Hello, folks! Here are my reading plans for the following weeks: Library Loot: April 11 to 18 Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire from The Captive Reader and Linda from Silly Little Mischief, encouraging bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library. Here is what I got this week: Blues Legacies and Black…
A clarity which startles
It’s terrible to be in danger of writing a philosophical novel “I suppose since I’m largely influenced and interested in moral philosophy that some of the reflections about moral philosophy and about ethics may be connected with thinking about the dilemmas of my characters but this is very, very indirect. Philosophy is such a different game from writing fiction. I think it’s terrible to be in danger…
Defeating the formlessness
I’m not a philosophical novelist “I’m not a philosophical novelist. People think that because I’m a philosopher there’s a philosophical view being put across, but this is not so. I’ve got a philosophical viewpoint but I certainly don’t want to force it across in the novels, although a certain amount of one’s metaphysic in a…
A small tear in the fabric of reality
Dear Nicole, Most of the time, we tend to think of fiction as a mirror held up, facing reality. Never mind if this is a clear mirror, a cloudy or an openly distorted one – our gaze rarely changes direction. Some books, however, attempt to cross through the looking-glass: they direct our gaze away from…
Nicole Krauss
Nicole Krauss (August 18, 1974) is an American writer. Krauss majored in English at Stanford University. She has a Master’s degree in English from Oxford University and one in art history from London’s Courtauld Institute. In 2007, Krauss was named by Granta one of the best young American novelists; in 2010, The New Yorker included her on its 20…
And if you’re lost enough to find yourself
Dear Robert, Something strong and heavy built upon a void: that’s what your poem “Directive” looks like for me. You are at the heart of paradox, that’s the place where you are writing from: “a house that is no more a house, / upon a farm that is no more a farm/ and in a…
Robert Frost
Robert Frost (March 26, 1874 – January 29, 1963) was an American poet. Frost enrolled at Dartmouth College, in 1892, and later at Harvard University, from 1897 to 1899, but never earned a formal college degree. He worked as farmer and English teacher at the local school. Later, he taught English at Amherst College and at the University of Michigan, and served as…
That resistance that runs under the surface of so many great female writers’ books
To speak as a man on the page “(…) A young woman grows in the world knowing that she will have to fight for her right to authority, while around her others shrug it on without any effort at all, like a coat. An expensive coat, that buttons left to right, which is also the…
Franz Kafka is Dead
Dead “Franz Kafka is Dead He died in a tree from which he wouldn’t come down. “Come down!” they cried to him. “Come down! Come down!” Silence filled the night, and the night filled the silence, while they waited for Kafka to speak. “I can’t,” he finally said, with a note of wistfulness. “Why?” they…
What can literature do that nothing else can?
This chance to become something “I think there were many things involved, but looking back, there must have been some sense that not only was writing a chance to express myself (…) I think it was something else, I think I recognized it was a chance to create myself. To actually decide for myself, who…
Because what is a question but a voided space?
Lost in the woods “We are as forlorn as children lost in the woods. When you stand in front of me and look at me, what do you know of the griefs that are in me and what do I know of yours. And if I were to cast myself down before you and weep and tell you, what more would you know…
the flood of my affection
this silence like ova bursting in my mouth, my eyes windows shivering behind the storm just before the break I lean my face into the glass pane, something trembles in your gaze, an imperceptible gap: I go through it, my mouth full of shrapnel my chest…
