Basically what my desk looks like these days. The fun part will come when I’m finished writing this draft and will need to type it all up!

(Source: blackteawithsugar, via breathingbooks)

"above all else, i value the absurd. art that mocks the observer. i’m going to write a novel and burn the final page and publish it and people will say, ‘oh, it’s so brave, the way it just ends!’ and no one will realize that the beloved characters they’d been spending their lunch breaks and train-ride-commutes with have been murdered behind their backs, ending in some atrocious cliche of a final paragraph. you see how it’s possible to write in the past-future tense? has it happened or is it yet to happen? you see, every thing has happened every time in every place. it’s just that we’re waiting for paper trains that run by central standard paper clock time, and we think it’s fixed and flat. that train you’re on may as well be a hoagie, and you probably never existed in the first place. it’s obvious, but sometimes it’s worth saying out loud."

This is great. S is for space: tell me a joke.

"We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind — mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent the reality."

J.G. Ballard (via nihilnoetia, via booklover)

"The novel’s spirit is the spirit of complexity. Every novel says to the reader: “Things are not as simple as you think.” That is the novel’s eternal truth, but it grows steadily harder to hear amid the din of easy, quick answers that come faster than the question and block it off."

Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel, transl. Linda Asher (Perennial, 2000), 18. (via enormousair, via libraryland, via booklover)

Are our novels being haunted by the housing bust? →

io9 observes that it seems everyone’s writing horror novels about economic downturn and how we’re all now holding onto houses bound up with tons of pain and economic insecurity. Somehow that all translates into ghosts and demons and all sorts of associated hauntings.