Woo-hoo! Welcome to the Turd Island Pubic Library. I hope you don't think you're some sort of intellectual now. In my quest to find interesting material for this page, I have realized there is precious little of anything literary on the Internet. Here's what I was able to dig up:
Fiction Section
Sherwood Anderson Author of Winesburg, Ohio, an incredible book that takes place near where I grew up. If you like Sherwood Anderson you might also like the paintings of Charles Burchfield.
Jack Kerouc Lotsa crap.
Sylvia Plath Biography, bibliography, and poetry.
Children's section
John Bellairs Really neat page about the only good writer of children's horror/supernatural stories I've ever read. Except he is more than good. He is fantastic. And many of the cover illustrations of his books are done by Edward Gorey .
Lewis Carroll (biography) Extremely in-depth.
Lewis Carroll (works) A very pretty page of Carollian texts.
Roald Dahl Everyone's dearly beloved author of The Witches, The BFG, James and the Giant Peach, etc.
L.M. Montgomery Anne up the arse.
Zilpha Keatley Snyder One of my childhood favorites. Author of the Egypt Game and the Changeling.
Magazine Rack
I, like many other girls coming-of-age in the early 90's, was weaned on the now sadly defunct old Sassy magazine. Yes, it was sometimes cloying and biased and was never taken very seriously by anyone...Snicker all you like, but Sassy supplied girls who might not have had any access to it otherwise, with a healthy slice of subculture and subversiveness. It was the only magazine for teenage girls that treated them like people with brains and it's a shame, in a society that has been scientifically proven to crush the soul out of most girls by age twelve, that it's gone. But here, in loving memory of our girlhoods, is an E-zine inspired by Sassy, Blair.
Writing Resources
fallen princess - an E-zine for freelance writers featuring an interview with superhunk Greg Dulli of the Afghan Whigs.
Book Stores
Atomic Books - A good place to buy bizarro reading material.
Past Quotes of the Week
"John Lennon...he's enough to make you want to go to war." - Chris Lowe
"The claims of love and self-preservation are opposed." - Joy Williams, "The Excursion"
"Donny D's on the backup. Drug-free. So put the crack up." - Alison Beth Hebert
"All geniuses born women are lost to the public good." - Stendhal
"Why does Pierre need whiskey? If you ask me, Pierre has the life of Riley. He doesn't have to eat, poop, or sleep." - my mother
"Southerners don't like madness the least bit." - Jack Kerouac
"The proper function of man is to live, not exist." - Jack London
"Life is hard enough when you belong here." - Morrissey, "Svengali in Platforms"
"I'm free, but life is so cheap." - Blondie, "Shayla"
"Don't worry, ma'am...I'm disturbing but A-sexual." - Bathtime Bob, The Hygiene Cowboy
"With your bitch-flap rappin' and your cocaine tongue you get nothin' done." - Alison Beth Hebert
"I don't like much really, do I? But what I do like I love passionately." - Chris Lowe, "Paninaro"
"I never worry about diets. The only carrots that interest me are the number you get in a diamond." - Mae West
Book Reviews
The Giant's House by ?
The Giant's House is about a young librarian and her relationship with a boy who has gigantism. Peggy first meets James when he comes to the library with his sixth grade class. She eventually becomes his closest friend and later falls in love with him. The book tells of their time spent together as the James' heighth gets increasingly out of hand and his health deteriorates. This book is very cerebral. There's a lot of thinking going on, often it seems, in the place of where one would expect emotion. As a result, there is really no great catharsis as one would expect there to be in a story with a plot as sad as this one, in other words I wasn't crying when the boy died. And this is not a bad thing at all. I think looking at relationships (god I hate that word but I can't think of a better one) between people in such a thoughtful manner as the author did is a very original idea. The book is also often quite funny because of this. Here are some interesting quotes I culled from it:
"Despite popular theories, I believe people fall in love based not on good looks or fate but on knowledge. Either they are amazed by something a beloved knows that they themselves do not know; or they discover a common rare knowledge; or they can supply knowledge to someone who's lacking."
"I do not like public ceremony, not graduations, not weddings, not pep rallies, nor church. Perhaps I simply do not understand trying to share one emotion (love, relief, faith, pep) with a quantity of strangers."
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