Showing posts tagged lit
“
You asked if I thought my fiction had changed anything in the culture and the answer is no. Sure, there’s been some scandal, but people are scandalized all the time; it’s a way of life for them. It doesn’t mean a thing. If you ask if I want my fiction to change anything in the culture, the answer is still no. What I want is to possess my readers while they are reading my book—if I can, to possess them in ways that other writers don’t. Then let them return, just as they were, to a world where everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt, and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise, to have set loose in them the consciousness that’s otherwise conditioned and hemmed in by all that isn’t fiction. This is something that every child, smitten by books, understands immediately, though it’s not at all a childish idea about the importance of reading.

Philip Roth, The Paris Review (via lexi-gold)

This interview was published in 1984 - feels about right to point to it on this week of thinking about children and how they consume books. 

(Reblogged from lexi-gold)
6 days left on the Kickstarter page.  The LA Times wrote a post today about the new Recommended Reading Kickstarter from Electric Literature:  The quarterly journal Electric Literature, which publishes simultaneously in print, ebook, iPhone and Kindle form, is always up for trying something new. It regularly invites animators to create short videos of single sentences from its stories, like the one above. And way back in 2009, it published a short story in tweets by Rick Moody on Twitter, an experiment that was only partially creatively successful but that earned it an important literary place in the Twittersphere. What does a quarterly do with 150,000 followers in the long months between publication? Editor Benjamin Samuel decided curation is the thing. Hence, Recommended Reading. It’s a project that will publish one fiction story per week, with selections being made by a variety of readers who are in the know: an independent press, a writer, the kind folks at Electric Literature, and another literary journal. That’s one month, then the cycle starts again. The project went up on Kickstarter in April and swiftly reached its $10,000 goal (aided in part by a donor perk of a really cool flask). The organizers now hope to raise double that goal, and have about $3,500 and less than a week to go. Samuel explained what to expect from Recommended Reading, via email.  View high resolution

6 days left on the Kickstarter page. 

The LA Times wrote a post today about the new Recommended Reading Kickstarter from Electric Literature:

 The quarterly journal Electric Literature, which publishes simultaneously in print, ebook, iPhone and Kindle form, is always up for trying something new. It regularly invites animators to create short videos of single sentences from its stories, like the one above. And way back in 2009, it published a short story in tweets by Rick Moody on Twitter, an experiment that was only partially creatively successful but that earned it an important literary place in the Twittersphere. What does a quarterly do with 150,000 followers in the long months between publication? Editor Benjamin Samuel decided curation is the thing.

Hence, Recommended Reading. It’s a project that will publish one fiction story per week, with selections being made by a variety of readers who are in the know: an independent press, a writer, the kind folks at Electric Literature, and another literary journal. That’s one month, then the cycle starts again.

The project went up on Kickstarter in April and swiftly reached its $10,000 goal (aided in part by a donor perk of a really cool flask). The organizers now hope to raise double that goal, and have about $3,500 and less than a week to go. Samuel explained what to expect from Recommended Reading, via email. 

theparisreview: Something Out of Something: Talking with Etgar Keret

theparisreview:

Something Out of Something: Talking with Etgar Keret

(Reblogged from theparisreview)

“For me writing is a place of ultimate freedom,” Keret said. “When I write I don’t have any idea what I’m writing. It’s like trust falls—couples go to counseling and do those trust falls. I close my eyes and fall back and I hope the story will catch me, and when it works, what comes out is me.”

For those of us with aspirations of becoming famous enough that our work might one day be translated, this method is a bit overwhelming. It hinges on one’s natural abilities and doesn’t bode well for what can be learned in class rooms. But that’s his point. We all need to let loose a little and just write. Englander was as much in awe as Keret’s fans despite his own success as a short story writer, novelist, and playwright.

“The stories I love most are the ones I can’t understand why they’re working for me, but when I finish I’m filled with such a deep and beautiful sadness, or belief, or love,” Englander said of Keret’s work. “The rules in his works are impeccable; the emotions are real. It’s almost like hyperrealism to me. You can see yourself in the character, just maybe in another dimension.”

“In Case You Missed It: For Etgar Keret Writing is like Trust Falls,” Gapers Block Book Club, April 27, 2012.  
Tonight! View high resolution

Tonight!

“Where did the future go?” was the question we asked at Lift10. For those who regret the absence of flying cars, immersive virtual reality and humanoid robots, the Lift 12 talk by James Bridle is definitely a good way to cheer up. Simply because this is about how to go beyond the nostalgia for yesterday’s tomorrows.

Entitled “WE FELL IN LOVE IN A CODED SPACE”, it deals with the technologically-enabled novelty in the world and the new aesthetic trope. What James referred to with this term is the kind of representations you get when artifacts in the physical are produced for robots and computers: the ability to see through satellites with Google Earth, the pervasive presence of robot-readable content (think about QR codes!) or the massive presence of spambots on social media. More specifically, the talk focused on the evolution of literature and storytelling when everything has become digital, the construction of knowledge and collaborating with robots!

People interested in this topic should also read what long-time Lifter Bruce Sterling wrote about it recently in this thought-provoking essay.

- LIFT Conference blog post.

Listening to an argot and identity assertion in this talk by James Bridle reminds me of Salman Rushie talking about linguistics and Bombay and writing an argot when I interviewed him at the Miami Book Fair in 2008 (starts about 24:00 in). 

Link: James Bridle’s The New Aesthetic Tumblr. 

Keret, born in 1967, has often been distinguished from Israeli writers of the previous generation by virtue of his whimsy. But his concerns are different, as well. While Amos Oz and David Grossman wrestle with the moral quandaries of the emergent Jewish state, and Aharon Appelfeld plumbs the calamitous dislocations of Jewish history, Keret tracks the chaotic inner life of his countrymen. To him, the perils of modern Israel — the free-floating rage, the anguish of occupation, the sudden and senseless violence — are not national dramas so much as existential dilemmas.

Lovely review of Etgar Keret’s ‘Suddenly, a Knock on the Door’ in today’s New York Times Book Review. (I had the pleasure of translating some of the stories in the book.)

In ‘The Reader’ a successful novelist emerges after several years of writing to find, on his book tour, that his following has shrunk to one. Is there a comment here about our ever shortening attention spans and our appetite for instant culture, without the wait for a long and complicated novel to be produced?

For me the story is talismanic in a way. And I do believe in the idea behind it. That it would be enough of a gift ‘to find one true reader’ in this world. You better not want for more. If you’ve managed to communicate with one other human being, it really is a gift. As a child I learnt everything I know from reaching for the wrong volume of the encyclopedia.Yes, I was also thinking about the printed word in the digital age. If an art form dies out, then so be it. But I don’t think we can measure success purely on numbers, in terms of how many people chose to do something or interact with it. I recently discovered that the Encyclopedia Britannica is no longer going to be in print. As a child I learnt everything I know from reaching for the wrong volume of the encyclopedia. It worries me that they think a nine-year-old is going to care about real-time online updates. There’s something special about the book, any book, the way a person can pull it off the shelf and discover a photo of an old girlfriend tucked into the pages, a receipt, a ticket stub, a note scribbled in the margin. I’m on Twitter and Facebook and all that, and was really excited to work with Electric Literature on the e-version of the story, but, outside of all the wonderful things that come with connectivity, I’d be saddened for us to lose that relationship with books and the solitude of reading. ■

- Interview today in Granta.

Translating God and Others: An Interview with Nathan Englander

For the New Yorker podcast series, you chose to read Isaac Bashevis Singer’s story “Disguise,” about a cross-dressing yeshiva boy in old Europe, and it reminded me of some of your own stories in this way that you’re comfortable enough to say, “This is a world. It has enough inside of it.”

My aesthetic is very simple: If a piece of art isn’t universal, it’s not functioning. It’s very strange that people want to ask Jews, “I’m not Jewish. My friends aren’t Jewish. Can I read this story?” It’s like Crime and Punishment. You don’t give that to someone and say, “Oh, you’re not Russian, you’ve never killed an old woman, so I don’t think this book’s for you.” Nobody’s worried about whether you can watch Star Warswithout having been a Jedi. It’s a really strange notion that gets put very specifically on literature with lots of Jews in it, or with lots of black people, or with lots of gay people. That’s how I feel about [John] Cheever. Nobody in my family ever mixed a martini. That world is as foreign to me as a dybbuk is to someone else. And you know what, there’s no distance, I get everything. Nothing is lost on me. So yes, why would a Jewish world be less of a world, or too “other,” unless the writer has failed?

- from an interview in Heeb, April 4, 2012. 

Translating God and Others: An Interview with Nathan Englander

lazersilberstein:

“People are human. There’s this idea of dirty laundry, and poor Philip Roth—I feel like I don’t get beat up so much because he got beat up for me. People used to treat him like, “The shandah! The bushah! The things you’re putting in the world!” But to me, the point of it is, I’m building worlds. Why is the Jewish world not a whole world or a complete world? It’s a whole universe and it will contain everything. That’s how I was raised. When I grew up they didn’t say to me, “This is a half-world or a fake world.” They said, “This is your universe.” So I feel like that’s the point—I’m telling a story and everything better be in the story.”

(Reblogged from lazersilberstein)