50 Incredibly Tough Books for Extreme Readers. The 13 greatest opening lines from novels of the 1950s. There are many things that make us read the first page of a book. It can be an author’s reputation, a favourable review, a recommendation by a trusted friend or a breathtaking cover. Yet all these pale into insignificance compared against the importance of a wonderful opening line. A book, of course, won’t stand or fall on the very first line of prose, but a really good first line can do so much to establish that crucial sense of voice. It’s the first thing that acquaints the reader, which makes them eager and enlists them for the long haul. So there’s incredible power in it, when it says, Come in here. You want to know about this and someone does just that. It should come as no surprising then that writers and readers alike are so fascinated by the art of the opening line. A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.
There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. Unmapped. The Phylogeny of Little Red Riding Hood. Researchers have long been fascinated by the strong continuities evident in the oral traditions associated with different cultures. According to the ‘historic-geographic’ school, it is possible to classify similar tales into “international types” and trace them back to their original archetypes. However, critics argue that folktale traditions are fundamentally fluid, and that most international types are artificial constructs.
Here, these issues are addressed using phylogenetic methods that were originally developed to reconstruct evolutionary relationships among biological species, and which have been recently applied to a range of cultural phenomena. The study focuses on one of the most debated international types in the literature: ATU 333, ‘Little Red Riding Hood’. A number of variants of ATU 333 have been recorded in European oral traditions, and it has been suggested that the group may include tales from other regions, including Africa and East Asia. Figures Editor: R. S Comprehensive Guide to Modern Literary Movements | Qwiklit. Sylvia Plath’s Unseen Drawings, Edited by Her Daughter and Illuminated in Her Private Letters. By Maria Popova “It gives me such a sense of peace to draw; more than prayer, walks, anything. I can close myself completely in the line, lose myself in it.” Sylvia Plath — beloved poet, lover of the world, repressed “addict of experience”, steamy romancer, editorial party girl — was among that small and special coterie of creators with surprising semi-secret talents in a medium radically different from that of their primary cultural acclaim.
Though her strikingly deft sketches and drawings have been previously exhibited, they are now collected with more depth and breadth in Sylvia Plath: Drawings (public library) — an enthralling portfolio of pen-and-ink illustrations amidst a context of the poet’s letters and diary entries, edited by the poet’s daughter, Frieda Hughes, for whom Plath wrote her two little-known and lovely children’s books. I’ve discovered my deepest source of inspiration, which is art: the art of the primitives like Henri Rousseau, Gauguin, Paul Klee, and De Chirico. The Trauma of Memory and the Shattering of Time in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse–Five and Chris Marker’s La Jetée | The Culture Counter. Journalist Jeffrey R.
Di Leo once asked Kurt Vonnegut about the situation of the world at that time, the mid-eighties. His question was not long and difficult, but infused all the urgency of the time into one sentence: “Where’s it all headed, Mr. Vonnegut?” He asked. Vonnegut replied, “The world’s on the brink of a nuclear war and the only thing preventing it from happening is an alcoholic president staring down his last beer in an otherwise empty refrigerator.” This mix of humour combined with a deep sense of reality can be seen as typically Vonnegut. . . Slaughterhouse-Five was published in the late 1960’s, a decade where the cold war was heating up fast and the race to outer space between the Soviet Union and the United States was reaching its climax. Monica Loeb devoted an entire chapter to time in her book Vonnegut’s Duty-Dance with Death: Theme and Structure in Slaughterhouse-Five.
By Virginia Woolf. Kurt Vonnegut “A siren went off, scaring the hell out of him. Chris Marker. The Power of History. Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago reviewed. Boris Pasternak's 'Doctor Zhivago' Should Inspire Reverence September 8, 1958 On this day in 1958, Boris Pasternak won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Six days later, he refused to accept it, stating in a telegram: "Considering the meaning this award has been given in the society to which I belong, I must reject this undeserved prize which has been presented to me. Please do not receive my voluntary rejection with displeasure. " Below is Irving Howe's review of Pasternak's masterwork, Doctor Zhivago, the novel that surely inspired the Nobel committee to bestow such an honor upon him.
Doctor Zhivago, the novel which climaxes the career of the Russian poet Boris Pasternak, is a major work of fiction; but it is also—and for the moment, perhaps more important—a historic utterance. The book comes to us in extraordinary circumstances. Doctor Zhivago opens in the first years of the century, spans the revolution, civil war and terror of the thirties, and ends with an epilogue in the mid-1940s. A Tale of Two Lolitas. By 1955, the writing careers of Vladimir Nabokov and Dorothy Parker were headed in opposite directions. Parker’s was in a deep slump. The New Yorker—a magazine she had been instrumental in founding—had not published her fiction in fourteen years. Nabokov, by contrast, was becoming a literary sensation. The New Yorker had published several of his short stories as well as chapters of his autobiography Conclusive Evidence and of his novel Pnin.
His next novel, Lolita, would bring him worldwide recognition for its virtuosic prose and the shocking story of a middle-aged man’s relationship with his pubescent stepdaughter and her aggressive mother. It was a manuscript that Nabokov circulated very little because he feared the controversy that would erupt when it was published. Nabokov had initially discussed his forthcoming book with his editor at The New Yorker, Katharine White, in 1953. White responded, sounding irked: “I don’t think that Vladimir need worry at all about sending me his book. The FBI files on being and nothingness. I was leafing through some FBI files on French philosophers when a new candidate for occupancy of the populous Grassy Knoll in Dallas leapt out at me.
To the massed ranks of the CIA, the Mafia, the KGB, Castro, Hoover, and LBJ, we can now add: Jean-Paul Sartre. FBI and State Department reports of the 1960s had drawn attention to Sartre’s membership of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, of which Lee Harvey Oswald was also a member. And—prophetically? —Sartre had “dismissed the US as a headless nation.” But subsequent references in the main Oswald file showed that the FBI, although generally perturbed by the “Leftist tendencies” of Sartre, and his association with Communists, Castro, and Bertrand Russell, were specifically concerned that he was now—in addition to protesting against US involvement in Vietnam—threatening to “take an active part in the French Who Killed Kennedy Committee” (according to an article in the Washington Post of 14th June 1964).
Sartre expected to be spied on. The Modern Library's Top 100 Nonfiction Books of the Century. A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings. A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings by Gabriel Garcia Marquez Translated by Gregory Rabassa On the third day of rain they had killed so many crabs inside the house that Pelayo had to cross his drenched courtyard and throw them into the sea, because the newborn child had a temperature all night and they thought it was due to the stench. The world had been sad since Tuesday. Sea and sky were a single ash-gray thing and the sands of the beach, which on March nights glimmered like powdered light, had become a stew of mud and rotten shellfish.
The light was so weak at noon that when Pelayo was coming back to the house after throwing away the crabs, it was hard for him to see what it was that was moving and groaning in the rear of the courtyard. Frightened by that nightmare, Pelayo ran to get Elisenda, his wife, who was putting compresses on the sick child, and he took her to the rear of the courtyard. “He’s an angel,” she told them. Father Gonzaga arrived before , alarmed at the strange news.
11 Literary Classics You Can Download for Free. Who needs new books? In this week’s issue of the magazine, our critics show us what’s in their personal collections of old culture, much of it you might’ve missed. All of it is available online, somewhere. Herewith, Kathryn Schulz’s list of the 11 lesser-known literary classics you can download for free. 1. The Last Man by Mary Shelley, 1826 An apocalyptic novel by Ms. Frankenstein herself, in which a 21st-century civilization—oh, yes—self-destructs in the face of an outbreak of plague. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. Eight Massive Online Troves of Great Reading MaterialThanks to digitization, readers can access literary material we could never have gotten our hands on in the past—because it was expensive, rare, remote, uncollected, impossible to find, or because of a literal prohibition against putting one’s hands on them. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.
Poetry. UGLY (poem) - Warsan Shire - United Kingdom. Listen! Beowulf opening line misinterpreted for 200 years - News - Books. Yet for more than two centuries “hwæt” has been misrepresented as an attention-grabbing latter-day “yo!” Designed to capture the interest of its intended Anglo-Saxon audience urging them to sit down and listen up to the exploits of the heroic monster-slayer Beowulf. According to an academic at the University of Manchester, however, the accepted definition of the opening line of the epic poem – including the most recent translation by the late Seamus Heaney - has been subtly wide of the mark.
In a new paper, Dr George Walkden argues that the use of the interrogative pronoun “hwæt” (rhymes with cat) means the first line is not a standalone command but informs the wider exclamatory nature of the sentence which was written by an unknown poet between 1,200 and 1,300 years ago. According to the historical linguist, rather than reading: “Listen! We have heard of the might of the kings” the Old English of “Hwæt! Since then it has variously been translated as “What ho!” “Hear me!”