literature

“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...

New blog post by Vagabond Heart – discussions in this thread, please --- This part of the book had the men taking centre stage. Shakespeare had hit his stride. At least, that’s what I’d heard, and I was interested to see if they lived up to the hype. Were they really mad, bad, and dangerous to...

New blog post by Vagabond Heart – discussions in this thread, please --- I was approaching the halfway mark of my Shakespeare-a-thon, and methought it was time for some top scores. The Big H was coming up, so I was well excited. That’s got to deliver the goods, I thought, otherwise why was it...

New blog post by Vagabond Heart – discussions in this thread, please --- I was cracking on with my stupidly self-imposed lockdown challenge to read The Complete Works of Shakespeare. I’d met a few Henry’s now, and although I knew one of them was meant to be rousing stuff, I had no clue which...

Subscriber OnlyOpinion We are up to our necks in a rising tide of AI-generated slop A person who thinks a book can be ‘edited’ by a piece of software is a person who simply doesn’t know what editing is Expand A majority of the study’s participants preferred a poem generated by AI in the style...

New blog post by Vagabond Heart – discussions in this thread, please --- Full of enthusiasm for my lockdown project of reading The Complete Works of Shakespeare, I wandered blindly on to play number 5. Some time later I stumbled back out, wondering if there’s any wriggle-room on those do not...

We cannot simply sit and stare at our wounds forever. Haruki Murakami

'It is only by writing, not dreaming about it, that we develop our own style.' P. D. James

We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else's mind. Anna Quindlen

When is it ??? Just starting Chapter 3. I may need one of Jeeves' tissue restoratives to get through this.

Talking about how I might write the next book is like talking about whether or not to have sex. Any dithering ruins it. Louise Erdrich

Like some reanimated mutilated corpse in a giallo B-movie filmed by Dario Argento… It’s back! This month’s One Perfect Sentence is open. So is your mind. Let them communicate with each other. https://colony.litopia.com/threads/one-perfect-sentence-october-2024.14989/

Electronic books are a bad thing because they cannot be accumulated on shelves to remind you of your past, to impress your neighbours and colleagues, and to help prevent divorces thanks to the sheer bother of arguing over who owns what. J. P. Donleavy

To gain your own voice, you have to forget about having it heard. Allen Ginsberg