Foes

Foes: A new story by Lorrie Moore
On the eve of the US election, we publish a new story by Lorrie Moore, the finest short-story writer in America today.

Hopes for a happy ending

Literary voices on the American Election -

Appalled spectators of political life for the past eight years, many of America's major writers dream of better times – but fear disappointment. John Freeman hears literary voices of a nation on the brink of change.

Theme in Yellow

Theme in Yellow
by Carl Sandburg

I spot the hills
With yellow balls in autumn.
I light the prairie cornfields
Orange and tawny gold clusters
And I am called pumpkins.
On the last of October
When dusk is fallen
Children join hands
And circle round me
Singing ghost songs
And love to the harvest moon;
I am a jack-o'-lantern
With terrible teeth
And the children know
I am fooling.

Literary witches quiz

Tis the eve of Halloween, when all manner of evil will be loosed upon the world - so you should make sure you know your enemy. Here's how.

Candidates Name Their Favorite Books

Obama And McCain Answer Katie Couric's Presidential Questions

Katie Couric: What is your favorite book of all time?

Barack Obama: Well, the bible is the book that shaped me and moved me the most. But, in addition to that, Toni Morrison's "Song of Solomon" might be one of my favorite books. It's just a beautiful, beautiful book. And I've gotten a chance to know Toni Morrison during the course of this campaign, and she's just as elegant and wise and thoughtful as you would want her to be. You know, it's always nice to meet somebody and they turn out to be just like you want them to be. She's just a spectacular writer and a spectacular woman.

Shakespeare's tragedies, whether it's "Hamlet" or "[King] Lear." There's so much in each of those tragedies. You can read them once a year and each year, there's something new, there's something you didn't notice. There is some insight into the human dilemma. It's powerful stuff.

John McCain: "For Whom the Bell Tolls." It's about a fella from Montana that goes to Spain to fight for a cause he believes in. His name is Jordan. He falls in love, of course, with a beautiful Spanish young woman, but he's willing - even when disillusioned with a cause he came to fight for, which was the Communists - he's willing to sacrifice his life for his comrades. And that's where I got the phrase "the world is a wonderful place and well worth the fighting for."

We all know that staffers write these things for the candidates and that the answers given are the ones that will either place the candidate in a favourable light with his core constituency or win him some new votes. Was Obama pandering to a new constituency when he cited the bible as his favourite book of all time? I bloody well hope that's what he was doing.

America

This is a 36-second wax cylinder recording of Walt Whitman reading four lines from the poem "America."

Centre of equal daughters, equal sons,
All, all alike endear'd, grown, ungrown, young or old,
Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,
Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love,
A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother,
Chair'd in the adamant of Time.

Beautiful Lies

Ridley Jones is comfortable with her life. She has a congenial relationship with her parents and a nice apartment courtesy of a bequest from one of their close friends. Suddenly her life changes when a photo of her saving a young child from a collision with a car leads to contact with a past she never knew. She falls in love, faces fear, deals with truth, etc. I needed to read something like this when I was working 70-80 hour weeks during a recent election campaign. It fit the bill and I finished it but wouldn't recommend it to any but fans of the suspense genre.

European Bookstore Guide

"Hello! We are Sonja and Ivan. And this is our Bookstore Guide. The idea of writing a guide to bookstores all around Europe was conceived while we were on a vacation in Sarajevo, Bosnia. Having a passion for reading and traveling, we have encountered various bookstores throughout Europe and thus have decided to make this blog and write about our findings. If you happen to find yourself in, let's say Amsterdam or Berlin or any other city, we hope that this Bookstore Guide will help you find the books you are looking for so make sure you stop and browse for some of your favorite books in these bookstores."

Top 10 Most Outrageous Opening Lines in Literature

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like 'I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive . . .' And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming, 'Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?

See more here.
Via

The Andy Warhol Family Album

Uncle Andy's, A Faabbbulous Visit with Andy Warhol, is an award-winning children's book written and illustrated by his nephew, James Warhola. If anyone wonders what it may have been like to have a famous artist as an uncle and to get a peak into Warhol's home life in the 1960's, then this is the book. It was released by Putnam Publishing in 2003 and won the prestigious International Reading Association's Award for Best Children's Non-Fiction Picture Book of the following year.

Via Uncertain Times.

Richard Brautigan died on this day

On this day in 1984 Richard Brautigan's body was found in his California home, a suicide some weeks earlier. The literary critics have never been kind to the writing, and the biographers have been unable to penetrate the writer's life, but Brautigan was a counter-culture hero in the late sixties and seventies; by the time of his death, the cult, the counter-culture, and his own mental health were pretty much gone.

Practically Painful English

Friends and admirers gathered in New York Thursday night at a memorial service for David Foster Wallace, who committed suicide last month at age 46. Read more at Paper Cuts Blog

Filthy Shakespeare

Filthy Shakespeare: Shakespeare's Most Outrageous Sexual Puns

It's a universal truth: sex sells. Giving the audience what they wanted in the 16th century, however, meant veiling it with puns, bon mots, slang and other tricks; fortunately, Shakespeare scholar Kiernan (Shakespeare's Theory of Drama) has taken the mystery out of the Bard's deceptively graphic passages in these frank translations from some of his most popular plays. Because most students read whitewashed versions (or because most high school instructors don't want to go there), even fans may be unaware of the degree to which, for instance, Iago (Shakespeare's 'filthiest-minded character') employs sexually loaded language to rouse Roderigo's murderous lust in Act 5 of Othello: 'Quick, quick, fear nothing... and fix most firm thy resolution' seems innocuous enough until Kiernan reveals that 'nothing' means 'vagina' and 'resolution' means 'balls.' These blush-inducing transcripts render Shakespeare's work instantly contemporaneous; as it turns out, just the title of Much Ado About Nothing is easily as vulgar as anything uttered by gross-out moviemakers the Ferrelly brothers. Divided into chapters on lesbianiasm, homosexuality, virginity, sexual diseases, impotency, whores, pimps, brothels and other topics that shall here remain nameless, this jaw-dropping, giggle-inducing text proves both the Bard's enduring relevance and the fact that today's popular entertainment isn't nearly as debased as some might think. - From Publishers Weekly

Ultimate guide to pairing alcohol and literature

The consumption of alcoholic beverages isn't just a coincidentally recurring quirk in the literary world: it's downright traditional. For many famous writers of the past and present, a cocktail glass is as at home in their hand as a pen.

More at read, drink, and be merry

The Dog Book Blog

The Dog Book Blog or rather, the Dog-shaped papier-mâché bookshelf blog entry.

Boring Books

This almost put me to sleep - it's better than counting sheep!

Via

Colombian 'Biblioburro' has 4,800 books and 10 legs

In a ritual repeated nearly every weekend for the past decade here in Colombia's war-weary Caribbean hinterlands, Luis Soriano gathered his two donkeys, Alfa and Beto, in front of his home on a recent Saturday afternoon.

Sweating already under the unforgiving sun, he strapped pouches with the word 'Biblioburro' painted in blue letters to the donkeys' backs and loaded them with an eclectic cargo of books destined for people living in the small villages beyond. More

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Great kids' books about financial ruin.

"A review of popular American children's books of the past century reveals a recurring theme in the children's publishing industry: When times are tough, cue the stories about times that were even tougher."

Thirteen Ways of Looking at 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

Thirteen Ways of Looking
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Boys and Girls Book About If and When To Have Sex.

Hey kids! Everything you need to know here.

Browse the Artifacts of Geek History

Nothing quite prepares you for the culture shock of Jay Walker's Library. You exit the austere parlor of his New England home and pass through a hallway into the bibliographic equivalent of a Disney ride. Stuffed with landmark tomes and eye-grabbing historical objects—on the walls, on tables, standing on the floor—the room occupies about 3,600 square feet on three mazelike levels.

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Gorgeous Lies

Gorgeous Lies is the sequel to Martha McPhee's first novel Bright Angel Time. a book I read years ago and of which I have only vague recall. It is the story of a family, a large blended unconventional family led by a charismatic patriarch, Anton Furey. It sprawls over twenty-five years during which Anton leaves his wife Agnes, mother of 4 of his five children, he marries Eve (who has 3 children from a previous marriage) and has a child with her. They buy a property in New Jersey and embark upon establishing a utopian community they call Chardin. We learn a lot about Anton's early life growing up in Texas and the experience in a Jesuit seminary that shaped his character. We learn of his womanizing, his controlling nature, his fearful temper and, ultimately his emotional vulnerability. We find out fairly early that Anton is dying of pancreatic cancer. The novel explores the shifting relationships of the family members over the years and reveals the desperate need for Anton's approval that grips all of them. It's about love and family and the lies that bind them together. There are many characters and McPhee manages to reveal a lot about them though the novel is not a lengthy one. Chardin is full of life; champagne flows freely and everyone drinks it, including the youngsters. They feed on a buffet of knowledge laid out by Anton. He has a half-hearted Gestalt therapy practice and works on his book about Christianity and sexuality in between caring for his enormous brood. At first it seems that it might be a sort of seventies Camelot but gradually we are exposed to the complicated emotions that simmer beneath the surface and occasionally erupt. There is a dreamy feel to the prose that I found appealing and I think I'll dig out Bright Angel Time and read it again.

Book Launch 2.0

Via Nag on the Lake

Dear Mrs. Plath

It’s hardly surprising that the incendiary, banked-coal marriage between Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath has been revealed to us over the years partly through the intensely personal form of “letters.”

Read more at Paper Cuts