“I am here to tell you that there are people who have never been defeated. They are the ones who have never fought. They managed to avoid scars, humiliations, and feelings of helplessness, as well as those moments when even warriors doubt the existence of God. Such people can say with pride: "I have never lost a battle." On the other hand, they can never say: "I have won a battle." Not that they care. They live in a universe in which they believe they are invulnerable; they close their eyes to injustices and suffering; they feel safe because they do not have to deal with daily challenges faced by those who risk stepping out of their own boundaries. They have never heard the words "good-bye" or "I've come back. Embrace me with the fervor of someone who, having lost me, has found me again.”
—Paulo Coelho. Manuscript Found in Accra
EAT YOUR FEELINGS: Stories of Jews, Food & Your Mom
facebook.comPaperback launch party June 6 at Housing Works.
Free drinks from Tumblr!
Featuring THE MIDDLESTEINS ALL-STARS:
Jason Diamond (Vol 1. Brooklyn/Flavorpill)
Ophira Eisenberg (Screw Everyone, NPR’s Ask Me Another)
Emily Gould (And the Heart Says Whatever, Emily Books)
Rachel Fershleiser (Tumblr Lit Goddess, Six-Word Memoirs)
Maris Kreizman (Slaughterhouse 90210)
Beth Lisick (Everybody into the Pool)
Rosie Schaap (Drinking with Men, NYT Mag’s Drink Columnist)
Bex Schwartz (TeenNick)
“You have my heart. And I could analyze that — but I won't. For it stands so unbearably complete on its own.”
—Frida Kahlo, from The Diary Of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-PortraitSolzhenitsyn on Beauty
“Archaeologists have not yet discovered any stage of human existence without art. Even in the half-light before the dawn of humanity we received this gift from Hands we did not manage to discern. Nor have we managed to ask: Why was this gift given to us and what are we to do with it?
And all those prophets who are predicting that art is disintegrating, that it has used up all its forms, that it is dying, are mistaken. We are the ones who shall die. And art will remain. The question is whether before we perish we shall understand all its aspects and all its ends.
Not all can be given names. Some of them go beyond words. Art opens even the chilled, darkened heart to high spiritual experience. Through the instrumentality of art we are sometimes sent—vaguely, briefly—insights which logical processes of thought cannot attain.
Like the tiny mirror of the fairy tale: you look into it and see—not yourself—but for one fleeting moment the Unattainable to which you cannot leap or fly. And the heart aches…” - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, from Beauty Will Save the World
David Foster Wallace
tetw.tumblr.com
The ultimate David Foster Wallace nonfiction collection, including links to every essay available online.
“Even more seriously, there’s no dirty business allowed. You can’t include “pornography or offensive depictions of graphic sexual acts” if you want to sell through Kindle Worlds. Does Amazon even understand the point of fan fiction? Why bother if you can’t lovingly depict sadomasochistic encounters between Megatron and Optimus Prime?”
—Betabeat gets it.Troy Palmer for #shortstorymonth
To celebrate Short Story Month, we’ve asked some awesome writers, editors, and other literary types to weigh in on their favourite stories and collections, and what makes a piece of short lit great. Today, Little Fiction editor, and writer, Troy Palmer.
My favourite short stories collections are both from Don Bajema: Reach and Boy in the Air. Both books carry the story of Eddie Burnett, through snippets and vignettes of a troubled upbringing in 1950s - 1970s America. Stories about military parents, drug deals gone bad, highway pile-ups, Airstream trailer parks, rock and roll, God and love.
The story Dog Party, from Boy in the Air, is one of those pieces that just sticks with you no matter how many stories you’ll go on to read in your life. It’s about a kid who gains the affection of neighbourhood dogs by drowning them in his backyard to the point where they’re nearly dead, and then he saves them. The dogs look at him smiling, thinking only that this is the person who saved them — not the person who just tried to kill them — and from then on they follow him around the ‘hood with complete devotion. When asked why he does it, the kid simply says, “for love”. It’s so fucked and horrifying and sad.
Both books (originally published by 2.13.61) are currently out of print, but they’ve recently been compiled and re-released as a collection called Winged Shoes and a Shield (published by City Lights books).
Honourable mentions go to Hubert Selby Jr.’s Song of the Silent Snow and Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower.
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In addition to running things at Little Fiction, Troy also tweets from time to time here.
“There are some things one cannot seize by realism, but by sheer poetry. I feel there is too much naturalism; It obscures moods, feelings, psychic states. I am fond of the lower depths, the underworlds. I never find myself fitting in a well assembled series of realistic events. I much rather prefer growth in an atmosphere of music, books and artists, always constructing, creating, writing, drawing, inventing plays, acting in them, writing a diary, living in created dreams as inside a cocoon, dreams born of reading, always reading, growing, disciplining myself to learn, to study, skirting abysses and dangers with incredible innocence, the body always sensitive but in flight from ugliness. I want to remain sincere and surround my innermost world with romance.”
—Anaïs Nin, The Diary Of Anaïs Nin Volume I 1931-1934“We are not allowed this. We are allowed to be deeply into basketball, or Buddhism, or Star Trek, or jazz, but we are not allowed to be deeply sad. Grief is a thing that we are encouraged to “let go of,” to “move on from,” and we are told specifically how this should be done. Countless well-intentioned friends, distant family members, hospital workers, and strangers I met at parties recited the famous five stages of grief to me: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I was alarmed by how many people knew them, how deeply this single definition of the grieving process had permeated our cultural consciousness. Not only was I supposed to feel these five things, I was meant to feel them in that order and for a prescribed amount of time.”
—Cheryl Strayed
A Song of Despair
(Poema de Amor XX)
I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.
Write, for instance: “The night is full of stars,
and the stars, blue, shiver in the distance.”
The night wind whirls in the sky and sings.
I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.
On nights like this, I held her in my arms.
I kissed her so many times under the infinite sky.
She loved me, sometimes I loved her.
How could I not have loved her large, still eyes?
I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.
To think I don’t have her. To feel that I’ve lost her.
To hear the immense night, more immense without her.
And the poem falls to the soul as dew to grass.
What does it matter that my love couldn’t keep her.
The night is full of stars and she is not with me.
That’s all. Far away, someone sings. Far away.
My soul is lost without her.
As if to bring her near, my eyes search for her.
My heart searches for her and she is not with me.
The same night that whitens the same trees.
We, we who were, we are the same no longer.
I no longer love her, true, but how much I loved her.
My voice searched the wind to touch her ear.
Someone else’s. She will be someone else’s. As she once
belonged to my kisses.
Her voice, her light body. Her infinite eyes.
I no longer love her, true, but perhaps I love her.
Love is so short and oblivion so long.
Because on nights like this I held her in my arms,
my soul is lost without her.
Although this may be the last pain she causes me,
and this may be the last poem I write for her.
— Pablo Neruda
