. If you are not currently being aggregated and think you should be send an email to kevin [at] perfumebloggers (dot) com with your blog URL.More Of a Person Than a Woman
from Lou @ Moving and Shaking“A graduate of Barnard, and an A.B.D. in 18th-century English literature from Columbia, Erica Jong began her literary career as a poet, but it was Fear of Flying that made her famous, and that novel, as the critic Lisa Marie Hogeland has said in Femini…
Read the rest here: More Of a Person Than a WomanFantasy Boom
from Lou @ Moving and Shaking“I don’t write fantasy fiction simply to provide a trap-door from reality. For me, the genre is as much about the world around us as EastEnders.But instead of coming slap-bang up against it, fantasy charts the unconscious hopes and aspirati…
Read the rest here: Fantasy BoomMy Enemies, My Teachers
from Lou @ Moving and Shaking“Thanks to prison, I have completed the initial two of five volumes of Continue to Live, my autobiographical novel. Thanks to prison, I have learned to play the flute, employing its music to call on the spirits of the ancient masters and console myself…
Read the rest here: My Enemies, My TeachersAbsinthe Series 2: the Green Fairy Muse
from perfumeshrine @ Perfume ShrineAbsinthe and its hallucinogenic reputation have contributed to the mythos of it being the drink of artists and poets who harnessed its “lucid intoxication” to produce works of inimitable fantasy. Through these works of visual and written art, the audie…
Read the rest here: Absinthe Series 2: the Green Fairy MuseNever Mind If It Is About Me
from Lou @ Moving and ShakingIs It About You?”And why my intense irritation at this persistent, boring and inane insistence that fiction must be autobiographical? Because it reduces the imagination to material for journalism; it takes an axe to fiction. Such journalism tells me of…
Read the rest here: Never Mind If It Is About MeNever Mind If It Is About Me
from Lou @ Moving and ShakingIs It About You?”And why my intense irritation at this persistent, boring and inane insistence that fiction must be autobiographical? Because it reduces the imagination to material for journalism; it takes an axe to fiction. Such journalism tells me of…
Read the rest here: Never Mind If It Is About MeWhat is Jhumpa Lahiri’s hook?
from Lou @ Moving and Shaking“Among the Brownstone Brooklyn novelists made good, there’s one thing that sets Jhumpa Lahiri proudly apart. She is a succinct realist writer in an era of attention-getting maneuvers. Stylistically, she doesn’t have a hook: no genre bending, no com…
Read the rest here: What is Jhumpa Lahiri’s hook?The Adaptability of Your Brain
from Lou @ Moving and Shaking“Reading, says Wolf, changed history. More than that, it changes the brain. It creates new pathways in the brain, and, by doing this, makes us think in new ways. When you read, you see letters written on a page, then you recognise them as representatio…
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from Lou @ Moving and Shaking“In 2004, Enright published a memoir, Making Babies, which described her experiences of mothering her two children, now seven and five. Written while the babies napped, it seemed to unfold in real time, and its brave, frank tenderness was much admired….
Read the rest here: What Women WantFreedom of the Book
from Lou @ Moving and Shaking“David Bidussa reminds [in Italian] Tariq Ramadan and all the others who criticised the Turin Book Fair for inviting Israel as its guest country, that things are far more amiss in Arab countries than in Northern Italy. “It is not what they are saying t…
Read the rest here: Freedom of the BookGet Out There
from Lou @ Moving and ShakingGold Advice from the Oscars”Writer Diablo Cody said she was “thrilled” to take home the best original screenplay Oscar for her debut script. She offered advice to other aspiring writers keen to get their work snapped up. “It is so important to get yo…
Read the rest here: Get Out ThereA Whole New Nervous System
from Lou @ Moving and Shaking“In the Prison of Her Skin : the title alone expresses the intense demand Leduc puts on her reader to enter a dark world full of personal demons. But it isn’t a world of soap opera. It is a world that also reconstructs a European society that had a…
Read the rest here: A Whole New Nervous SystemAn Undependable Blunderer
from Lou @ Moving and Shaking“Between snowflakes and leaves there are resemblances. At the sight of snow falling one thinks that one is seeing small flowers that are falling from the sky. Why is foliage dying in the autumn secretly golden, and why does one think of springtime flow…
Read the rest here: An Undependable BlundererWelcome Passion
from Lou @ Moving and ShakingReading Clarice Lispector”There was a time, in my early twenties, when I teetered on the edge: I was living in Harlem like a squatter; I was drifting between magazine jobs (publications all seemed to fold soon after I joined); I was looking for signs??…
Read the rest here: Welcome PassionExercising Your Imagination
from Lou @ Moving and Shaking“”I can never cry when there’s a guy in the room without him immediately trying to hump me,” says AL Kennedy unexpectedly. It’s 1am in London’s Intercontinental hotel. A few hours earlier in the ballroom, the Scottish novelist had won the £25,000 Cost…
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from Lou @ Moving and Shaking“It’s no use saying Freud, Freud. People do, you know. Like squeezing a stale sponge. Nothing was simple, known, safe, believed, identified. Boundaries were not possible, where nothing finished, shapes encircled, and there was no beginning. A storm…
Read the rest here: Learning to FlyOblomovism
from Lou @ Moving and Shaking“On the question of individuality and modernity, Nabokov represents one clear choice. For his opposite, look back to the dreamy, aimless hero of Oblomov, the 1858 best-seller by Ivan Goncharov. The protagonist (Oblomov) has inherited property that’s de…
Read the rest here: OblomovismThe Rejection Letter
from Lou @ Moving and ShakingCategory: PublisherSubmitted by: Rejected once, but not twice. The Letter: Sorry, but you submission does not meet our standards and therefore not accepted. How did this letter make you feel? Being that this was my first book, I knew that I would be …
Read the rest here: The Rejection LetterDead White Males
from Lou @ Moving and ShakingThe Fruits of Parasitism”In these seemingly anti-literary times, authors tend to do all they can to support literature; Spanish novelist Enrique Vila-Matas is the first I’ve seen to treat it like a disease. That’s not to say, however, that he isn’t sup…
Read the rest here: Dead White MalesPsychogeography
from Lou @ Moving and ShakingWorld Hum: For the uninitiated, what exactly is psychogeography? Will Self: The term derives from the French Situationists, a post-Marxian groupuscule in 1950s Paris. Their leader, Guy Debord, coined it. For him, what he fervently hoped was that “l…
Read the rest here: PsychogeographyMaking Sense of George Steiner
from Lou @ Moving and Shaking“Making sense of Steinerese may look difficult, but it’s quite simple once you get the hang of it. Just ignore three-quarters of the words, and translate the rest into plain English. Steinerese: “The rhetoric of desire is a category of discourse i…
Read the rest here: Making Sense of George SteinerNothing Serious
from Lou @ Moving and ShakingIn 2004 Justine Lévy (1974) published Rien de Grave, which swiftly bumped Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code out of the number one position with naked, urgent prose and a complicated tale about love angst and (fashionably late) coming-of-age. Prompty it got tr…
Read the rest here: Nothing SeriousFred & Ginger of French Existentialism
from Lou @ Moving and Shaking“The real game here is for De Beauvoir to step out of Sartre’s shadow,” she said. “I think Sartre was authoritarian, classically macho and traditional. De Beauvoir wanted to be revolutionary in everything concerning her public and private life. Sartre …
Read the rest here: Fred & Ginger of French ExistentialismDualism: How Not to Live
from Lou @ Moving and Shaking“The mind-body conflict is presented even more starkly by the case of Señor C, whose split nature is displayed on either side of a line that literally divides the page. Below his fragmented self, on the other side of yet another line, salvation dangle…
Read the rest here: Dualism: How Not to LiveBest Wishes!
from Lou @ Moving and ShakingAnd when I found the door was locked,I pulled and pushed and knocked.And when I found the door was shut,I tried to turn the handle, but — ‘ There was a long pause.`Is that all?’ Alice timidly asked.`That’s all,’ said Humpty Dumpty. Good-bye.’AliceI…
Read the rest here: Best Wishes!A Sinner’s Tale
from Lou @ Moving and ShakingIt seems to me that the impulse to atone is a religious one, and yet you are a self-declared atheist. Yes, I am an atheist, and probably Briony is, too. Atheists have as much conscience, possibly more, than people with deep religious conviction, and th…
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from Lou @ Moving and Shaking“Pamuk is a creature of Istanbul’s haute bourgeoisie, a class of Turks much given to examining their own misery and alienation and finding them intensely significant, much in the way the 19th-century romantics admired their own tuberculosis. The Turkis…
Read the rest here: Prophet or Poseur?The gift of endless dreams
from perfumeshrine @ Perfume ShrinePerfume Shrine loves to read. Loves to read all sort of books. Especially those that have an inward afinity with what is not mentioned in everyday life.And when on a cold, cold night, there is a classic which is being re-read that mentions scent in poe…
Read the rest here: The gift of endless dreamsKmart Realism
from Lou @ Moving and ShakingThe Cutting of Carver”In 1971, Gordon Lish accepted Raymond Carver’s story “Neighbors,” and throughout the seventies he continued to publish Carver’s work—stories of marriage, struggle, and the working poor—or guided him to other publicatio…
Read the rest here: Kmart RealismPlease Send Us Books
from Lou @ Moving and ShakingWe are a jaded lot, we in our world - our threatened world. We are good for irony and even cynicism. Some words and ideas we hardly use, so worn out have they become. But we may want to restore some words that have lost their potency.(..)We have a bequ…
Read the rest here: Please Send Us BooksInnocence and Experience
from Lou @ Moving and Shaking“In the novels Pullman dramatises this shift from innocence to experience through the device of daemons. Everyone has a daemon or animal spirit: when you are young, the daemon keeps changing shape; as you get older your daemon settles into a constant f…
Read the rest here: Innocence and ExperienceSleepless Nights
from Lou @ Moving and ShakingAt the Death of Elizabeth HardwickIn San Diego, where I lived from 1992 to 1994, Sally rented the condominium at the back of our complex. She was blond, stout and short, she had a Marilyn Monroe peach fuzz on her cheeks and a mellow yet determined deme…
Read the rest here: Sleepless NightsThe Birth of Fast Food
from Lou @ Moving and Shaking“It was loneliness- that sense of deep alienation from one’s true home and community - that drove people to begin to eat out en masse.The popularity of the cafetaria in L.A. was primarily due to the loneliness of the people. It was a friendlier type of…
Read the rest here: The Birth of Fast Food