a monument was subsequently raised over the spot, as well as at the hospital in which he died. In his adopted home of Hastings he is honoured throughout the townscape, including an accommodation block of the university, and several commemorative plaques. His family received nothing beyond the £25 Kathleen was paid for the rights to the manuscript in 1914, although she and her own son continued to champion the novel's causes. There has been a marked upswing in the book's sales this year, and this week The New Statesman named it number 5 in their list of the most important progressive and liberal books ever (just behind Marx, Engels, and Jesus).