literature

We already have a thread on how silly Mormonism is, but here's a different question: how bad were they? I remember being quite surprised when I first read the Sherlock Holmes tale "A Study in Scarlett" to find that the dastardly villains were Mormons - I just didn't have the LDS pegged as a...

We had the thread Best Opening Lines for Novels and people participated quite a bit. I thought it might be interesting to try the inverse. I have tried to be more inclusive by calling this "Literature's best closing lines," because I think just limiting it to "novels" would be too restrictive...

I feel i need some positive input and thought of literature on utopian worlds. Any good tip?

I noticed that very few SF books make any mention of literature in the world they depict. Yet a major point of science fiction is to portray a world significantly different from our own; shouldn't art and literature in that world reflect the difference? I wonder what literature would be like in...

In older Swedish literature (say 50+ yrs old), a fairly common stock character is the "negerkung" (Negro King). For example, Pippi Longstocking's dad is the negerkung over the South Sea Kurrekurredutt Island in older prints of the books. The negerkung is the leader of some small nation of...

Hi, I'm contemplating reading, and blogging about the Bible. This is not going to be like Slate's effort where the blogger read one specific translation and talked about what he read with no outside references. I want to go over at two translations, one Catholic and one Protestant, but I also...

I feel challenged to come up with literary references to Brooklyn, a.k.a. Kings County, New York City. It has about 3 mln residents and covers about 70 sq miles. The wife and I lived there for 6 years and our daughter was born there. I can come up with 3 titles of stories or novels which...

I'm interested in any recommendations/synopses that anyone has, since I have a broad interest in this genre, but have not read very much of it at all, and am daunted by the long list of works out there. At school I read sci-fi such as War of the Worlds (HG Wellls), Day of the Triffids (John...

Came across this in a local bookstore:

This concerns the literature of conspiracies. Or perhaps fiction, novels, which postulate or rely on interesting conspiracies. These often are espionage novels, spy novels, of course, but they don't have to be. I am starting this thread because 1/ such works are interesting in and of themselves...

Full story here She was out shopping, when the news broke. :)

Bible course(s) should be compulsory once in: elementary school; high school; college; english lit major. Bible course(s) should be optional once in: elementary school; high school; college; english lit major. Teaching the Bible in public schools at any level should be forbidden. The Bible...

I thought this was a good companion thread to "Who's Your Favorite Painter." I've got a degree in English and I concentrated primarily on the Romantic Period poets. I love poetry in general though and my list of favorite poets can be long and tedious, so I'll try to shorten it for the...

The following text appears in a spam email I read today (for prescription drugs). This is the entire excerpt. Any idea where it comes from? Anyone else notice thing like this showing up in spam lately? Why are they doing this? (It's not my email account, so no lectures on security, please.)

I thought it would be a nice contrast to the other topic here. Just to kick things off, I'll start listing some that I REALLY liked/enjoyed: -Adventures of Huckleberry Finn -Anything by Shakespere -Brave New World -Candide -Lord of the Flies -Inherit the Wind -Picture of Dorian Grey -Crime and...

Read the title.

Hello - I'm currently trying to convince a friend of mine that homeopathy is grade A bunk. Rather worryingly, she is a medical student, so I feel that this is an important one to win; I have been so disturbed at the fact that her medical school are allowing a total woo to come in and teach this...

I wonder how nobody from our British friends has started a thread about that. One of the living legends of modern theatre, the British writer Harold Pinter, won the Nobel Prize for Literature. I am thrilled with the news because just before the announcement I was wondering which unknown...

So says Sven Birkerts, writing for the New York Times. Check out his biog here. I wish I could fathom why remarks like this still bother me so much. For one thing, it displays a rather shocking level of ignorance - what about 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, The Time Machine, War Of The Worlds...

Pub re-miner: a tool for PubMed query building and literature mining. In the vast amounts if medical literature, finding information tailored to your needs and interest is becoming more and more complex. Using the right keywords is essential for effective searches, but which ones should you...

Forget the Gideons, folks. When you're a guest in a hotel in Saudi Arabia you receive a pleathora of books designed to convert. Fresh off the plane, The GM has the goods, compliments of someone who was a visitor to SA. I have: What the Bible says about Muhummed, PBUH, by Ahmed Deedat Christ...

This year's prize goes to Elfriede Jelinek of austria, who writes plays against the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Who is this person? I've never heard of her. Also the co-winner is Kenya's Wangari Maathai (big on your reading list, right?) who suggests that AIDS is a biological weapon that the West...

I originally intended to start a literature quote quiz, like the movie quote one, but I figured that would be too difficult. So let´s just have a "greatest quotes in literature" thread. Please state the quote, (and perhaps an explanation of the context) title, and author. All genres, fiction...

1st grader get library book about gay guys WILMINGTON, N.C. - The parents of a first-grader are fuming over the book their daughter brought home from the school library: a children's story about a prince whose true love turns out to be another prince. Michael Hartsell said he and his wife...

Our university newspaper, the Student Life, ran a clever article on a piece of fiction that was reviewed by the Washington Post. Seems they've deemed this particular work the "Worst piece of English fiction". Here's a link to the article, be sure to read the excerpt at the bottom, which is...

Recently I have heard people talking about making Altered Books. Initially I thought they were speaking of making books of witchcraft or something like that lol. Anyway here is a link as to what altered books look like : http://www.art-e-zine.co.uk/alteredbook.html I find some of them to be...

If Billiefan can do it, so can I. Bill Griffith strikes again: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/comics/Zippy_the_Pinhead_Color.dtl