Adolphe by Benjamin Constant [1816]

Author photo: Joy Williams by Jill Krementz. *Rare* This blog is just my scans of book jackets now. Yeah, sorry.

Author photo: Ann Beattie by Trisha Orr

Author photo: Renata Adler by Richard Avedon

An Octet… Upon Arriving in His Home, in the Town of Dieppe, Hungry

togongclangs:

Whoever wishes to go to Florida,

Let him go where I have been,

And return dry and arid,

And worn out by rot.

For the only good I have brought back—

A single silvery stick in my hand.

But I am safe, not defeated:

It’s time to eat; I die of hunger.

-Nicholas Le Challeux, trans. Maurice O’Sullivan. Written in 1565, it is the earliest known poem about America written by a European. found here

How to End a Story (or anything else) Like Raymond Queneau:

“Anyway, this story is quite tedious. It’s a good thing it’s finished. Whether you like it or not, I couldn’t care less.”

“Witnesses are unanimous: Kant didn’t sweat. Or, he sweat as little as possible. Jachmann tells us that in the summer Kant would walk very slowly to avoid even the slightest drop of perspiration. Wasianki confirms that “Kant did not sweat, neither by night nor by day.” When Kant couldn’t avoid perspiring, even by wearing light clothes, he stayed in the shade, as if he were waiting for somebody, until the sweat vanished. If he noticed any sweat on him he talked about this fact very seriously, as if it were a very melancholy incident.”

- from ‘The Sex Life of Immanuel Kant’ by Frédéric Pagès [1999]

As long as any group defines liberation as gaining social equality with ruling-class white men, they have a vested interest in the continued exploitation and oppression of others.

- from ‘Feminist Theory’ by bell hooks [1984], I would like to quote this entire book.

"I’m breakin’ into your likes page / I’m lookin’ at what you like."

Anonymous Valentine

“I’m trying to write a book of poetry in which I translate a single poem, through the process of encipherment, into a sequence of genetic nucleotides, and then, with the assistance of scientists, I plan to build this genetic sequence in a laboratory so that I can implant the gene into a bacterium, replacing a portion of its genome with my text. The bacterium would, in effect, be the poem…I am hoping to write a book that would still be on the planet Earth when the sun explodes.”

- Christian Bök, from an interview in The Believer