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November 12, 2008

"KNOW LITERATURE, KNOW THE WORLD"

A powerful riposte to those who think we "live in a non-fiction moment" ...

The report is named The Fiction of Development: Literary Representation as a Source of Authoritative Knowledge, a title which, whether intentionally or not, is pleasingly ambiguous. That word "fiction" looks alarmingly pessimistic for an instant, as if indicating that development is itself a myth or fiction. Instead of course, it is referring to novels and poems whose subject matter includes poverty, migration and so on. These are real-world issues, of course, but the authors insist that our understanding of them grows out of a series of "stories".

Posted at 03:42 PM in World Beat |

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Comments

William

I just want to bring your attention on the best selling book "Earning Serendipity" Written by the Cuban American author Glenn Llopis. “Earning Serendipity” is a book that illustrates a entirely new way of thinking about your business and everyday life. Great work Glenn! Glenn Llopis, your book offers more down -to-earth, practical and commonsense knowledge versus most other books that try to sell me unrealistic concepts. Earning Serendipity is a constant incentive and perennial source of inspiration for go-getters. It allowed me to experience my goals and taught me the meaning of success in simple ways that benefited me and those around me. I am motivated to take actions in the right way not the easy way Glenn, your book changed my life forever!

Posted by: William | November 17, 2008 at 01:47 AM

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TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

    Bs

    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
  • The Rider by Tim Krabbe

    Rider_4

    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

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