Michele Filgate
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“Reading can be a refuge from other people.”
Artist-in-residence Flash Rosenberg’s artistic expression of the words of psychoanalyst Adam Phillips.
So true.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hoban, Russell.
Turtle diary / by Russell Hoban ; introduction by Ed Park.
pages cm. — (New York Review Books classics)
ISBN 978-1-59017-646-7 (pbk.)
1. Bookstores—Employees—Fiction. 2. Women authors—Fiction. 3. Turtles—Fiction. 4. Zoo animals—England—London—Fiction. 5. Psychological fiction. I. Park, Ed, 1970– II. Title.
PS3558.O336T87 2013
813’.54—dc23
2012045910It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes it seems like the Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication department really knows what will make us pick up a book.
(This post inspired by Michele Filgate and Liberty Hardy, whose love of books set in bookstores we share.)
It’s true! I’m kind of obsessed with books that are set in bookstores, books about books, and books about writers.
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“Another explanation is that we were raised up from chemosynthetic life in the deep ocean to become photosynthetic life at the top. Having ascended from the eternal night we cannot stop ourselves from heading toward the light. We are moths in the thrall of the sun and the stars, shedding off darkness. That is our instinct, but our conscious nature is also to be drawn to the unknown. We want to know what is behind the wood, what the next valley looks like, and the valley beyond that. We want to know what is in the sky and what is behind the sky. These have been our obsessions since our beginnings, yet the curiosity does not extend to the ocean. We forget there is so much darkness in our world, and to be out on a beach is to be lucky.” — from SUBMERGENCE by J.M. Ledgard -
“Having asked then of man and of bird and the insects, for fish, men tell us, who have lived in green caves, solitary for years to hear them speak, never, never say, and so perhaps know what life is—having asked them all and grown no wiser, but only older and colder (for did we not pray once in a way to wrap up in a book something so hard, so rare, one could swear it was life’s meaning?) back we must go and say straight out to the reader who waits a tiptoe to hear what life is—Alas, we don’t know.” — from ORLANDO by Virginia Woolf -
“The poet’s then in the highest office of all, she continued. His words reach where others fall short. A silly song of Shakespeare’s has done more for the poor and the wicked than all the preachers and philanthropists in the world. No time, no devotion, can be too great, therefore, which makes the vehicle of our message less distorting. We must shape our words till they are the thinnest integument for our thoughts. Thoughts are divine.” — from ORLANDO by Virginia Woolf -
“A student asked Donald Barthelme how he might become a better writer. Barthelme advised him to read through the whole history of philosophy from the pre-Socratics up through the modern-day thinkers. The student wondered how he could possibly do this. ‘You’re probably wasting time on things like eating and sleeping,’ Barthelme said. ‘Cease that, and read all of philosophy and all of literature.’ Also art, he amended. Also politics.” — from DEPT. OF SPECULATION by Jenny Offill -
We’ve decided that our staff artist @perilouspaper is certifiably insane and probably a little masochistic too - but you really should still visit our garden.
AC (@perilouspaper) isn’t insane, but she IS insanely talented.
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“But it was true that most of those early forays were eminently forgettable, and Giroux was not in the habit of doing forgettable books. ‘The most sobering of all publishing lessons,’ he had once said, is that ‘a great book is often ahead of its time, and the trick is how to keep it afloat until the times catch up with it.’” — from HOTHOUSE by Boris Kachka -
“A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image…” — from the essay “In the Islands” from THE WHITE ALBUM by Joan Didion -
Franklin Park didn’t have the Bulls game on, but that was okay because they had a stacked bill of readers in the house.
(1) Karen Russell reads her short story, “The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis” (2) Karen chats up fellow author Fiona Maazel w/ Roxane in the background (3) Leigh Newman (4) Tin House editor-at-large, Elissa Schappell (5) Leigh Newman reads from “Still Point North” (6) Roxane Gay reads her review of the movie Battleship (7) Roxane and Lauren Cerand (8) Michael Heald reads from “Goodbye To The Nervous Apprehension”
That’s the back of my head in the second photograph. I had so much fun listening to some of my favorite writers at last night’s Franklin Park reading. Major props to Penina Roth for running one of the best reading series in NYC!
(via luxlotus)
