Feel free to discuss old books, new books, good books, bad books...

Short story of the week:
"Guest of the Nation" by Frank O'Connor
Read it online, discuss it here, smoke if you got 'em

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Jack Kerouac’s Hand-Drawn Map of the Hitchhiking Trip Narrated in On the Road

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The Prince of Patchin Place

quote:
Now remembered largely for his funky punctuation, E. E. Cummings was for decades one of America’s most celebrated, controversial, and popular poets—the dashing, impecunious prince of Greenwich Village. In an adaptation from her new biography of Cummings, Susan Cheever recalls one winter night in 1958 when the Harris Tweed-clad modernist, a longtime friend and mentor to her novelist father, rocked her teenage world.

Buffalo Bill's

Buffalo Bill's

defunct

who used to

ride a watersmooth-silver

stallion

and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat

Jesus

he was a handsome man

and what i want to know is

how do you like your blueeyed boy

Mister Death

-- e e cummings

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Russian 'kills friend in argument over whether poetry or prose is better'

quote:
Investigators say drunken literary dispute led to 53-year-old former teacher, who preferred poetry, killing friend with knife

The killing came four months after an argument over the theories of the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant ended in a man being shot in a grocery store in southern Russia

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Don DeLillo: The Word, The Image and The Gun (BBC-TV Omnibus, 1991) -- Fascinating documentary even if you're unfamiliar with DeLillo, especially if you are interested in the JFK assassination.

“Isolation, solitude, secret plotting. A novel is a secret a writer may keep for years before he lets it out of his room. Writers in hiding, writers in prison. Sometimes their secrets turn out to be dangerous to the state machine. For most writers in the West of course this danger is extremely remote. The cells we live in are strictly personal constructions.”

quote:
Don DeLillo (born November 20, 1936) is an American writer of novels, short stories, plays and essays. His works have covered subjects as diverse as television, nuclear war, sports, the complexities of language, performance art, the Cold War, mathematics, the advent of the digital age, and global terrorism. Initially a well-regarded cult writer, the publication in 1985 of White Noise brought him widespread recognition, and was followed in 1988 by Libra, a bestseller. DeLillo has twice been a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist (for Mao II in 1992 and for Underworld in 1998), won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Mao II in 1992.

DeLillo has described his fiction as being concerned with "living in dangerous times", and in a 2005 interview declared, "Writers must oppose systems. It's important to write against power, corporations, the state, and the whole system of consumption and of debilitating entertainments ... I think writers, by nature, must oppose things, oppose whatever power tries to impose on us." -- Wikipedia

Don DeLillo interviewed by the Paris Review

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Charlie Chaplin's only novel published for the first time

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Texas

Here too. Here as at the other

Edge of the hemisphere, an endless plain

Where a man’s cry dies a lonely death.

Here too the Indian, the lasso, the wild horse.

Here too the bird that never shows itself,

That sings for the memory of one evening

Over the rumblings of history

Here too the mystic alphabet of stars

Leading my pen over the page to names

Not swept aside in the continual

Labyrinth of Days: San Jacinto

And that other Thermopylae, the Alamo.

Here too, the never understood

Anxious, and brief affair that is life.

-- Jorge Louis Borges

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Previous meetings of the society:

10-16

11-11

11-25

12-9

12-16

1-7

1-20

"There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag; and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty; and vice versa. Don't read a book out of its right time for you." -- Doris Lessing

London bookstore after an air raid, 1940: