We're here to nurture your love for the written word with the written word. Here you'll find the work of contemporary authors showcased, a stepping stone into historical literature, as well as writing prompts, competitions, and the opportunity to get your works out there! If you love reading and writing, this is the place for you.
Poe Visualized by Harry Clarke
From the 1919 deluxe edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination, Harry Clarke reached deep into those dark, flinching corners underneath the bed and ripped out the grotesque horrors that lurked within, creating these macabre illustrations that accompanied Poe’s disturbing classics like “The Pit and the Pendulum” and the “The Telltale Heart” perfectly. In the same vein as Stephen Gammell’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark monstrosities decades later, these illustrations are sufficient evidence that while some stories can be even more frightening when left to your imagination, it takes a truly visceral artist to give those shadows form and really scare the bejeezus out of you.
(via: fastcodesign / io9)
(via toomuchart)
- Octavia E. Butler
- L.A. Banks
- Tananarive Due
- N.K. Jemisin
- Nalo Hopkinson
- Samuel R. Delany
- Haruki Murakami
- Andrea Hairston
- Shaun Tan
- Steven Barnes
- Nisi Shawl
- Nnedi Okorafor
- Dark Matter (compilation series)
- The Carl Brandon Society (organization)
Thanks to everybody who contributed!
Feel free to reblog & add more.
“I recently spoke at a university where a student told me it was such a shame that Nigerian men were physical abusers like the father character in my novel. I told him that I had recently read a novel called American Psycho,and that it was a shame that young Americans were serial murderers.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Currently Reading: Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards by Afsaneh Najmabadi.
“Drawing from a rich array of visual and literary material from nineteenth-century Iran, this groundbreaking book rereads and rewrites the history of Iranian modernity through the lens of gender and sexuality. Peeling away notions of a rigid pre-modern Islamic gender system, Afsaneh Najmabadi provides a compelling demonstration of the centrality of gender and sexuality to the shaping of modern culture and politics in Iran and of how changes in ideas about gender and sexuality affected conceptions of beauty, love, homeland, marriage, education, and citizenship. She concludes with a provocative discussion of Iranian feminism and its role in that country’s current culture wars. In addition to providing an important new perspective on Iranian history, Najmabadi skillfully demonstrates how using gender as an analytic category can provide insight into structures of hierarchy and power and thus into the organization of politics and social life.”
(via khamoshzulfon)
Yes.
Weapon of Mass Instruction
Built from a welded frame atop a 1979 Ford Falcon, Raul Lemesoff drives around the streets of Buenos Aires distributing free books to anybody who wants to be assaulted with some serious learnin’.
(via: make / laughingsquid)
(via npr)
The suicide note. A collection of words written impulsively in a crazed frenzy, or carefully, thoughtfully agonized over, so each word fits and flows seamlessly. Highly choreographed, overly manipulated, driven by madness, or calmly articulated - it doesn’t matter. Each note is the same, each note is different - a last word leaving no room for rebuttal. Suicide notes are meant to explain, revoke sympathy, provide understanding, answer questions, or create new ones. They beg for forgiveness, confess deep, dark secrets, or attempt to hide things. Some point fingers, sharing the truth and thus setting off a spree of investigations.
Excerpts from some famous suicides:
Jules Pascin: “Lucy, Pardonnez-moi,”
Hunter S. Thompson: “Football Season is Over. No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax This won’t hurt.”
Sylvia Plath: “Please call Dr. Horder.”
Dorothy Dandridge: “In case of my death, to whomever discovers it, don’t remove anything I have on - scarf, gown or underwear. Cremate me right away. If I have anything, money, furniture, give it to my mother Ruby Dandridge. She will know what to do.
Virginia Woolf: “I feel certain that I’m going mad again. I feel we can’t go thru another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do.”
Spalding Gray: “It’s an old story you’ve heard over and over. My life is coming to an end. Everything is in my head now. My timing is off. In the last two years I’ve had at least ten therapists and all those shock treatments. Suicide is a viable alternative for me instead of going to an institution. I don’t want an audiene. I don’t want anyone to see me slip into the water.”
Wendy O. Williams: “I don’t believe that people should take their own lives without deep and thoughtful reflection over a considerable period of time.”
Clara Blandick: “I am now about to make the great adventure. I cannot endure this agonizing pain any longer. It is all over my body. Neither can I face the impending blindness. I pray the Lord my soul to take. Amen.”
James Whale: “The future is just old age and illness and pain…. I must have peace and this is the only way.”
Sid Vicious: “We made a death pact, and I have to accomplish my part of the deal. Please bury me next to my baby. Please bury me with my leather jacket, jeans and motorcycle boots. Goodbye. With love, Sid.”
Per Yngve Ohlin: “Excuse all the blood.”
(via anonsy-anonso)
Augusta Braxton Baker, librarian with The New York Public Library from 1937 to 1974, blowing out the story hour candle. Baker was a devoted storyteller who developed a groundbreaking list of stories that portrayed African Americans positively and established a collection of African American children’s literature at the New York Public Library. She became the first African American coordinator of Children’s Services at the NYPL in 1961, in charge of youth programming at all eighty-three branches. Her influence touched New York libraries, schools, community groups, the American Library Association, Sesame Street, and the works of authors like Madeleine L’Engle and Maurice Sendak. World-renowned novelist James Baldwin was one of the young men who sat in the children’s room at her first library job at the 135th St Branch.
She was born on this day, April 1st, in 1911. You can read more about her life and legacy from the New York Public Library, Wikipedia, and the University of South Carolina. Hear her interviewed and see more photographs of her at work at Speaking of History.
(via looksnbooks)
Among the current crop of writers in South Africa, Kopano Matlwa stands uniquely head and shoulders above the rest. This grounded twenty two year old author of provocative novel Coconut about black South African youths’ loss of identity in their highly Westernised nation highlights what can happen to African children when they realize that in a world that is black-and-white, life can be cruel when one is not black enough to be black but too black to be white.
Matlwa is not only the youngest European Literary Award winner to come out of South Africa but in addition, continues to manage a hectic writer’s schedule of book readings, literary fairs et al, with a full-time schedule as a medical student at University of Cape Town.
She cites Zimbabwean Tsitsi Dangarembgwa’s Nervous Conditions as one of her favourite books. (source: http://www.african-writing.com)
Lara Deeb, An Enchanted Modern:Gender and Public Piety in Shi`i Lebanon. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.
In An Enchanted Modern, Lara Deeb examines the “pious modernity” that is practiced in the southern suburbs of Beirut. For Deeb, a pious, or enchanted modern is one in which there is an emphasis on both spiritual and material progress away from what is perceived as tradition. The Enchanted Modern is an ethnographic example of a community in Lebanon that is a popular subject in public discourse about Lebanon, yet has not been given much careful and sensitive treatment in academia. Also a text that explores the workinds of non-heterodox and yet mainstream practice of Islam and resistance politics in an Arab country, An Enchanted Modern is a book that is insightfully involved in several conversations simultaneously.
Irene Gendzier, Notes on the Minefield: United States Intervention in Lebanon, 1945-1958. Boulder: Westview Press, 1993.
In Notes on the Minefield Irene Gendzier utilizes previously underused archives to write a critical and innovative account of US involvement in Lebanon post WWII. Gendzier demonstrates that the politics and infrastructures of oil and extraction informed US policies in the region during the independence period, even in countries that are not oil producing, such as Lebanon.
Theodor Hanf, Coexistence in Wartime Lebanon: Decline of a State and Rise of a Nation. London: I.B. Taurus, 1993.
Hanf’s 1993 book is nothing less than an encyclopedia of reference material and analysis for anyone thinking deeply about the Lebanese civil war, its buildup and its aftermath.
Jens Hanssen, Fin De Siecle Beirut:The Making of an Ottoman Provincial Capital. Oxford University Press, 2005.
In Fin De Siecle Beirut, Hannssen explains the Ottoman history of Beirut before “Lebanon.” This history is cirucual to understanding the background picture out of which Beirut came to be a “capital city” of a nation state.
Micheal Hudson, The Precarious Republic: Political Modernization in Lebanon. Random House, 1968.
The Precarious Republic is one of the books that many, if not most scholars of Lebanon will agree should have a place on this list. Reading it today, it is as interesting, engaging and thought provoking (although perhaps it provokes different thoughts) as it was in 1968, the year it was published.
Michael Johnson, Class and Client in Beirut: The Sunni Muslim Community and the Lebanese State, 1840-1985. London: Ithaca Press, 1986.
Johnson’s 1986 text provides a nuanced account of Lebanese politics, economics, and social structures through a study of family history in Beirut, focusing on the Sunni community. In doing so, he conveys a deep sense of a historical period (post WWII and pre-civil war) that deserves more academic attention. By doing so, Johnson develops innovative ways of thinking about the 1958 Lebanese civil war.
Akram F. Khater, Inventing Home; Emigration, Gender and the Middle Class in Lebanon 1870-1920. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
Inventing Home is a beautifully written account of turn of the century migration out of the geographic area that became “Lebanon.” Khater traces the complex ways that migration patterns and circulations produced and impacted society, economy, family structure, and politics in not only the “Lebanon,” but also places that were the recipients of large numbers of migrants, such as New York City.
Never too early to work on the summer reading list.
“Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.
“The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.
“Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.
“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”
― Arundhati Roy, War Talk
(via brandx)
