Literary The MR Literary Supplement

[sun surfer]

Welcome to the MR Literary Supplement, an ongoing place to discuss any literary books you've read, are reading or are interested in reading, or any news on the literary front. This is a supplement to the MR Lit Club and anyone is welcome to post here.

*This thread was inspired by fantasyfan.

[Dngrsone]

Define "literary"

[Bookworm_Girl]

Here is the definition of literary from the club introduction. The link below also includes a listing of the books that the Literary Club has read as examples of works that meet this definition.

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=158829

So, what is literature for the purposes of this club? A superior work of lasting merit that enriches the mind. Often it is important, challenging, critically acclaimed. It may be from ancient times to today; it may be from anywhere in the world; it may be obscure or famous, short or long; it may be a story, a novel, a poem, an essay or another written form. If you are unsure if a work would be considered literature, just ask!

[darryl]

An interesting definition. Very much "I know it when I see it".

[Dngrsone]

With that definition, then Ancillary Justice can be considered literature. And perhaps The Martian?

Ooh, Definitely The Lord of the Rings!

[fantasyfan]

Hi Folks, I posted the following on the general discussion thread for the Literary Club, but this is where it belongs.


I have been reading Philip Pullman’s Grimm Tales: For Young and Old. I have downloaded the ebook with its Audible companion. This edition is edited and with a very fine introduction by Pullman. He has chosen fifty of the 210 tales collected by the Brothers Grimm over the several editions published in the 18th century.

The Brothers Grimm collected the tales as ”a cultural treasure”of German folklore and did not intend them to be read by children. When this became evident, the brothers sanitised the stories in the later editions. What Pullman has done is to present his selection in a translation that doesn’t shy away from the more gruesome aspects of the stories. In fairy tales the good are good and the bad are unforgivably bad. Thus, the latter are imaginatively punished with no holds barred. The wicked mother who tries to burn the Princess alive gets the following sentence in “ The Twelve Brothers”:

”But then it was the old woman’s turn to be accused, and the court had no problem in finding her guilty. She was put into a barrel filled with poisonous snakes and boiling oil, and she didn’t last long after that.”

Stories with unhappy endings may end with an ironic shrug. The story of the cat and the mouse in partnership ends with the mouse being eaten up. The last lines of the story are:

”Well, what else did you expect? That’s just the sort of thing that happens in this world.”

Pullman’s excellent introduction is filled with the insights of a fine author. He also adds end notes to each tale in which he gives the tale type, the source, and any other material he finds relevant.

The Audible edition is very well done. Pullman himself reads the introduction and Samuel West does a quite brilliant reading of the tales themselves. The end notes, however, are not included in the Audible version which is available in BorrowBox or Overdrive.
__________________

[Bookworm_Girl]

Thanks, fantasyfan! I recently read The Book of Dust and saw this collection was available. I will definitely check it out now that I have your testimonial. I saw this statement in an NPR interview.

On how rewriting fairy tales has influenced The Book of Dust, his upcoming sequel to the His Dark Materials series

"[The Grimm fairy tales] move very quickly. There's not an ounce of narrative fat in them. They go very, very swiftly from event to event. And another thing is you see very few adverbs in them, so I'm trying to cut down on my adverbs. You choose the right verb, and you don't need an adverb to qualify it."

[fantasyfan]

Originally Posted by Bookworm_Girl

Thanks, fantasyfan! I recently read The Book of Dust and saw this collection was available. I will definitely check it out now that I have your testimonial. I saw this statement in an NPR interview.

Thank you for your comment, Bookworm Girl. I have yet to read The Book of Dust which I have only recently bought. I look forward to it.

[Bookworm_Girl]

The Book of Dust was an entertaining read. Not as good as His Dark Materials series but still satisfying. I really like Pullman's writing.

I would like to share this new "Top 10 UK & Irish Authors" poll by the Times Literary Supplement that was in the news this week. The objective was "Critics, academics and authors vote to find ‘the new Elizabethans’, to correct the tendency to champion older authors as the literary establishment." In other words, the intent was to identify the best authors "at the moment" and whose future work is most anticipated. Examples of the old establishment that you won't see on the list are Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis.

The poll includes many authors that the Literary Club has read or nominated. The top 5 authors in the poll were Ali Smith, Hilary Mantel, Zadie Smith, Kazuo Ishiguro and Eimear McBride. Four of the top five are women! The rest of the top 10 are Colm Tóibín, Nicola Barker, Alan Hollinghurst and Anne Enright, with Sebastian Barry and Jon McGregor tying for 10th.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/20...-irish-authors
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/p...velists-today/

I recently read and enjoyed Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor after it was announced as the 2017 Costa Book Novel Award winner in January. I posted my thoughts on this author in the New Leaf Book Club discussion thread. Here's a link to the post.
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...&postcount=142

[Bookworm_Girl]

I discovered Empires of the Indus: The Story of River by Alice Albinia. It relates to both this month's regional theme as well as last month's travelogue.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/...om_search=true

“Alice Albinia is the most extraordinary traveler of her generation. . . . A journey of astonishing confidence and courage.”—Rory Stewart

One of the largest rivers in the world, the Indus rises in the Tibetan mountains and flows west across northern India and south through Pakistan. It has been worshipped as a god, used as a tool of imperial expansion, and today is the cement of Pakistan’s fractious union. Alice Albinia follows the river upstream, through two thousand miles of geography and back to a time five thousand years ago when a string of sophisticated cities grew on its banks. “This turbulent history, entwined with a superlative travel narrative” (The Guardian) leads us from the ruins of elaborate metropolises, to the bitter divisions of today. Like Rory Stewart’s The Places In Between, Empires of the Indus is an engrossing personal journey and a deeply moving portrait of a river and its people.

[fantasyfan]

Well, here I go being all Grimm again.��

I bought Maria Tatar’s edition of the Bicentennial Edition of “The Annotated Brothers Grimm”. It is excellent and contains wonderful illustrations. Her translation is more fluid than the accurate but older version by Margaret Hunt. The annotations are very interesting and the volume contains other materials including an excellent introduction, biographical information about the Brothers Grimm, and their own superb introductions to the first two editions of the Tales. The book contains fifty of the most interesting stories and with the annotations and additional material runs to five hundred pages. If you want all 200+ stories that appeared in the final edition of Grimm then you must go to Margaret Hunt which is available free as an ebook.

The Bicentennial Edition will set you back €35 but it’s worth it

[Bookworm_Girl]

I was browsing the longlist for the Women's Prize for Fiction. Miss Burma by Charmaine Craig looked interesting and reminded me of our reading about Burma last year.

From Goodreads:

A beautiful and poignant story of one family during the most violent and turbulent years of world history, Miss Burma is a powerful novel of love and war, colonialism and ethnicity, and the ties of blood.

Miss Burma tells the story of modern-day Burma through the eyes of Benny and Khin, husband and wife, and their daughter Louisa. After attending school in Calcutta, Benny settles in Rangoon, then part of the British Empire, and falls in love with Khin, a woman who is part of a long-persecuted ethnic minority group, the Karen. World War II comes to Southeast Asia, and Benny and Khin must go into hiding in the eastern part of the country during the Japanese Occupation, beginning a journey that will lead them to change the country’s history. After the war, the British authorities make a deal with the Burman nationalists, led by Aung San, whose party gains control of the country. When Aung San is assassinated, his successor ignores the pleas for self-government of the Karen people and other ethnic groups, and in doing so sets off what will become the longest-running civil war in recorded history. Benny and Khin’s eldest child, Louisa, has a danger-filled, tempestuous childhood and reaches prominence as Burma’s first beauty queen, soon before the country falls to dictatorship. As Louisa navigates her new-found fame, she is forced to reckon with her family’s past, the West’s ongoing covert dealings in her country, and her own loyalty to the cause of the Karen people.

Based on the story of the author’s mother and grandparents, Miss Burma is a captivating portrait of how modern Burma came to be, and of the ordinary people swept up in the struggle for self-determination and freedom.

[Bookworm_Girl]

While searching for books to nominate this month, I found Starting Over: Stories by Elizabeth Spencer. I didn't nominate it because it was not available in ebook in the UK and won't be released in paperback until July 31st. Bad timing!

From Goodreads:

On the release of her first novel in 1948, Elizabeth Spencer was immediately championed by Robert Penn Warren and Eudora Welty, setting off a remarkable career as one of the great literary voices of the American South. Her career, now spanning seven decades, continues here with nine new stories. In Starting Over, Spencer returns to the deep emotional fault lines and unseen fractures that lie just beneath the veneer of happy family life. In “Sightings,” a troubled daughter suddenly returns to the home of the father she accidently blinded during her parents’ bitter separation; in “Blackie,” the reappearance of a son from a divorcee’s first marriage triggers a harrowing confrontation with her new family; while in “The Wedding Visitor,” a cousin travels home only to find himself entwined in the events leading up to a family wedding. In these nine stories, Spencer excels at revealing the flawed fabric of human relations.

I found another book that sounded interesting, Island Sojourn by Elizabeth Arthur. It was difficult from the sample to tell how literary it would be and if it would appeal to others. However, I thought I would share it in this thread.

From Amazon:

In Island Sojourn, Arthur has a painter's eye for recording the world's voluptuousness, a philosopher's ability to get inside the objects of experience, and a writer's sensitivity for handling feelings...Her journal can join other works on life in the Canadian wilds, such as Wacousta, and Roughing It In The Bush, as a powerful witness to the wilderness experience. Literary Guild of Canada

Arthur labors at tracking down essences and essential relationships in the progresses of wind and water, or human and animal...There are magnificent, stormy crossings to and from the island, both threatening and intimate;there are heart-stopping visions of an eagle, of swans contemplating the end of fall, of the shooting and soft death of a moose...Vigorous, scouring reportage which places Arthur firmly in line to join the Hoaglands and Dillards and other astringent precisionists. Kirkus, March 1, 1980

About Elizabeth Arthur:

Elizabeth Arthur was born in New York City, and has lived in Vermont, Wyoming, British Columbia and Indiana. She is the author of five novels - Beyond the Mountain, Bad Guys, Binding Spell, Antarctic Navigation, and Bring Deeps-- as well as two memoirs, Island Sojourn and Looking for the Klondike Stone. Her work has twice been recognized with fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 1990 she was the first novelist selected for participation in the Antarctic Artists and Writers Program, under the auspices of the National Science Foundation.

Her novel Antarctic Navigation also sounds interesting, but it is 800 pages. It was a New York Times Notable Book and received a Critics Choice Award from the San Francisco Review of Books.

From Goodreads:

The dazzling landscape central to this multifaceted tale of adventure and aspiration is the white Antarctic vastness known as the Ice. The story told is of an expedition to the South Pole, led by a young, ardent American woman, Morgan Lamont - an expedition inspired and haunted by the tragic journey, eighty years before, of the British explorer Robert Falcon Scott. For Morgan, Scott's life, his dream, his death, and the very concept of Antarctic navigation are obsessive emblems of the search for integrity in a morally precarious age. Freed by her mother's quixotic and frightening sacrifice and the generosity of a hitherto estranged grandfather, she sets out to fulfil her own dream - to vindicate Scott by recreating his historic polar expedition.