Tag: books
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“Authenticity is exactly the same as phoniness.” – Marginal REVOLUTION
Authenticity is exactly the same as phoniness. Good writing is never authentic to the self, because a good writer needs to know that the self is fundamentally unknowable: it’s the ‘wedge-shaped core of darkness’ that Virginia Woolf saw humming beneath the surface of daily life, and definitely not anything you can write autofiction about. —…
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Jimbōchō Book Town
I visited Jimbōchō today, a neighborhood that’s home to more than 100 used bookstores. Many sell only Japanese books, but some of them have books in Englis — Read on kottke.org/26/09/jimbch-book-town
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Reading Maps – Maps & Travel Routes from Books & Films
Reading Maps plots real-world journeys from classic novels and films – Around the World in 80 Days, Heart of Darkness, James Bond, On the Road – on an interactive atlas. — Read on readingmaps.com/
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‘Am I 68? 69?’ Irvine Welsh on growing old, getting clean, bashing out his new novel – and flirting with guns | Irvine Welsh | The Guardian
“The worst part is the psychological thing. Once [drug use] is in your emotional vocabulary as your get-out – ‘I can stop feeling crap by doing this’ – you have to reorder your thinking.” View image in fullscreen Las Vegas, where Welsh’s new novel is set. Photograph: Heather Diehl/Getty Images Reordering thoughts isn’t always easy,…
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The End of Reading Is Here – The Atlantic
Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA, argues that people are losing the ability to think deeply about writing. That doesn’t mean they are forgetting how to decode individual words. Rather, they are losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis. America, in other words, isn’t illiterate. It’s postliterate. — Read on www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/08/reading-crisis-postliterate-age/687618/
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The Strange Allure of the Single-Sentence Novel | Totei – The Art Is in the Making
John Banville says the sentence is what sets us above and apart from the animals — Read on www.totei.com/story/single-sentence-novel-daniel-kraus-jon-fosse
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What major works of literature were written after age of 85? 75? 65?!
Unless an author makes a major stylistic turn later in their career, I can’t imagine any new work being favorably compared against the earlier work that established the style and sounded so fresh. On the other hand, it’s not always the first work that is considered the best. It can still take time to perfect…