Eggplant.place

311d

Ovid’s Metamorphoses is all about mothers

Mothers don’t normally belong in Latin epics, which were meant to be devoted to warriors and warfare.

by Frances Myatt

https://theconversation.com/ovids-metamorphoses-is-all-about-mothers-266383?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Latest%20from%20The%20Conversation%20for%20December%208%202025%20-%203610136859&utm_content=Latest%20from%20The%20Conversation%20for%20December%208%202025%20-%203610136859+CID_dd5bfffedf1c121cf798264446dd13b0&utm_source=campaign_monitor_uk&utm_term=Ovids%20Metamorphoses%20is%20all%20about%20mothers

Metamorphoses at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/21765

#books #poetry #literature

Page from the edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses published by Lucantonio Giunti in Venice, 1497.

A 1497 Venice printed page from Ovid's Metamorphoses, published by Lucantonio Giunti. Features elaborate Renaissance border decoration with mythological scenes, ornate floral patterns, decorative initial letters, and Italian text in two columns beneath a woodcut illustration.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamorphoses#/media/File:Ovidius_Naso_-_Metamorphoses,_del_MCCCCLXXXXVII_Adi_X_del_mese_di_aprile_-_1583162_Carta_a1r.jpeg

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356d

Published in 1986, "INTERLISP: The Language and Its Usage" by Stephen Kaisler was the only book on Interlisp printed by a publisher. It extensively covers the Interlisp language and environment with many code snippets and examples.

https://interlisp.org/documentation/1986-interlisp-language-book-1.pdf

#interlisp #lisp #retrocomputing #books

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356d

This week's #NewBooks at the library: I bought several second copies of
- How the Mind Changed: A Human History of our Evolving Brain
- Kate Raworth's Doughnut #Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist. We had hoped to get this signed when she recently spoke in London, but, alas, failed.
- An ex-library copy of an older classic on #Buffon: From Natural History to the History of Nature: Readings from Buffon and His Critics, of which I made a note after reviewing Every Living Thing some time back.

#Books #Scicomm #Bookstodon #Neurobiology #Degrowth #HistoryOfScience #ScienceHistory #HistSci @bookstodon

A photo of three books standing on a small, brown, wooden table. The out-of-focus background shows black shelves full of books.

On the left, standing up, How the Mind Changed, showing two pictures of a human brain on a black background. At the top, part of a connectome picture, showing a high-resolution brain scan of neuronal connections in green, red, and purple; at the bottom, part of the surface of the brain, using the same green, red, and purple colour scheme

In the middle, Doughtnut Economics, showing a close-up picture of a blackboard with a drawing in white chalk of two concentric circles, one inside the other. Two pieces of white chalk lie next to the outer circle.

On the right, From Natural History to the History of Nature, showing a plain hardcover book bound in navy blue cloth with gold lettering. This is an ex-library copy bound in transparent protective foil that gives it a slightly shiny look.

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356d

Looking for a new ebook? My novel THE EXPERT OF SUBTLE REVISIONS is on sale now! Just 1.99, wherever you buy ebooks.

"In this 'appealing intellectual mystery' (Publishers Weekly) spanning continents, Hase knows exactly what to do when her dad goes missing: Go to the library, find a specific book, and follow instructions. 'Brilliant, uplifting… I was swept away' (New York Times bestselling author Janet Skeslien Charles)."

#books #writing #writersofmastodon #WritingCommunity #bookstodon @bookstodon

https://www.bookbub.com/books/the-expert-of-subtle-revisions-by-kirsten-menger-anderson-2025-10-22?ebook_deal

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2y

Italian mathematician, astronomer and engineer Giovanni Domenico Cassini was born #OTD in 1625.

His observations & calculations helped to confirm & refine Kepler’s laws of planetary motion. He formulated Cassini’s Law, describing the rotational behavior of the Moon, which was crucial for understanding the Moon's synchronous rotation with the Earth. He was involved in measuring the meridian arc of Paris, contributing to the accurate determination of the shape of the Earth.

#books #astronomy

Fig. 1-6. Illustrations to the article Diversae motus periodi in Jove... published in the Acta Eruditorum of 1692

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Drawings of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn
Robert Hooke, Giovanni Cassini - Observations Made in Italy, Confirming the Former, and Withall Fixing the Period of the Revolution of Mars. In: Philosophical Transactions. Band 1, Nummer 14, 2. Juli 1666, S. 242–245.

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356d

📚 Crying in H Mart by: Michelle Zauner

In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up one of the few Asian American kids at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother's particular, high expec...

https://bookblabla.com/book/crying-in-h-mart

@bookstodon

#books #reading #libraries #biographyautobiography

In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up one of the few Asian American kids at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother's particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother's tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food.

As she grew up, moving to the East Coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, and performing gigs with her fledgling band--and meeting the man who would become her husband--her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live. It was her mother's diagnosis of terminal cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her.

Vivacious and plainspoken, lyrical and honest, Zauner's voice is as radiantly alive on the page as it is onstage. Rich with intimate anecdotes that will resonate widely, and complete with family photos, Crying in H Mart is a book to cherish, share, and reread.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the indie rock sensation known as Japanese Breakfast, an unforgettable memoir about family, food, grief, love, and growing up Korean American—“in losing her mother and

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2y

French novelist, memoirist and journalist George Sand died #OTD in 1876.

Sand's writing combines elements of Romanticism and early Realism, with rich descriptions, strong emotions, and detailed character studies. Her novels often critique societal norms, particularly the limitations placed on women and the injustices faced by the lower classes.

Books by George Sand at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/851

#books #literature

George Sand (esquisse) par Eugène Delacroix en 1838. Collection Ordrupgaard museum de Copenhague.

Serene woman depicted in a painting, holding a white handkerchief delicately.

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La Mare au diable.
Edmond Rudaux — Bibliothèque nationale de France
Illustrations de La Mare au Diable par Edmond Rudaux, dess. et grav. ; George Sand, aut. du texte

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356d

Make Biblioburros Great Again

#biblioburros #books @bookstodon

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152d

#SpeakingOutOfPlace welcomes #QuinnSlobodian & #BenTarnoff to talk about their book #Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed.

'We see a mind that is profoundly troubled by any contagion spreading into seemingly closed systems—it can take the form of racial others, transpeople, “woke” populations, or most generally and dismissively, “Non-Player-Characters.” '

https://speakingoutofplace.buzzsprout.com/2084729/episodes/19188391-muskism-its-roots-nature-and-how-to-fight-it-a-conversation-with-quinn-slobodian-and-ben-tarnoff

#Musk #ElonMusk #tech #BigTech #SiliconValleyRight #techFutures #techCriticism #techOligarchs #books @bookstodon

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356d

📚 King Sorrow by: Joe Hill

Bookish dreamer Arthur Oakes is a student at Rackham College, Maine, renowned for its frosty winters and beautiful buildings.

But his idyll - and burgeoning romance with Gwen Underfoot - is shattered when local drug dealers force him into a terrible crime: stealing rare and valuable books from the ...

https://bookblabla.com/book/king-sorrow

@bookstodon

#books #reading #libraries #fiction #generalfiction #fantasy #contemporaryfiction #horror

Bookish dreamer Arthur Oakes is a student at Rackham College, Maine, renowned for its frosty winters and beautiful buildings.

But his idyll - and burgeoning romance with Gwen Underfoot - is shattered when local drug dealers force him into a terrible crime: stealing rare and valuable books from the exceptional college library.

Trapped and desperate, Arthur turns to his closest friends for help: the wealthy, irrepressible Colin Wren; brave, beautiful Allison Shiner; the battling twins Donna and Donovan McBride; and brainy, bold Gwen. Together they dream up an impossible, fantastical scheme that they scarcely imagine will work: to summon the fabled dragon King Sorrow to kill those tormenting Arthur.

But the six stumble backwards into a deadly bargain - they soon learn they must choose a new sacrifice for King Sorrow each year or one of them will become his next victim. Unleashing consequences they can neither predict nor control, this promise will, over the course of four decades, shape and endanger their lives in ways they could never expect.

'A brilliantly Faustian fable with a heart as huge as a dragon's, and a stinging twist in its tail. I devoured it.' RUTH WARE
'A wild, genre-defying journey, packed with all sorts of unexpected twists and turns' DAILY MIRROR
'A glorious, wild ride' NEW YORK TIMES
'Epic! KING SORROW is Hill's best and most ambitious work to date' LINWOOD BARCLAY
'Magnificent - by far and away Hill's best book to date' SFX
'When they talk ab

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312d

The Mathilda Effect - The Missing Heroines of Science

If you believe the history books, science is a guy thing. Discoveries are made by men, which spur further innovation by men, followed by acclaim and prizes for men. But too often, there is an unsung woman genius who deserves just as much credit.

By Martha Rossiter

https://medium.com/s/the-matilda-effect

More about it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matilda_effect#:~:text=The%20Matilda%20effect%20is%20a,attributed%20to%20their%20male%20colleagues.

#books #womeninStem

Dr. Lise Meitner, Austrian physicist, three-quarter length portrait.

A formal black and white portrait of Dr. Lise Meitner, the pioneering Austrian physicist, seated in professional attire with a book in hand before a library bookshelf.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lise_Meitner#/media/File:Lise_Meitner_NatGeo.jpg

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312d

Nobel literature laureate László Krasznahorkai delivers rare lecture in Stockholm

Hungarian László Krasznahorkai, who won the Nobel Prize in literature for his lyrical novels that combine a bleak worldview with mordant humor, gave a lecture in Stockholm on Sunday in one of his rare public appearances.

The lecture was part of the Nobel week that is underway in Stockholm and Oslo with laureates holding news conferences and giving speeches before they are awarded the prestigious prizes.

Krasznahorkai’s lecture, which he gave in Hungarian, ranged across topics such as old and new angels, human dignity, hope or the lack thereof, rebellion and his observations of a clochard — or tramp — on the Berlin subway.

He introduced his lecture, according to the English translation, by saying that “on receiving the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature, I originally wished to share my thought with you on the subject of hope, but as my stories of hope have definitely come to an end, I will now speak about angels.”

As opposed to “the angels of old,” the new angels, Krasznahorkai said, “have no wings, but they also have no message, none whatsoever. They are merely here among us in their simple street clothes, unrecognizable if they so wish.”

“They just stand there and look at us, they are searching for our gaze, and in this search there is a plea for us, to look into their eyes, so that we ourselves can transmit a message to them, only that unfortunately, we have no message to give,” the author said.

Expressing himself in his long, winding trademark sentences full of apocalypse and without full stops, he says it comes as a shock when he “detects the horrific story of these new angels that stand before me, the story that they are sacrifices, sacrifices: and not for us, but because of us, for every single one of us, because of every single one of us, angels without wings and angels without a message, and all the while knowing that there is war, war and only war, war in nature, war in society, and this war is being waged not only with weapons, not only with torture, not only with destruction: of course, this is one end of the scale, but this war proceeds at the opposite of the scale as well, because one single bad word is enough.”

When the Nobel judges announced the award for Krasznahorkai in October, they described the 71-year-old as “a great epic writer” whose work “is characterized by absurdism and grotesque excess.”

“Krasznahorkai’s work can be seen as part of a Central European tradition,” the Nobel Prize organization said. ”Important features are pessimism and apocalypse, but also humor and unpredictability.”

His novels include “Satantango,” “The Melancholy of Resistance,” “War and War,” “Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming” and “Herscht 07769,” which are available in English.

Last year’s winner was South Korean author Han Kang. The 2023 winner was Norwegian writer Jon Fosse, whose work includes a seven-book epic made up of a single sentence.

Meanwhile, the director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute, Kristian Harpviken, said Saturday that Venezuelan Peace Prize laureate and opposition leader María Corina Machado will come to Oslo this week to receive her award in person.

The 58-year-old, who won for her struggle to achieve a democratic transition in the South American nation, has been in hiding and has not been seen in public since January.

Harpviken told Norwegian public broadcaster NRK that Machado was expected to personally pick up the prize Wednesday.

“I spoke with the Peace Prize winner last night, and she will come to Oslo,” Harpviken said, according to NRK.

The Nobel Prize award ceremonies will be held Wednesday on the anniversary of founder Alfred Nobel’s death in 1896. The award ceremony for peace is in Oslo and the other ceremonies are in Stockholm.

nobel-literature-laureate-laszlo-krasznahorkai-delivers-rare-lecture-in-stockholm

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2y

"Destiny and history are untidy."
Nightwood (1936)

American writer, journalist, and artist Djuna Barnes died #OTD in 1982.

"Ryder" was Barnes's first novel, a semi-autobiographical and highly experimental work. "Nightwood" is widely regarded as Barnes's masterpiece. The novel is a dense, poetic exploration of love, identity, and despair, set in the bohemian world of Paris and Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s.

Books by Djuna Barnes at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/51179

#books #literature

Djuna Barnes, c. 1921.

A fashionable woman wearing a polka dot scarf and hat, radiating sophistication and style.

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Illustration from The Book of Repulsive Women
Djuna Barnes - Poe's Mother: Selected Drawings of Djuna Barnes, ed. Douglas Messerli, ISBN 1-55713-143-0, p. 95

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312d

finished reading Wind and Truth 🌕🌕🌕🌗🌑
by Brandon Sanderson.

An absolute brick of a book - possibly the longest I've ever read. Could certainly have been shorter (successful authors get way too much latitude), with too frequent changes in PoV, and while I appreciate his use of mental health to disrupt tired fantasy tropes, after three weeks of amateur therapy I was a bit over it. But he does pull together sprawling plotlines to a satisfying climax, with an appealing set up for a fresh take on the second half of the series.

#BookReview #Books #Bookstodon #SFF

@WildWoila @wildwoila@wyrms.de

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361d

I couldn't resist doing some analysis of ABC Radio National's Top 100 Books of the 21st Century.

How much more likely were people to vote for books because they had read them in recent memory (recency bias)? You would expect that good books are spread out evenly across the years, but it's hard to remember books that you read many years ago! Turns out there was an even spread of books across 2000-2019. But there were 40% more books than expected from 2020-2024. (See first graph.)

Were newer books more likely to be lower down the list? I thought this might be lkely because votes for recently read books might spread out more. But that wasn't completely true. The bottom 40 of the list did lean new, but so did the top 20. (See second graph.)
How diverse were the authors on the list? Not very! Only 22 of the books were by authors with diverse backgrounds, by which I mean non-white or not hetero-normative. The top 20 were the least diverse, but it was pretty even across the range. Probably not surprising - people might connect most strongly with books that speak to their own experience. Would be fascinating to see more demographic info on the voters.
Most books were by authors from Australia (35), the USA (31), the UK (17) and Ireland (7). Ireland seemed to punch above its weight. New Zealand only had one author! (Heather Morris, The Tattooist of Auschwitz).

There were very few non-fiction books, especially if you exclude memoirs and true crime. I count 4: Dark Emu, Stasiland, Sapiens and A Short History of Nearly Everything. And yet non-fiction accounts for something like 40% of book sales. I wonder if that is because a non-fiction book tends to focus on a particular subject, which would have less widespread appeal. It could also be that the type of people who vote in this sort of poll are book nerds, and book nerds mostly read fiction.

As a keen #fantasy & #scifi reader, I was disappointed. Project Hail Mary is the only full-blown scifi, but I wouldn't say it is a good representation of the genre. There is Hunger Games and Harry Potter, but both are young adult. The others (Cloud Atlas, Station Eleven, Piranesi, Never Let Me Go) feel borderline (I've not read the last two).
How did the list compare with my own ratings? I've read 57 of the 100 books, and I did rate higher books better, but the relationship was very weak. (See third graph.)

Highest ranked book that I didn't really like: #12. Where The Crawdads Sing. (Runner up The Dry.)
Lowest ranked book that I really liked: #86. Cloud Atlas
Highest ranked book I'd never heard of: #9. A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

I've got 43 books to catch up on in the next few years, plus the favourites as voted by my friends. Never short a good book!

#Top100Books #ABCRN #RadioNational #Books #Bookstodon

Number of books in each 5 year period. Recency bias only apparent for the last 5 years.

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Average publishing year for each quintile. Newer books tend to be lower down the list except for the top 20.

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My average rating by quintile. In general I rated higher books better.

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2y

"The strongest of all psychic forces in the world is unsatisfied desire."
A Glastonbury Romance

English novelist John Cowper Powys died #OTD in 1963.

He appeared with a volume of verse in 1896 and a first novel in 1915, but gained success only with his novel Wolf Solent in 1929. He has been seen as a successor to Thomas Hardy, and Wolf Solent, A Glastonbury Romance, Weymouth Sands, and Maiden Castle have been called his Wessex novels.

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/4710

#books #literature

Rework of file from a scan photo from After The Victorians.

An elegant man in formal attire seated on a chair.

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Cover of Rodmoor: A Romance by John Cowper Powys.

"Rodmoor: A Romance" is a novel by John Cowper Powys, first published in 1916. It is one of Powys's early works, reflecting his characteristic blend of rich psychological insight and a deep connection to nature and place.

"Rodmoor" is considered an important early work in Powys's oeuvre. While it may not be as well-known as some of his later novels like "Wolf Solent" or "A Glastonbury Romance," it is valued for its psychological complexity and its vivid portrayal of the English landscape. The novel has been praised for its deep characterizations and the way it prefigures themes that Powys would continue to explore in his later works.

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354d

📚 Colin Gets Promoted and Dooms the World by: Mark Waddell

WARNING! Under no circumstances must employees strike a deal with unauthorized personnel on Dark Enterprises property. Such behavior may result in death…or the end of the world.

Colin is a low-level employee at Dark Enterprises, a Hell-like mul...

https://bookblabla.com/book/colin-gets-promoted-and-dooms-the-world

@bookstodon

#books #reading #libraries #fiction #fantasy #contemporaryfiction #humorous #lgbtq

WARNING! Under no circumstances must employees strike a deal with unauthorized personnel on Dark Enterprises property. Such behavior may result in death…or the end of the world.

Colin is a low-level employee at Dark Enterprises, a Hell-like multinational corporation solving the world’s most difficult problems in deeply questionable ways. After years of toiling away in a cubicle, he’s ready to climb the corporate ladder and claim the power he’s never had.

The only problem is, he’s pretty sure he’s about to be terminated. Like, terminated. That’s tough, because his BFF has just set him up with a great guy. In fact, maybe he’s a little too great. And he asks a lot of questions . . .

When Colin meets a shadowy figure promising his deepest desire in return for a small, unspecified favor, he can’t resist the urge to fast-track his goals. He asks for the one thing that will improve his life: a promotion.

But that small favor unleashes an ancient evil. People in New York are disappearing, the world might be ending, and Management is starting to notice. Getting to the top is never easy, and now it’s up to Colin to save the world. It’s the ultimate power move, after all.

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355d

New on my YouTube Channel: "Mid-October 2025 Hutchins Library Book Haul"
https://youtu.be/el0wyHcceM0?si=ufClQM80oY4qop6i

Ten books we recently acquired here at my library that I am adding to my personal TBR list and hope to read down the road.

#books #reading #ItinerantLibrarian #library #BookHaul #LibraryBookHaul #vlog #video #TBR

💙📚

@bookstodon
@bookstodon@a.gup.pe
@librarians

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312d

📚 Wild Dark Shore by: Charlotte McConaghy

Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny island not far from Antarctica. Home to the world’s largest seed bank, Shearwater was once full of researchers, but with sea levels rising, the Salts are now its final inhabitants. Until, during the worst storm the island has ever seen, a woman ...

https://bookblabla.com/book/wild-dark-shore

@bookstodon

#books #reading #libraries #fiction #places #women

Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny island not far from Antarctica. Home to the world’s largest seed bank, Shearwater was once full of researchers, but with sea levels rising, the Salts are now its final inhabitants. Until, during the worst storm the island has ever seen, a woman mysteriously washes ashore.

Isolation has taken its toll on the Salts, but as they nurse the woman, Rowan, back to strength, it begins to feel like she might just be what they need. Rowan, long accustomed to protecting herself, starts imagining a future where she could belong to someone again.

But Rowan isn’t telling the whole truth about why she set out for Shearwater. And when she discovers sabotaged radios and a freshly dug grave, she realizes Dominic is keeping his own secrets. As the storms on Shearwater gather force, they all must decide if they can trust each other enough to protect the precious seeds in their care before it’s too late—and if they can finally put the tragedies of the past behind them to create something new, together.

A novel of breathtaking twists, dizzying beauty, and ferocious love, Wild Dark Shore is about the impossible choices we make to protect the people we love, even as the world around us disappears.

REESE'S BOOK CLUB PICK.INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER.#1 AMAZON BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR SO FAR 2025

A breathtaking novel of ROMANCE, MYSTERY, AND TWISTS that will shock you...I love this book so much. Reese Wit

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312d

The young Anton Chekhov searches for his voice

This book collects 58 pieces of fiction that Anton Chekhov published between the ages of 20 and 22. Many appear in English for the first time. In her introduction, Rosamund Bartlett refers to the material with disarming candour as a ‘wholly unremarkable debut’. Is there ever any point in publishing juvenilia?

In his first years as a medical student Anton Pavlovich dashed off these pieces for a few kopecks a line (his father, born a serf, was a bankrupt shopkeeper). Ranging in length from three paragraphs to 76 pages, they appeared under pseudonyms in lowbrow comic magazines that included another Spectator (founded in Moscow in 1881). Unremarkable they may be – but they open a window on provincial Russia in the early 1880s, the tense period before and after revolutionaries assassinated Tsar Alexander II in St Petersburg. The reader will also enjoy identifying the seeds of the master’s mature style; and indeed some of the stories are worth reading in their own right.

Chekhov’s world unfurls in these pages. Character types limber up, preparing to emerge fully formed in the later work – among them Trifon Semyonovich, the owner of 8,000 acres of black earth, who enthusiastically fleeces ‘peasants and neighbours’ in the short story ‘On Account of the Apples’. Orioles whistle in the blackthorn; a tarantass rumbles past, loaded with travelling rugs and hunters’ guns; the whiff of salted fish pervades the spring air and everywhere narrators (often first-person ones) perceive ‘a sense of tedium… in people’s faces and in the whining of the mosquitoes’.

Experimentation with form is less familiar. The volume includes elaborate parody, satire, gothic fiction and sci-fi (in an example of the latter, mischievously attributed to Jules Verne, a fellow from London’s Royal Geographical Society tries to drill a hole in the moon). Chekhov even employs the epistolary form, in part to indulge his fondness for puns. The very first entry consists of a letter written from the village of Eaten Pancakes. The editors have curated this disparate, uneven stuff skilfully. The excellent footnotes explain the abundant wordplay.

As for the translation, the book is the result of a remarkable international collaboration. Eighty-three individuals from nine countries have each translated a piece and then passed it around for team revision. No individual translator’s name follows any one story, but a group credit appears at the beginning. This cooperative approach, a notable success, achieves a consistency often absent from multi-translator anthologies.

Returning to the ‘unremarkable’ aspect of the whole: endings do tend to have a dying fall, as though Chekhov were in a rush to get the thing off his desk. The squibs and comic skits are of the schoolboy variety – though I quite liked the Spectator fake ads, one offering sausage-free worms. ‘The Distorting Mirror (A Christmas Tale)’ was the only piece here that Chekhov included in his first Collected Works, and one can see why. The story has a thematic unity lacking elsewhere in this debut spread.

Chekhov had not found his voice by 1882 – but you can see him searching for it. (One novella foreshadows the theme of his celebrated story ‘The Bet’.) In short, the everyday realism of the later work is on display in this collection, but not its psychological depth. After all, the callow youth had not yet experienced the emotions at the heart of the later great stories and plays. (In Britain he is best known for his stage work; in Russia, for his short stories.) He had not confronted the unfathomable realities of life, nor the ambiguity and nuance that govern human behaviour. We go to the theatre to hear the Trigorins and the Prozorovs express elegiac melancholy – and that is not a young man’s game. On the other hand, the slapstick here humanises the writer whose sense of dramatic economy once caused him to note with approval the effect of placing a pistol on a table in the first act.

What links should we seek between an author’s early and late work anyway? How many of our juvenile preoccupations still concern us in middle age? The man who conjured Uncle Vanya was once a coltish 20-year-old. The trajectory from the inky youth of this book to the titan we know from the plays might be the most Chekhovian theme of all.

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2y

Scottish poet and writer Thomas Campbell died #OTD in 1844.

In 1799 he wrote Pleasures of Hope, a traditional 18th-century didactic poem in heroic couplets. He also produced several patriotic war songs— "Ye Mariners of England", "The Soldier's Dream", "Hohenlinden" and, in 1801, The Battle of the Baltic, but was no less at home in delicate lyrics such as "At Love's Beginning".

Books by Thomas Campbell at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/7520

#books #literature #poetry

Portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence c. 1810.

A painting of a man in black attire, wearing a white shirt and a black jacket.

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Cover of The Poetical Works of Thomas Campbell by Thomas Campbell.

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148d

Reading is an act of rebellion whether it's legal or not 😁

@reading @bookstodon @books @humor @humor@lemmy.world @aiop

#ReadingMemes #Meme #Memes #Humor #Humour #Funny
#Reading #Readers #ReadingCommunity
#Novel #Books #Fiction
#Bookwyrm #Bookstodon

Drawn image of a woman carrying a stack of books with '1984' falling of the top.

Caption: READ! While it is still legal.

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2y

"Remember, to the last, that while there is life there is hope."

English novelist and social critic Charles Dickens died #OTD in 1870.

Dickens edited a weekly journal for 20 years; wrote 15 novels, five novellas, hundreds of short stories and nonfiction articles; lectured and performed readings extensively; was an indefatigable letter writer; and campaigned vigorously for children's rights, education, and other social reforms.

Charles Dickens at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/37

#books #literature

Dickens's Dream by Robert William Buss, portraying Dickens at his desk at Gads Hill Place surrounded by many of his characters.

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1y

Looking for more spicy audiobooks for spooky season? 🎃

My Wife The Witch is another Size Fantasy I narrated for Amber Collins.

A naughty witch shrinks her husband to fit the dollhouse where she keeps four enchanted, doll-sized girlfriends — and then keeps shrinking!

This story goes hard, harder than most of my catalogue, so I will put content warnings in the next post in the thread.

If you like erotica with witches, magic, and a degree of peril, this might be for you!

Get yourself in the Halloween spirit with this spicy story. 😉

Available in audiobook format on Amazon, Audible an Apple Books. Also available in ebook format on Amazon.

https://geni.us/MWTW

1/n

@audiofiction @bookstodon

#NSFW #Audioook #Audioobooks #Books #Bookstodon #Halloween #Erotica #SizeFantasy #Shrinking #Magic #Witch #Halloween

A book cover shows a dark Victorian house with brightly lit windows shrouded in mist under a starry sky. Text across the top says: "My Wife, The Witch. By Amer Collins. Narrated by Adara Astin." A yellow banner across the bottom right corner says: "Now in Audio."

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2y

French poet and novelist Marceline Desbordes-Valmore was born #OTD in 1786.

Marceline Desbordes-Valmore published her first book of poetry, "Élégies et romances," in 1819. She was highly regarded by her contemporaries, including Victor Hugo and Alphonse de Lamartine. Her work influenced later poets, including Paul Verlaine and the Symbolists, who admired her emotional expressiveness and musicality.

Books by Marceline Desbordes-Valmore at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/5436

#Books #literature #poetry

Portrait of Marceline Desbordes by her uncle Constant Joseph Desbordes, kept at the Musée de la Chartreuse in Douai.

A woman sitting at a table, looking distressed, with her hands placed on her head in frustration.

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Cover of Le livre des enfants by Marceline Desbordes-Valmore.

"Le Livre des enfants" (The Children's Book) by Marceline Desbordes-Valmore is a delightful collection of poetry and prose specifically written for children. This work, published in 1830, is a testament to Desbordes-Valmore's versatility as a writer and her deep empathy and affection for children. It reflects her Romantic sensibilities, blending her poetic talents with her maternal instincts to create literature that is both engaging and instructive for young readers.

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