Archiv citátů
Week from 28th Dec 2009 to 3rd Jan 2010: Irvine Welsh
From Trainspotting (1993)
‘Choose life. Choose mortgage payments; choose washing machines; choose cars; choose sitting oan a couch watching mind-numbing and spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fuckin junk food intae yir mouth. Choose rotting away, pishing and shiteing yersel in a home, a total fuckin embarrassment tae the selfish, fucked-up brats ye've spawned to replace yourself. Choose life.’
Irvine Welsh
About: Irvine Welsh (b. 1958) is a contemporary Scottish novelist. His first novel, Trainspotting (1993), is a blackly comic portrait of a group of young heroin users in Edinburgh in the 1980s. The novel was adapted as a film three years after its publication.
His second novel, Marabou Stork Nightmares (1995), is a harrowing stream of consciousness narrated by a footbal hooligan. He also wrote several collections of short stories, among them The Acid House (1994) or Ecstasy: Three Tales of Chemical Romance (1996).
Week from 21st to 27th Dec 2009: Vladimir Nabokov
From Lolita (1955)
‘I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing all.’
Vladimir Nabokov
About: Vladimir Nabokov (1899 – 1977) was a Russian-American novelist and short story writer. He produced his first critically acclaimed books in Russian. The book that established his reputation, Lolita (1955), was already written in English.
Lolita tells of the passion of a middle-aged European émigré for a twelve-year-old girl and their wanderings across America. The narrator uses a style both outrageously lyrical and outrageously jokey, he is constantly teasing and eluding his audience. Besides the controversial subject, it is exactly this masterly verbal play performed in the novel that makes it so remarkable.
Week from 14th to 20th Dec 2009: Timothy Leary
‘The universe is an intelligence test.’
Timothy Leary
About: Dr Timothy Leary (1920 – 1996) was an American psychologist and writer, most famous as an advocate of psychedelic drugs for therapeutic purposes. He tested the effects of LSD on volunteers as well as on himself and explored the use of drugs as a way to achieve a heightened spiritual experience.
His colourful personality is portrayed in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968) which follows a trip of Ken Kesey and his band, including Leary, across the states in a psychedelic painted bus. Among his own works is The Psychedelic Experience (1964), a manual to be used during sessions involving psychedelic drugs.
Week from 7th to 13th Dec 2009: Cormac McCarthy
From The Road (2006)
‘You forget some things, don’t you?
‘Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.’
Cormac McCarthy
About: Cormac McCarthy (b. 1933) is a contemporary American novelist, a representative of the American South. His work meditates on the unhomelike nature of our environment, the disconnection of the human from the non-human.
His early novels are participations in the debate between pastoralism and the anti-pastoral. His later works leave the South in favour of Western settings. They deconstruct Western myth and tell tales of a newer, truer West. His most accomplished work is the ‘Border Trilogy’, consisting of the novels All the Pretty Horses (1992), The Crossing (1994) and Cities of the Plain (1998).
Week from 30th Nov to 6th Dec 2009: William Wycherley
From The Country Wife (1675)
‘Well, but let me tell you, women, as you say, are like soldiers, made constant and loyal by good pay rather than oaths and covenants. Therefore I'd advise my friends to keep rather than marry.’
William Wycherley
About: William Wycherley (1641 – 1715) was a Restoration playwright. He wrote comedies accentuating the artificiality of the stage and mirroring the sheen of the society that produced it. He used satiric mode but was amused rather than disgusted by dubious morals.
The Country Wife (1675) features as a protagonist a greedy, sensual and lustful libertarian who spreads the news of his impotence in order to be able to enjoy the attention of unguarded wives.
Week from 23rd to 29th Nov 2009: George Orwell
From Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
‘The Ministry of Truth, which concerned itself with news, entertainment, education and the fine arts. The Ministry of Peace, which concerned itself with war. The Ministry of Love, which maintained law and order. And the Ministry of Plenty, which was responsible for economic affairs.’
George Orwell
About: George Orwell (1903 – 1950) was a British novelist, essayist and journalist. He was born as Eric Arthur Blair in India and received his education in England. He suffered under a sense of guilt about British colonialism and a feeling that he must make some kind of personal expiation for it. He never formally joined a political party but sympathized with the Left.
His two most famous novels are Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). The former is an animal fable which satirizes the manifest failure of Communist ideals in Russia. The latter is a dystopia set in a totalitarian England where the government exploits the language of socialism to cover its own tyranny.
Week from 16th to 22nd Nov 2009: Jack Kerouac
From The Dharma Bums (1958)
‘Japhy, do you think God made the world to amuse himself because he was bored? Because if so he would have to be mean.’
Jack Kerouac
About: Jack Kerouac (1922 – 1969) was an American novelist and poet, the leading novelist of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. His books are semi-autobiographical documents of beat consciousness, especially his most famous On the Road (1957).
His writing also reflects his growing interest in the discovery of truth through Zen Buddhism, for instance The Dharma Bums (1958). Kerouac’s poetry is collected in Mexico City Blues (1959).
Week from 9th to 15th Nov 2009: Joseph Heller
From Catch-22 (1961)
‘He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt, and his only mission each time he went up was to come down alive.’
Joseph Heller
About: Joseph Heller (1923 – 99) was an American novelist, most famous for his anti-war novel Catch-22 (1961). The novel uses the techniques of the absurd to capture the bleak, bitter absurdities of the Second World War. It shows its protagonist, Yossarian, as the victim of a mad, conspiratorial military and political complex, caught in a closed system of the war machine. Heller wrote several other novels, including Something Happened (1974) and a sequel to Catch-22, Closing Time (1994).
Week from 2nd to 8th Nov 2009: Kurt Vonnegut
From Cat’s Cradle (1963)
‘Ah, God,’ says Bokonon, ‘what an ugly city every city is.’
Kurt Vonnegut
About: Kurt Vonnegut (1922 – 2007) was an American novelist whose work blends science fiction with satire, comedy with a bleak determinism. His writing typically moves between satirical humour and surreal fantasy.
Cat’s Cradle (1963), Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), or Breakfast of Champions (1973) are among his most famous novels.
Slaughterhouse-Five circulates around the firebombing of Dresden, which the author witnessed as a prisoner of war. The novel simultaneously offers ironic commentary on our inhumanity, satirizes the bourgeois standards of suburbia, and explores human inconsequence and impotence.
Week from 26th Oct to 1st Nov 2009: James Joyce
From A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
‘And thanks be to God, Johnny, said Mr Dedalus, that we lived so long and did so little harm.’
James Joyce
About: James Joyce (1882 - 1941) was an Irish-born novelist and short story writer. He was concerned exclusively with his native Dublin which to him was a microcosm, a small-scale model of all human life and experience, of all history, and of all geography.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) is an autobiography woven into a novel, it follows the growth of an artist’s mind and his assuming of the priesthood of the artist. Ulysses (1922), an account of one day in the lives of citizens of Dublin, is his novelistic masterpiece. His best short stories are contained in Dubliners (1914).
Week from 19th to 25th Oct 2009: Herman Melville
From Moby Dick (1851)
‘Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.’
Herman Melville
About: Herman Melville (1819 - 1891) was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet. In his writing he saw and felt a complex moral reality, on one pole he affirmed the grandeur of the individual, on the other he painfully perceived his egotism.
Moby Dick (1851) is his classic masterpiece, featuring Captain Ahab who seeks to kill the white whale as a revenge for the loss of his leg and whose destructive mission results in the sinking of his ship. His notable short stories are Billy Budd, Sailor (publ. 1924) or Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853).
Week from 12th to 18th Oct 2009: Alasdair Gray
From Lanark (1981)
‘People in Scotland have a queer idea of the arts. They think you can be an artist in your spare time, though nobody expects you to be a spare-time dustman, engineer, lawyer or brain surgeon.’
Alasdair Gray
About: Alasdair Gray (b. 1934) is a Scottish novelist, short story writer, painter, illustrator, and author of non-fiction. He often combines his diverse artistic talents within single works: he composes paintings with words and letters and punctuates novels with paintings. He is preoccupied with his native Glasgow, examines Scottish identity, but at the same time enlarges his scope to encompass universal problems.
Lanark (1981) is his postmodern epic, fragmented yet all-compassing, mingling word and design, and blending the seemingly incompatible literary genres of satire and tragedy, realism and fantasy. 1982, Janine (1984) is his most controversial novel, in subject an exploitation of pornographic fantasy, in form an explosive experiment in style, layout, and typography. The Book of Prefaces (2000) is a literary history, serious in subject but playful in form.
Week from 5th to 11th Oct 2009: Anthony Burgess
From A Clockwork Orange (1962)
‘Initiative comes to thems that wait.’
Anthony Burgess
About: Anthony Burgess (1917 - 1993) was a versatile and extremely prolific British novelist, poet, playwright, critic, journalist, essayist, travel writer, composer, and translator. He spoke seven languages, including also Malaya, Russian, or Welsh. His writing is preoccuppied with the theology and sociology of sin and evil.
A Clockwork Orange (1962) is his most brilliant experimental novel which offers a dystopian vision of the technological future. It is narrated from the point of view of the young London delinquent Alex who fantasizes about rape, assault, and murder while listening to Mozart. Among his other notable novels are The Wanting Seed (1962), Earthly Powers (1980), and Napoleon Symphony (1974).
Week from 28th Sep to 4th Oct 2009: Aldous Huxley
From Brave New World (1932)
‘(CH3)C6H2(NO2)3 + Hg(CNO)2 = well, what? An enormous hole in the ground, a pile of masonry, some bits of flesh and mucus, a foot, with the boot still on it, flying through the air and landing, flop, in the middle of the geraniums–the scarlet ones; such a splendid show that summer!’
Aldous Huxley
About: Aldous Huxley (1894 - 1963) was a British novelist, author of satirical pictures of the self-conscious pursuit of modernity on the part of his characters. He was well-read and self-consciously literary, in his titles he used phrases of Shakespeare, Bacon, Milton, and others.
Brave New World (1932) is his Dystopian masterpiece which challenges scientific optimism about the future. It claims that individual freedom is rooted in literature and religion. His formally most experimental novel is Eyeless in Gaza (1936) which employes difficult unchronological shifts in time and perspective.
Week from 21st to 27th Sep 2009: Ezra Pound
From ABC of Reading (1934)
‘The man of understanding can no more sit quiet and resigned while his country lets literature decay than a good doctor could sit quiet and contented while some ignorant child was infecting itself with tuberculosis under the impression that it was merely eating jam tarts.’
Ezra Pound
About: Ezra Pound (1885 - 1972) was an American poet, critic, translator, and literary entrepreneur. He exported the Modernist revolution to America, he promoted avant-garde poetry movements as Imagism or Vorticism. He adopted traditional forms and rendered them in a new way: not to break with the past but to modernise the past, ‘make it new’.
His probably finest poetry collection is called Personae (1909), of interest is also a volume entitled Hugh Selwyn Mauberley: Life and Contacts (1920) which reacts on the death of his friend, the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Bryeska, at the WW I front. His masterpiece are The Cantos, a long, unending poem in open form and free verse, a momumental epic intended to bridge the ancient and modern cultures.
Week from 14th to 20th Sep 2009: Edith Wharton
From The House of Mirth (1905)
‘The only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it.’
Edith Wharton
About: Edith Wharton (1862 - 1937) was an American novelist and short story writer. She is often regarded as the female counterpart of Henry James: she shares his carefully wrought style but adds her peculiarly own treatment of inner life, sense of cultural nuances, and indignation at the lack of social freedom.
The House of Mirth (1905) is her early naturalistic novel concerned with economic determinism and following the confrontation of a pure woman with corrupted morals and sexuality. Ethan Fromme (1911) is a local colour novel set in New England and naturalistically portraying the decline of the protagonist's marriage. The Age of Innocence (1920) is a later masterpiece which won her the Pulitzer Prize.
Week from 7th to 13th Sep 2009: Graham Greene
‘The world is not black and white. More like black and grey.’
(London Observer, Jan 2, 1983)
Graham Greene
About: Graham Greene (1904 - 1991) was a British novelist and short story writer. His writing is preoccupied with political and religious problems, he projects into it his anti-imperialism and Catholic faith. His typical settings are countries suffering under the effects of imperialism, or countries torn by war. His typical characters are outsiders and rebels, double-sided characters with destructive tendencies, and characters suffering under their sense of sin and moral unworthiness.
Among his most famous novels are The Power and the Glory (1940), featuring as the protagonist a whisky-priest in the restless anti-clerical Mexico; The End of the Affair (1951), concerned with an illegitimate love affair against the background of the blitzed London; and The Quiet American (1955), set during the Vietnam War and arguing for the necessity of expressing one's political loyalties.
Week from 31th Aug to 6th Sep 2009: Thomas Carlyle
From Past and Present (1843)
"The English are a dumb people. They can do great acts, but not describe them."
Thomas Carlyle
About: Thomas Carlyle (1795 - 1881) was a British prose writer, historian, and social critic. Known principally as the author of Past and Present (1843), he was the most noisy and effective critic of the early Victorian Britain. His non-fiction masterpiece juxtaposes the achievements of the past with the confusions of the present.
His masterpiece in fiction is called Sartor Resartus (1832), formally a reflexive discourse moulded around a learned study of the philosophy of clothes. The title, meaning "The Tailor Retailored", well describes the method of amalgamation and assimilation used in the book.
Week from 24th to 30th Aug 2009: J. D. Salinger
From The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
"I’m quite illiterate, but I read a lot."
J. D. Salinger
About: J(erome) D(avid) Salinger (b. 1919) is an American novelist and short story writer. He is most famous for his first novel, The Catcher in the Rye (1951), which describes the exploits of a rebellious teenager during his two-day trip to the New York underworld. The book is notable for its fresh colloquial language and the often self-ironizing humour of its young protagonist-narrator.
Salinger published several collections of short stories and novellas in which he further develops his preoccupation with lonely and eccentric individuals, for instance Franny and Zooey (1961) or Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963). In the early 1960s he withdrew from the literary scene and stopped publishing his work.
Week from 17th to 23rd Aug 2009: Tony Hoagland
From "Grammar"
"Maxine, back from a weekend with her boyfriend,
smiles like a big cat and says
that she's a conjugated verb.
She's been doing the direct object
with a second person pronoun named Phil..."
Tony Hoagland
About: Tony Hoagland (b. 1953) is a contemporary American poet who self-consciously seeks to create popular and widely read poetry. He counts among the Younger American Poets who write in the confessional mode but who at the same time manage to be humorous and entertaining.
Week from 10th to 16th Aug 2009: George Gordon Byron
From Don Juan (1819 – 1824)
"Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch's wife,
He would have written sonnets all his life?"
George Gordon Byron
About: Lord George Gordon Byron (1788 – 1824) was a British poet, playwright, and revolutionary. He was immensely popular already in his lifetime and was regarded as the prototype of literary Romanticism.
He was associated with the ‘Satanic School’ of poets. He wrote old-fashioned lyrics in neo-classic style as well as political poems on public life, politics, and revolution.
His masterpiece is Don Juan (1819 – 1824), a verse satire against modern civilization. It deconstructs the myths of the supposed glory of war, the Rousseauistic faith in human goodness, or fidelity in love.
Week from 3rd to 9th Aug 2009: Max Beerbohm
From "Going Back to School" (1899)
"I was a modest, good-humoured boy. It is Oxford that has made me insufferable."
Max Beerbohm
About: Max Beerbohm (1872 - 1956) was a British caricaturist, parodist, and critic. He studied Oxford where he became a part of the Oscar Wild set.
He was considered a great wit and entertaining companion, he mocked both the Victorian earnestness and the Aesthetes and Decadents.
His first published book was mockingly called The Works of Max Beerbohm (1896). He wrote one novel, Zuleika Dobson; or, An Oxford Love Story (1911). His most appreciated work is A Christmas Garland (1912), a parody of literary styles.
Week from 27th July to 2nd Aug 2009: John Braine
"Being a writer in a library is rather like being a eunuch in a harem."
John Braine
About: John Braine (1922 - 1986) was a British novelist, one of the leading personalities of the Angry Young Men movement. He wrote some fifteen books of fiction and some non-fiction but is chiefly remembered for his first novel, Room at the Top (1957), which won him immediate recognition.
Room at the Top offers a sharp picture of the period obsessed with wealth and social status. It features an unscrupulous and opportunistic protagonist who chooses to marry for wealth and success rather than for love and has to come to terms with his disenchantment by the spiritual emptiness he finds in the ‘top’ society.
Week from 20th to 26th July 2009: John Osborne
From The Entertainer (1957)
"Don't clap too hard––it's a very old building."
About: John Osborne (1929 - 1994) was a British playwright, the leading personality of the Angry Young Men. He freed the theatre from the formal constraints of the former generation and introduced a new kind of drama challenging the middle-class virtues of ‘the well-made play’. His plays shifted the emphasis to language, theatrical rhetoric, and intensive emotions.
Between 1950s - 1960s he managed to shock his audiences into responsive attention, later his social vision however got out of fashion and his plays started to decline in quality. Among his most brilliant early plays are Look Back in Anger (1956), which supplied the label for the Angry Young Men Movement, The Entertainer (1957), and Luther (1961).
Week from 13th to 19th July 2009: Harold Pinter
From The Birthday Party (1957)
"You need a long convalescence."
"A change of air."
"Somewhere over the rainbow."
"Where angels fear to tread."
"Exactly."
"You're in a rut."
"You look anaemic."
"Rheumatic."
"Myopic."
"Epileptic."
"You're on the verge."
"You're a dead duck."
"But we can save you."
"From a worse state."
Harold Pinter
About: Harold Pinter (b. 1930) is a British playwright and scriptwriter, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005. His favourite genres are absurd drama, farce, and political drama.
He is characteristic for his disturbing language, which mirrors the world of dislocated relationships and undefined threats. Among his best-known plays areThe Dumb Waiter (1957), The Homecoming (1964), or Betrayal (1978).
Week from 6th to 12th July 2009: G. B. Shaw
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
G. B. Shaw
About: G(eorge) B(ernard) Shaw (1856 - 1950) was a diverse personality influential from the last decades of the 19th century throughout the first half of the 20th. Though Irish-born, he spent most of his life in England. He was occupied as a playwright, drama critic, music critic, social critic, and public speaker. In 1925 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
He wrote more than fifty plays in which he fuses elements of socialism, science, and philosophy. He attacks conventional moralism, makes his characters argue their points of view to justify themselves, and moves the audience to uncomfortable sympathy. His most famous are his early "unpleasant" play Mrs Warren’s Profession (1893) and later Pygmalion (1912) which became the basis for the musical My Fair Lady (1956).
Week from 29th June to 5th July 2009: Stevie Smith
From "Not Waving but Drowning" (1957)
"Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning."
Stevie Smith
About: Stevie Smith (1902 - 1971) was a British poet and novelist. All of her three published novels are slightly fictionalised accounts of her own life: Novel on Yellow Paper (1936), Over the Frontier (1938), and The Holiday (1949).
She won critical esteem by her mature collections of poetry, especially Not Waving But Drowning (1957), whose title poem (quoted above) describes the fundamental isolation of the poet from her audience by using the metaphor of a misapprehended swimmer dying at sea whose desparate gesturing is held for friendly waving.
Week from 22nd to 28th June 2009: Washington Irving
From Bracebridge Hall (1822)
"Whenever a man's friends begin to compliment him about looking young, he may be sure that they think he is growing old."
Washington Irving
About: Washington Irving (1783 - 1859) was an American short story writer, essayist, travel writer, and biographist. His early writings treat satirically the absence of American cultural traditions, as for instance the History of New York by Diedrich Knickerbocker (1809), which is a burlesque parody of the methods of contemporary historians and of the short American history.
He is notable for his contribution to the development of the American short story. His collection entitled The Sketch Book (1819) adapts the European local histories and legends to American settings and includes what is considered the first American tale, “Rip Van Winkle”, a short story based on a German legend. Towards the end of his life he completed the Life of George Washington (1855 - 1859), an influential biography in five volumes.
Week from 15th to 21st June 2009: Oliver Wendell Holmes
From The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)
"Put not your trust in money, but put your money in trust."
Oliver Wendell Holmes
About: Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809 - 1894) was an American poet, novelist, and essayist, a prominent personality of the Boston Brahmins.
His poetry was written mostly for public occasions and published principaly in the Atlantic Monthly. Some of his poems eventually became schoolroom classics, as for instance “The Chambered Nautilus”.
Besides his poetry, he is well known for his series of humorous essays describing imaginary entertaining conversations at a Boston boarding-house. They were published in several volumes, The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858) being the first of them.
Week from 8th to 14th June 2009: George S. Kaufman
From A Night at the Opera (1935)
"That’s why I’m sitting here with you, because you remind me of you. Your eyes, your throat, your lips, everything about you reminds me of you, except you. How do you account for that? If she figures that one out, she’s good."
George S. Kaufman
About: George S. Kaufman (1889 - 1961) was an American playwright and drama critic. He was dubbed the "Great Collaborator" because he collaborated on more than 40 plays with different writers but wrote very few plays of his own.
He wrote mostly comedy and farce. Among his notable collaborations are Of Thee I Sing (1931), a musical play in collaboration with Morrie Ryskin, or You Can't Take It With You (1936), a comedy in collaboration with Moss Hart. Both plays were awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
Week from 1st to 7th June 2009: William Byrd
From The History of the Dividing Line (1841)
"Amongst other Indian Commodities, they brought over Some of the bewitching Vegetable, Tobacco. And this being the first that ever came to England, Sir Walter thought he could do no less than make a present of Some of the brightest of it to His Roial Mistress, for her own Smoaking. The Queen graciously accepted of it, but finding her Stomach sicken after two or three Whiffs, it was presently whispered by the Earl of Leicester's Faction, that Sir Walter had certainly Poison'd Her. But Her Majesty soon recovering Her Disorder, obliged the Countess of Nottingham and all her Maids to Smoak a whole Pipe out amongst them."
William Byrd
About: William Byrd (1674 - 1744) was an early American colonist in Virginia and author of autobiographical writings remarkable especially for their easy style and irreverent humour.
Week from 25th to 31st May 2009: Marilyn Chin
From "How I Got That Name"
"I am Marilyn Mei Ling Chin. / ... Of course, / the name had been changed
somewhere between Angel Island and the sea,
when my father the paperson / in the late 1950s
obsessed with a bombshell blond / transliterated 'Mei Ling' to 'Marilyn'.
... My mother couldn't pronounce the 'r.'
She dubbed me 'Numba one female offshoot' / for brevity..."
Marilyn Chin
About: Marilyn Chin (b. 1955) is an Asian American poet, translator, and editor of Chinese origin. Her poetry focuses on social issues, she often satirizes the stereotypical image of Chinese Americans as the exemplary minority. She won numerous prizes for her poetry, her work frequently appears in various anthologies.
Week from 18th to 24th May 2009: Oscar Wilde
From The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)
Algernon:
"Oh! I am not really wicked at all, cousin Cecily. You mustn't think that I am wicked."
Cecily:
"If you are not, then you have certainly been deceiving us all in a very inexcusable manner. I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy."
Oscar Wilde
Week from 11th to 17th May 2009: William Dean Howells
"There will presently be no room in the world for things; it will be filled up with the advertisements of things."
William Dean Howells
About: William Dean Howells (1837 - 1920) was an American novelist and the foremost American critic and editor from mid-1880s into the early 20th century. As the chief editor of The Atlantic Monthly, he recognized and declared the central importance of Mark Twain and Henry James at the beginning of their respective literary careers. He also supported the naturalists Frank Norris and Steven Crane.
His own novels employ the method of minute realism, he records the details of everyday life with a photography-like fidelity. He is author of a number of realistic and moralistic novels, for instance The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), and several influential volumes of literary criticism, including My Mark Twain (1910).
Week from 4th to 10th May 2009: John Steinbeck
From The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
"Fella says today, 'Depression is over. I seen a jackrabbit, an' they wasn't nobody after him.' That's how I mean. Ain't really funny, not funny like that time Uncle John converted an Injun an' brang him home, an' that Injun et his way clean to the bottom of the bean bin, an' then backslid with Uncle John's whiskey."
John Steinbeck
About: John Steinbeck (1902 - 1968) was an American novelist and short story writer, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature (1962). Born in California, he was preoccupied with portraying the California paisanos in his writing.
His fiction typically focuses on lowly dispossessed people with their indignant fear and inherent dignity against the Great Depression background. At the same time he expresses an universal desire to become a voice for the broken dreams and lives of common people.
Week from 27th April to 3rd May 2009: Angela Carter
From The Sadeian Woman (1979)
"The whore is despised by the hypocritical world because she has made a realistic assessment of her assets and does not have to rely on fraud to make a living. In an area of human relations where fraud is regular practice between the sexes, her honesty is regarded with a mocking wonder."
Angela Carter
About: Angela Carter (1940 - 1992) was a British novelist and short story writer. Her fiction typically merges magic realism, gothicism, and feminism. She also reinvented the fairy tale for a knowing adult public.
Both Nights at the Circus (1984) and Wise Children (1991) are theatrical novels set in the golden age of escapist entertainment in the late 19th to early 20th century. Notable are also her collections of Gothic short stories, Fireworks (1974) and The Bloody Chamber (1979).
Week from 20th to 26th April 2009: David Gascoyne
From "And the Seventh Dream is the Dream of Isis" (1933)
"she was standing at the window clothed only in a ribbon
she was burning the eyes of snails in a candle
she was eating the excrement of dogs and horses
she was writing a letter to the president of france"
David Gascoyne
About: David Gascoyne (1916 - 2001) was a British poet, one of the most determined apologists for surreal poetry, also author of war poems. His best known collection, Hölderlin's Madness (1938), contains his own original poems as well as translations of French surrealists. The above quoted poem dispenses with capital letters and punctuation, it intermixes the challenging and the extraordinary.
Week from 13th to 19th April 2009: Charles Dickens
From David Copperfield (1849 - 1850)
"My other piece of advice, Copperfield," said Mr. Micawber, "you know. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery."
Charles Dickens
Week from 6th to 12th April 2009: Gwendolyn Brooks
"We Real Cool" (1960)
We real cool. We
Left school. We
Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We
Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We
Jazz June. We
Die soon.
Gwendolyn Brooks
About: Gwendolyn Brooks (1917 - 2000) was an African-American poet. Her collection Annie Allen (1949) won her the Pulitzer Prize (1950) and made her the first African-American writer to ever receive this prize.
Week from 30th March to 5th April 2009: Henry James
From Hawthorne (1879)
"It is, I think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most self-conscious people in the world, and the most addicted to the belief that the other nations of the earth are in a conspiracy to undervalue them."
Henry James
About: Henry James (1846 - 1916) was an expatriate American novelist, short story writer, and critic. He initiated the method of psychological realism and introduced the 20th century fiction as a drama of consciousness rather than of plot development. He also introduced the American-European subject, the clash of the New and the Old World.
The protagonists of his psychological novels are mostly upper class characters who are at leisure to linger with their consciousness. Among his mature masterpieces are The Wings of the Dove (1902),The Ambassadors (1903), orThe Golden Bowl (1904).
Week from 23rd to 29th March 2009: Mark Twain
Author's Notice to Huckleberry Finn (1884)
"Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot."
BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR
Mark Twain
Week from 16th to 22nd March 2009: James Russell Lowell
From A Fable for Critics (1848).
"Nature fits all her children with something to do,
He who would write and can't write, can surely review".
James Russell Lowell
About: James Russell Lowell (1819 - 1891) was one of the most versatile and respected literary figures in America in the second half of the nineteenth century. He was a poet, critic, and editor; associated with the New England Brahmins. He was chosen for editor of the Atlantic Monthly when it launched (1857).
His newspaper series of political and social criticism was collected under the title The Biglow Papers (1846). The collection established his reputation as a satirist and wit.
His most famous work is A Fable for Critics (1848), which represents the best features of his writing. It demonstrates his facility and wit in rhyming grounded on his familiarity with the classic and modern literature.
Week from 9th to 15th March 2009: Evelyn Waugh
From Decline and Fall (1928)
"Anyone who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison."
Evelyn Waugh
About: Evelyn Waugh (1903 - 1966) was a British novelist and journalist. His fiction is preoccupied with society in decay, human depravity, and menace. His typical modes of expression are satire and grotesque comedy. His novels jest at human folly, injustice, crime, and even potential horror.
Decline and Fall (1928), his first novel, follows the disastrous career of a failed undergraduate, a failing schoolmaster, and an exploited lover, that terminates in prison. His other novels include Vile Bodies (1930), A Handful of Dust (1934), or Brideshead Revisited (1945).
His journalistic work is concerned above all with Ethiopia. An account of his Ethiopia visits is entitled Waugh in Abyssinia (1936); a later fictional enlargement was published under the title Scoop (1938).
Week from 2nd to 8th March 2009: Robert Frost
From "The Death of the Hired Man"
"Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in."
Robert Frost
About: Robert Frost (1875 - 1963) was among the most popular of American poets of any time. His poetry is simple in subject matter, seemingly easily accessible, but a great deal is communicated in between the lines.
He is characteristic for his pragmatism, scepticism, even pessimism. His poetry was influenced by the British poet and novelist Thomas Hardy, who was regarded as the literary proto-pessimist by his 20th century followers.
Among Frost's collections are A Boy's Will (1913), North of Boston (1914), and New Hampshire (1923). Among his most famous poems are "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening", "Mending Wall", or "The Oven Bird".
Week from 23rd Feb to 1st March 2009: John Dos Passos
From Strikers in Airways (1929)
"We work to eat to get the strength to work to eat to get the strength to work to eat to get the strength to work to eat to get the strength to work."
John Dos Passos
About: John Dos Passos (1896 - 1970) was an American novelist and author of plays and travel books. As a young writer he sympathised with communism but later he was disenchanted with the ideology and became an anti-communist.
His masterpiece is the trilogy U.S.A. (1937), a detailed survey of the contemporary American history and politics but also an original experiment in language and technique. The central conflict is based on the clash between the "two nations", that is a small group of the rich and a large group of the poor.
Week from 16th to 22nd Feb 2009: Laurence Sterne
The opening sentence of Tristram Shandy (1759 - 68)
"I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me..."
Laurence Sterne
About: Laurence Sterne (1713 - 1768) was probably the most experimental of the mid-eighteenth-century British novelists. His Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is based on the consciousness of a narrator who fails in the first two of the total of nine volumes even to get himself born. All information in the novel remains provisional, all interpretation is relative, and any sense of ending is consistently denied.
Sterne's other novel, A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768), is a parody of the conventional travel-book. The protagonist ends his journey in Lyons without even nearing the French border with Italy and concludes his narrative with an abruptly broken sentence.
Week from 9th to 15th Feb 2009: Philip Larkin
From "This Be The Verse" (1971)
"They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had.
And add some extra, just for you."
Philip Larkin
About: Philip Larkin (1922 - 1985) was a British poet, the leading figure of The Movement.
His mature poetry was influenced by Thomas Hardy, he typically takes a pessimistic, sceptical attitude to reality.
Some of his poetry is provocatively frank (as the quote above), but he also wrote delicately lyrical poems.
Week from 2nd to 8th Feb 2009: Stephen Crane
From "Blue Hotel"
"Every sin is the result of collaboration."
Stephen Crane
About: Stephen Crane (1871 - 1900) was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet. His work is preoccupied with war as well as with other forms of physical and psychic violence.
His first novel, Maggie, A Girl of the Streets (1890), is written in the vein of naturalism. His masterpiece, The Red Badge of Courage (1895), marks a shift to an impressionist sensitivity. The novel follows the emotional growing up of a young man in the context of war.
Crane's poetry is original, spare, and unflinchingly honest. His short untitled poems, called "lines", are characteristic for his masterly use of irony. This is evident already in the title of one of his collections, War is Kind, and Other Poems (1899).
Week from 26th Jan to 1st Feb 2009: Kenneth Koch
From "Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams"
"I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next summer.
I am sorry, but it was morning, and I had nothing to do and its wooden beams were so inviting."
"Last evening we went dancing and I broke you leg.
Forgive me. I was clumsy and I wanted you here in the wards, where I am the doctor!"
Kenneth Koch
About: Kenneth Koch (1925 - 2002) was an American poet associated with the New York School. He wrote miniature small-scale poems, long epic poems in Whitmanesque tradition, and brilliant parodies on many classic poets. The lines above reformulate William Carlos Williams's poem "This is Just to Say".
(Poznámka: Původní Williamsovu báseň si můžete přečíst v archivu citátů pod prvním týdnem září 2008).
Week from 19th to 25th Jan 2009: Jane Austen
From Northanger Abbey (1817)
Then forming his features into a set smile, and affectedly softening his voice, he added, with a simpering air, 'Have you been long in Bath, madam?'
'About a week, sir,' replied Catherine, trying not to laugh.
'Really!' with affected astonishment.
'Why should you be surprised, sir?'
'Why, indeed!' said he, in his natural tone -- 'but some emotion must appear to be raised by your reply, and surprise is more easily assumed, and not less reasonable than any other. -- Now let us go on. Were you never here before, madam?'
Jane Austen
Week from 12th to 18th Jan 2009: Samuel Johnson
From A Dictionary of the English Language (1755)
"Lexico'grapher. n.: A writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words."
"Oats. n.: A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people."
"Pe'nsion. n.: An allowance made to anyone without an equivalent. In England it is generally understood to mean pay given to a state hireling for treason to his country."
Samuel Johnson
About: Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709 - 1784) was a critic, moralist, biographer, lexicographer, essayist, and poet. His Dictionary of the English Language (1755) was a pioneering project aiming to preserve the purity of the English language; it served as a standard reference book for one hundred years. The definitions above are one of the few illustrations of Johnson's whimsical wit in the otherwise serious work.
Week from 5th to 11th Jan 2009: David Lodge
From Changing Places (1975)
"Fortunately the apartment was well provided with gas burners of antique design, and by keeping them on at full volume all day he was able to maintain a tolerable temperature in his rooms, though O'Shea evidently found it excessive, entering Morris's apartment with his arm held up to shield his face, like a man breaking into a burning house."
David Lodge
About: David Lodge (b. 1935) is a British professor of literature and author of novels which typically deal with the life of academia in a humorous and satirical way. Changing Places (1975) is one of his campus novels, other famous representatives of this genre are his Small World (1984) and Nice Work (1988).
Week from 29th Dec 2008 to 4th Jan 2009: A. L. Kennedy
From "The Mouseboks Family Dictionary"
"marriage: A kind of bedroom ceasefire without benefit of UN Peacekeeping Forces. See Fear of Psychiatrists, Money, Murder, Odd Noises, Sex.
"masturbation: Another word for Self-Respect. Or substitute for central heating in older Mouseboks homes. See Sex, See Fear of Psychiatrists.
"money: Something to light the heart. A family symbol of reliability, warmth, affection, self-esteem and dignity. Should be easy to fold. See Mouseboks."
A. L. Kennedy
About: A(lison) L(ouise) Kennedy (b. 1965) is a Scottish novelist, short-story writer, author of non-fiction, and stand-up comedian. She is characteristic for her compulsive tone, original language, and dark humour. The story above comes from her collection Now That You're Back (1994).
Week from 22nd to 28th Dec 2008: Jonathan Swift
From Gulliver's Travels (1726)
"Hence it follows of necessity, that vast numbers of our people are compelled to seek their livelihood by begging, robbing, stealing, cheating, pimping, forswearing, flattering, suborning, forging, gaming, lying, fawning, hectoring, voting, scribbling, stargazing, poisoning, whoring, canting, libelling, free-thinking, and the like occupations."
Jonathan Swift
About: Jonathan Swift (1667 - 1745) was an influential Irish satirist who exploited a variety of political, religious, and social ills; with special attention to the affairs of Ireland. Besides the extended Gulliver's Travels, he wrote a series of shorter essays, including A Tale of a Tub (1704), The Battle of the Books (1704), or A Modest Proposal (1729).
Week from 15th to 21st Dec 2008: Gertrude Stein
From "A Valentine" (1922)
"Very fine is my valentine.
Very fine and very mine.
Very mine is my valentine very mine and very fine.
Very fine is my valentine and mine, very fine very mine and mine is my valentine."
Gertrude Stein
About: Gertrude Stein (1874 - 1946) was an American Modernist novelist, poet, and literary critic. She was famous for her linguistic experiments with simple, familiar, often monosyllabic words, and her typically circular way of expression. Her prose masterpieces include Three Lives (1905), Tender Buttons (1914), and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933).
Week from 8th to 14th Dec 2008: Oliver Wendell Holmes
From The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)
"A pun does not commonly justify a blow in return. But if a blow were given for such cause, and death ensued, the jury would be judges both of the facts and of the pun, and might, if the latter were of an aggravated character, return a verdict of justifiable homicide."
Oliver Wendell Holmes
About: Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809 - 1894) was a member of the Boston Brahmins, a frequent contributor to the Atlantic Monthly, a poet, essayist, and novelist. Some of his poems, for instance "The Chambered Nautilus", eventually became schoolroom classics, hence the label Schoolroom Poet. The quote above comes from his first collection of humorous essays which well reflect his opinions, charm, and remarkable conversational wit.
Week from 1st to 7th Dec 2008: Richard Brinsley Sheridan
From The School for Scandal (1777)
Mrs Candour: "She has a charming fresh colour."
Lady Teazel: "Yes, when it is fresh put on."
Mrs Candour: "Well, I'll swear 'tis natural, for I've seen it come and go."
Lady Teazel: "Yes, it comes at night, and goes again in the morning."
Sir Benjamin: "True, madam, it not only goes and comes, but what's more, her maid can fetch and carry it."
Richard Brinsley Sheridan
About: Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751 - 1816) was an Irish playwright, an heir of the Restoration comedy. Wrote comedies of manners filled with quick action, funny confusion, and clever verbal wit.
Week from 24th to 30th Nov 2008: Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway describes Francis Scott Fitzgerald's version of heaven:
"A beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists, all powerful and members of the best families all drinking themselves to death."
Hemingway describes Fitzgerald's version of hell:
"An ugly vacuum full of poor polygamists unable to obtain booze or with chronic stomach disorders that they called secret sorrows."
Ernest Hemingway
Week from 17th to 23th Nov 2008: Alexander Pope
"Epitaph on Isaac Newton"
"Nature and nature's laws lay hid in night,
God said, Let Newton be, and all was light."
Alexander Pope
About: Alexander Pope (1688 - 1744) was a neoclassical British poet, known for his fierce satires, verse writings on literary criticism and philosophy, as well as influential translations of Homer, all composed in masterful heroic couplets.
His most enduring works include a witty satire of The Rape of the Lock (1712), a discussion of literary theory in An Essay on Criticism (1711), and a serious philosophical discourse of An Essay on Man (1734).
"Epitaph on Isaac Newton" (1643 - 1727) is a witty reference to Newton's Opticks (1704), a ground-breaking work formulating Newton's scientific discoveries about light and colour.
Week from 10th to 16th Nov 2008: Sinclair Lewis
From Main Street (1920).
"She was not a Respectable Married Woman but fully a human being".
Sinclair Lewis
About: Sinclair Lewis (1885 - 1951) was an American novelist, the first winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature to represent the United States. He devoted most of his work to attack the materialism of American society and the stiffling effects of American provincialism. Main Street (1920) deals with a woman protagonist who attempts to enlighten a small town with 'culture' but ends up in failure. His other novels include Babbitt (1922) or Arrowsmith (1925).
Week from 3rd to 9th Nov 2008: Henry Miller
From Tropic of Cancer (1931).
"I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive".
Henry Miller
About: Henry Miller (1891 - 1980) was an American author of what may be described as anti-novels springing from the economical and political crisis launched by the Wall Street Crash of 1929. Produced largely autobiographical writings which dismiss both literary and social conventions and famously boast with his obscenity and sexual frankness. Besides the Tropic of Cancer (1931) and Tropic of Capricorn (1939) wrote the trilogy known as The Rosy Crucifixion (1949 - 60).
Week from 27th Oct to 2nd Nov 2008: Joe Orton
From Loot (1965)
Truscott: "And you complain you were beaten?"
Dennis: "Yes."
Truscott: "Did you tell anyone?"
Dennis: "Yes."
Truscott: "Who?"
Dennis: "The officer in charge."
Truscott: "What did he say?"
Dennis: "Nothing."
Truscott: "Why not?"
Dennis: "He was out of breath with kicking."
Joe Orton
About: Joe Orton (1933 - 1967) was a British playwright, author of black comedies which typically use clever verbal humour and explore the potential of the state to oppress the citizen. Wrote among others Loot (1966), The Erpingham Camp (1967), or What the Butler Saw (1967).
Week from 20th to 26th Oct 2008: George Farquhar
From The Beaux-Stratagem (1707)
Mrs Sullen: "You must assist me."
Dorinda: "What, against my own brother?"
Mrs Sullen: "He's but half a brother, and I'm your entire friend."
George Farquhar
About: George Farquhar (1677 or 1678 - 1707) was an Irish-born actor and playwright, notable for his contribution to the genre of Restoration comedy. His bright, rattling comedies represent a transition between the bawdiness of the 17th century Restoration drama and the sentimentality of the 18th century theatre. The Beaux-Stratagem (1707) together with The Recruiting Officer (1706) are his most enduring plays.
Week from 13th to 19th Oct 2008: G. K. Chesterton
"Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it."
G. K. Chesterton
About: Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874 - 1936) was a British novelist, poet and literary and social critic. Best remembered for his fantasy writings, especially for his dystopian novel The Man Who was Thursday (1908). Also wrote literary criticism, produced among others a biography of Charles Dickens (1906). Sometimes called the 'prince of paradox' for his whimsical and startlingly original formulations.
Week from 6th to 12th Oct 2008: Iain Banks
"Two years after I killed Blyth I murdered my young brother Paul, for quite different and more fundamental reasons than I'd disposed of Blyth, and then a year after that I did for my young cousin Esmerelda, more or less on a whim.
That's my score to date. Three. I haven't killed anybody for years, and don't intend to ever again.
It was just a stage I was going through."
Iain Banks
About: Iain Banks (b. 1954) is a Scottish novelist. Writes literary fiction as Iain Banks and science-fiction as Iain M. Banks. The quote above comes from his first novel, The Wasp Factory (1984), a blackly comic account of a teenager trying to come to terms with his (supposed) accidental castration.
Week from 29th Sept to 5th Oct 2008: Zadie Smith
"Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
Zadie Smith
About: Zadie Smith (b. 1975) is a British novelist of Jamaican origin. She wrote her first novel, White Teeth (2000), when she was still an university student. The novel was an immediate success and was since then translated in over twenty languages, including Czech. She has written two more novels and published a collection of literary critical essays, Fail Better: The Morality of the Novel (2006), from which the quote above is taken.
Week from 22nd to 28th Sept 2008: Edwin Morgan
From "The Loch Ness Monster's Song" (1973)
"Hovoplodok--doplodovok--plovodokot--doplodokosh?
Splgraw fok fok splgrafhatchgabrlgabrl fok splfok!
Zgra kra gka fok!
Grof grawff gahf?"
Edwin Morgan
About: Edwin Morgan (b. 1920) is the first Glasgow Poet Laureate (since 1999) and the first Scots Makar, i.e. the National Poet for Scotland (since 2004). The quote above is one of his playful experiments in sound poetry.
Week from 15th to 21st Sept 2008: Arnold Bennett
"Does there, I wonder, exist a being who has read all, or approximately all, that the person of average culture is supposed to have read, and that not to have read is a social sin? If such a being does exist, surely he is an old, a very old man."
Arnold Bennett
About: Arnold Bennett (1867 - 1931) was a popular British novelist, author of novels in the traditional "materialistic" style. Today chiefly remembered as the writer of novels set in the "Five Towns" of the Staffordshire Potteries, including The Clayhanger Family series (1925).
Week from 8th to 14th Sept 2008: Terry Eagleton
"Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech. If you approach me at a bus stop and murmur 'Thou still unravished bride of quietness,' then I am instantly aware that I am in the presence of the literary."
Terry Eagleton
About: Terry Eagleton (b. 1943) is Britain's most influential living literary critic. Currently Professor of English Literature at the University of Manchester. Author of more than forty books, including Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983), from which the quote above is taken.
Week from 1st to 7th Sept 2008: William Carlos Williams
"This is Just to Say"
"I have eaten and which Forgive me
the plums you were probably they were delicious
that were in saving so sweet
the icebox for breakfast. and so cold."
William Carlos Williams
Week from 25th to 31st Aug 2008: Thomas Hardy
"Epitaph on a Pessimist"
"I'm Smith of Stoke aged sixty odd
I've lived without a dame all my life
And wish to God
My dad had done the same".
Thomas Hardy
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