Literature

Do any of you know of an instance that would be good for creating more hyper specific Literature/books communities? Not the big two lemmy.ml or lemmy.world or any that would get defederated here. Basically not any of the instances that are getting crushed ATM or are too unmoderated.

By specific, I mean fan communities for a specific author, series, genre etc.

Here's me reading the whole of Canto 1 of Dante's #Inferno in my English verse-translation.

Basically, I enjoyed the Chantilly manuscript of the Inferno so much that one thing led to another and I wound up making this.

#medieval

@literature @medievodons @bookstodon @poetry

for the unaware:

Strange Horizons is a speculative fiction magazine, available free online, published every Monday. We began in September 2000. In the last year, Strange Horizons and our translation-focused sibling magazine, Samovar, have published nearly a million words of speculative fiction, poetry, essays, round tables, interviews, and reviews.

Since our inception, we have been entirely funded by voluntary contributions, both from readers and the volunteer labor of our editors. We pay all authors and artists fair market rates for their work, and want to continue doing so in the coming years.

their stretch goals for 2024:

• At $12,500, we will publish a special issue on Japanese Speculative Fiction, guest-edited by Terrie Hashimoto, the managing editor of Rikka Zine.

• At $15,000, we will raise our column rates to $75 per column.

• At $17,000, we will publish a special issue on SFF and Neurodiversity.

• At $18,500, we will publish a special issue themed on Body Horror.

• At $20,000 we will raise rates for reviews to $60 per review.

• At $24,000 we'll host a virtual panel with Strange Horizons editors and contributors. All backers will be invited to attend and submit questions for the Q&A!

• At $30,000 we will commission additional pieces of artwork in 2024.

I remember the salt smoke from a beach fire
And shadows under the pines- 
Solid, clean… fixed-
Seagulls perched at the tip of land,
White upon green…
And a wind comes through the pines
To sway the shadows;
The seagulls spread their wings,
Lift
And fill the sky with screeches.
And I hear the wind
Blowing across the beach,
And the surf,
And I see that our fire
Has scorched the seaweed.

When you’re getting books do you prefer to get new ones or secondhand ones?

I really enjoy the “hunt” for used editions of books that I want, and browsing through stacks in used bookstores is fun and neat way to discover books that I might not ever run across otherwise! But I’m kind of picky about the condition of books I buy, so sometimes I just go the easy route and pick up a new copy. Or if it’s a book I don’t want to wait to read I’ll snag a new one!

I proudly announce that today is Bloomsday!

Have you ever tried to read Ulysses, or why do you shy away from it? Any hardcore James Joyce enjoyer in this community?

I'll share my story with Ulysses: I have to shamefully admit I never read the original, but only the German translation, which is of course not the Irish experience that Ulysses should be. The next cardinal sin I must confess is that I did not quite read Ulysses but listened to the audiobook. The narrators were great and carried me through without getting bored. I want to read some parts in the original language, and can't quite decide which ones. I have an e-book version from gutenberg, but the quotation marks are missing, which makes me wish that standard ebooks would make an edition.

What are your favorite chapters? I quite like the part with the news articles. It's funny, different, and the narrators of my audiobook did an especially good job with that chapter.

Comment what books have caused you to become distressed, traumatized, or unsettled in any way. Please elaborate as to why.

I can't help but wonder if the benefits of e-ink are as good in the format of goggles/glasses. I'm skeptical, for sure, but it is an interesting form factor. Also a interesting decision that they work with your phone, so the glasses don't need to have much on board storage. Would anybody here use something like this? Definitely seems ultra-niche.

this is super interesting. braille had been invented by this point but it was not in widespread use yet--it also obviously can't do a good job at representing cartography, since that fundamentally isn't its domain.

With the 30th anniversary of Jurassic Park (film) having just passed, I've had Michael Crichton on my mind. I was introduced to him with Prey in middle school (undoubtedly a little early for the material) and I consider his work to be hugely influential in my love for reading today.

Bearing in mind at the end there he got a bit controversial, I still love almost every Crichton book I've read and have a few cherished copies of Prey and Airframe in my collection (IMO an underrated title in his backlist).

Are you a Michael Crichton fan and if so which titles do you most enjoy? Who are some other pop fiction authors you enjoy or consider guilty pleasures?

If you haven't read Cormac McCarthy, that needs to change. His prose simply has no equal. The man was an actual, honest-to-god, national treasure. He was so formative for me as an author, and I'm just gutted by his death.

Be warned: if you're going to attempt to read one of his books, you need to make sure that you have the time and space to give it proper attention. His work is heavy, like a slab of lead, and you need to be sure to give yourself extra time to digest things. But it's so, so rewarding.

I'm still on Goodreads but it's so slow, the app's just an even slower webview of the site and the redesign has made me have to click more to do what I want.

What's the alternative? Obviously we're on the fediverse and I see people talking about Bookwyrm.

I used Anobii till 2010 and I can't remember why I left but it's still there. I've poked StoryGraph a bit but it was lacking several of the books I wanted to add.

There must be more! What do you use/recommend?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/114069

Born in Kirkwood, Missouri, on November 15, 1887, Moore was raised solely by her mother in an interesting, albeit not unique, world. Her father, John Milton Moore, was victimized by a psychotic episode that would dissever his marriage to Mary Warner Moore, Marianne's mother, before their daughter was born. Her early life would solidify her strong Presbyterian faith and formulate the bedrock themes of much of her future poetry.

When her grandfather, Presbyterian pastor John Riddle Warner, died in 1894, while Marianne was only six years old, her family moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania before eventually settling in the town of Carlisle two years later. This move would set the stage for her future renown as it placed her within the proximity of Bryn Mawr College, which she would attend in 1905. Graduating four years later with degrees in history, economics, and political science, Moore would also write her first poems here alongside her classmate, poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle).

Later, Moore would live with her mother in Brooklyn, working as a librarian before eventually holding a four-year tenure as editor of the literary journal The Dial. Her time spent in the city would make her an avid Dodgers fan, to such a degree that she would even compose an ode to the 1955 World Champions. During this time, she also networked with, and received no small degree of praise from, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Wallace Stevens. Moore would return the favor by later mentoring and encouraging promising young poets Elizabeth Bishop, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbury, and James Merrill.

Moore's habit of using quotations "not as illustrations, but as a means to extend and complete a poem's original intentions" would prove to be a major innovation in the modern American style. She also pushed the limits of minimalism in some of her work by revising previously published poems and reducing them to their core, famously saying "omissions are not accidents."

She lived her life holding true to the idea that strength came from adversity, becoming a staunch supporter of the women's suffrage movement and opposing Pound's anti-Semitic beliefs. Moore would die on February 5, 1972, having received the National Book Award (1951), Pulitzer Prize (1951), Bollingen Prize (1951), Edward MacDowell Medal (1967), and National Medal for Literature (1968) in her lifetime.

(Brief biography sourced from The Oxford Book of American Poetry (2006 edition), Poets.org, and Wikipedia)

Silence

My father used to say,
"Superior people never make long visits,
have to be shown Longfellow's grave
or the glass flowers at Harvard.
Self-reliant like the cat —
that takes its prey to privacy,
the mouse's limp tail hanging like a shoelace from its mouth —
they sometimes enjoy solitude,
and can be robbed of speech
by speech which has delighted them.
The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence;
not in silence, but restraint."
Nor was he insincere in saying, "Make my house your inn."
Inns are not residences.

— Marianne Moore

Man... :( (Also for transparency, I chose npr illinois bc it has the least intrusive ads and layoutof all sources I found.)

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/80166

I'm thinking we should have a central post for all the book sublemmys so we can easily find them. The ones I'm aware of are: Lemmy:

• !Literature@beehaw.org
• !ScienceFiction@lemmy.ml
• !Socialistbooks@lemmygrad.ml
• !Fantasy@lemmy.ml
• !GayFiction@lemmy.world
• !SapphicFiction@lemmy.world
• !Nonfiction@lemmy.world
• !StephenKing@mander.xyz (cr. mizu6079)
• !Manga@lemmy.ml (cr. AWanderingsorcerer)
• !Comics@lemmy.ml (cr. AWanderingsorcerer)
• !Comicbooks@lemmy.world (cr. AWanderingsorcerer)
• !Books@oceanbreeze.earth
• !literatur@feddit.de (cr. Communist)
• !horrorlit@lemmy.ml (cr. Lazycog)
• !books@lemmy.ml

Fediverse:

• !comics@a.gup.pe (cr. Yuki)
• !comics@chirp.social (cr. Yuki)
• !webcomics@a.gup.pe (cr. Yuki)
• !webtoons@a.gup.pe (cr. Yuki)
• !books@a.gup.pe (cr. Yuki)
• !books@chirp.social (cr. Yuki)
• !bookstodon@a.gup.pe (cr. Yuki)
• !writers@a.gup.pe (cr. Yuki)

Sublemmys in other languages would be great to add here too! I'll keep adding more as I find them.

Apparently this is where Penguin books was conceived

I would like to hear peoples thoughts on short stories. Is it something you read, occasionally or often?

Most other readers I know read mostly novels - and often long series with recurring characters or same universe. I have been there myself, mostly in the science fiction genre, but in the last couple of years I have switched to mostly reading short stories. I found many novels that had decent stories, but they were simply too long and felt padded. Many 600 pages novels that could have been 200 pages - or even less. With short stories I can get the joys of several good stories in a week and the bad ones doesn’t feel like a huge time waste.

However it seems like the trend with many forms of cultural consumption these days are familiarity. Season after season of the same tv series. Series of movies in same universe. Book series with recurring characters and many seem to think the longer the better. Especially in fantasy.

Many writers start with short stories before their first novel and many readers will try a short story as a sort of sample of that author. Nothing wrong with that, but short stories deserves recognition on its own merit and I love when otherwise well established authors are still publishing short stories.

A novel is usually better for longer character developments or grand world building, but for me there is great value in “less is more”. Don’t always need the entire backstory or have every loose end tied up neatly. Focus on one thing. Especially in a genre like science fiction where a short story can be a great way to explore a concept or an idea, limited to some thousands words and get to the core of what the authors wants to tell.

I've recently started diving into publishing as a hobby/side gig. It got me to see the other side of things when it comes to books, and it's quite the craziness.

The first thing I came to realize is how much I rely on word of mouth to select my books. Things like ads, author interviews and usual marketing stuff means nothing to me. But if I see a book listed in a post when searching for a specific genre or topic, or a friend recommends it to me, it almost always immediatly goes to my reading list.

So as I focus on getting my story published and read, I wonder if I should invest in anything other than word of mouth.

So, I wanted to hear from you guys. How do you usually put a book on your radar? How would you like to discover new books?

There's a thread about how people find new books, and one of my favorite ways to find things to read was browsing comments from the weekly 'What are you reading' threads in r/truelit and r/books. So what is Lemmy reading?

I'm finishing The Passenger, and about to jump into John Williams' Stoner. Excited to see what is next!