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livefromthenypl:

Colbert: Why do you write short stories? America likes big. Go big or go home. We like big, huge, huge, huge novels. 

Saunders: I’ll tell you why. If you imagine this, let’s say you were madly in love with somebody and your mission was to tell the person that you love them. So here’s two scenarios: one is you can take a weeklong train trip with the person, take your time, you’ll be in boring situations, beautiful scenery, everything. That’s a novel.

Colbert: Sounds good, sounds really good.

Saunders: The second scenario is she’s stepping on the train and you’ve got three minutes. So you have to make all that declaration in three minutes. That would be a short story.

Colbert: Can I get on the train with her?

Saunders: No, you’ve just got to shout it as she goes.

Colbert: Why can’t I get on the train?

Saunders: Because it’s a short story. You’re not allowed. You have to end it in eight pages and get out.

Colbert: But this is the short story I want to read — where is she going? Why can’t I go with her? We’re on to something here. Does she love me back? I’ve got to know!

Saunders: I don’t know yet! Sometimes a short story will just end with that question — does she love me back? So it’s a very special kind of beauty.

Saunders will be at the library with another eminent talk show host, Dick Cavett, next Tuesday, Feb. 26 to talk about his much-lauded latest story collection, “Tenth of December.”

(via thetinhouse)

Great story from The Oatmeal about the day his house burned down 20 years ago.

explore-blog:

How fiction can change reality – in this fascinating animated film from TED-Ed, Jessica Wise traces how seminal novels have shaped the minds of thought leaders across history and help all of us broaden our spectrum of empathy by assuming different perspectives. 

(Source: )

(vía The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories: Visual Micro-Tales of Our Shared Humanity | Brain Pickings)

(vía xkcd: Sloppier Than Fiction)

"We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character’s pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside. What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic. Personally, yeah, I’m a Platonist. I think that God has particular languages, and one of them is music and one of them is mathematics. But young adults of the nineties - who got to watch all this brave new individualism and sexual freedom deteriorate into the joyless and anomic self-indulgence of the Me Generation - today’s subforties have very different horrors, prominent among which are anomie and solipsism and a peculiarly American loneliness: the prospect of dying without even once having loved something more than yourself. You think it makes you a fraud, the tiny fraction anyone else ever sees? Of course you’re a fraud, of course what people see is never you. And of course you know this, and of course you try to manage what part they see if you know it’s only a part."

David Foster Wallace (via yetuntold)

Janey and I were in our snowsuits, just outside the pasture, on the Lund’s farm. It was one of those warm winter days when the fog rolls in from who knows where and everything’s white—the trees invisible, the snow-covered cornfields infinite beyond the near fence.

“Did you know,” Janey said, “that if you shut your eyes, it’s impossible to walk a straight line?”

I was eight, maybe nine. I didn’t believe her. So I closed my eyes and took a few unsteady steps forward. The thick, damp air cocooned around me, absorbing all but the sound of my heavy footfalls in the snow. My course felt guided by some invisible tunnel heading straight toward the fence posts at the border of the cornfields. After ten sure steps, I opened my eyes.

Everything had disappeared.

I watched my breath float into the air and join the fog as it drifted past my face. I turned a full circle. “Janey?” I said.

But she was gone. Five years had passed. She’d moved out, headed west for college.

And there I was, her little brother, stranded in a winter field, wondering how I’d lost her.

-T.D. Storm (wiscostorm)