Blurred Lines: A Reading List of Metafiction
Writing fiction often contains an element of self-hypnosis, of flying in the dark.
Teju Cole • Black Paper: Writing in a Dark Time (Berlin Family Lectures)
Book people, relax. I’m not looking to replace reading-for-pleasure with cheap AI-generated summaries. They’re hollow and void of joy. I don’t want the Spark Notes. I want the obscure excerpts hidden in Chapter 13, written in elegant prose, and eerily related to my exact stream of thought. They’re just impossible to find at the right moment. Can al... See more
Michael Dean • Margin Matchmaker
Scholars quickly set about organizing the new mental environment by clipping their favorite passages from books and assembling them into huge tomes—florilegia, bouquets of text—so that readers could sample the best parts.
Clive Thompson • Smarter Than You Think
Unlike modern readers, who follow the flow of a narrative from beginning to end, early modern Englishmen read in fits and starts and jumped from book to book. They broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks. Then they reread the copies and rearranged the patterns whi
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