BOOK SALON

For fans of English courtroom humour, you might enjoy "The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit" by Richard Harris.

Think Rumpole.

By the way, it's free.

Howdy! This is my first post here, so hopefully it doesn't sound too naive to the pros here and all.

I've recently finished Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and more or less fell in love with good ol Murakami - admittedly, I initially decided to buy the book simply because I found out that it had inspired the setting of another anime I used to watch.

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Since yesterday, I have published the complete works of Dashiell Hammett. Then discovered that his work is not out of copyright. So, it will not appear on the Grendel Hall Press website.

However, Philo Grubb, Correspondence School Detective, by Ellis Parker Butler, is out of copyright, has been published, and has been uploaded to the Grendel Hall Press website.

This is one of a series of "deteckativin'" books which became fashionable shortly after the advent of Sherlock Holmes and Co. A number of people, including George Barr McCutcheon (whose Anderson Barr books are delightful), decided that producing send-ups of the genre was worth their time.

I think that reading and publishing such send-ups is worth my time. I hope you do, too.

Hi there!

I just learned I've been accepted to participate in a program that brings area teachers to China for two weeks. However, I'm grossly uninformed about pretty much everything related to China. The upside is that I'm thrilled about the amount of learning that's going to take place between now and when I leave in July. The downside is that I have no clue where to start. I've run a few searches and tried poking around some sites, but I wound up overwhelmed within ten minutes.

I'm looking for readable books about anything related to China. I'd prefer nonfiction, obviously, but if there's a novel out there that gives me an accurate picture of life in China, I'd be game. These can be books about China's past, present or future.'

I recognize I cannot hope to develop a complete picture of an entire nation and culture through a few books. However, I'm looking to reduce my ignorance by whatever means necessary.

Any help you can provide would be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance.

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Any Twin Citians out there?

I’m looking for people who’d like to form a small group of writers and readers (three to five of us would be about right).  The ideal members will be people who are not just writers but really strong readers, who are adept at analyzing literature, and who can articulate in both contemporary and canonical terms what their literary sensibility is.  (I tend to prefer and have been influenced by a style that’s more Proust via Nabokov than, say, Hemingway via Carver, but I can still be responsive to writers who are cultivating a style closer to the latter.)  As a group, we’d meet several times a month to critique each other’s writing and discuss literature on a level that’s constructive and inspiring to us as writers. 

If this sounds like something you’d like to be a part of, please contact me at hsilep [at] yahoo. com.  Tell me about your literary aesthetic and what kind of writing you do. 

So, well, about me: I’ve done the MFA thing (although, in retrospect, not at a time when I could’ve gotten the most out of it), studied literature at the doctoral level, write reviews of current literary fiction and poetry, and have some experience on the inside of the small press scene.  I write fiction and prose poetry, and take absolutely to heart what Mallarmé said about it being the job of the poet to renew the language of the tribe. 

Hello,

Although I intend to do my own research, I hope that I might find a starting point by asking for recommendations in this community.

I've been keeping tabs on what I read, and have noticed that the list of authors is primarily populated by dead white males, living white males, and white women. I'm very fond of the books I read, but I'm starting to appreciate that reading work from this general group might be somewhat limiting. I'd love to read authors with different voices, who write from perspectives I'm unfamiliar with.

If possible, would you be kind enough to recommend books (non-fiction, fiction, poetry, anything that you consider worthwhile) by authors from Africa, South America, Eastern Europe, Russia, China, Japan, the Pacific and Asia? I'm interested in the well-established authors as well as work by newer authors.

Sorry for such a general question! This request covers a very broad area, I know.

Thanks in advance.

I've recently finished Kenzaburo Oe's A Personal Matter and very much enjoyed it. I have also recently enjoyed Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. I was hoping I could receive some suggestions on books with other idiosyncratic, modern narrators.
Thanks.

I am in search of good nature writing. It can be book-length or essay-length, fiction or non, contemporary or classic...I'm not fussy about the particulars. So please tell me, you literary-minded citizens of livejournal, what is the best, the most inspiring, the most interesting writing about nature that you have read? Are you a fan of Thoreau? Is Annie Dillard your cup of tea? Tell me what you like in this area; I promise I'll appreciate any suggestions you can give me.

Maybe I'm way behind the times on this, but I just discovered the University of Wisconsin Digital Collections. I found them because after I couldn't locate some poetry chapbooks I'd just gotten press releases about at Amazon, I googled the author's last name and the name of the chapbook, and pages popped up for each (for trivia purposes, they're Sharon F. McDermott's Alley Scatting and Barbara Edelman's A Girl in Water). Full text, if a bit ugly in the accessing of it-- a hyperlink to each page rather than a full scan. Still, this is about as awesome as awesome gets. If you're a poetry fan and looking for obscure, not-necessarily-brand-new stuff, this is tres cool.

Something odd and slightly unsettling is happening to me with alarming frequency during my current book read. I'm only on page seventy-three but on nearly every page so far there are paragraphs, sentences, or phrases that I think are poorly written. Well, maybe not always poorly written but certainly improvable.

I can't decide if this is simply a sign that it's not a particularly well-written book or if my eye (or ear, I hear myself in my head when I read) has improved because of my own writing efforts. Once you've agonized over getting a sentence just right, are you more apt to recognize a sentence that wasn't agonized over? I think I'm interested enough in the plot to keep going and am hoping that once I'm more deeply engaged the faults I'm finding will quietly fade away, but at this point I'm more than a little worried.

The book is Chris Bohjalian's The Double Bind. I've read two others by him that I really enjoyed- Midwives and Trans-Sister Radio. When I saw this on the buy 2 get 1 free table I grabbed it. I understand that not every book by a particular author can be as good as every other, and because I haven't re-read either of the other two I honestly don't know if it's me or the writing. It seems clunky, wordy for the sake of wordiness, explanations and descriptions that seem out of place, even the names are overused. Maybe it's so alarming because it's been ages since I read a book I didn't love or like a lot.

Don't just talk amongst yourselves... talk here. 

Xposted to:
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