All in all, I would urge readers to not pay too much attention to big prestigious literary prizes. In a perfect world, I would wish for every writer a magical bag of money that is never empty (to level the financial question) and simply do away with them all: no Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, no National Book Award, no PEN/Faulkner, no Man Booker, no Nobel Prize in Literature. Let writers write, let critics have their say, let readers read, let time decide.
- Benjamin Hale, “A Passion for Immortality: On the Missing Pulitzer and the Problem with Prizes.”
“Digital publisher Electric Literature has launched a new digital literary magazine that will publish one story a week. Recommended Reading is a free online publication, available in ePub, Kindle and through email and Tumblr.”
Follow it on Tumblr.
(Source: mediabistro.com)
You asked if I thought my fiction had changed anything in the culture and the answer is no. Sure, there’s been some scandal, but people are scandalized all the time; it’s a way of life for them. It doesn’t mean a thing. If you ask if I want my fiction to change anything in the culture, the answer is still no. What I want is to possess my readers while they are reading my book—if I can, to possess them in ways that other writers don’t. Then let them return, just as they were, to a world where everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt, and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise, to have set loose in them the consciousness that’s otherwise conditioned and hemmed in by all that isn’t fiction. This is something that every child, smitten by books, understands immediately, though it’s not at all a childish idea about the importance of reading.
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Philip Roth, The Paris Review (via lexi-gold)
This interview was published in 1984 - feels about right to point to it on this week of thinking about children and how they consume books.
(via nathanenglander)
Top 10 Most Read Books in the World (copies sold, past 50 years).
(Source: visualnews.com)
I believe it. For writers, note the influence of writings in the first person…
Ohio State University researchers have released a study about “experience-taking,” the psychological term for the moment when readers find themselves “feeling the emotions, thoughts, beliefs and internal responses” of a fictional character when reading.
“The results showed that participants who read a story told in first-person, about a student at their own university, had the highest level of experience-taking. And a full 65 percent of these participants reported they voted on Election Day, when they were asked later. In comparison, only 29 percent of the participants voted if they read the first-person story about a student from a different university.”
From the study (http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/exptaking.htm): “Experience-taking doesn’t happen all the time. It only occurs when people are able, in a sense, to forget about themselves and their own self-concept and self-identity while reading, Kaufman said.” “The results showed that participants who read a story told in first-person, about a student at their own university, had the highest level of experience-taking.”
“The Denver, Colorado nonprofit literacy group Burning Through Pages has gone viral with a gorgeous black and white poster encouraging parents to share books with their kids.”
“Some claim that literary fiction has ‘lost the next generation’ of readers – but brilliant writing remains as important as ever.”
Literary fiction can be about anything, so long as it’s beautifully, intriguingly, surprisingly, gorgeously written, so long as it’s brilliantly constructed – from the word, to the sentence, the paragraph, the chapter, the novel and beyond.
If I’m ever lucky enough to do a reading, I suspect it’ll look a lot like this. Unfortunately, you can’t see my mother in the corner. She’s asleep.
luckyshirt:
Taken with instagram
Throughout my 20s and early 30s — my two-books-per-week years — I did most of my reading at the International House of Pancakes.
- David Sedaris, the author of Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, on his reading habits
(Source: The New York Times)
Buildings with Libraries: A Soft-Spoken Amenity
In the highly competitive New York marketplace, where developers of residential buildings seem to be engaged in an amenities arms race — cold storage, wine cellar, gym, pool, hot tub, children’s playroom, ’tween playroom, party room — the library is a low-cost frill.
About those books. The developer generally seeds the collection, but often it grows in an organic fashion as residents cull their own shelves. Such was the case at Manhattan House on East 66th Street, where coffee table tomes on design got the ball rolling. Similarly themed titles have made their way from personal collections to the rooftop library, a building spokesman said.
No librarians or other authority figures patrol the bookshelves in any of these buildings. There is no mechanism for checking out books — they are borrowed at will with no penalties for those who take their sweet time reading them. Guilt and good manners keep the collections intact.
“The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated. Keith Oatley, an emeritus professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto (and a published novelist), has proposed that reading produces a vivid simulation of reality, one that “runs on minds of readers just as computer simulations run on computers.” Fiction — with its redolent details, imaginative metaphors and attentive descriptions of people and their actions — offers an especially rich replica. Indeed, in one respect novels go beyond simulating reality to give readers an experience unavailable off the page: the opportunity to enter fully into other people’s thoughts and feelings.”
