Tag: Literature

One night in a Dublin street I watched an extraordinary scene – Frank O’Connor on Potential Maupassant Story

One night in a Dublin street I watched an extraordinary scene between a tramp and a prostitute whose sad little affair had broken up – his hope of a home, hers of a husband. Bit by bit she stripped off the few garments he had bought for her, threw them at his feet, and stood in the cold night air shivering. Suddenly I looked around and saw a beautiful girl who was also watching the scene and realized that she was easily the most interesting figure in the little group. On her face was a look that I can describe only as one of exaltation. Maupassant would have followed that girl to her home.

The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story
Frank O’Connor
The Lonely Voice is the definitive work of Irish non-fiction on the art of writing short fiction, and has long been held up as one of the greatest works in global literature on the short form.

Eternity is the Eve of Something – Chesterton Quote

To sum up the whole matter very simply, if Mr. McCabe asks me why I import frivolity into a discussion of the nature of man, I answer, because frivolity is a part of the nature of man. If he asks me why I introduce what he calls paradoxes into a philosophical problem, I answer, because all philosophical problems tend to become paradoxical. If he objects to my treating of life riotously, I reply that life is a riot. And I say that the Universe as I see it, at any rate, is very much more like the fireworks at the Crystal Palace than it is like his own philosophy. About the whole cosmos there is a tense and secret festivity—like preparations for Guy Fawkes’ day. Eternity is the eve of something. I never look up at the stars without feeling that they are the fires of a schoolboy’s rocket, fixed in their everlasting fall.

Heretics
Gilbert K Chesterton

Close Reading Kafka, with ChatGpt

“Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one morning. Every day at eight o’clock he was brought his breakfast by Frau Grubach, the cook, but today she did not come.”

Annotation: where description collapses into self
1. Apparent fact – but already contaminated
“Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K.”
This sounds like explanation of an external situation. But notice: No evidence. No witness. No uncertainty marker except “must”. This is not world-description. It is K.’s assumption. The world has not yet been described at all — only K.’s defensive inference.

2. Moral assertion posing as fact
“for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one morning.” Key phrase: “without having done anything wrong.” Arrest is an external event. Innocence is an internal claim. Kafka fuses them grammatically, as if innocence were observable. The “world” here is already being narrated from inside K.’s self-justifying consciousness.

3. Routine as psychological anchor
“Every day at eight o’clock he was brought his breakfast by Frau Grubach.” This is a real-world habit. But its function is psychological: K. defines reality by routine. Normalcy is his measure of legitimacy. The description is telling us how K. stabilizes his sense of self.

4. The disturbance (pure projection)
“but today she did not come.”
Objectively: someone is late.
Subjectively: A violation
A threat. A sign that order has broken. Kafka gives us no external confirmation that this matters. The importance of the event exists only in K.’s inner framework.

What we learn
About the world:
Almost nothing verifiable. Only actions stripped of motive
About Josef K.:
He equates innocence with order. He treats routine as legitimacy. He assumes accusation requires malice. He experiences authority as intrusion, not structure.

The world is opaque. The self is over-exposed.

Restaurant Manager as Revelation

His favorite was the manageress of the restaurant, a handsome blonde with a very sweet motherly smile, about thirty years old. Bergmann approved of her highly. “I have only to look at her,” he told me,” to know that she is satisfied. Deeply satisfied. Some man has made her happy. For her, there is no longer any search. She has found what we are all looking for. She understands all of us. She does not need books, or theories, or philosophy, or priests. She understands Michelangelo, Beethoven, Christ, Lenin—even Hitler. And she is afraid of nothing, nothing.… Such a woman is my religion.”

The manageress would always have a special smile for Bergmann when we came in; and, during the meal, she would walk over to our table and ask if everything was all right. “Everything is all right, my darling,” Bergmann would reply; “thanks to God, but chiefly to you. You restore our confidence in ourselves.”

I don’t know exactly what the manageress made of this, but she smiled, in an amused, kindly way. She really was very nice. “You see?” Bergmann would turn to me, after she had gone. “We understand each other perfectly.”

Prater Violet: A Novel
Christopher Isherwood

Mole Revisits Home – The Wind in the Willows, Quote from

The weary Mole also was glad to turn in without delay, and soon had his head on his pillow, in great joy and contentment. But ere he closed his eyes he let them wander round his old room, mellow in the glow of the firelight that played or rested on familiar and friendly things which had long been unconsciously a part of him, and now smilingly received him back, without rancour. He was now in just the frame of mind that the tactful Rat had quietly worked to bring about in him. He saw clearly how plain and simple—how narrow, even—it all was; but clearly, too, how much it all meant to him, and the special value of some such anchorage in one’s existence. He did not at all want to abandon the new life and its splendid spaces, to turn his back on sun and air and all they offered him and creep home and stay there; the upper world was all too strong, it called to him still, even down there, and he knew he must return to the larger stage. But it was good to think he had this to come back to, this place which was all his own, these things which were so glad to see him again and could always be counted upon for the same simple welcome.

The Wind In The Willows
Kenneth Grahame

Invisible Literatures – J.G. Ballard

Since then I’ve continued on my magpie way, and in the last 10 years have found that I read more and more, in particular the 19th- and 20th-century classics that I speed-read in my teens. Most of them are totally different from the books I remember. I have always been a voracious reader of what I call invisible literatures — scientific journals, technical manuals, pharmaceutical company brochures, think-tank internal documents, PR company position papers — part of that universe of published material to which most literate people have scarcely any access but which provides the most potent compost for the imagination. I never read my own fiction.

In compiling my list of 10 favorite books I have selected not those that I think are literature’s masterpieces, but simply those that I have read most frequently in the past five years. I strongly recommend Patrick Trevor-Roper’s “The World through Blunted Sight” to anyone interested in the influence of the eye’s physiology on the work of poets and painters. “The Black Box” consists of cockpit voice-recorder transcripts (not all involving fatal crashes), and is a remarkable tribute to the courage and stoicism of professional flight crews. My copy of the Los Angeles “Yellow Pages” I stole from the Beverly Hilton Hotel three years ago; it has been a fund of extraordinary material, as surrealist in its way as Dalí’s autobiography.

“The Day of the Locust,” Nathanael West
“Collected Short Stories,” Ernest Hemingway
“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“The Annotated Alice,” ed. Martin Gardner
“The World through Blunted Sight,” Patrick Trevor-Roper
“The Naked Lunch,” William Burroughs
“The Black Box,” ed. Malcolm MacPherson
“Los Angeles Yellow Pages”
“America,” Jean Baudrillard
“The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí,” by Dalí

J.G. Ballard: My Favorite Books
The renowned English writer reflects on the literature that shaped his imagination.
The MIT Press Reader

Excerpted from: Selected Nonfiction, 1962-2007

Best Books I Read in 2025 that Weren’t Published in 2025

Selections mine. Comments via Amazon. In order of publication date.

The Night of the Gun
David Carr
Publication Date: August 5, 2008

Amazon Best of the Month, August 2008: In his fabulously entertaining The Kid Stays in the Picture, legendary Hollywood producer Robert Evans wrote: “There are three sides to every story: yours, mine, and the truth.” David Carr’s riveting debut memoir, The Night of the Gun, takes this theory to the extreme, as the New York Times reporter embarks on a three-year fact-finding mission to revisit his harrowing past as a drug addict and discovers that the search for answers can reveal many versions of the truth. Carr acknowledges that you can’t write a my-life-as-an-addict story without the recent memoir scandals of James Frey and others weighing you down, but he regains the reader’s trust by relying on his reporting skills to conduct dozens of often uncomfortable interviews with old party buddies, cops, and ex-girlfriends and follow an endless paper trail of legal and medical records, mug shots, and rejection letters. The kaleidoscopic narrative follows Carr through failed relationships and botched jobs, in and out of rehab and all manner of unsavory places in between, with cameos from the likes of Tom Arnold, Jayson Blair, and Barbara Bush. Admittedly, it’s hard to love David Carr–sometimes you barely like the guy. How can you feel sympathy for a man who was smoking crack with his pregnant girlfriend when her water broke? But plenty of dark humor rushes through the book, and knowing that this troubled man will make it–will survive addiction, fight cancer, raise his twin girls–makes you want to stick around for the full 400-page journey. –Brad Thomas Parsons

Planet Funny
Ken Jennings
Publication Date: May 29, 2018

In his “smartly structured, soundly argued, and yes—pretty darn funny” (Booklist, starred review) Planet Funny, Ken Jennings explores this brave new comedic world and what it means—or doesn’t—to be funny in it now. Tracing the evolution of humor from the caveman days to the bawdy middle-class antics of Chaucer to Monty Python’s game-changing silliness to the fast-paced meta-humor of The Simpsons, Jennings explains how we built our humor-saturated modern age, where lots of us get our news from comedy shows and a comic figure can even be elected President of the United States purely on showmanship. “Fascinating, entertaining and—I’m being dead serious here—important” (A.J. Jacobs, author of The Year of Living Biblically), Planet Funny is a full taxonomy of what spawned and defines the modern sense of humor.

The Art of Logic in an Illogical World
Eugenia Cheng
Publication Date: September 11, 2018

In a world where fake news stories change election outcomes, has rationality become futile? In The Art of Logic in an Illogical World, Eugenia Cheng throws a lifeline to readers drowning in the illogic of contemporary life. Cheng is a mathematician, so she knows how to make an airtight argument. But even for her, logic sometimes falls prey to emotion, which is why she still fears flying and eats more cookies than she should. If a mathematician can’t be logical, what are we to do? In this book, Cheng reveals the inner workings and limitations of logic, and explains why alogic — for example, emotion — is vital to how we think and communicate. Cheng shows us how to use logic and alogic together to navigate a world awash in bigotry, mansplaining, and manipulative memes. Insightful, useful, and funny, this essential book is for anyone who wants to think more clearly.

The History of Bones
John Lurie
Publication Date: August 17, 2021

In the tornado that was downtown New York in the 1980s, John Lurie stood at the vortex. After founding the band The Lounge Lizards with his brother, Evan, in 1979, Lurie quickly became a centrifugal figure in the world of outsider artists, cutting-edge filmmakers, and cultural rebels. Now Lurie vibrantly brings to life the whole wash of 1980s New York as he developed his artistic soul over the course of the decade and came into orbit with all the prominent artists of that time and place, including Andy Warhol, Debbie Harry, Boris Policeband, and, especially, Jean-Michel Basquiat, the enigmatic prodigy who spent a year sleeping on the floor of Lurie’s East Third Street apartment.

5 Best Books of 2025

Selections mine, summary via Amazon. In order of publication date.

The Very Heart of It: New York Diaries, 1983-1994
Publication date: June 3, 2025

In 1983, Thomas Mallon was still unknown. A literature professor at Vassar College, he spent his days traveling from Manhattan to campus, reviewing books to make ends meet and searching the city for his own purpose and fulfillment. The AIDS epidemic was beginning to surge in New York City, the ever-bustling epicenter of literary culture and gay life, alive with parties, art, and sex.

Waiting for Britney Spears: A True Story, Allegedly
Publication date: June 10, 2025

America, 2003: A country at war, its shiny veneer beginning to crack. Von Dutch and The Simple Life dominate. And on the cover of every magazine, a twenty-one-year-old pop star named Britney Spears. Tracking her every move for a third-tier gossip rag in Los Angeles was an unknown young writer taking whatever job he could while pursuing his distant literary dreams. He’d instead become an eyewitness to the slow tragedy of a changing nation, represented in spirit by “the coy it-girl at the end of history.”

The Jailhouse Lawyer
Publication date: July 8, 2025

Calvin Duncan was nineteen when he was incarcerated for a 1981 New Orleans murder he didn’t commit. The victim of a wildly incompetent public defense system and a badly compromised witness, Duncan was left to rot in the waking nightmare of confinement. Armed with little education, he took matters into his own hands.

King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation
Publication date: August 5, 2025

On New Year’s Eve, 1977, on a state visit to Iran, President Jimmy Carter toasted Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, King of Kings, Light of the Aryans, Shadow of God on Earth, praising Iran as “an island of stability “ due to “your leadership and the respect and admiration and love which your people give to you.” Iran had the world’s fifth largest army and was awash in billions of dollars in oil revenues. Construction cranes dotted the skyline of its booming capital, Tehran. The regime’s feared secret police force SAVAK had crushed communist opposition, and the Shah had bought off the conservative Muslim clergy inside the country. He seemed invulnerable, and invaluable to the United States as an ally in the Cold War. Fourteen months later the Shah fled Iran into exile, forced from the throne by a volcanic religious revolution led by a fiery cleric named Ayatollah Khomeini. The ensuing hostage crisis forever damaged America’s standing in the world. How could the United States, which had one of the largest CIA stations in the world and thousands of military personnel in Iran, have been so blind?

The Uncool: A Memoir
Publication date: October 28, 2025

The long-awaited memoir by Cameron Crowe—one of America’s most iconic journalists and filmmakers—The Uncool is a joyful dispatch from a lost world, a chronicle of the real-life events that became Almost Famous, and a coming-of-age journey filled with music legends as you’ve never seen them before.

Why people talk when they’re not really talking about the thing they’re talking about. – ChatGPT on Chekhov

Uncle Vanya is one of the richest texts for understanding why people talk when they’re not really talking about the thing they’re talking about. Chekhov’s characters speak to avoid truth, ease loneliness, signal desire, maintain roles, fill silence, or relieve ache, far more than they speak to convey facts.

THE PATTERN IN UNCLE VANYA
Every major character uses talk not to convey information, but to perform one of a few deep needs:
Astrov: talks to avoid despair → identity performance
Yelena: talks to hide desire → polite deflection
Sonya: talks to console → emotional caretaking
Vanya: talks to be acknowledged → validation-seeking
Serebryakov: talks to maintain status → ego protection
Marina: talks to comfort → stable background warmth

Chekhov’s genius is that the real story always happens beneath the dialogue, in the gaps, in the evasions, in what’s being unspoken. The talk is camouflage, coping, performance — everything except direct communication.

Below is a structured breakdown, focusing on several key scenes with close paraphrases and line-level function analysis (no direct copyrighted text).

1. ASTROV’S FOREST SPEECHES — “Talking to Perform Identity / Avoid Pain”
Context: Astrov goes on long monologues about the forests, conservation, maps, logging, the future of the region. His speeches recur in Acts I and II.

Paraphrased moment: Astrov unfurls a map and launches into an impassioned lecture about deforestation. He points out patches of green, lists the acreage lost, describes the peasant’s short-sightedness. No one asked for this level of detail.

What’s really going on beneath the words:
Self-soothing: He’s talking to stabilize himself, to escape his emotional drought and existential exhaustion.
Identity armor: He wants to be the idealist doctor who cares about something enduring.
Avoidance: Talking about forests is easier than talking about burnout, alcoholism, or loneliness.
A bid for admiration: Especially in front of Yelena, his speeches are a way of saying: See me. I’m noble, thoughtful, worthy.
Deflection: By talking about trees, he avoids talking about human suffering—his own included.
Function of the speech: Not information, but existential distraction + self-mythologizing.

Youthful Reading – Pros and Cons of, Italo Calvino

The classics are those books which constitute a treasured experience for those who have read and loved them; but they remain just as rich an experience for those who reserve the chance to read them for when they are in the best condition to enjoy them.

For the fact is that the reading we do when young can often be of little value because we are impatient, cannot concentrate, lack expertise in how to read, or because we lack experience of life. This youthful reading can be (perhaps at the same time) literally formative in that it gives a form or shape to our future experiences, providing them with models, ways of dealing with them, terms of comparison, schemes for categorising them, scales of value, paradigms of beauty: all things which continue to operate in us even when we remember little or nothing about the book we read when young. When we reread the book in our maturity, we then rediscover these constants which by now form part of our inner mechanisms though we have forgotten where they came from. There is a particular potency in the work which can be forgotten in itself but which leaves its seed behind in us.

Why read the classics?
In this republished article from 1986, Italian journalist and writer Italo Calvino explains why we continue to read and love the classics

Goethe on the Regularities of Life, Being in Tune With, Saul Bellow Reference

It is a narcotic dullness. There are times when I am not even aware that there is anything wrong with this existence. But, on the other hand, there are times when I rouse myself in bewilderment and vexation, and then I think of myself as a moral casualty of the war. I have changed. Two incidents in the past week have shown me how greatly. The first can hardly be called an incident. I was leafing through Goethe’s Poetry and Life and I came upon the following phrase: “This loathing of life has both physical and moral causes. . . .” I was sufficiently stirred by this to read on. “All comfort in life is based upon a regular occurrence of external phenomena. The changes of the day and night, of the seasons, of flowers and fruits, and all other recurring pleasures that come to us, that we may and should enjoy them—these are the mainsprings of our earthly life. The more open we are to these enjoyments, the happier we are; but if these changing phenomena unfold themselves and we take no interest in them, if we are insensible to such fair solicitations, then comes on the sorest evil, the heaviest disease—we regard life as a loathsome burden. It is said of an Englishman that he hanged himself that he might no longer have to dress and undress himself every day.” I read on and on with unacccustomed feeling.

Dangling Man
Saul Bellow

Note – copy I’m reading, above.
From Myopic Books, in Chicago.
One of Atlas Obscura’s:
162 Cool, Hidden, and Unusual Things to Do in Chicago, Illinois
Thereʼs more than wind in the metropolis of the Midwest. Fascinating foods, marvelous museums, and an actual 1957 Cadillac De Ville encased in 15 cubic yards of concrete. This place has everything.

James Baldwin on Disagreement

“We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist”

James Baldwin

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— Literary Pearls (@literarypearls.bsky.social) February 21, 2025 at 9:18 AM

John Cheever – Desultory Quotes

“I know some people who are afraid to write a business letter because they will encounter and reveal themselves.”

“I was brought up in southern Massachusetts, where it was thought that mythology was a subject that we should all grasp. It was very much a part of my education. The easiest way to parse the world is through mythology.”

“These stories seem at times to be stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat.”

“Everything outside was elegant and savage and fleshy. Everything inside was slow and cool and vacant. It seemed a shame to stay inside.”

“The secret of keeping young is to read children’s books. You read the books they write for little children and you’ll keep young. You read novels, philosophy, stuff like that and it makes you feel old.”

“Like all bitter men, Flint knew less than half the story and was more interested in unloading his own peppery feelings than in learning the truth.”

“The city is full of accidental revelation, half-heard cries for help, and strangers who will tell you everything at the first suspicion of sympathy.”

https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/7464.John_Cheever?page=1

A Tip About Shakespearen Soliloquies – Roger Michell to Simon Russell Beale

While I was rehearsing for Richard III, another director, Roger Michell, gave me a tip about soliloquies. ‘When you have to speak directly to the audience,’ he said, ‘always give them a role.’ It’s a simple and brilliant idea. As an example: I said earlier that Iago lies to his audience. If that is true, then he would, presumably, think of them as a pack of gullible idiots. For Hamlet, the only people he can really trust are his friends in the audience; he believes that, whatever happens and whatever he chooses to do, they will understand him. In Richard’s case, he behaves like the leader of the gang. Any challenge that the audience might throw down – seducing a woman over the corpse of a man that he’s just killed, let’s say, or seizing the crown – he will accept. And he will triumph – to his and the gang’s delight.

A Piece of Work: Playing Shakespeare and Other Stories
Simon Russell Beale