Nepenthe

Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea.   Foto: Lara Ferreira.      

                              Shorter Stories The Tower – Tolkien; One Year of Solitude – Márquez ;Tiny Women – Alcott; Two Blue Fish – Seuss; The Gentleman of Verona – Shakespeare; The Jaunt – Homer; Six Angry Men – Rose; Peace – Tolstoy;  John Atkinson, Wrong Hands . 

  For the June 8, 2026, Fiction Issue cover, the artists Sergio García Sánchez and Lola Moral collaborated on a shared vision of a life filled with books, enjoyed by a whole community. The two work in close partnership: he draws, she applies the colors, and they develop their ideas together. “Our home is literally filled with books in every room, even the bathroom. We and our children read them, study them, live with and among them,” the couple told us. They quoted Federico García Lorca, a writer from their home town of Granada, Spain: “No sólo de pan vive el hombre. Yo, si tuviera hambre y estuviera desvalido en la calle no pediría un pan; sino que pediría medio pan y un libro.” His words translate to: “Man does not live by bread alone. If I were hungry and destitute on the street, I would not ask for a loaf of bread; I would ask for half a loaf and a book.”

From The New York Times     Chris (Simpsons artist)                 As someone in the word business, I’m often asked to weigh in on the question of literature and artificial intelligence. People are usually surprised when I admit that I love A.I. I use A.I. for everything, 24/7. I can’t get enough, me and my whole family. My uncle uses A.I. to buy onions. It used to be you wanted onions, you went to the store and maybe it was full of people, or it was empty — you literally never knew. Now A.I. can calculate when the grocery store is low-traffic, and my uncle just strolls in, la-di-da, and buys onions, no waiting. Imagine a world where you don’t have to wait to buy onions. It’s here. I have this digital agent. Does everything for me, from managing work flow to offloading repetitive tasks to reminding me when to hug my kids. I call it the Gooch. The Gooch is up all night, scrabbling around its binary habit trail, what’s-upping m...

Millie Ramm for the 1000 Libraries magazine . One woman novelist featured here. Five of the nine books mentioned are not English originals, so we're left thinking how long did it take for translators to produce them. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë; One Hundred Years of Solitude by García Márquez; The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky; Moby-Dick by Herman Melville; The Lord of the Rings by Tolkien; Ulysses by Joyce; War and Peace by Tolstoy; In Search of Lost Time by Proust; Les Misérables by Victor Hugo.  

Somos como livros. A maioria das pessoas só vê a capa, a minoria só lê a introdução, muita gente acredita nas críticas. Poucos nos conhecem por dentro. A Bertrand tem o blogue Somos Livros , conceito que já foi uma revista.

  "So that here, in the real living experience of living men, the prodigies related in old times of the inland Strello mountain in Portugal (near whose top there was said to be a lake in which the wrecks of ships floated up to the surface); and that still more wonderful story of the Arethusa fountain near Syracuse (whose waters were believed to have come from the Holy Land by an underground passage); these fabulous narrations are almost fully equalled by the realities of the whalemen."

𝐌𝐚𝐫𝐢𝐚 𝐓𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐚 𝐇𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐚, a nossa luminar, uma mulher belíssima de corpo inteiro que tanto nos tem dado, é uma das 100 Mulheres de 2024 para a BBC , linque nos comentários. Continuamos "para inglês ver," deslumbrados com "the Beeb" mas, sim, todo o reconhecimento e toda a visibilidade são poucas. Aqui sugiro o critério mais preguiçoso para ler e oferecer livros da autora (porque são todos ótimos, e todos das Publicações Dom Quixote Lda. / Grupo Leya ) Vão pelos nomes! Esperemos que venha por aí um intitulado 𝐒𝐮𝐬𝐚𝐧𝐚. Poet Writer and journalist Maria Teresa Horta is one of Portugal’s most prominent feminists and author of many award-winning books, but she is perhaps best known as co-author of the internationally acclaimed Novas Cartas Portuguesas (New Portuguese Letters), written with Maria Isabel Barreno and Maria Velho da Costa. The collec...

 Here 🪳

Alas, no women :|

 

Publicado em De Rerum Natura   Uma estudiosa cabo-verdiana, doutoranda numa universidade norte-americana, Vanusa Vera Cruz, julgou, aliás em termos louvavelmente moderados, descobrir no romance Os Maias traços de racismo numa fala de João da Ega, dirigida ao funcionário superior da Instrução pública, Sousa Neto. Para começar, é de um primarismo clamorosamente lamentável, ainda mais numa doutoranda, confundir as opiniões de Eça com as opiniões dos personagens que congeminou para a sua soberba comédia humana. Imagine-se confundirmos Shakespeare com Macbeth, Victor Hugo com Javert ou Eça com o Conselheiro Acácio! Confundir as opiniões dos personagens com as do seu criador é sempre um erro de palmatória e faz lembrar aquele espectador que não conseguia dissociar o actor do personagem que, no palco, encarnava e, no final da peça, indignado com o comportamento do “vilão”, subiu ao palco e deu um arraial de pancada ao actor que o representava… Aliás, uma leitura que nem pre...

 With culinary classics

 

 

Find it much bigger at Electric Lit [hic]

From i09 Science Fiction:  The origin of the actual term "science fiction" is a bit mysterious. The first use cited by the OED is in William Wilson's 1851  A Little Earnest Book upon a Great Old Subject . In it, Wilson looks at how a single object might be perceived through the eyes of six different animals: a bee, an ant, a spider, a perch, a robin, and a cat. Wilson terms this work "Science-Fiction": We hope it will not be long before we may have other works of Science-Fiction, as we believe such books likely to fulfil a good purpose, and create an interest, where, unhappily, science alone might fail. [Thomas] Campbell says that "Fiction in Poetry is not the reverse of truth, but her soft and enchanting resemblance". Now this applies especially to Science-Fiction, in which the revealed truths of Science may be given, interwoven with a pleasing story which may itself be poetical and true – thus circulating a knowledge of the Poetry of Science, ...

From LitHub : First, there’s the obvious: the incantatory effect of the repetition, the rush of sibilance, the plain punch of those four syllables. It just sounds good, and any great title should sound good. It is alluring, an obvious spell (ah, the famous “buy this book” spell), or perhaps simply a swoon. It is also a mystery—why the double? Why not simply  The Sea  if that’s what it’s about? “The anaphora,”  writes Rebecca Hazelton , “demands more, more, more, and is a never-ending question for [us] to answer.” The spell worked on me the first time I saw the spine in a store; I bought it. It may still be my favorite title of any novel, on pure feeling. Next, the provenance. According to Peter J. Conradi in his biography of Murdoch, the title of her Booker Prize-winning novel  The Sea, The Sea  (1978) comes from “the Greeks’ cry during the Persian wars when they finally sight salt-water” (i.e. the Black Sea) as reported in Xenophon’s  Anabasis . In...