"The unifying theme is resilience and faith. The unifying theme is being a warrior and a motherfucker. It’s not fragility. It’s strength. It’s nerve … Writing is hard for every last one of us—straight white men included. Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig."
—
All I want to do is lay under the covers reading this book forever.
"One of the chief pleasures of a book is mental solitude, that deep, quiet focus on an author’s thoughts—and your own."
—Clive Thompson, 2009 (via swellcontent)
3. Anthony Doerr ‘The River Nemunas’: Why he’s not better known is a mystery to me. The Shell Collector was an amazing collection back in 2002 and this year’s Memory Wall tends to leave one speechless. This tale of an orphaned American girl and her poodle moving to Lithuania and trying to catch a legendary fish with her grandfather was my favourite, but only because the title story was on my list last year.
2. T.C. Boyle ‘The Wreck of the Beverly B’: The other standout from McSweeney’s 34, prolific short story writer Boyle pulls a Jack London with this tale of a beleaguered woman who is the sole survivor of a boat accident. Unreal. Boyle captures the lives of others like no one else.
1. Tea Obreht ‘The Space Elephant’: There should be an acute accent over the ‘e’ in ‘Tea’, the youngest writer on the New Yorker 20 under 40 list, who makes my list two years running. In 2009 she had the best story in The Atlantic fiction issue and this year has the best in Zoetrope (Volume 14 No.3). An imaginary (or not?) creature helps a man paint surreal murals all over a coastal town. Get it. Read it. Obreht is a once-in-a-generation talent, I suspect. Her novel The Tiger’s Wife comes out next year and early word is that it’s a meteor that will knock the Earth off its axis.
(Source: flythefalcon.blogspot.com)
LOVE Joan Didion. Such a rock star.
Joan Didion and her 1969 Yellow Corvette Stingray
(via tulletulle)
Lignin, the stuff that prevents all trees from adopting the weeping habit, is a polymer made up of units that are closely related to vanillin. When made into paper and stored for years, it breaks down and smells good. Which is how divine providence has arranged for secondhand bookstores to smell like good quality vanilla absolute, subliminally stoking a hunger for knowledge in all of us.
Perfumes: The Guide (via)
(via downlo)
Hemingway and one of his many, many cats, which he prized for their emotional honesty.
His story “Cat in the Rain,” a favorite in high school English classes, is about — of course — a failing, emotionally barren marriage.
