My younger self had read Orwell’s “On Shooting an Elephant” (when maybe 11 or 12?)- and it did not make much of an impression at the time. Re-read the story last night. Wow, is all I could muster.
As an aside, “The Literature Network” has some great stuff, which I hope remains in the public domain.
Tag: Literature
Need more reasons to read? Or just some recommendations? [Article]
Leo Babauta has a few suggestions, as well as a link to this Quartz article about a study which concludes that folks who read literary fiction are more empathetic.
“I get lost in worlds wholly created by an author, imagined but containing truths about life, incisively commenting about life, reproducing it in beautiful new ways, putting me in the mind of another human being, grabbing my heart and dragging it through the thrill of falling in love or the dull numbness of divorce or the fear of being found out, giving me the power of flight or omniscience or magic, confessing about guilty deeds and crimes and affairs, taking me into richly re-imagined periods of history, helping me time travel and space travel and regular travel into new lands, showing me how other people live in helplessness, in slavery, in squalor, in power and luxury, in prostitution and presidency, making the mundane seem magical and the magical seem possible.”
The value of reading literary fiction over popular fiction [Article]
Research shows that reading literary fiction is more valuable in improving empathy.
Popular fiction tends to be focused on plot, says Emanuele Castano, professor of psychology, and the characters are rather stereotypical. “You open a book of what we call popular fiction and you know from the get-go who is going to be the good guy and the bad guy.” Literary fiction, in contrast, focuses on the psychology and inner life of the characters. And importantly, characters in literary fiction are left somewhat incomplete. Readers have to watch what they do and infer what they are thinking and feeling.
“An opera of breasts”: But I really did love putting the stories in Playboy! [Article]
Amy Grace Loyd was hired to be the literary editor of Playboy magazine – ” Saul Bellow, Nabokov, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Ursula Le Guin, Joyce Carol Oates – all were repeat contributors to Playboy” (no I didn’t know that either!). She writes about her experience in this neatly written article.
Hefner may be an anachronism to many, but he’s also an iconoclast of a distinctly American variety. My time there made me a better editor, probably a better and certainly a more resilient person; and even when I knew I had no place there anymore, as the editorial direction changed and the New York offices and then, only a few years later, the Chicago offices closed, I didn’t regret a day of it. I still don’t. I was able to do things there as an editor that I’ll never be able to do anywhere else.