Change is the principal feature of our age and literature should explore how people deal with it.
– David Brin
Tag: literature
Quotable 248
Words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.
– Cyril Connolly
Quotable 187
The attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and often, paradoxically, it is literature that suffers for it.
– Vaclav Havel
Pen to Paper: YA, It’s Good Literature
I’ve begun scoping out the Young Adult section of my favorite area library. No one has asked if I have a learning disability, or if I’m getting a book for my child, or whether I’m a pervert trolling for youngsters; libraries are polite places. But if someone ever did clear a questioning throat, I always have a ready response: This is where the cool stuff is happening in books today.
YA librarian Gretchen Kolderup explains her involvement – both professional and personal – with YA literature. She gives us a good feel for what YA lit is and isn’t, and how it differs from adult literature. This point stands out for me: “YA lit has a freshness that I really enjoy, and it rarely gets bogged down in its own self-importance.”
Pen to Paper: On Being Well-Read
What does it mean to be well-read? We who write have more than a passing interest in reading. We read to fuel our own thoughts and works, and we want others to read us. My idea of someone who is well-read is a person who can quote extensively and lovingly from my stories.
But seriously, folks…
Quotable 40
Great literature must spring from an upheaval in the author’s soul. If that upheaval is not present then it must come from the works of any other author which happens to be handy and easily adapted.
– Robert Benchley
Pen to Paper: Pulling Twain’s Fangs
“But the truth is, that when a Library expels a book of mine and leaves an unexpurgated Bible lying around where unprotected youth and age can get hold of it, the deep unconscious irony of it delights me and doesn’t anger me.”
— Samuel L. Clemens, letter to Mrs. F. G. Whitmore, February 7, 1907
You’ve seen the story by now: a book publisher is bringing out a sanitized version of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Nigger Jim will be Slave Jim; Injun Joe will be Indian Joe. I’ll be surprised if they’ve left Huck’s (and Twain’s) greatest line alone rather than change it to, “All right, then, I’ll go to heck.”
Quotable 31
Listen. All great literature is about what a bummer it is to be a human being: Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, The Red Badge of Courage, the Iliad and the Odyssey, Crime and Punishment, the Bible and The Charge of the Light Brigade.
– Kurt Vonnegut