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The Wonder Garden
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by Lauren Acampora (Goodreads Author)
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Moby Dick; or, Th...
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Samuel Beckett
“ESTRAGON: I can't go on like this.
VLADIMIR: That's what you think.”
Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

David Simon
“My standard for verisimilitude is simple and I came to it when I started to write prose narrative: fuck the average reader. I was always told to write for the average reader in my newspaper life. The average reader, as they meant it, was some suburban white subscriber with two-point-whatever kids and three-point-whatever cars and a dog and a cat and lawn furniture. He knows nothing and he needs everything explained to him right away, so that exposition becomes this incredible, story-killing burden. Fuck him. Fuck him to hell.”
David Simon

David Foster Wallace
“You want your art to be hip and seem cool to people, but a great deal of what passes for hip or cool is now highly commercially driven. And some if it is important art. I think 'The Simpsons' is important art. On the other hand, it's also, in my opinion, relentlessly corrosive to the soul and everything is parodied and everything is ridiculous. Maybe I'm old but for my part I can be steeped in about an hour of it and then I have to walk away and look at a flower.

If there's something to be talked about, that thing is this weird conflict between what my girlfriend calls the 'inner sap,' the part of us that can really wholeheartedly weep at stuff and the part of us that has to live in a world of smart, jaded, sophisticated people and wants very much to be taken seriously by those people.”
David Foster Wallace

Philip Roth
“There is truth and then again there is truth. For all that the world is full of people who go around believing they've got you or your neighbor figured out, there really is no bottom to what is not known. The truth about us is endless. As are the lies.”
Philip Roth, The Human Stain

Philip Roth
“You asked if I thought my fiction had changed anything in the culture and the answer is no. Sure, there's been some scandal, but people are scandalized all the time; it's a way of life for them. It doesn't mean a thing. If you ask if I want my fiction to change anything in the culture, the answer is still no. What I want is to possess my readers while they are reading my book--if I can, to possess them in ways that other writers don't. Then let them return, just as they were, to a world where everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt, and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise, to have set loose in them the consciousness that's otherwise conditioned and hemmed in by all that isn't fiction. This is something that every child, smitten by books, understands immediately, though it's not at all a childish idea about the importance of reading.”
Philip Roth

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This book group was established for those interested in participating in The Morning News's Tournament of Books. Please do not feel the need to finish ...more
19703 Infinite Summer — 304 members — last activity Jun 21, 2019 03:36PM
For all those planning to read Infinite Jest this summer starting June 21. Support, encouragement and gentle pushes welcome.
25x33 Time's 100 all time greatest novels — 33 members — last activity Jan 02, 2023 04:53PM
For those of us too daunted by the 1001 list here's another, compiled by the good folk at Time magazine... ...more
55303 The Millions — 273 members — last activity Apr 01, 2020 08:07PM
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46928 The Bookhouse Boys — 78 members — last activity Oct 29, 2017 08:35PM
Hatched from the The Bookhouse Boys podcast, this is the group for the lover of classic and modern literature, a community made for discussion of all ...more
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