10 Free eBooks For Halloween - eBookNewser. Halloween is almost here and to celebrate the spooky holiday, we’ve put together a list of 10 free eBook classics that are sure to give you a chill. All of the books are available for free download on Project Gutenberg. We’ve listed the book, author, an excerpt from the book and linked to where you can download the eBook. 1.
Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: “I saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision—I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion. Frightful must it be, for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Support your indie bookstore! - American Spring. If you’re like most readers, chances are the last time you discovered a great book by a new author it was because a friend recommended it. Maybe you read that book on an e-reader, or you picked up a used copy online or downloaded the audiobook. Maybe that’s how your friend read it as well. If so, chances are that neither of you realizes the key role independent bookstores played in helping that new favorite find its way to you.
An independent bookstore brings a lot to a city or a town: a showroom for the latest literary releases, an auditorium where authors share their work and meet their fans, a bookish environment in which to sip coffee and a fun place to browse in the 20 minutes before the movie starts. Name the last book you really loved — be it “The Help,” The Hunger Games,” “Like Water for Elephants” or “Game of Thrones.”
There are lots of reasons to support local businesses, whether it’s mom-and-pop hardware stores or neighborhood farmers’ markets. David Foster Wallace’s syllabus: Is there any better? Photo by Keith Bedford/Getty Images. Lately David Foster Wallace seems to be in the air: Is his style still influencing bloggers? Is Jeffrey Eugenides’ bandana-wearing depressed character in The Marriage Plot based on him? My own reasons for thinking about him are less high-flown. Like lots of other professors, I am just now sitting down to write the syllabus for a class next semester, and the extraordinary syllabuses of David Foster Wallace are in my head.
I am not generally into the reverential hush that seems to surround any mention of David Foster Wallace’s name by most writers of my generation or remotely proximate to it; I am not enchanted by some fundamental childlike innocence people seem to find in him. Wallace doesn’t accept the silent social contract between students and professors: He takes apart and analyzes and makes explicit, in a way that is almost painful, all of the tiny conventional unspoken agreements usually made between professors and their students. Ghostly Kirk - Home. Why American novelists don't deserve the Nobel Prize - Fiction. America wants a Nobel Prize in literature. America demands it! America doesn’t understand why those superannuated Swedes haven’t given one to an American since Toni Morrison in 1993. America wonders what they’re waiting for with Philip Roth and Thomas Pynchon.
America wonders how you say “clueless” in Swedish. OK, enough. But the literature Nobel will be announced this Thursday and if an American doesn’t win yet again, there will be the usual entitled whining — the sound of which has been especially piercing since 2008, when Nobel Academy permanent secretary Horace Engdahl deemed American fiction “too isolated, too insular” and declared Europe “the centre of the literary world.” Boy, were we upset. It’s true that the Academy, like any body of judges, has made some ill-informed decisions. That only fed the vitriol directed at Stockholm, obscuring a valid point about American letters: We’ve become an Oldsmobile in a world yearning for a Prius. That makes for a small literature, indeed. A Nobel Laureate in the Family: Newsroom.
A Nobel Laureate in the FamilyBy Alvaro Vargas Llosa | Posted: Wed. October 13, 2010Also published in Washington Post Writers Group WASHINGTON—A few days ago, I received an early-morning phone call from my father, Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa: “The secretary of the Swedish Academy has just told me that I have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 2010. They will announce it in nine minutes.” I shared my joy with him and thanked him for liberating me from a question with which I have been pestered for a couple of decades—“Why did your father not receive the Nobel Prize this year?” The driving principle of my father’s life has been that there is no shortcut to accomplishment.
He became globalized well before Latin America’s political economy did. At the time, almost everything else in Latin America pointed in the opposite direction. Another cue I hope younger readers take from my father is that being a “public intellectual” carries responsibility. Don’t give him the Nobel – he’s right-wing! ‘I am a bit angry’, said the Swedish literary critic Ulrika Milles during Swedish television’s broadcast of the announcement of the Nobel Prize in literature for 2010. It took the country’s cultural elite just seconds to realise that a mistake had been made in the Swedish Academy’s voting process: you see, Mario Vargas Llosa, the winner, is no longer a socialist. ‘I lost him when he became a neo-liberal’, complained Milles.
Many others echoed her. People who never voiced any concerns about the politics of other Nobel Prize winners – like Wisława Szymborska, who wrote poetic celebrations of Lenin and Stalin; Günter Grass, who praised Cuba’s dictatorship; Harold Pinter, who supported Slobodan Milošević; José Saramago, who purged anti-Stalinists from the revolutionary newspaper he edited – thought that the Swedish Academy had finally crossed a line. Mario Vargas Llosa’s politics apparently should have disqualified him from any prize considerations.
Article continues after advertisement. Book Review: Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead. 50 Most Famous & Impressive Debut Novels of All Time - Learn-gasm. Esquire – The magazine for men who mean business. If it's funny you want on your holiday reading list, you're in the right place. We asked a panel of authors and comedians to pick the world's wittiest tomes. Here's the first batch: 1 Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth (1969) Portnoy’s Complaint is the Derek And Clive of high literature, a proper book by a proper writer in which the main character fucks a piece of liver. Roth’s key discovery – published in the same decade as British juries agonized over whether to allow the masses to read Lady Chatterley’s Lover, DH Lawrence’s pompous, semi-fascist high seriousness outpouring about sex – was that the best way to render the pain, disgust, uncertainty, anxiety, despair and terror surrounding sex was to make it funny.
(Review by David Baddiel) 3 The Moon's A Balloon by David Niven (1972)David Niven is probably best remembered for his glittering Hollywood career, his roguish, moustachioed charm, and his notably thick penis (by a chosen few at least). ‘Should I marry W.? Esquire – The magazine for men who mean business. Greatest Books Ever Written - Esquire's 75 Books Every Man Should Read. Kierkegaard: Stages on Life’s Way « All Manner of Thing.
Stages on Life’s Way (1845) Søren Kierkegaard (Princeton, 1988) 798 p. First reading. Stages on Life’s Way followed two years after the publication of Either/Or, and it is something of a sequel, reiterating, developing, and extending the first book’s argument. Either/Or had explored Kierkegaard’s “aesthetic” and “ethical” spheres of life, touching only briefly at the end on the “religious” sphere. In Stages on Life’s Way the focus shifts: all three spheres are again represented, but the greater part of the work is devoted to consideration of the religious sphere. Ultimately Kierkegaard is an advocate for the superiority of the religious sphere, but, knowing this, we must be cautious in our interpretation of this book. Stages on Life’s Way belongs to Kierkegaard’s “indirect communication”.
In these notes, I intend to give little more than an overview of the book’s main sections, of which there are four. The husband is the young lover, totally so. Related reading: Like this: Like Loading... Archive - In Their Own Words: British Novelists - Interviews with remarkable modern writers. Hawthorne Series: Science, Progress, and Human Nature. A series of critical essays accompanied by annotated stories Several of the best stories by the great American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) touch on the moral meaning of modern science. During the next two years, The New Atlantis will be publishing a series of essays devoted to Hawthorne’s stories about science, technology, and progress. With each essay, we will publish online a critical edition of the corresponding Hawthorne story. And we are pleased that each story will be accompanied by an illustration by Elliott Banfield.
To learn more about Hawthorne and our series, please read our introductory essay, “Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Spirit of Science.” A note on the critical editions: The text of the Hawthorne stories presented in this series will generally be based on the final editions published during the author’s lifetime. Five Best Books on Curmudgeons | By John Derbyshire. Fifty Books Project 2010.