Sometimes, especially in humankind's most urgent matters of life and death, truth may emerge through paradox. In this connection, one may usefully recall the illuminating work of Jorge Luis Borges. In one of his most ingenious parables, the often mystical Argentine writer, who once wished openly that he had been born a Jew, examines the bewildering calculations of a condemned man.
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If you thought watching funny animal videos was a bad habit, a time-sink, a distraction from writing your novel, well, you're probably right. But if you feel like indulging a little self-delusion, here are nine animal videos that EVERY WRITER must study carefully. They were absolutely instrumental for us in writing War of the Encyclopaedists! [...]
The Harry Ransom Center, an institution based at the University of Texas at Austin, has acquired the archive of the late Gabriel García Márquez.
The Nobel Prize-winning writer had passed on earlier this year. Some of the items in the García Márquez archive include letters, photo albums, typewriters, computers, scrapbooks, drafts of his 1982 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, and the manuscripts for One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera, and Memories of My Melancholy Whore.
Here’s more from the press release: “Highlights in the archive include multiple drafts of García Márquez’s unpublished novel We’ll See Each Other in August, research for The General in His Labyrinth (1989) and a heavily annotated typescript of the novella Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981). The materials document the gestation and changes of García Márquez’s works, revealing the writer’s struggle with language and structure…The archive will reside at the Ransom Center alongside the work of many of the 20th century’s most notable authors, including Jorge Luis Borges, William Faulkner, and James Joyce, who all influenced García Márquez.”
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The great Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges has just received his own Google Doodle for his birthday. In the image (embedded above), the blind writer stares at the sprawling worlds he imagined in his books.
Read the late author’s long biography at this link. In his short stories, poems and essays, Borges explored imaginary libraries and focused on the way our books shape reality.
Here’s a quote from a 1971 interview with Borges at The New York Times: “When I began writing in the 1920′s in Buenos Aires, nobody thought of literature in terms of failure or success … You might publish an edition of 300 copies and these you gave away to your friends … People in this country may be idiotic, but they won’t be that idiotic–nobody would think of buying anything I’ve written.”
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Flavorpill has collected the doodles of famous authors, including Sylvia Plath, David Foster Wallace, Vladimir Nabokov, Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Allen Ginsberg, Mark Twain, Henry Miller, Kurt Vonnegut, and Jorge Luis Borges.
The drawings ranged from insect portraits to nightmare images. Wallace drew one of the funnier pieces, doodling glasses and fangs on a photo of Cormac McCarthy.
Vonnegut (pictured with his artwork, via) incorporated many of his drawings into his books. He even had his own art gallery exhibitions. What author should illustrate their next book?
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Here is the last of these very short (1-3 min) audio excerpts from two of the six Norton Lectures Jorge Luis Borges delivered at Harvard in 1967 and 1968, recently discovered in the Harvard University Archives.
A Poet's Creed (Lecture 6):
advice to writers...
Here is the next of these very short (1-3 min) audio clips from two of the six Norton Lectures Jorge Luis Borges delivered at Harvard in 1967 and 1968, recently discovered in the Harvard University Archives.
A Poet's Creed (Lecture 6):
I try not to understand it...
Here is the next of these very short (1-3 min) audio excerpts from two of the six Norton Lectures Jorge Luis Borges delivered at Harvard in 1967 and 1968, recently discovered in the Harvard University Archives.
A Poet's Creed (Lecture 6):
when I began writing...
From "The Metaphor" (Lecture 2)
Life as a dream (e e cummings)
Here is the next of these very short (1-3 min) audio excerpts from two of the six Norton Lectures Jorge Luis Borges delivered at Harvard in 1967 and 1968, recently discovered in the Harvard University Archives.
From "The Metaphor" (Lecture 2)
Sleep as death (Robert Frost)
