Literature
Esther Eze and
Literature
In out-of-the-way places of the heart,
Where your thoughts never think to wander,
This beginning has been quietly forming,
Waiting until you were ready to emerge.
For a long time it has watched your desire,
Feeling the emptiness growing inside you,
Noticing how you willed yourself on,
Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.
It watched you play with the seduction of safety
And the gray promises that sameness whispered,
Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent,
Wondered would you always live like this.
Then the delight, when your courage kindled,
And out you stepped onto new ground,
Your eyes young again with energy and dream,
A path of plenitude opening before you.
Though your destination is not yet clear
You can trust the promise of this opening;
Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning
That is at one with your life’s desire.
Awaken your spirit to adventure;
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;
Soon you will be home in a new rhythm,
For your soul senses the world that awaits you.
— For a new beginning, John O’Donohue
Houellebecq wore his biography, professional identity, marital status, and psychiatric condition – everything modern society considers intrinsic and defining of the individual – as an amusing costume to be played with and discarded. He frees himself through his work from the straitjacket of ‘identity politics’ which placates its prisoners, like a... See more
Alexander • Poseur
The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.
To be honest, my appetite for this sort of online blowup diminishes hourly. Though I’m as prone to schadenfreude as any other media professional trying to hold onto relevance in an increasingly winner-take-all economy, there’s something about watching extremely online people have noisy meltdowns that makes me feel like I’m inhaling my own body... See more
Who Killed Creative Writing?
It’s hard to talk about “masterpieces” because the concept trades on a theory of aesthetics that is controversial when spelled out (aesthetic value realism; maybe even a kind of Platonism about beauty) and difficult to defend, but which we all nevertheless subscribe to intuitively.
The Cultural Decline of Literary Fiction
“Love becomes the deposit of the heart, analogous in all degrees to the ‘findings’ in a tomb. As in one will be charted the taken place of the body, the raiment, the utensils necessary to its other life, so in the heart of the lover will be traced, as an indelible shadow, that which he loves. In Nora’s heart lay the fossil of Robin, intaglio of her
... See more"Prose-forward,” though, goes a long way toward explaining what books are counted as literary in the real world. Not just as a term that explains what unites the surrealism of Donald Barthelme, the Kmart realism of Ann Beattie, the lush prose of Toni Morrison, and [insert infinite other examples here]. But also what genre authors are counted among... See more
Lincoln Michel • On "Prose-Forward" Writing and the Pleasures of Different Genre Conversations
She has said she is against “the self-promotion obsessively imposed by the media. This demand for self-promotion diminishes the actual work of art, whatever that art may be...” Thus, she continues to absent herself from the marketing of her work. While acknowledging her position is extreme, she maintains “that a book has to absolutely make it on... See more