literature

“There’s a kind of ear music … a rhythmic synchronicity which creates a kind of heartbeat on the page.” Allan Gurganus

Today is April Fool’s day, correlating with The Fool in the Tarot, or The Joker in playing cards, and The Fool may also be acting as The Trickster. The exact origins of April Fool's Day as a British and European tradition are not known. This date may been associated with pranksters since the...

Our knowledge is a receding mirage in an expanding desert of ignorance. Will Durant

No one ever became extremely wicked suddenly. Juvenal

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/good-riddance-to-literary-fiction/

https://desperateliterature.com/product-category/literaryprize/eleven-stories/ ABOUT THE PRIZE: The aim of the Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize is both to celebrate the best of new short fiction and to give winners the most visibility possible for their writing. That’s why we’ve teamed...

I will not back down from my revelation that all literature essentially stems from gossip. Madame Bovary being some of the juiciest. So I am now taking that conviction to the cookie bakery. Evaluating my first pages ... is there enough tea spilled to warrant the next table listening in...

https://mariaedgeworthcenter.com/maria-edgeworth-literary-festival/maria-edgeworth-literary-festival-competition/

Big Book, big bore. Callimachus

Never look back unless you are planning to go that way. Henry David Thoreau

“When you sell a man a book you don’t sell him just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night - there’s all heaven and earth in a book, a real book I mean.” Christopher Morley

New blog post by mickleinapickle One Perfect Sentence Posted on behalf of Peter Cox… The prompt this month was to complete “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” in a novel way. In this, you manifestly succeeded In fact, this was arguably the best OPS contest we’ve run so...

“If you show someone something you’ve written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, ‘When you’re ready’”. David Mitchell

“It seems incredible, the ease with which we sink through books quite out of sight, pass clamorous pages into soundless dreams.” William H. Gass

David Lodge was one of my literary heroes and a true comic genius. David Lodge, Campus Trilogy novelist and academic, dies aged 89

“For last year’s words belong to last year’s language. And next year’s words await another voice.” T. S. Eliot

The last clementine of xmas. A little gift to start the year right. https://archive.org/details/steering-the-craft-a-twenty-first-century-guide-to-sailing-the-sea-of-story-repr/page/n4/mode/1up

New blog post by Vagabond Heart WTF, Will! sonnets + summary My reading of The Complete Works of Shakespeare was almost at an end. The book (only a paperback) had weighed in at 1250g, and the font was tiny, so this really felt like an achievement. It was now so mauled-looking that Will had...

New blog post by Vagabond Heart WTF, Will! The poems 1 – 5 Well, I’d just read all of Shakespeare’s plays and I was feeling extremely showy-offy. And yes, I’d been totally mind-blown or singularly unimpressed and all the stops inbetween. But I couldn’t say I’d read the Complete Works until...