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The New York Review of Books (blog) The Unanswerable Question In the same way that we cannot deliberately, faithfully construct a dream while asleep, awake we are unable to put into words the complexity of the universe. To avoid or bypass this incompetence, a literary dream, the story of a dream, must be organized differently, made to assume other objectives, appear less keen in reproducing a real dream than in fitting something called “a dream” into the logic and tone of the narrative. Perhaps the only success to which the writer can aspire in dream-telling is to make the reader believe that the characters themselves believe the dream to be a dream. It doesn’t matter if we as readers know (to use three Biblical examples) that the dreams that Joseph tells his brothers are prophetic, or that the dreams that Nebuchadnezzar tells Daniel are allegorical, or that Joseph’s dream about Mary’s pregnancy is explanatory: each of these discussions of dreams works within the narrative that contains it, is justified by it, and illuminates it.
The Guardian
Strange Bodies by Marcel Theroux – review t's a memory stick rather than a dusty manuscript that Susanna wants to share with the world, but the purpose of her preface is familiar from any number of Victorian ghost stories: it ushers the reader towards the realm of amazement while grounding a tall story in the details of daily life. Like Frankenstein, Strange Bodies is steeped in literary history even as it plays with the cutting edge of science. Fittingly so, for Nicholas Slopen, the Samuel Johnson academic whose testimony we are reading, is someone for whom books are "the centre of the world": and it's a cache of dusty letters, supposedly written by Johnson, that first draws him into the mystery. . . . Theroux harnesses the history of Russian utopianism as well as the life of Dr Johnson to the juggernaut of his plot, moving from scruffy south London to gleaming modern Moscow, mental hospital to Kazakhstan compound. Golem myths and psychoanalytic theories about doubles get rewarding new twists. The unfolding of the narrative is genuinely eerie, but the richness of allusion and elegance of design make Strange Bodies as much an inquiry into language and identity as a high-concept literary thriller.
Quick: What’s the most unforgivable sin a writer can commit in fiction? A writerly crime so awful that major, award-winning novelists are condemning it on the pages of Publishers Weekly and inveighing against it in The New Yorker? If you said lazy plotting, dull language, or cardboard-thin characters, well, shame on you. Currently, the most gauche thing a modern-day writer can do is write protagonist who is—oh, the horror—likable.
VICE 'Leviathan,' I Love You Leviathan is where documentary filmmaking can go if they aspire to art. So many forms are consumed by the television these days, to see a bunch of truckers travel over ice-covered roads or a family of hunters doing their thing and being funny to boot is de rigeur on any given night. But only as a movie—a film—takes the care to do this sort of baby work, the important minutiae. In this case it feels as majestic, or as horrible, as something out of the Bible. A document becomes an epic. This is life. Man versus nature. Man’s machines. Man’s mastery of the planet. Man’s destruction of the planet. Man’s ushering in of the apocalypse. But it is also beautiful. I used to wonder how the greatness and horror of Moby Dick might ever be recaptured on film or otherwise, chiefly because whaling is now considered among the worst environmental crimes on the planet. Well, here it is: man, mastering the seas and the world, doing horrible things, brave things, impossible things. Because we are man. We need to survive. And conquer.
Christian Science Monitor
'Bates Motel': it all goes back to a brilliant novelist named Robert Bloch Q: How does the novel "Psycho" fit into its era and the history of horror fiction?
A: Robert Bloch holds a significant place in the development of modern American horror because of the way he took H. P. Lovecraft’s style and expanded it to include a deeper investigation of human psychology. Other writers were taken with mental illness, but Bloch took things further by showing readers that monsters didn’t need to have fangs or green skin. He was fascinated by the notion that anybody, even the person next door, could be monstrous.
How bilinguals switch between languages ScienceBlog.com (blog) Individuals who learn two languages at an early age seem to switch back and forth between separate “sound systems” for each language, according to new research conducted at the University of Arizona. The research, to be published in a forthcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, addresses enduring questions in bilingual studies about how bilingual speakers hear and process sound in two different languages.
International Business Times
Those Were The Days: How Norman Lear And 'All in the Family' Permanently Changed US Television And Society “All in the Family” startled, delighted (and often outraged) audiences by its stark, realistic depiction of blue-collar life, as well as by Archie’s unrestrained, sometimes thoughtless prejudice. The show became a huge hit – perhaps the most popular program in U.S. television history – and is now accorded a lofty position in American culture shared by the likes of Mark Twain, Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams. But, at its core, the show was essentially about a loving family struggling to survive in a rapidly changing world – using such topics as race, war, sex, politics and women’s rights as a point of reference for an audience hungry for entertainment mixed with substance and innovation.
Tale has elements of Gothic, Southern and mystery genres
Times Record News Longer days and more sunlight are important if you pick up “The Darkling” by R.B. Chesterton, the pseudonym of Carolyn Haines. Be aware that “The Darkling” is a Southern Gothic tale, much darker and more sinister than Haines’ popular “Bones” mystery series set in the Mississippi Delta. Many regard Haines as one of the most fascinating female Southern authors of our day. Her novels infuse lead female characters with emotional strength and independence, often as a hard-fought and well-earned acquisition. Her “Bones” series — with Sarah Booth Delaney, Twinkie and Jitty — take a lighthearted approach to crime fighting. Others, such as “Penumbra” and “Summer of the Redeemers,” bring relationships to the forefront. Under the Chesterton pen, she delves even more into the darker side of human nature.
Times of India Harry Potter's Quidditch invented after Rowling had tiff with her boyfriend A fight that J K Rowling had with her boyfriend, in a Manchester hotel room, resulted in the idea that led to creation of the most gripping sport in 'wizarding world'.
Quidditch - the sport which is one of the most famous elements of the Harry Potter books; played using broomsticks, hoop goals and a flying ball with wings, was created by Rowling following a tiff with her then boyfriend.
Personal scribbles by Rowling in her signed, annotated first edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, containing insights into how she wrote it, will be unveiled to the world on Monday in London.
BBC News
Five things prisoners' books show about life in prison Vicky Pryce, the economist convicted of taking speeding points for disgraced cabinet minister Chris Huhne, is writing a book inspired by her time behind bars. What can people glean about life inside from books written by prisoners? Pryce's book Prisonomics will explain the economics of imprisonment. She joins a long list of people who have squeezed a book out of their experience of life inside. All have shown something about the nature of incarceration.
Telegraph.co.uk Patrick McGrath: In the shadow of Broadmoor "The criminally insane were very much a feature of my childhood,” says Patrick McGrath, from New York, where he has lived since the early Eighties writing elegantly airless novels that teem with madness and threat. Frequently hailed as the best contemporary inheritor of the Gothic tradition, McGrath has an appropriately Gothic backstory of his own; he grew up in the shadow of Broadmoor hospital, where his father worked as a forensic psychiatrist. “He treated people who’d drowned their children or thrown their father under a train and so forth,” McGrath says, “and I grew up with these stories. So when I started writing, my imagination was well stocked with the destructive aspect of human nature that arises out of mental illness.”
Yorkshire Post
Thriller that delves into the dark side of fairytales Her [Alison Littlewood’s] second book Path of Needles was published last week and is a compelling read, focusing on a series of murders which, from the gruesome way in which the victims’ bodies are posed, appear to have a connection with fairytales. A young police officer, Cate Corbin, is part of the investigating team and on a hunch she calls in academic Alice Hyland, an expert in fairytales, to assist them on the case. The book was, in part, inspired by Littlewood’s own fascination with folk tales, myth and legend. “I was thinking about the fairytales I had loved as a child,” she says. “Then I started to think about some of the dark and gruesome things in fairytales that you maybe don’t really notice or understand as a child – and I thought ‘what if those things happened in the real world?’” She began by researching the different variants that exist of fairytales we have all heard of and think we know. “I did quite a lot of reading, but it wasn’t a chore,” she says. “It was interesting to learn about how stories were passed on and changed.”
Ottawa Citizen Ian McEwan on why good spy novels should be considered literature “In the end these things just dissolve,” he says. “The only question is how good a novel is, not whether it has spies or detectives or nurses marrying doctors. Take Conrad — we wouldn’t say of him that he’s merely a writer of seafaring yarns. What matters is whether a novelist can devise a particular and plausible world that holds us, and make a moral universe that has such a resonance that we can go back years later and find it still works. Then genre is transcended. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy holds up because it’s a brilliant novel.”
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This book blew me away when I first read it – the complexity of the story, the flawed and damaged nature of the characters, the way it wove counter-cultural themes and crime fiction together. It felt real and urgent.
Analysis of period medical discourse, legal categories and medical technologies can enrich literary criticism in richly contextualising fictional works within medical practices. ... Our field offers textual strategies for analysing the processes by
which medical discourse, medical processes and globalised
biotechnological networks can, at times, do violence to human bodies
and minds – both of patient and practitioner. Cultural studies of
medicine analyse and unmask this violence. This special issue will
explore Gothic representations of the way medical practice controls,
classifies and torments the body in the service of healing.
The Hindu Between dreams and reality Chittala’s is an amazing career as a writer, not for its longevity, but for the single-minded creative energy with which he has made fiction-writing a complex means of exploring the mysterious and the unknowable in human life. He very frequently uses a narrative structure which grips the reader by its liberal use of the unexpected – both in terms of the incidents and of human nature.
Metro Raven Girl: Audrey Niffenegger and Wayne McGregor's dark creation The Royal Ballet has teamed best-selling US author and artist Audrey Niffenegger with British master of extreme movement. Wayne McGregor. They talk about their dark creation, Raven Girl. . . . ‘I was thinking about how in fairy tales things are always transforming: people are transformed as a punishment or a reward, or they’re stuck in between. Really, the drama in Raven Girl is about her own efforts to make herself and her body match up’ [Niffenegger]
Court Finds Fantasy Stories Obscene Techdirt Obscenity law and the First Amendment tend to run into each other from time to time and the whole "I know it when I see it" concept makes things a bit arbitrary in the best of situations. Still, it's pretty standard for people to assume questions of obscenity revolve around imagery -- still or video -- rather than written works. Text and stories often explore taboo subjects, but still are seen to have legitimate literary value. Stories like Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita involve somewhat horrifying concepts, but generally are still considered legitimate works of literature. In an age of easy creation for user-generated content, fan fiction and the like, it is not uncommon for things like slash fiction or related fan fiction to involve incredibly graphic scenes. Whether or not you see the appeal (and, personally, I don't get it at all), it's difficult to step aside and say that a particular form of storytelling should be judged as obscene and illegal. When it's purely fiction, and no one is being harmed or forced to participate and/or experience the work against their will, it is difficult to see what sort of harm has been caused. That is, perhaps, why it is "very rare" for there to be obscenity prosecutions for purely text-based works of fiction. Rare, but not unknown.
Søren K.'s Two-Hundredth Birthday New Yorker (blog) William James liked to quote Søren Kierkegaard’s famous assertion that “we live forward, but we understand backwards.” Kierkegaard, the great Danish philosopher of subjectivity, would have been two hundred years old on May 5th, and, looking back, we can see that ironic, angst-ridden modern literature begins with him. Strindberg, Ibsen, Nietzsche, Kafka, Borges, Camus, Sartre, and Wittgenstein are among his heirs—and without him, where would Woody Allen be?
The Guardian
Does Prozac help artists be creative? In his 1993 book Listening to Prozac, the psychiatrist Peter D Kramer explored the ethical issues around the rise of what he termed "cosmetic pharmacology". With a daily pill people could now banish social awkwardness or the unhappiness of relationship break-ups, forge brassily assertive personae from their once shy selves. Like the Soma of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Prozac was making people "better than well". Kramer wrote of the "personality transformations" that occurred in a substantial minority of those taking the drug, briefly pausing to speculate as to what impact this might have had on their creativity. While we know, thanks to Kay Redfield Jamison's Touched with Fire, that poets are up to 30 times more likely to suffer from bipolar disorder than the national average, we have no idea how or if the pills they take to treat the disease affect their creative output.
Houston Chronicle
Khaled Hosseini goes to heart of characters' desires
STLtoday.com Khaled Hosseini’s first novel, “The Kite Runner,” became a sensation in 2003. Hosseini, now 48, was able to stop working as a physician while writing his second novel, “A Thousand Spendid Suns.” He says he struggled with the second book, in part, because it was about two women. At some point, he decided to go “straight to character without so much concern about nailing a voice that ‘sounded’ female. I stopped worrying about gender and went right to the heart of the character’s fears and desires.”
7 Great Works of Classic Literature Turned into Video Games. classic literature is a surprisingly common source of inspiration for developers. Some of the literary games that have been produced over the years are classics in their own right, while others are... well, they tried. Check out one of the following the next time you want to add a touch of sophistication to your gaming session.
What writers see in life, language and literature
Poynter.org How do writers see? They see the way dogs smell, with special cognitive equipment and that dogged enthusiasm. Ever try to move an alert pup off an enticing scent? And what do writers see? They see experience, and they see it through the lenses of life, language and literature.
Notes toward a Pagan Theology of Fiction - Patheos Pagans widely agree that fiction has spiritual power. In their interviews of Pagans, Margot Adler (Drawing Down the Moon) and Sarah Pike (Earthly Bodies, Magical Selves) both found that Pagans often cited science fiction or fantasy as important inspirations for their spiritual life. In religious studies scholarship generally, there’s an enormous amount of material on how people have engaged novels, films, and other media for spiritual purposes (one good recent example is Invented Religions; some of my own contributions to this topic include papers on matriarchal Goddess novels, Heinlein and Starhawk, and film as religion). My take has generally focused on how fiction with a spiritual impulse has inspired real-life community practice, followed by individuals re-fictionalizing those community practices in order to better articulate and spread their religious values. As in myth, which tends to focus on spiritual or cultural truth rather than historical truth (though there may be a historical event or person at the core of the tale), Pagans often use fiction to clarify values, describe ecstatic experiences, or articulate hopes in a way that feels spiritually authentic—a purpose for which literal, historical prose accounts are not well designed.
Sci-Fi Film 'After Earth' Presents Dark Future for Humanity Space.com Although it might seem like a depressing fantasy, Whitta thinks that people are drawn to these kinds of apocalyptic movies for a reason. "It's just kind of a strangely masochistic part of human nature where we seem to enjoy fantasizing about our own destruction," Whitta said.
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