Brother Capek

@paul_jkrause Matthew McIntosh

The short story is a great art to teach writing, it is also wonderful fun just to read. Who is the most recent author you've read short stories from? Me: Edgar Allan Poe.

@Kulambq I always liked Rabbit Angstrom.

What are some of your favorite literary character names? Here are a few of mine: Ebenezer Scrooge, Huckleberry Finn, Queequeg, Ishmael, Ignatius J. Reilly, Nathan Zuckerman, Kilgore Trout, Wackford Squeers, Mr. Pumblechook, Othello, Leopold Bloom, George Follansbee Babbitt, Christopher Tietjens, Prospero, Dogberry, Bardolph (the perfect cat/dog name, by the bye), Quentin Compson, Thomas Sutpen, John Joel Glanton, Anton Chigurh, Falstaff, Gracchus, and many others.

@Therewillbbooks We don’t stand for Richard Ford hatred here (hate on the rest if you want, Powers more than Russo if I can make a recommendation).

I have trouble with the lit fic Richards. Richard Powers, Richard Ford, Richard Price, and Richard Russo. Don't ask me which one wrote Nobody's Fool, but I know it was one of them.

@DepartureJay Wtf is this. Is her other stuff worth reading? Because I’m very discouraged after this.

Picked up Your Name Here again. This stuff is just so unbelievably bad.

@PYeerk But how I miss the girl And I'd go a million times around the world just to say She had been mine for a day

Some men do

@PiousArtist I’m not particularly enthralled with the first two that I’ve read (Mornin Star & Wolves) either. Unclear if I would feel the same had I not loved My Struggle so much and I’m just comparing too much. But I’m sure I’ll end up reading them all either way.

Finished this today. Probably the least interesting book of the series. «The Wolves of Eternity» was OK. Too long, but had its moments. Didn’t need the story of the father and his Russian mistress to be a whole book. Surprisingly flat compared to «The School of Night.»

@misterminsoo I don’t get it, is this an attempt to “get the young kids readin’ again” sort of thing? Dots don’t connect for me there…

foreword by mj lenderman is killing me

@paul_jkrause “Larry’s such a liar — he tells outrageous lies…” (I kid).

What is the most famous opening line in poetry?

@AdamOPrice There’s more discourse about the discourse than anyone trying to write something of their own. We are in a commentator’s world now.

It feels like an index of how little is happening in literature these of days that people are big mad about Ben Lerner’s new book getting a good review

@tinndfishmonger Kind of undeniable at this point to say anything other than “yes, poetry is dead”. And that’s fine I guess. No poet has had any real cultural impact since like Shel Silverstein lol (he’s great!). Especially not people like Amanda Gorman and Rupi Kaur, or Lerner-as-a-poet. Oh well

I say this as someone who otherwise likes Lerner

I think that American letters are in a dire state, and that it is unproductive to stubbornly insist that the novel or poem matters solely on its existence, but on the other hand, this brand of fatalist cynicism is just as annoying, unproductive, very Reddit

@leeartr I’m pretty ambivalent about his work; good not great maybe? But saying this in an interview is begging to be *taken seriously*. Screams “I’m important! I promise!” I get the impression that most truly great writers are apathetic about their audience taking them *seriously*.

Ben Lerner: It's not a fucking beach read. Takes the book to the beach anyways: It's a fucking beach read.

@philiptraylen “We’re asking the sentence to behave like a butler, which comes from the newspaper model” is one of the most retarded ideas I’ve heard in my life. Maybe widespread literacy was not the best idea if it results in people like this becoming world famous and “respected”.

impressed by the people who know full well that Ocean Vuong can't really speak English but pretend otherwise, probably about a million such people, wonder what their plan is, quite intriguing

@churrascooooo A bad drink cooler, and a worse chip selection.

my corner store has the worst selection of items in the city from top to bottom, its truly appalling but i gotta roll with them because they're the home team, it is what it is

@andysmokesmid Repulsive writer and I wholeheartedly agree. The likes of him and Rupi Kaur, and all the like, not only not worthy of admiration, but deserving of disdain.

Low hanging fruit but he actually may be the biggest fraud in human history

@PiousArtist There are leagues of literature to read that have existed before 2000 and the advent of technology-complemented writing (~20 year buffer). Johan Nilsen Nagel you KNOW this. But I’m required, spiritually, to tell anyone who come across this post. Ylajali!

Whenever I read sentences like «It’s not just repression. It’s unconscious manifestation.» or something like that, I immediately stop reading. I intuitively know it’s AI. And even if it’s actually written by a human, it’s so evidently AI inspired it makes me throw up a little.

@Miskatonian__ This guy is retweeting articles from “The Hill” and posting about RFK pedo conspiracies. Not to be taken seriously. And thats before even addressing the asinine opinion (yes, some opinions are so bad they can be WRONG) about Dostoevsky.

“There is no literary public in England for anything except newspapers, primers, and encyclopaedias.” Oscar Wilde

“Dandelion Wine is nothing if it is not the boy-hid-in-the-man playing in the fields of the Lord on the green grass of other Augusts in the midst of starting to grow up, grow old, and sense darkness waiting under the trees to seed the blood.” Ray Bradbury

@Drhr90 @DeepVellum On the to-be-read pile!

Whoa Nelly, what a fantastic example of the creative art of translation from the ⁦@DeepVellum⁩ imprint. One of the many words I loved is “needcessities.” Yessiree Bob!

@Kulambq Agreed about the uncertainty. Though I worry about the opposite - the taking over by those who don’t or can’t read / write. I work with many of the sort. “I can’t figure out how to say XXX” and so they put it into AI to form their own “thoughts”. Very concerning.

I am not sure about the future belonging to the readers. Alas! But peace of mind and the cultivation within oneself of a repository of beautiful ideas surely belong to those who read deeply. That, perhaps, is the best one can hope for amid the tempestuous currents of our times.

@PincherMartin8 No modern “popular”writer has a background or life worth reading about. Upper middle class, MFA, big-city-living, we know the story. It’s more an indictment on the art of writing, or the business of publishing, than it is on the legacy of artist biographies.

How quickly the literary biography has died as a serious genre. When I was in school in the 1980s, a new biography of, say, F. Scott Fitzgerald or Ernest Hemingway or Charles Dickens would attract the kind of critical attention - and sometimes even sales - that today I can only compare to the most acclaimed presidential biographies. Richard Ellmann's biographies on James Joyce in 1959 and Oscar Wilde in 1989, as well as Leon Edel's multi-volume work on Henry James (1953-1972), were all so highly regarded that the biographers' names (if perhaps not their faces) were as well-known to the reading public in the 1970s and 1980s as Robert Caro is today. Ellmann's biography on Joyce is considered by some to be among the best nonfiction works of the 20th century. More than twenty years after its publication, I could still find its revised and expanded edition featured prominently in bookstores. Even the historian David Herbert Donald left his bailiwick of the Civil War in the mid-1980s to write a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of the novelist Thomas Wolfe that the literary critic Harold Bloom lavished with praise. No one thought it strange that a historian would go from writing about Charles Sumner to a novelist of the Twenties and Thirties because... well, because novelists were still considered important and worthy of a scholar's attention. When Donald's biography received its Pulitzer in 1988, the other two finalists that year were a biography on Hemingway and another on the philosopher (and novelist) Santayana. Nowadays it is the rare literary biography that gets critical attention which doesn't focus on women or minority writers. Last year, for example, one of the finalists for the Pulitzer was the biography THE WORLD SHE EDITED: KATHARINE S. WHITE AT THE NEW YORKER by Amy Reading. We're a long way from Joyce and James or even Fitzgerald. Perhaps this is punishment for the patriarchy making them read biographies of Maxwell Perkins and Harold Ross when they were in school. Other finalists since 2020 are: SONTAG: HER LIFE AND WORK by Benjamin Moser (winner); PARISIAN LIVES: SAMUEL BECKETT, SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR AND ME by Deirdre Bair (the 'ME' in that title); RED COMET: THE SHORT LIFE AND BLAZING ART OF SYLVIA PLATH by Heather Clark; PESSOA: A BIOGRAPHY by Richard Zenith about a highly important Portuguese poet I've never read; and Tracy Daugherty's LARRY MCMURTRY: A LIFE. Of those six books, only the last two are of any interest to me - the biography on Pessoa, because I had never heard of him before and yet he seemed genuinely interesting when I did read up on him, and the work on McMurtry.