The last story in my collection is a 13,000-word contemplation about laziness (titled "Indolence: Notebooks"). Of course, paradoxically, to write about laziness (or read about it) is to succumb to it. Diligence is often paired with "virtue" or determination. But I've been fascinated with the flip side; what are the positive aspects of inaction, procrastination, or daydreaming? Some people always try to look and stay busy, while others avoid work shamelessly at all costs.
True Story: after an exhausting day teaching classes at an overseas college, I looked out my window and saw two shepherds seated comfortably against a tree, yawning as they watched their sheep grazing in the field. Ahh, what price civilization!?
I stumbled upon this incredible book that explored the parallels between ancient Eastern philosophy and Western psychology.
Thinkers like Zhuangzi and Laozi understood that not trying paradoxically can improve performance and focus. Indolence can be another way to release one’s mind to the ebbs and flows of the outside world. Honestly, it was a delicious surprise to realize that the ancient philosophers had so much to say about human indolence.
A fiction writer instinctively overthinks what he is writing about, but this book helped me to stop worrying about word counts or writer’s block and just accept that words come out eventually… sometimes as a trickle and sometimes as a roar.
A deeply original exploration of the power of spontaneity—an ancient Chinese ideal that cognitive scientists are only now beginning to understand—and why it is so essential to our well-being
Why is it always hard to fall asleep the night before an important meeting? Or be charming and relaxed on a first date? What is it about a politician who seems wooden or a comedian whose jokes fall flat or an athlete who chokes? In all of these cases, striving seems to backfire.
In Trying Not To Try, Edward Slingerland explains why we find spontaneity so elusive, and shows how early…
Ideally, novels are supposed to provide escape and insight, but sometimes a hefty novel can seem too ponderous a commitment for lazy people.
As an alternative, flash fiction can accommodate people who have failing attention spans or inflexible schedules. Sure, it won’t be as engrossing or uplifting as a 900-page novel, but it’s easy to dive into a random page and enjoy the magical possibilities of prose.
Yourgrau’s flash fictions are more playful than plausible. (Example: “A man comes home and finds his wife in bed with a squirrel.”) Good flash fiction doesn’t need a lot of action, just surrealistic touches and a surprising moment or two.
Eventually, after a few good laughs, you’ll be ready to read something longer and meatier.
Ever dreamed of strolling through a Dali print? Or stepping into a fairy tale? Open A Man Jumps Out of an Airplane and experience the rush of having reality yanked from underfoot.
This is the book that put Barry Yourgrau on the literary map, where he remains as an icon of imaginative prowess. In A Man Jumps Out of an Airplane, Yourgrau focuses his wide-awake subconscious mind on well-trodden themes—fathers, mothers, lovers, sex, the imagination itself—and recasts them into madcap parables, surrealistic fables, and grotesque fantasies. Here are dreamscapes compressed into razor-sharp prose, where a twelve-inch girl lolls in her…
This is the fourth book in the Joplin/Halloran forensic mystery series, which features Hollis Joplin, a death investigator, and Tom Halloran, an Atlanta attorney.
It's August of 2018, shortly after the Republican National Convention has nominated Donald Trump as its presidential candidate. Racial and political tensions are rising, and so…
Not much happens in this light-hearted 1965 children’s book by an award-winning poet.
A solitary hunter befriends (and shares an abode with) a mermaid, a bear, a lynx, and a young boy. They live together, totally unbound by human rules. The hunter teaches human language to the mermaid and learns about the perspective of undersea creatures.
The mermaid is a perfect audience for the animals’ wild antics and the hunter’s strange human habits. She finds it hilarious that the hunter uses a fishing pole to catch fish. (“You look so helpless just sitting there waiting for one,” she says.)
This clever and carefree story lacks plot or incident, but it captures the absurdity of different kinds of creatures living under the same roof.
This is the story of how, one by one, a man found himself a family. Almost nowhere in fiction is there a stranger, dearer, or funnier family -- and the life that the members of The Animal Family live together, there in the wilderness beside the sea, is as extraordinary and as enchanting as the family itself.
Nothing much seems to happen in this remarkable novella, which describes a single lunch break of a man at work.
Actually, though, the reader gets to eavesdrop on the man’s ruminations about everyday things—shoelaces, bathroom blow dryers, vending machines, office supplies, and so much more.
These ruminations are practically Proustian; they start with something ordinary (a milk carton), followed by a digression (memories of having milk delivered to his home), interrupted by another digression (about his sister’s milk allergy), and veering into philosophical territory (pondering the nature of all childhood memories).
Reading this novella is both exhausting and exhilarating. It’s like wandering haphazardly through a maze of ideas and memories. Luckily, the novella is short enough that the reader never grows bored or tired.
The Mezzanine is the story of one man's lunch hour. Pondering life's littlest questions - why does one shoelace always wear out before the other? Whatever happened to the paper drinking straw - our narrator interrogates the inner-workings of corporate living as he traipses his way down escalators to the first floor and through the mundaneness of office life.
Mixing humour with the existentialism that surrounds all our working lives, The Mezzanine is a classic work of modern American literature.
In an underground coal mine in Northern Germany, over forty scribes who are fluent in different languages have been spared the camps to answer letters to the dead—letters that people were forced to answer before being gassed, assuring relatives that conditions in the camps were good.
I love Andersen because his stories almost out-Kafka Kafka.
His animal characters are not exactly philosophers, but they observe, they dread, they dream. Animals—like humans—rarely challenge the natural order of things, but they must deal with the world as it actually is.
One Danish critic said that Andersen wrote more self-portraits than Rembrandt ever painted. Andersen’s great contribution to literature is recognizing how little is needed to produce a story and how little a great story really needs to say.
One story tells of a chance meeting and spurned friendship between two toys in a drawer. Andersen seems capable of turning anything into a story.
This annotated hardback edition by a folklore scholar is one of the most beautiful-looking books I own.
In her most ambitious annotated work to date, Maria Tatar celebrates the stories told by Denmark's "perfect wizard" and re-envisions Hans Christian Andersen as a writer who casts his spell on both children and adults. Andersen's most beloved tales, such as "The Emperor's New Clothes," "The Ugly Duckling," and "The Little Mermaid," are now joined by "The Shadow" and "Story of a Mother," mature stories that reveal his literary range and depth. Tatar captures the tales' unrivaled dramatic and visual power, showing exactly how Andersen became one of the world's ten most translated authors, along with Shakespeare, Dickens, and Marx.…
These introspective tales feature animals, allegories, and melodramas of everyday life. At the center of the stories are tiny creatures (a sparrow, an earthworm, or a paperclip) struggling to make sense of larger mysterious forces. Human protagonists are equally perplexed by ordinary events – like searching for a lost key, watching late-night TV, or eating a taco.
I’ve always enjoyed stories that focus more on a character’s inner world and sensations than on typical plots of romance and criminality. A character’s thoughts and feelings during random moments of boredom can be especially entertaining or enlightening. Although it’s fun when a story transports a reader to a strange new world, it’s totally unnecessary; the current world and its inhabitants are already strange enough.
He will stop at nothing to keep his secrets hidden.
Denise Tyler’s future in New Jersey with fiancé Jeremy Guerdon unravels when she stumbles upon a kill list, with her name on it. A chilling directive, “Leave the family memories of her, nothing else,” exposes a nightmare she never imagined.…
Tina Edwards loved her childhood and creating fairy houses, a passion shared with her father, a world-renowned architect. But at nine years old, she found him dead at his desk and is haunted by this memory. Tina's mother abruptly moved away, leaving Tina with feelings of abandonment and suspicion.
