“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something [...]
Entries Tagged as 'Brooks'
Scalping Nazis for Aesthetic Purposes
August 27th, 2009 3 Comments
Tags: big screen/small screen week · Brooks
Writing Machines
August 9th, 2009 3 Comments
In On Writing, Stephen King’s “memoir of the craft,” he recommends that aspiring authors write 1000 words per day, in addition to reading “a lot.” A recent New Yorker article says of Joyce Carol Oates, “it has been said that, at one point in her career, she wrote forty pages of fiction every day…”
Tags: Brooks · John Hawkes · Joyce Carol Oates · Trollope · writers' habits · writing process
Man Booker Prize Longlist Announced
July 28th, 2009 No Comments
From BBC News: “The winner of the £50,000 award, which honours the best fiction written in English by an author from the UK, Ireland or the Commonwealth, will be named in October. A shortlist of six will be revealed on 8 September.”
The longlist for this year includes nine authors from the UK, two from [...]
Tags: Brooks · literary prizes
Blood Meridian or the Best Western
July 17th, 2009 No Comments
I’ve mostly avoided books marketed as Westerns. I read the first Lonesome Dove book in high school, but all I really remember was a river-crossing scene with a giant ball of snakes in the water. Ghost Town, Robert Coover’s postmodern take on the Western, more or less unpacks all of the conventions of the [...]
Tags: Blood Meridian · Brooks · reading habits · Westerns
Rare Books, Indecipherable Texts, Precious Metals
July 11th, 2009 No Comments
This week, apparently, is travel writing week, but you don’t have to leave town. Thanks to literature, you don’t even have to leave your house to travel, inwardly at least. However, I’d like to recommend a book that’s well worth a trip to the library.
It’s called the Codex Seraphinianus, and is very mysterious. I learned [...]
The Da Vinci Code is a Stepped-On Bag of Pork Rinds
June 27th, 2009 14 Comments
“People do not deserve to have good writing, they are so pleased with bad,” sayeth Ralph Waldo Emerson.
You may already know this, but Harry Potter is very bad for you. One might respond with “I know it’s not literature but I just read it for pleasure–it’s kind of like junk food.” Harry Potter is not [...]
Tags: Brooks · Harold Bloom · literary taste · reading habits · Virginia Woolf · William Gass
The Click of a Well-made Box
June 5th, 2009 No Comments
“It was really an experience of what I think Yeats called ‘the click of a well-made box.’ Something like that. The word I always think of it as is ‘click.’…In Don DeLillo’s stuff, for example, almost line by line I can hear the click. It’s maybe the only way to describe writers I love. I [...]
Tags: Brooks · David Foster Wallace · Don Delillo · John Updike · writers' habits · writing process
Free Literature
May 13th, 2009 4 Comments
Tragic Magic, Wesley Brown’s first novel, is out of print, underappreciated, and something to the effect of “nothing short of mind-blowing” (sorry to stoop to this cliché, but it’s true). His third novel Push Comes to Shove just came out, and I’m pretty excited about it. The interesting thing is that Concord Free Press is [...]
Tags: books · Brooks · publishing industry · Wesley Brown
“Science and technology multiply around us.”
April 24th, 2009 No Comments
This is a bit late, but “cult” novelist and short story writer J.G. Ballard died last weekend at age 78.
Tags: Brooks · J. G. Ballard · writers
Happy Easter from Amazon.com
April 12th, 2009 3 Comments
I just read here, and elsewhere, that Amazon is now excluding what it deems to be “adult” material from search results, and is removing these titles’ sales rankings. A quote from an Amazon employee:
Tags: books · bookstores · Brooks