The Picador Book Room

“There were some books that reached through the noise of life to grab you by the collar and speak only of the truest things.” ―Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

(Source: hyassin)

… All polls of opinion must be superficial. They reveal the top of what people think, organized into common sense. What people really think is always partly hidden. Only way to get at it is through a study of their language—a study in depth: its metaphors, structures, tone. And of their gestures, way of moving in space. All orthodoxy, whether religious or political, is an enemy of language; all orthodoxy postulates “the usual expression.” 

From As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh:  Journals and Notebooks 1964-1980, by Susan Sontag. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, page 406. This quotation is from 1976.

Siri Hustvedt On Reading: 

I discovered ironies in Middlemarch I had not fully appreciated before, no doubt the product of my advancing age, which has been paralleled by the internal accumulation of more and more books that have altered my thoughts and created a broader context for my reading. The text is the same, but I am not (Pg. 137)

Openness to a book is vital, and openness is simply a willingness to be changed by what we read. (Pg. 138)

Reading is not a purely cognitive act of deciphering signs; it is taking in a dance of meanings that has resonance far beyond the merely intellectual. (Pg. 139)

Reading is creative listening that alters the reader. (Pg. 140)

From Living, Thinking, Looking, by Siri Hustvedt. Picador, p. 133. 2012
This essay was originally published in Columbia; 49 (2011)

I put that word on the page, 
but he added the apostrophe.

“Collaboration with Fly” / The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis,p. 508 (Picador 2010)

Find more excerpts from The Collected Stories on NPR, check out a new story from Lydia at The Telegraph, and read an interview from 2008 at The Believer.

BLVR: Flash fiction, sudden fiction, short shorts, very shorts, prose poems, proems—do you think the solution to sorting the chaos is to create more categories?

LD: Where a need is felt for another category, I think it will be created and accepted, although that may take time. There is some acceptance of the terms flash fiction, sudden fiction,etc. But I think people may still be expecting a kind of miniature short story when they begin reading a piece of flash fiction, rather than the less usual offering that it might be—meditation, logic game, extended wordplay, diatribe—for which there is no good general name. Robert Walser was described by one critic (rather diminishingly, I think) as a “feuilletonist.” He sometimes referred to his work simply as “short prose pieces.”