Fiction

This Tumblr is curated by several assistant editors of Fiction: Carly Rubin, Sarah Meyer and Kristen Hamelin Tracey. [more]

[fiction-magazine]

Like any writer of fiction, I need to give information, but I try to relay it in a creative and sound-conscious way. Prose needs to aspire to something more than declarative sentences. I hesitate to say that it should express itself in a beautiful manner because that might seem pompous, but that's the general idea.

Alistair MacLeod, Jul. 20 1936 - Apr. 20 2014, via MQR

[vintagelibraries]

Mount Vernon Public Library, Bookmobile, year unknown.

[writingquotes-deactivated201509]

You can’t think yourself out of a writing block; you have to write yourself out of a thinking block.

John Rogers (via writingquotes)

[thebooktrove]

The best part of waking up on a Saturday. What are you reading this weekend?!

[nationalbook]

National Book Award Winner Flannery O’Connor gets her own postage stamp.

[sneakypigeon]

Book haul, april 2015 

[fiction-magazine]

...it is only when a man goes out into the world with the thought that there are heroisms all round him, and with the desire all alive in his heart to follow any which may come within sight of him, that he breaks away as I did from the life he knows, and ventures forth into the wonderful mystic twilight land where lie the great adventures and the great rewards

The Lost World, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (born May 22, 1859)

[heirloombabydoll-deactivated201]

They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.

Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (via dantequartet)

[classicpenguin]

Over at Salon, Laura Miller took advantage of our new edition of Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber to re-read and re-evaluate this classic story collection:

Carter needed the fantastic, and the imagination it springs from, because she wanted to do justice to the beauty of the old ways and also to the wonders of the new ways she hoped would replace them. It’s no coincidence that both the literary fiction and the feminism of her time would drift toward the priggish and the prohibitive; so much attention to what one shouldn’t do! She was a liberationist in every sense of the word, a champion of unruly pleasures, always busting out of one tower or another and encouraging everyone else to do so, too. If our personal and literary spaces feel more wide open now, she’s one of the ones we have thank.

For more on Carter’s legacy and what this wonderful, frightening, erotic, and imaginative collection means to literature in the 21st century, read the rest of Miller’s essay. 

[nogreatillusion]

There’s a lot of presumption that goes into writing. There’s a lot of internal questioning: Am I an expert? Can I speak on this topic? What makes me valid enough to have a voice? I’ve had to work towards the idea that I couldn’t just arrive in a room and be a person with ideas; and that I needed to respond to other people’s curiosity about who I was before I could really enter a room.

Durga Chew-Bose (via nogreatillusion)

[curethriftshop]

Welcome to NYC (at Cure Thrift Shop)

[apartmenttherapy]

Kah’s Terrific Triangle — Small Cool: http://on.apttherapy.com/0Uh4ks

[chuckpalahniuk]

Read: “The Haunting - How To Conquer The Shame Of Being A Writer,” a new essay I just wrote. Only on LitReactor.com.

[fiction-magazine]

Love this piece -- especially the line “It’s obscene to enjoy something this much and still call it work.” So true.

[sail-for-warmer-climes]

The distinction between children and adults, while probably useful for some purposes, is at bottom a specious one, I feel. There are only individual egos, crazy for love.

Donald Barthelme (via sail-for-warmer-climes)

[snip-of-parsley]

I could only sit and look at myself, feeling like the oldest person who had ever lived and who had not learned a single thing.

Jamaica Kincaid (via apple-pies-and-battle-cries)

[michaelmoonsbookshop]

Art Nouveau book cover designs c1900

[khingzotow]

[teachingliteracy]

kadotlil:

Strands of the west.

(at Powell’s City of Books)