Reading Blaise Cendrars is like stepping into another universe. His fiction is unlike anything else I've ever read. His poetry influenced the mighty Guillaume Apollinaire and helped shape the face of modernism. But it is his mockery of biographical detail and the very notion of literature that fascinates me the most. If, like me, you're not a fan of autobiography, then Blaise Cendrars is the memoirist for you.
posted by Trurl
on Nov 30, 2011 -
10 comments
Henry Roth had one of the most anomalous careers in modern letters: a brilliant novel at age twenty-eight, the incomparable Call It Sleep, lost for thirty years but never quite forgotten, then a torrent of words let loose in his seventies and eighties. ... Roth continued to resist any single explanation for his catastrophic writer's block, but it became evident that it was the incest, and the self-loathing that accompanied it, that threw the biggest roadblock across his path. [more inside]
posted by Joe Beese
on Jan 12, 2011 -
7 comments
Think you get a lot done? Isaac Asimov (
pronounced like "has, him, of" without the h's) , who would have turned 87 today, wrote or edited over
500 books, including
science-fiction novels, introductions to
organic chemistry (a field in which he held a professorship at B.U.) , indispensable
anthologies of early science fiction,
jokebooks,
guides to Shakespeare, and
collections of lively essays on science that have introduced thousands of people to the pleasures of thinking hard about the universe. He also found the time to write
a few essays and
write postcards to his fans. His story
"Runaround" , from his 1950 collection
I, Robot, is the only piece of fiction I know centered on the properties of a differential equation. His
Foundation Trilogy was given a
special Hugo award in 1966 as the best science fiction series of all time; a
movie version, to be written by Jeff Vintar and directed by Shekhar Kapur, is currently in development. Previous AsimovFilter:
here,
here,
here. Feel like a slacker yet? Stop reading MetaFilter and get to work!
posted by escabeche
on Jan 2, 2007 -
95 comments
What is the current state of American poetry? Hank Lazer:
Perhaps, contrary to the laments, we are now living through a particularly rich time in American poetry—an era of radically democratized poetry...In its anarchic democratic disorganized decentralization, poetry culture has developed in a manner parallel to the computer: the decentralized PC has beaten the main-frame. No one can pretend to know what is out there, or what is next. Who are some of the most notable American poets active in the beginning of the 21st century?
posted by rushmc
on May 27, 2004 -
33 comments
