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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.
With college-age women’s childhood stars growing up and posting half-naked photos to Twitter or blowing off rehab, female role models are hard to come by. Young women sometimes turn to literature for guidance, yet experts warn these readers to consider the time and circumstance when choosing literary females to emulate. Writer Ella Ceron, Fordham University graduate and Thought Catalog contributor, says The Great Gatsby’s Daisy Buchanan should not be admired as the flighty, flirty object of men’s affections that author F. Scott Fitzgerald portrays — but it isn’t Daisy’s fault. “It’s not that Daisy’s a bad role model, necessarily,” Ceron says. “She’s a girl of her times and circumstance.”
Advocate.com
Op-ed: Gay Fiction Is Everybody's Fiction If gay people are part of the human experience, then why are mainstream publishers and straight readers so quick to keep gay characters in the closet?
Nashville Scene
Kevin Powers, author of The Yellow Birds, discusses the delicate art of writing about war Even though I experienced things that are in the same ballpark as the events in the book, the events themselves are imagined. I tried to create enough space in the book for readers to imagine themselves into it.
Publishers Seek Next College-Age Bestseller
Uloop News A new genre of literature - New Adult Fiction - needs college-aged authors to tell its stories, and publishers such as HarperCollins are looking to give those authors voices. Not to be mistaken as a euphemism for Young Adult (YA) fiction such as “The Hunger Games,” New Adult Fiction is a growing genre featuring college-aged protagonists who face struggles more realistic and engaging than those of high schoolers.
Storied Legacy: Children's Author Earns Ph.D. in Childhood Studies, Tenure ... Even as an undergraduate student, Lara Saguisag was busy rereading Alice and Wonderland while her classmates were studying Shakespeare. It wasn’t long before she too was capturing children’s imaginations, authoring the books Children of Two Seasons: Poems for Young People and Cat Eyes in her native Philippines. As she enjoyed literary success, Saguisag increasingly sought to understand children’s literature on a more fundamental level. Consequently, after earning master’s degrees from Hollins University and The New School, she enrolled at Rutgers–Camden in 2007 as a member of the inaugural class of the new Ph.D. in childhood studies program.
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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.”
She's a successful law professor and a Sunday school teacher, with a host of family and friends. But her interpersonal calculus centers on how to manipulate and outmaneuver the many people in her life.
Boston Globe
The Werewolf Novel as Post-9/11 Political Allegory? It’s a tricky thing to address pressing issues of the day in fiction without making prose do the work of preaching. In his new novel, Red Moon, the talented Benjamin Percy has taken on an ambitious project—a werewolf novel as political allegory—and he deftly negotiates the delicate balance of crafting both commentary and a compelling literary creation.
Chris J. Rudge, from Sydney, writes about literature, drugs, science-fiction, computers, language and philosophy. ...
A contemporary novel worth reading
Glens Falls Post-Star (blog) Generally, I avoid contemporary novels as lightweight and annoyingly self-conscious, but Richard Ford has changed my perspective. I just read "Canada," his latest book, and am about 10 pages away from finishing "Independence Day," his 1996 novel, which is the middle book of a trilogy starring the same character, Frank Bascombe. Bascombe starts as a sportswriter in the first book of the trilogy, "The Sportswriter," then, after traumatic personal events, takes some time off and transforms himself into a real estate agent. His immersion in the minutia and the psychology of real estate is wonderfully entertaining. The book isn't perfect -- the climactic event, which happens during a trip with his 15-year-old son -- doesn't quite ring true, but any good book will have flaws. Ford's humor is wonderful, and his descriptions of American roads and malls and housing developments and neighborhoods take on a weight of significance -- this is where we live our lives, and it reflects who we are.
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