English 272

(Image credit: gingerhaze)

What are some of your favorite reading experiences?

(Source: goodnightsweetgirl, via tissah)

writinguniversity:

Poet Robert Frost and Paul Engle, director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop from 1941-1965, meeting with workshop students circa 1959. Engle helped establish Iowa City’s literary rep by hosting a string of luminaries like Frost.

Poet Robert Frost and Paul Engle, director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop from 1941-1965, meeting with workshop students circa 1959. Engle helped establish Iowa City’s literary rep by hosting a string of luminaries like Frost.

2 hours ago -

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Writing Habits, Part I from The Short Form.

Advice from Jennifer Mills:

Sometimes I’ll sit on a train with my headphones in but no music playing, just so it looks like I’m not listening. Whole stories can unfold in train carriages. It’s important to pay attention to sensory information, using all five senses, and take notes, because you never know when you are going to need a particular detail. If you don’t write about other people, really listen to how they talk, then all your characters will be versions of yourself, and you might as well go home.

3 days ago -

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My favorite season is mango season. Two towering mango tress grew at my grandma’s house on the island of Guåhan. We patiently waited and watched the fruit turn from green, to yellow, to ripe red.

I remember afternoons sitting around grandma’s table as she cut a ripe mango into two cheeks, crosshatching the orange flesh with a knife, careful not to cut through the skin. When she inverts the cheek, magic cubes form. Still life with convex mango.

Sweet, creamy, tart, floral, transcendent. Eating a mango is like eating sunshine. They say the Buddha often meditated in mango groves. They say the “mango’s kiss” awakens consciousness. Yet the mango also embodies immanence: it returns you to your body as its juices stain mouth, lips, fingers, hands, and clothes. Every bite roots my body home.

Craig Santos Perez, “Matå’pang, Migration, and The Case of the Stolen Mangos”, on the Kenyon Review blog.

4 days ago -

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mulhollandbooks:

The Great Gatsby for NES reminds me of a passage about video games from Austin Grossman’s novel, You:

There’s no pre-set story. There’s just a clockwork world full of objects and places and people and rules for how they interact, and you can do what you want with them. There’s a story, but you have to choose what it is and make it yourself, but the world is full of tools for doing that.

There’s something immensely appealing about taking one of the world’s greatest stories and handing the reins over to you. The narrative push-and-pull that lies at the heart of every good video game is expertly explored by Austin Grossman—and he should know, having written a fair number of games. Pick up You when it goes on sale next week, and join us at You’s launch party.