A loin-clothed homage to Aboriginal peoples backfires. By ERIC FELTEN Wall Street Journal OPINION: DE GUSTIBUS JANUARY 28, 2010, 7:55 P.M. ET, wsj.com Russian figure-skaters Oksana Domnina and Maxim Shabalin, who have been favorites to win gold medals at next month’s Vancouver Olympics, thought they had found an admirably multicultural theme for their ice-dancing routine—an [...]
Archive for the ‘Short Prose’ Category
On Thin Ice: Two Russians Skate Off the Reservation
Posted in Short Prose, tagged Article on January 29, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Why the Fetish About Footnotes?
Posted in Short Prose, tagged Articles on January 29, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
In the world of academe, Web clicking would be too easy. By MARK BAUERLEIN Wall Street Journal OPINION: TASTE JANUARY 28, 2010, 7:38 P.M. ET, wsj.com Is there a college graduate alive who doesn’t react to the words “footnotes” and “bibliography” with at least a small shiver of lingering dread? But while the citations, the [...]
The Meaning of No Meaning :: Jennie Yabroff
Posted in Short Prose, tagged Article on January 25, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
By Jennie Yabroff | NEWSWEEK Published Jan 15, 2010 [From the magazine issue dated Jan 25, 2010] Joshua Ferris’s first novel, Then We Came to the End, a comic look at work culture during economic upheaval, was a bestselling National Book Award finalist that propelled Ferris into Next Great American Novelist territory. So when you hear [...]
Preface (excerpt) to Poems from the Book of Hours
Posted in Short Prose, tagged Quotes on January 10, 2010 | 1 Comment »
[T]he monk who is the imaginary author of the poems is represented as an adherent of the peculiar faith that Rilke ascribed to his spiritual kinsmen, a faith in a God remote from the august if benign Father of western Christianity, a God, rather, who is waiting to be born of the artist’s alert and [...]
The death of Virginia Woolf
Posted in Quotes, Short Prose, tagged Quotes on December 9, 2009 | 1 Comment »
She hurries from the house, wearing a coat too heavy for the weather. It is 1941. Another war has begun. She has left a note for Leonard, and another for Vanessa. She walks purposefully toward the river, certain of what she’ll do, but even now she is almost distracted by the sight of the downs, [...]
Gods :: Vladimir Nabokov
Posted in Short Prose, tagged Short Story on October 28, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Here is what I see in your eyes right now: rainy night, narrow street, streetlamps gliding away into the distance. The water runs down the drainpipes from steeply sloping roofs. Under the snake’s-mouth of each pipe stands a green-hooped bucket. Rows of buckets line the black walls on either side of the street. I watch [...]
Modern Fiction :: Virginia Woolf
Posted in Short Prose, tagged essay on September 21, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
In making any survey, even the freest and loosest, of modern fiction, it is difficult not to take it for granted that the modern practice of the art is somehow an improvement upon the old. With their simple tools and primitive materials, it might be said, Fielding did well and Jane Austen even better, but [...]
Beatles: Rock Band; Impressive Review
Posted in Music, Short Prose, tagged Article, New York Times on September 6, 2009 | 1 Comment »
By SETH SCHIESEL Published: September 1, 2009 THERE may be no better way to bait a baby boomer than to be anything less than totally reverential about the Beatles. So the news that the lads from Liverpool were taking fresh form in a video game (a video game!) called The Beatles: Rock Band struck some [...]
Cities of the Red Night :: William S. Burroughs
Posted in Short Prose, tagged Chapter, Short Story on August 25, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
The Cities of the Red Night were six in number: Tamaghis, Ba’dan, Yass-Waddah, Waghdas, Naufana, and Ghadis. These cities were located in an area roughly corresponding to the Gobi Desert, a hundred thousand years ago. At that time the desert was dotted with large oases and traversed by a river which emptied into the Caspian [...]
“I am the size of what I see!”
Posted in Quotes, Short Prose, tagged Quotes on August 16, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
109 [3.24.1930] Receiving what I felt to be an inspiration and a liberation, I passively reread those simple verses by Caeiro, his natural account of the results of the small size of his village. He says that because his village is small, it’s possible to see more of the world from it than from a [...]
Good Readers and Good Writers :: Vladimir Nabokov
Posted in Short Prose, tagged Lectures on Literature, Vladimir Nabokov on August 9, 2009 | 1 Comment »
My course, among other things, is a kind of detective investigation of the mystery of literary structures. . . . The following is Nabokov’s introduction to his Lectures on Literature, a series of lectures he gave covering Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Robert Luis Stevenson’s “The Strange Case [...]
The novelist is all of us, and we narrate when we see, because seeing is as complex as everything else
Posted in Quotes, Short Prose, tagged Quotes on August 9, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
276 Literature — art wed to thought, attained without the stain of reality — seems to me to be the goal toward which every human effort ought to strive, if that effort were really human and not an animal superfluity. I think that to say a thing is to retain its virtue and throw out [...]
streetlights * burning * down
Posted in Quotes, Short Prose, tagged Quotes on July 30, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
73 [n.d.; 1929?] The clock over there in the back, in the house deserted because everyone is asleep, slowly drops the clear, quadruple sound of four o’clock in the morning. I haven’t gone to sleep yet, nor do I expect to sleep. Unless something catches my attention, in which case I will not sleep, or [...]
Politics and the English Language :: George Orwell
Posted in Short Prose, tagged essay on July 23, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language — so the argument runs — must inevitably share in the general collapse. [...]
The Stranger-God
Posted in Quotes, Short Prose, tagged Quotes on July 23, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
That night he had a terrible dream, if dream is the right word for a bodily and mental experience which did indeed overtake him during deepest sleep, in complete independence of his will and with complete sensuous vividness, but with no perception of himself as present and moving about in any space external to the [...]
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