Category: Books

Read Donald Barthelme’s Story “Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning”

BibliokleptLeave a comment

K at His Desk

He is neither abrupt with nor excessively kind to associates. Or he is both abrupt and kind. The telephone is, for him, a whip, a lash, but also a conduit for soothing words, a sink into which he can hurl gallons of syrup if it comes to that. He reads quickly, scratching brief comments (“Yes,” “No”) in corners of the paper. He slouches in the leather chair, looking about him with a slightly irritated air for new visitors, new difficulties. He spends his time sending and receiving messengers. “I spend my time sending and receiving messengers,” he says. “Some of these messages are important. Others are not.”

Described by Secretaries

A: “Quite frankly I think he forgets a lot of things. But the things he forgets are those which are inessential. I even think he might forget deliberately, to leave his mind free. He has the ability to get rid of unimportant details. And he does.” B: “Once when I was sick, I hadn’t heard from him, and I thought he had forgotten me. You know usually your boss will send flowers or something like that. I was in the hospital, and I was mighty blue. I was in a room with another girl, and her boss hadn’t sent her anything either. Then suddenly the door opened and there he was with the biggest bunch of yellow tulips I’d ever seen in my life. And the other girl’s boss was with him, and he had tulips too. They were standing there with all those tulips, smiling. ”

Behind the Bar

At a crowded party, he wanders behind the bar to make himself a Scotch and water. His hand is on the bottle of Scotch, his glass is waiting. The bartender, a small man in a beige uniform with gilt buttons, politely asks K. to return to the other side, the guests’ side, of the bar. “You let one behind here, they all be behind here,” the bartender says.

Read the rest of Donald Barthelme’s short story “Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning.”

 

The Newspaper — William Russell Flint

BibliokleptLeave a comment

russellflint-newspaper

The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013 (Book Acquired, Sometime Last Week)

Biblioklept2 Comments

20130914-084712.jpg

Here are the table of contents for the 2013 O. Henry Prize Stories:

Your Duck Is My Duck, by DEBORAH EISENBERG
Sugarcane, by DEREK PALACIO
The Summer People, by KELLY LINK
Leaving Maverley, by ALICE MUNRO
White Carnations, by POLLY ROSENWAIKE
Sail, by TASH AW
Anecdotes, by ANN BEATTIE
Lay My Head, by L. ANNETTE BINDER
He Knew, by DONALD ANTRIM
The Visitor, by ASAKO SERIZAWA
Where Do You Go? by SAMAR FARAH FITZGERALD
Aphrodisiac, by RUTH PRAWER JHABVALA
Two Opinions, by JOAN SILBER
They Find the Drowned, by MELINDA MOUSTAKIS
The Mexican, by GEORGE MCCORMICK
Tiger, by NALINI JONES
Pérou, by LILY TUCK
Sinkhole, by JAMIE QUATRO
The History of Girls, by AYŞE PAPATYA BUCAK
The Particles, by ANDREA BARRETT

My favorite thing about the list is that I’ve only heard of a handful of the writers here. Read the introduction here.

Biblioklept’s Dictionary of Literary Terms

Biblioklept12 Comments

AFFECTIVE FALLACY

Avoid reading with emotions. Ignore any feelings you feel during reading—that’s not the point of literature.

BYRONIC HERO

Super-cool cool guy.

CANON

All the literature that’s fit to print. Declare it dead or meaningless or obsolete every few years. Revise as necessary.

DIARY

The private thoughts of an author, never intended for publication. Publish and disseminate widely after death.

ENLIGHTENMENT

A brief, optimistic mistake.

FRANKENSTEIN

Always point out that Frankenstein is the doctor’s name, not the monster’s. Argue that Percy Shelley’s edits were intrusive.

GOTHIC NOVEL

Wears black; smokes cloves.

HAIKU

A form of poetry grade school children are forced to write. Count the syllables.

INKHORN TERM

Linguistic aureation proliferated to adnichilate reader apperception.

JOUISSANCE

A nebulous, sticky French pun.

KITSCH

The sad process by which the consumerist trash capitalism necessitates colonizes an aesthetic perspective via defensive irony.

LIMERICK

The acme of excellence in poetry. Nantucket is a popular setting.

MEMOIR

A genre of literature often mistaken for truth by its audience.

NOVELLA

A novelist’s chance at perfection.

ORWELLIAN

A useful adjective. Misuse freely—especially if you only dimly recall the two or three things you ever read by George Orwell.

PHALLOGOCENTRISM

In the beginning there was the Word, and the Word was Phallus.

QUARTO

Bring up in any discussion of Shakespeare; watch the students’ eyes glaze over.

ROMAN A CLEF

A genre of literature often mistaken for fiction by its audience.

SOCRATIC IRONY

The tedious, drawn out process of questioning that Plato submits his characters to in order to get to his thesis.

THEME

A misunderstanding of the text in which all its words are distilled into a single cliché, guaranteeing that the text will not have to be reread.

UNCANNY

Pair with valley or X-Men.

VARIORUM

An annotated edition of a text with scholarly commentary intended to ruin any possible enjoyment on the reader’s part.

WELTANSCHAUUNG

A German word that students should use in term papers instead of “viewpoint” or “perspective.”

XANADU

Poorly received 1980 musical film about roller skating. Also the setting of a Coleridge poem.

YA

Abbreviation for “Young Adult,” a genre of books that people of all ages read and which serve as the basis for Hollywood film franchises.

ZARATHUSTRA

Dude who spake.

Cartwheel (Book Acquired, 9.10.2013)

BibliokleptLeave a comment

20130914-084658.jpg

Cartwheel is Jennifer DuBois’ follow up to last year’s hit A Partial History of Lost Causes. It’s out later this month from Random House. Their blurb:

When Lily Hayes arrives in Buenos Aires for her semester abroad, she is enchanted by everything she encounters: the colorful buildings, the street food, the handsome, elusive man next door. Her studious roommate Katy is a bit of a bore, but Lily didn’t come to Argentina to hang out with other Americans.

Five weeks later, Katy is found brutally murdered in their shared home, and Lily is the prime suspect. But who is Lily Hayes? It depends on who’s asking. As the case takes shape—revealing deceptions, secrets, and suspicious DNA—Lily appears alternately sinister and guileless through the eyes of those around her: the media, her family, the man who loves her and the man who seeks her conviction. With mordant wit and keen emotional insight, Cartwheel offers a prismatic investigation of the ways we decide what to see—and to believe—in one another and ourselves.

In Cartwheel, duBois delivers a novel of propulsive psychological suspense and rare moral nuance. No two readers will agree who Lily is and what happened to her roommate. Cartwheel will keep you guessing until the final page, and its questions about how well we really know ourselves will linger well beyond.

Four Story Ideas from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Note-Books

Biblioklept1 Comment
  1. A girl’s lover to be slain and buried in her flower-garden, and the earth levelled over him. That particular spot, which she happens to plant with some peculiar variety of flowers, produces them of admirable splendor, beauty, and perfume; and she delights, with an indescribable impulse, to wear them in her bosom, and scent her chamber with them. Thus the classic fantasy would be realized, of dead people transformed to flowers.
  2. Objects seen by a magic-lantern reversed. A street, or other location, might be presented, where there would be opportunity to bring forward all objects of worldly interest, and thus much pleasant satire might be the result.
  3. A missionary to the heathen in a great city, to describe his labors in the manner of a foreign mission.
  4. To show the effect of gratified revenge. As an instance, merely, suppose a woman sues her lover for breach of promise, and gets the money by instalments, through a long series of years. At last, when the miserable victim were utterly trodden down, the triumpher would have become a very devil of evil passions,–they having overgrown his whole nature; so that a far greater evil would have come upon himself than on his victim.

Two on the Aisle — Edward Hopper

Biblioklept1 Comment

THRILLING NARRATIVES OF MUTINY, MURDER AND PIRACY, A WEIRD SERIES OF Tales of Shipwreck and Disaster, FROM THE EARLIEST PART OF THE CENTURY TO THE PRESENT TIME, WITH ACCOUNTS OF Providential Escapes AND HEART-RENDING FATALITIES.

BibliokleptLeave a comment

Capture

Beauty and the Beast — Alan Baker

BibliokleptLeave a comment

Capture

“The conventional means of attaining the castle” (Donald Barthelme)

BibliokleptLeave a comment

80. The conventional means of attaining the castle are as follows: “The eagle dug its sharp claws into the tender flesh of the youth, but he bore the pain without a sound, and seized the bird’s two feet with his hands. The creature in terror lifted him high up into the air and began to circle the castle. The youth held on bravely. He saw the glittering palace, which by the pale rays of the moon looked like a dim lamp; and he saw the windows and balconies of the castle tower. Drawing a small knife from his belt, he cut off both the eagle’s feet. The bird rose up in the air with a yelp, and the youth dropped lightly onto a broad balcony. At the same moment a door opened, and he saw a courtyard filled with flowers and trees, and there, the beautiful enchanted princess.” (The Yellow Fairy Book)

From Donald Barthelme’s short story “The Glass Mountain” (read it here).

Cluster No. 11– John Latham

BibliokleptLeave a comment

National Day of Encouragement Reading List

Biblioklept3 Comments

Today, a dollar store calendar my grandmother gave me tells me, is National Day of Encouragement, which is totally a real thing. So here is a National Day of Encouragement Reading List, which is also totally a real thing. Much encouragement to you, citizens!

  1. King Lear, William Shakespeare
  2. Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy
  3. “Before the Law,” Franz Kafka
  4. Candide, Voltaire
  5. First Love and Other Sorrows, Harold Brodkey
  6. “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” Nathaniel Hawthorne
  7. Camp Concentration, Thomas Disch
  8. “The Lottery,” Shirley Jackson
  9. “The Raven,” Edgar Allan Poe
  10. The Awakening, Kate Chopin
  11. Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
  12. The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
  13. Correction, Thomas Bernhard
  14. Butterfly Stories, William Vollmann
  15. “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” Flannery O’Connor
  16. The Road, Cormac McCarthy
  17. 2666, Roberto Bolaño
  18. “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Edgar Allan Poe
  19. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
  20. From Hell, Alan Moore & Eddie Campbell
  21. The Flame Alphabet, Ben Marcus
  22. The Painted Bird, Jerzy Kosinski
  23. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
  24. “The Wasteland,” T.S. Eliot
  25. Hamlet, William Shakespeare
  26. The Pearl, John Steinbeck
  27. Distant Star, Roberto Bolaño
  28. Notes from Underground,  Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  29. The Yearling, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
  30. The Kindly Ones, Jonathan Littell
  31. “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” Flannery O’Connor
  32. Gargoyles, Thomas Bernhard
  33. The Plague, Albert Camus
  34. “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman
  35. Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
  36. Where the Red Fern Grows, Wilson Rawls
  37. A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
  38. “Good Old Neon,” David Foster Wallace
  39. 1984, George Orwell
  40. Nausea, Jean-Paul Sartre

Melville Underwater Camera

Biblioklept3 Comments

20130912-114628.jpg

From David Wiesner’s marvelous wordless wonder book Flotsam.

“A Note on Realism” — Robert Louis Stevenson

Biblioklept5 Comments

“A Note on Realism” by Robert Louis Stevenson

Style is the invariable mark of any master; and for the student who does not aspire so high as to be numbered with the giants, it is still the one quality in which he may improve himself at will.  Passion, wisdom, creative force, the power of mystery or colour, are allotted in the hour of birth, and can be neither learned nor simulated.  But the just and dexterous use of what qualities we have, the proportion of one part to another and to the whole, the elision of the useless, the accentuation of the important, and the preservation of a uniform character from end to end—these, which taken together constitute technical perfection, are to some degree within the reach of industry and intellectual courage.  What to put in and what to leave out; whether some particular fact be organically necessary or purely ornamental; whether, if it be purely ornamental, it may not weaken or obscure the general design; and finally, whether, if we decide to use it, we should do so grossly and notably, or in some conventional disguise: are questions of plastic style continually rearising.  And the sphinx that patrols the highways of executive art has no more unanswerable riddle to propound.

In literature (from which I must draw my instances) the great change of the past century has been effected by the admission of detail.  It was inaugurated by the romantic Scott; and at length, by the semi-romantic Balzac and his more or less wholly unromantic followers, bound like a duty on the novelist.  For some time it signified and expressed a more ample contemplation of the conditions of man’s life; but it has recently (at least in France) fallen into a merely technical and decorative stage, which it is, perhaps, still too harsh to call survival.  With a movement of alarm, the wiser or more timid begin to fall a little back from these extremities; they begin to aspire after a more naked, narrative articulation; after the succinct, the dignified, and the poetic; and as a means to this, after a general lightening of this baggage of detail.  After Scott we beheld the starveling story—once, in the hands of Voltaire, as abstract as a parable—begin to be pampered upon facts.  The introduction of these details developed a particular ability of hand; and that ability, childishly indulged, has led to the works that now amaze us on a railway journey.  A man of the unquestionable force of M. Zola spends himself on technical successes.  To afford a popular flavour and attract the mob, he adds a steady current of what I may be allowed to call the rancid.  That is exciting to the moralist; but what more particularly interests the artist is this tendency of the extreme of detail, when followed as a principle, to degenerate into merefeux-de-joie of literary tricking.  The other day even M. Daudet was to be heard babbling of audible colours and visible sounds. Continue reading ““A Note on Realism” — Robert Louis Stevenson” →

Reading the Newspaper — Fyodor Bronnikov

Biblioklept2 Comments

Five from Félix Fénéon

BibliokleptLeave a comment

ffff

“The only form of discourse” (Donald Barthelme)

BibliokleptLeave a comment

“The only form of discourse of which I approve,” Miss R. said in her dry, tense voice, “is the litany. I believe our masters and teachers as well as plain citizens should confine themselves to what can safely be said. Thus when I hear the words pewter, snake, tea, Fad #6 sherry, serviette, fenestration, crown, blue coming from the mouth of some public official, or some raw youth, I am not disappointed. Vertical organisation is also possible,” Miss R. said, “ as in

pewter

snake

tea

fad #6 sherry

serviette

fenestration

crown

blue.

I run to liquids and colours,” she said, “but you, you may run to something else, my virgin,’ my darling, my thistle, my poppet, my own. Young people,” Miss R. said, “run to more and more unpleasant combinations as they sense the nature of our society. Some people,” Miss R. said, “run to conceits or wisdom but I hold to the hard, brown, nutlike word. I might point out that there is enough aesthetic excitement here to satisfy anyone but a damned fool.” I sat in solemn silence.

From Donald Barthelme’s short story “The Indian Uprising”; read the full story.