literature

Quoted: academic, cultural and economic critic, and farmer. He is a prolific author of novels, short stories, poems, and essays.

Great language.

Quoted: How financial panic influenced the philosophies of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

David Foster Wallace, best known for his 1996 novel ''Infinite Jest,'' was found dead in his home, according to police. Wallace's wife found her husband had hanged himself when she returned home Friday.

Quoted: how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed... Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.
This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

Short stories & essays by Wallace; videos, interviews, reviews...

Quoted: used his prodigious gifts as a writer — his manic, exuberant prose; his ferocious powers of observation, his ability to fuse avant garde techniques with old-fashioned moral seriousness — to create a series of strobe-lit portraits of a millennial America overdosing on the drugs of entertainment and self-gratification, and to capture, in the words of the musician Robert Plant, the myriad “deep and meaningless” facets of contemporary life.

Quoted: Enter what you're reading or your whole library—it's an easy, library-quality catalog. LibraryThing also connects you with people who read the same things.

From hknapp's faves.

Quoted: The seven stories display an amazing confidence and range for so young an author, moving from a religious festival in Tehran to the days before an atomic bomb is dropped on Hiroshima to the cardboard shantytowns of Colombia where 14-year-old boys yearn to get “an office job,” slang for work as a hired assassin.

A list of 1,001 books to read before you die.

Orson Scott Card reflects on J.K. Rowling and her lawsuit.. in a rather scathing way - complete with his comparison of the Harry Potter stories to his own Ender's Game.

Quoted: A young kid growing up in an oppressive family situation suddenly learns that he is one of a special class of children with special abilities, who are to be educated in a remote training facility where student life is dominated by an intense game played by teams flying in midair, at which this kid turns out to be exceptionally talented and a natural leader.