5 posts tagged ‘Literature’
Vintage travel guide accidentally becomes masterpiece of tourist horror fiction
Boing Boing,
Is Collins' Pocket Interpreters: France (1937 edition) the most pessimistic phrasebook ever published? What was meant as a practical tool for British tourists instead became an accidental masterpiece of travel anxiety literature, suggesting that a trip to France was less about seeing the Eiffel Tower and more about navigating a gauntlet of pickpockets, stalkers, and blood loss. — Read the rest The post Vintage travel guide accidentally becomes masterpiece of tourist horror fiction appeared first on Boing Boing.
Writing as Transformation
The New Yorker,
Words and phrases came from nowhere; I rarely had any sense of what they meant or to what context they belonged.
Dark sci-fi genius wrote at superhuman speed — Barry Malzberg
Could a human writer complete a readable novel in just 27 hours? Barry Malzberg, who died last week at 85, did it — and it wasn't even his most impressive achievement. In February 1969, a 29-year-old Malzberg sat down at his typewriter and churned out Diary of a Parisian Chambermaid at a pace of 60 words per minute. — Read the rest The post Dark sci-fi genius wrote at superhuman speed — Barry Malzberg appeared first on Boing Boing.
“A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” Isn’t a Feel-Good New York Story
Memorialized as the quintessential Brooklyn novel, it is really a book about leaving the borough—and escaping the poverty and brutality of immigrant New York.
When Your Own Book Gets Caught Up in the Censorship Wars
I had envisioned book bans as modern morality plays—but the reality was far more complicated.