All my favorite poetry and prose!
In Verse
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Pablo Neruda Real name, Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto, his imagery is like no one
else's, and very soon, I hope to have some of his work up here on my
page. My favorites seem to be sadly lacking from the internet thus
far. He was Chilean and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. Check out his Elementary Odes
Fiction Favorites
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Fyodor Dostoevsky's
I read The Brothers Karamazov my junior year in college, and walked around in an ecstasy for weeks. The ecstasy may have worn off, but the memory remains strong.
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Isabel Allende is Chilean, and wrote two of my favorite books in
the world, Eva Luna and The Stories of Eva Luna. I recently
read Paula, Isabel's autobiography, and loved it. Ooh. Just
finished The House of the Spirits and I think that it might be
my favorite Allende novel yet. Haven't seen the movie yet, but I heard
that it's pretty good, with Winona Ryder, Glenn Close, Meryl Streep and
Jeremy Irons.
- Another favorite novel is Joanne Greenburg's
I Never Promised You a Rose Garden
(I just lent my copy to
Kieran, and I hope that he likes it!
You can visit his page, and I'm sure that in no time at all
he will have a whole section dedicated to this wonderful book.) Anyway,
I first read INPYARG
when I was on a "mental illness in literature" kick in HS,
and read
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Ken Kesey's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest and
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Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar around the same time
(by the way, these are both excellent, as well)
- Another book that you must must must read is
One Hundred Years of Solitude by
Gabriel Garcia-Marquez. Mini-story here. While I was spending time in NYC,
working in a lab at NYU, I went out to dinner with my aunt and her friend Allen,
and an old friend of Allen's named Ana, from Colombia. It turns out that Ana is
good friends with Garcia-Marquez, and that she went with him to pick up his
Nobel Prize in 1982. I just thought that was really fun. So I am now separated by a
mere two degrees from Garcia-Marquez.
- Okay, story-time being over, here's
one last life-changing book from me,
Toni Morrison's (what do you know? another Nobel Prize winner!)
The Bluest Eye.
Poem that I meant to change and didn't
Envoi
Imprisoned by four walls
(to the North, the crystal of non-knowledge
a landscape to be invented
to the South, reflective memory
to the East, the mirror
to the West, stone and the song of silence)
I wrote messages, but received no reply.
Octavio Paz
Also, check out the Lit and Art Magazine of Boston College, The Stylus. I happen to be
one of the former editors.