Within each of us, too, there is a little world—an inner world—and the purpose of that, too, is to reflect the big world. Sometimes a director comes along whose films, by a double reflection, help us understand how our inner world reflects the big world.
In this fascinating book on both novel writing in general and the writing of his own novels in particular, Pamuk devotes his second chapter entirely to how fiction can be be both real and imaginary. From the reader’s point of view, Pamuk takes the idea of the naive to stand for what has been been perceived, in an autobiographical way.
Beside the obvious function of deferring things uncomfortable to think through (including the denial of complex motives), relegating something to the realm of the unspeakable plays the other obvious role of reducing social friction on things likely to create discord.
Kristen Valentine Cadieux/OnFiction
Marie d’Origny, deputy director of the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, accused Rolling Stones guitarist and best-selling memoirist Keith Richards of murdering her plant.
Meredith Blake/The New Yorker
Our view here at OnFiction has always been that psychologists and authors share a great deal in common. Both are concerned with elucidating human psychology, psychologists through systematic observation and experimentation, and authors through imagination and mental simulation of complex social situations.
Raymond A./OnFiction
The case, known in Sweden as styckmordet (the ‘cutting up murder’), gave rise to an almost unprecedented public outrage. It has spawned four books, several television documentaries and countless newspaper and academic articles in Sweden over the years.
Julie Bindel /The Telegraph
Telepathic communication between minds doesn’t occur, but to me reading a novel by George Eliot or a short story by Anton Chekhov comes close. In a good film, something else occurs: a watching of people with whom one empathizes as they make decisions in pursuit of their goals.
While it’s true that I haven’t lived in very many places… and therefore my opportunities for comparison are slim… I feel like Fredericton has more than its fair share of peculiarities that make it an alternately fascinating, wonderful, frustrating and sometimes truly fist-clenchingly dumb town. Let’s throw light on a few of them over the next few posts, shall we? OK.
For almost every recent transaction I’ve made on Kobo, I arrived—inspired in the moment like many of us who live in a mobile culture, smartphones in hand—in pursuit of an indie title that I ultimately couldn’t find. As a self-diagnosed text fetishist, if I’m going to spend $10, $20, $30 on anything, it’s more often than not going to be a book. But if the mood strikes and I’m not in a bookstore, or the bookstore I’m in doesn’t carry the title I’m after, what does the mobile consumer do?
@bookmadam
First, is art merely a hobby? For some, probably. But for those who take it seriously, it is not. Art takes tremendous determination, practice and time for it to evolve. I can only speak of writing because that is the artistic discipline I practice: much study needs to be undertaken to learn elements of craft (style, metaphor, prosody, etc.) and then much time needs to be spent to develop. A hobby is something done in spare time; art is, in many ways, an employment.
