literature

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...

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