About Literature: Contemporary (Free subscription) | 30/10/2009
William Golding's The Lord of the Flies illustrated edition Kelly Link's "The Wrong Grave" on Scribd.com Augusten Burroughs reads from You Better Not Cry More about Twitterature The Huffington Post's Scariest Books-Turned-Movies And the latest entrants into the E-book market Friday Endpapers originally appeared on About.com Contemporary Literature on Friday, October 30th, 2009 at 12:24:20....
donpaskini (Free subscription) | 30/10/2009
The New Statesman seems to have got even worse since its recent relaunch, with recent features like 'Barack W Bush' about how Barack Obama is like George Bush. The latest to fall victim to the Curse of the New Statesman is Dominic Sandbrook, a very well-regarded historian, who has produced a desperately bad article for them on populism and 'trial by fury'. Sandbrook's article advances the argument...
War Poetry (Free subscription) | 29/10/2009
Ō ksein', angellein Lakedaimoniois hoti tēide keimetha tois keinōn rhēmasi peithomenoi. Simonides ' famous epitaph for the dead at Thermopylae has been translated countless times. (Scroll down here for 13 versions.) William Golding, self-taught in Greek, claimed that it could only be paraphrased, and offered this prosaic attempt: 'Stranger, tell the Spartans that we behaved as they...
BOOOOOOOM! (Free subscription) | 29/10/2009
I am drooling over this new edition of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, illustrated by Sam Weber! It comes out in December.
Signalnoise.com (Free subscription) | 26/10/2009
Here are some intensely beautiful illustrations by Sam Weber for the new illustrated edition of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. Excellent compositions where each one stands alone, just look at the color palette of the first and third. Here’s a little piece written by Weber regarding the project: “Using contemporary illustration to accompany a much [...]
sunstruck (Free subscription) | 25/10/2009
Danny Archer: So you think because your intentions are good, they'll spare you, huh? Benjamin Kapanay: My heart always told me that people are inherently good. My experience suggests otherwise. But what about you, Mr. Archer? In your long career as a journalist, would you say that people are mostly good? Danny Archer: No. I'd say they're just people. Benjamin Kapanay: Exactly. It is what they do that...
Beattie's Book Blog (Free subscription) | 21/10/2009
Monday 2 November 2009 7pm William Golding: The Making of a Novelist John Carey Chaired by Claire Tomalin The Sunday Times Lecture In 1953, an editor at Faber & Faber pulled off the rejection pile the manuscript of a novel about a group of schoolboys stranded on a desert island, and their chilling descent into barbarity. Its author, William Golding , pic left, was a middle-aged provincial schoolmaster,...
Beattie's Book Blog (Free subscription) | 19/10/2009
Stop the bean-counters ruling the fiction roost How can good new writers be published when the industry is ruled by people who aren't interested in originality? Robert McCrum The Observer , Sunday 18 October 2009 Everyone's been saying that the 2009 Booker prize has been good for new fiction . That rumbling sound you can hear is the noise of a consensus forming on the high ground of British literary...
POE'S DEADLY DAUGHTERS (Free subscription) | 19/10/2009
I was looking at a list of banned books , and found myself amazed anew at the idea that anyone would feel so powerful and so right that they would take it upon themselves to attempt to control the flow of information into another person's life, another person's mind. And yet books are banned every year--books many of us consider great, important, wonderful works of literature. Consider the list below,...
The Complete Booker (Free subscription) | 18/10/2009
Rites of Passage William Golding 278 pages When Edmund Talbot leaves England on a ship bound for Australia, he begins a journal dedicated to his godfather and patron. In it he records details of daily life and detailed descriptions of the passengers and crew (many of whom are quite interesting characters). He takes pride in learning maritime vocabulary; that is, once he has overcome extreme seasickness....
Reading matters (Free subscription) | 12/10/2009
AbeBooks has recently released a list of the Top 10 Most Depressing Books nominated by readers -- and I've read 8 of them! It looks something like this: The Road by Cormac McCarthy The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy 1984 by George Orwell Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck Night by Elie Wiesel On the Beach by Neville Shute The Bluest Eye by Toni...
Ambling Along the Aqueduct (Free subscription) | 12/10/2009
I see that over at the Sci-fi Wire , Paul Di Filippo is asking Why does the jury that awards the Nobel Prize for Literature hate us? By "us," I mean, of course, hardcore writers and partisans of fantastika, people unafraid and unashamed to boldly identify themselves primarily with the genres of science fiction, fantasy and horror, rather than with mainstream, mimetic literature. I think I...
30-something (Free subscription) | 10/10/2009
For the primal beast that lies inside each and every one of us. "Inspired by William Golding's Lord of the Flies, as well as by Akira Kurosawa's samurai films and the comic book epic-ness of things like Conan, Beastmaster, etc. Mostly, inspiration came from the Japanese taiko drumming group Kodo ."
Inexplicable DeVice (Free subscription) | 08/10/2009
Remember I said I was going on holiday? Well, I went. And read some books! These are them: Trillions , by Nicholas Fisk This childrens - or, young adult, I should say - story, is a surprisingly chilling tale. In a small town, a peculiar rain of tiny, multi-faceted, toroidal o bjects fall. Millions of them. Billions. Trillions! Within hours, they have fallen all over the world. Initially, they appear...
over the cliff, onto the rocks. (Free subscription) | 08/10/2009
Friendly bet, lazily monitored, you got it.Two years? We can make it easier than that [maybe; if they close my library it could take me a couple of years]. Of the top 100 books of all time, only 42 have been banned or challenged [I was a tad confused in my earlier post], which means we can cross Rand and Wolfe [and a host of others] off the list without even batting an eye.The Revised Listbold =
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