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Category: Literary Matters

Happy Birthday, Penguin!

2005-06-08 John Winkelman

Penguin Book U.K. is celebrating their 70th anniversary. They have thrown up a cool little website with an unusual and elegant Flash interface.

I have always liked British book cover art. It seems much more free-form and playful than the American style.

Posted in Literary Matters comment on Happy Birthday, Penguin!

Current News in Books

2005-05-31 John Winkelman

I have just finished Twisty Little Passages by Nick Montfort.

I am close to the end of The Milagro Beanfield War by John Nichols.

I just purchased Gun, With Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem.

Life is good.

Posted in Literary MattersTagged reading comment on Current News in Books

Catch-22

2005-02-24 John Winkelman

Yup. I am finally reading it. Don’t know why it took me so long to get to it.

The nightmares appeared to Hungry Joe with celestial punctuality every single night he spent in the squadron throughout the whole harrowing ordeal when he was not flying combat missions and was waiting once again for the orders sending him home that never came. Impressionable men in the squadron like Dobbs and Captain Flume were so deeply disturbed by Hungry Joe’s shrieking nightmares that they began to have shrieking nightmares of their own, and the piercing obscenities they flung into the air every night from their separate places in the squadron rang against each other in the darkness romantically like the mating calls of songbirds with filthy minds.
Joseph Heller, Catch-22 .

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RIP HST

2005-02-21 John Winkelman

There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. And that, I think, was the handle – that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting – on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark – that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back. – Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas .

Hunter S. Thompson
1937 – 2005

Posted in Literary Matters comment on RIP HST

Advice on Writing

2005-01-10 John Winkelman

…from Annie Dillard. From the article: Einstein likened the generation of a new idea to a chicken’s laying an egg: «Kieks – auf einmal ist es da.» Cheep – and all at once there it is.

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Andrey Kharshak

2005-01-04 John Winkelman

Today, on a whim, I did a Google search for the ISBN of a book I picked up in Russia back in the summer of 1994. I figured that the number would be the one attribute of the book which would not need to be translated.

Lo and behold, I got a hit: Master and Margarita, written by Michael Bulgakov and illustrated by Andrey Kharshak.

So now I was curious: you can’t swing a cat on the internet without hitting a Bulgakov reference, but how about Mr. Kharshak? His illustrations are good enough that SOMEBODY must have heard of him… And here he is! Apparently Mr Kharshak is well known everywhere in the world except The United States and the Internet. I should do something about that…

Manuscripts Don't Burn Manuscripts Don’t Burn

Golgotha Golgotha

These are prints of works by Mr. Kharshak which I picked up while in Russia. They are reproduced in Master and Margarita, along with at least two dozen other illustrations.

And for your convenience here is a link to the English version of Master and Margarita (translated by Pevear and Volokhonsky). It is, as they say, a Ripping Good Yarn.

Posted in Literary MattersTagged Master and Margarita, Russian literature comment on Andrey Kharshak

Readerly Stuff

2004-11-16 John Winkelman

Finished reading Outwitting History over the weekend. If you get the chance, I highly recommend picking it up. Especially if you are any kind of lover of books.

One of the first books I bought upon being hired at the bookstore many years ago was Writers At Work, a collection of interviews with writers, which were first published in the Paris Review. Now PR has put up on line, for free, all 300+ interviews in the Writers At Work series, each available for download as PDF.

Posted in Literary Matters comment on Readerly Stuff

Now What Do I Do?

2004-10-25 John Winkelman

I have just now finished reading The System of the World, the third volume in Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle . 886 pages in a little over 30 days. I guess I had some free time, after all.

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Slashdot gets Eccesignum-ed

2004-10-20 John Winkelman

Briefly, an interview with Neal Stephenson, author of Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, et.al, over on Slashdot. The reader comments are every bit as entertaining as Stephenson’s answers to the interview questions.

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Go Read Something Else

2004-09-28 John Winkelman

Over the weekend I picked up an issue of NFG Magazine, published in Toronto, showcasing Edgy Writing. A lot of small, independent magazines (and a great many literary journals) tend to be full of writers who miss the forest for the trees, writing technically proficient but boring stories. NFGs stories seem to suffer less from this trend than most, perhaps partly because they have a section called 69 which contains dozens of 69-word stories, aimed at readers with “attention spans of less than 22 seconds”, and partly because, well, the Writing tends to be Edgy.

A writer would have to be amazingly accomplished to become boring in 69 words.

Normally this is the kind of thing I would read in the bookstore, spill coffee on it, and put it back in the magazine rack. I bought this one because it contained an interview with an author whose work I started reading over twenty years ago: Michael Moorcock . When I joined the Science Fiction Book Club back in 1984 the collected Elric Saga was the first book on my list, sight unseen and words unread. I devoured the entire thing in a long July weekend of adolescent obsessive/compulsive behavior, and spent the rest of the summer wishing I was a thin, red-eyed albino with a vampiric sword.

From there I moved on to the chronicles of Corum, and a few random stories about the Eternal Champion. All in all, probably about a dozen of Moorcocks’ 60-plus books.

Now I see that he has a website: Moorcock’s Weekly Miscellany . It is not updated all that often, but it is well-done and contains a wealth of information on a writer who doesn’t get as much attention as he deserves.

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