In 1980, Julio Cortázar gave a series of lectures at Berkeley, which you can now read in the slim, simply-titled volume Literature Class. Among the highlights? This sentence: “I had lived with a complete feeling of familiarity with the fantastic because it seemed as acceptable to me, as possible and as real, as the fact of eating soup at eight o’clock in the evening.”
Fantastisch
Some Links
E-paper continues to get press. The New York Times talks up the technology’s potential for newspapers. See also: The digital future of the book.MetaxuCafe is covering the Pen World Voices Festival.Sara Gran, much praised for her book Dope and her blog has a new edition of her book, Come Closer, coming out.
●
●
Not Sure
Are people losing interest in fiction that “offers more questions than answers?” In her book Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, Jane Smiley suggested that modern readers have little taste for uncertainty. At The Rumpus, Rob Roberge asks how much this contributes to popular disinterest in literature.
●
●
Dispatches from Down Under
“With each step, I had to remind myself to touch pavement again, as if in a moment’s forgetfulness I might slip the earth’s magnetic pull and go pinwheeling over Sydney Harbor and out to sea,” our own Michael Bourne writes in his Dispatches column at The Common, “Stanley Street.”
●
●
Hope in the Dark
“Most of all, they don’t tell you that fear, to reverse a phrase from C. S. Lewis, will feel so like grief, and so you begin to mourn what you have not yet lost, because mourning prematurely is the only way to protect yourself from hope.” For Catapult, Laura Turner writes about her trio of miscarriages and the hope she lost (and found) along the way. (Turner is a 2017 Year in Reading alum).
Boo!
Spooky! The good folks over at The New York Times understand that there is only so much time left to bask in the eerie Halloween vibe, so they’ve put together this helpful list of the latest and best in horror fiction to help you find something suitably scary to read.
Huh. Who Knew?
“The Mariko Aoki phenomenon is a phenomenon consisting of the urge to defecate while visiting a bookstore. Originating in Japan, it is named for the woman who first publicized such an urge.”