Showing posts with label Cats. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cats. Show all posts

Friday, December 12, 2008

There Was No Way I Wasn't Going to Post This


But in other more serious news, there's a new literary magazine being born and it is called Kitty Snacks.

Also, here's a discussion of David Foster Wallace's unpublished undergrad thesis in which he deconstructs Fatalism, at least Fatalism as proposed by one Richard Taylor (not WETA Richard Taylor mind you, but a fatalistic Richard Taylor with far more bees and far less ability to conjure Orcs and Oliphaunts). It turns out that fatalist Richard Taylor was an internationally known bee collector.

Listen and watch an audio slide-show of writers' rooms.

Read about James Wood's angled modifiers( such as "royal fatalism"), his unfortunate bias towards realism, and why it'd be nice if critics sometimes criticized in the old ways of Edmund Wilson or Elizabeth Hardwick, i.e., thought about the worldly and human context of literature instead of "treat[ing] the novelistic canon like one giant Keatsian urn, a self-sufficient aesthetic artifact removed from commerce with the dirty, human world."

If you ever wondered what would happen if Buffy Summers met Edward from Twilight, now you can find out. [via Shaken & Stirred]

Have a sparkly weekend, readers.

Sunday, September 28, 2008

Banned Books Week


Reading Neil Gaiman's journal, one learns many interesting things about cats and Maddys and graveyards, plus the occasional interesting thing about books, such as that this week is Banned Books Week. Every year the ALA celebrates our freedom to read by reminding us of those small pockets of resistance still carrying on in their noble, hopefully futile, quest to rid the world of children's books with too many wizards, adult books with too many racisms, or books of any sort with homosexual penguins.

The ten most frequently challenged authors of 2007 according to the ALA:

1) Robert Cormier
2) Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson
3) Mark Twain
4) Toni Morrison
5) Philip Pullman
6) Kevin Henkes
7) Lois Lowry
8) Chris Crutcher
9) Lauren Myracle
10) Joann Sfar

Do your part readers, go to your local library or bookstore and pick up a book THEY don't want you to read. Do it for your country, for your soul, and for that little devil on your shoulder that looks remarkably like a young Mark Twain.