Quick Connects
Some of My Favorite Books
See the menu tab “Favorites” above for more information, but here’s a revolving (e.g., incomplete) quick-hit:
Job Postings with “Publishers Lunch”
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Shelf Awareness for Readers
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Figurative Language
The idea for a section on figurative language—metaphors, similes, and so on—sprouted when I received this spontaneous note from Windy Mule (his chosen alias): “A book is like an octopus’s tentacles, drawing your mind into a world of exhilarating experiences.” Below, some figurative language I have enjoyed during my own reading.About Writing
- “Alice Munro writes with the simplicity and beauty of a Shaker box.”—Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer
- “It’s hardly a surprise that the memoirist looking deep into the past should find herself constantly moving between experience tasted and experience digested.”—Sven Birkerts, The Art of Time in Memoir
- “It should surprise no one that the life of the writer—such as it is—is colorless to the point of sensory deprivation.”—Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
About Anything Else
- “On every side of me the red and blue and white jacketed skiers tore away down the blinding slope like fugitive bits of an American flag.”—Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
- “I had many fine teachers during my years at Princeton, but the one I think of most often was my fortune-telling professor, a complete hag with wild gray hair, warts the size of new potatoes, the whole nine yards.”—David Sedaris, When You Are Engulfed in Flames
- “The pebbles in the wet asphalt look like scales on a snake’s back, and the road has a nasty tendency to squirm away just before I set my foot down, so a few times I stumble over a curb and sit my ass in wet grass.”—Mary Karr, Lit
- “When seen full on, the feathers atop [the kookaburra’s] head looked like brush-cut hair, and that gave him a brutish, almost conservative look. If owls were the professors of the avian kingdom, then kookaburras, I thought, might well be the gym teachers.”—David Sedaris, personal essay “Laugh, Kookaburra”
Answers to April Fool’s Day Quiz 4/1/2012
1. d / 2. b / 3. c / 4. a / 5. e / 6. i / 7. f / 8. h / 9. g / 10. j / 11. m / 12. l /13. o / 14. k / 15. n / 16. u / 17. p / 18. q / 19. s / 20. r / 21. t