"Loneliness does not come from having no people around you, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to you."
— Carl Jung (via perfect)
(Source: 13neighbors, via faineemae)
The best-selling author of 17 Jack Reacher novels recommends six debut novels that led to greater things
The only book that I might read from this list is Casino Royale. One of my top 6 books would definitely be Wild Seed by Octavia Butler. What would you put on your list?
"Writers don’t write from experience, though many are resistant to admit that they don’t. I want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you’d get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy."
— Nikki Giovanni (via amandaonwriting)
(via thefemaletyrant)
Today in labor history, May 3, 1919: Folk singer-songwriter and activist Pete Seeger is born. “Now, if you want higher wages, let me tell you what to do./ You got to talk to the workers in the shop with you./ You got to build you a union, got to make it strong./ But if you all stick together, boys, it won’t be long./ You’ll get shorter hours. Better working conditions./ Vacations with pay. Take your kids to the seashore.” — from “Talking Union,” by Lee Hays, Millard Lampell, and Pete Seeger.
Today in labor history, April 10, 1930: Labor leader, community organizer, civil rights activist, and feminist Dolores Huerta is born. She co-founded, with Cesar Chavez, the National Farm Workers Association, which would later become the United Farm Workers. “Walk the street with us into history,” Huerta said. “Get off the sidewalk.”
The Great Gatsby was originally published 88 years ago today. Had Nintendo adapted the game in the late-1980s, it would have looked like this.
Wow. I kinda want to play this now.
What do you think Higgs is planing? And what will Julliet and Nia do next? Read the rest of Book 2 on our site.
Book 2 is up! Check it out and let us know what you think. We love feedback :)
Peep the link and check out the brand-new INITIUM site while you’re there.
Peep-Infused Vodka, and Other Things to Do With 2 Billion Gelatinous Birds
[Images: Baking Bits, Instructables, NoshBlog]
From Salon:
“In my view, a good writer can learn something from whatever he or she reads. And so I certainly don’t begrudge a student reading any piece of contemporary fiction. In fact, I assign the annual best-of anthologies as textbooks in my workshops, and more often than not our discussions of the assigned readings — initiated by students, not by me — center on what makes the stories so goddam awful. This is useful and good.
But a fiction writer ought to engage with other parts of the culture, too. This includes reading outside one’s genre — I happen to favor sci-fi and mystery, but I think it’s fine for literary writers to read YA, romance, fantasy or whatever they please. Literary writers are in the privileged position of being permitted to raid any genre for tools to subvert and repurpose. We ought to be reading poetry, too, of course, and nonfiction. We should read instruction manuals, legal documents, restaurant reviews and corporate newsletters. We should follow weird people on Twitter and go to lots of parties and have lots of intense and ridiculous conversations with drunk people. We should go home for the holidays and argue with our families, and we ought to listen to lots of music and we ought to watch plenty of television, because television is, at the moment, the most artistically important narrative medium. We should eavesdrop, and we should gossip. We should probably be in therapy. We should probably drink more coffee.
Let’s face it: Literary fiction is fucking boring. It really is. It’s a genre as replete with clichés as any. And when you’re as deeply immersed in it as many of us are, it’s all too easy to stop noticing the clichés. They no longer stand out. They’re just What People Do. And so, we do them. If a writer of literary fiction wants to be great, she needs to poke her head up out of the echo chamber every now and then and absorb the genuine peculiarity of human striving. And that means reading stuff that is not literary fiction, and, sometimes, not reading at all.”
It is rare for me to read literary fiction. I mainly read fantasy, nonfiction, and a little poetry and scifi. I also read a lot of blogs and news-type stuff online. So what do you all think? Is literary fiction really that awful?
