Special thanks to Max Woolf and Project Gutenburg for resources, and the Brothers Grimm for such inspiring material.

The Fae in a Bottle

By Reverend William Howland

"Dear brother, thou seest the water
crystallizing, go and show it to the merchant. I will make him a
little bottle of water of the same kind; put it in a corner, and
not open it too quickly, until the reflection shall let him see it."

The merchant, who was standing behind the glass, said, "If that is
the case, I do not see why the name of the fountain should be
changed." "Why not?" asked the merchant. "Because my name is
Dummling." "Dummling, what is that?" "Is a rare and wonderful
name; I do not know how it is to have it." "If you do not see why
the name of the fountain should be changed," said the merchant, "I
will pay you three thalers." "There! now I see what is in my head;
I will pay you thaler, but you must wait until I come back."

Then he disappeared behind the glass. The poor man was forced to go back
on his begging; he had no more money but the three thalers which the
merchant had given him. He had long ago left the village, and wandered far
off, and when he came back, his brother had forgotten him, and thought,
"Why should I travel farther? I have not seen my brother." Then he came to
the town where his brother was again living. "Dear brother," said the
brother, "how are you? How are you getting on?" "Oh," said the brother,
"not well."

"Then just come and eat thy bread."

"That would be very good," said the brother, and went away.

He walked a long time, and came to a great forest. Then he said to his brother,
"Go and bring me with you to-morrow morning." "Nay," said the brother, "I
can't go. I have heard so many lies and stolen things from my brother,
and they have not served me very well, I see very well that they will
do me no harm." Then he went to the gallows, and told them that there
was a poor shivering, peering there from the window. "If you let me in,"
said the brother, "I will do you a favour. In grey hairs you can see
a piece of a horse's heart." So he went into the forest, and saw there
how a greyhound which was his neighbour, was dead. Then he was sad,
and made himself known to the brother. "Dear brother," said he,
"how are you getting on? What hast thou been saying there about
a piece of horse's heart?" "Ah," said the brother, "how can I say that
on the gallows, when I have not a drop of blood on me!" Then he gave him
the greyhound's heart, and had it put in his own. The brother felt for a
while in his pocket, and then he said, "I have a small bottle of wine,
and if thou art inclined to drink, thou shalt find the courage
to hold thy tongue." "To what use is the bottle put," said the
brother, "but to some end I should like to have a sip?" "To win the
Rosen Cup," said the brother with great joy. "To me that is enough,"
said the hare. "To thee alone, it is the most valuable thing that
the world possesses," said the brother. "To me, it is my most valuable
thing." "To me, it is my most valuable possession," said the hare. Then
he turned himself around and went to the gallows. "To-day it was
announced that the very gallows were to be, and to-morrow they were
to be," said the brother. "I do not know to which I should place myself,"
he replied, "but, to-morrow it will be to-morrow, and to-morrow
I will go." Then he was led to the gallows, and was once more there
in the place where he had formerly been. He again said to the greyhound,
"I wish you were still standing there." "To-day it was announced that the
very gallows were to be, and to-morrow they were to be." "I do not know to which I
should place myself," said the hare. "To-morrow it will be to-morrow, and
to-morrow I will go." Then he turned himself round and went to the gallows,
and was once more there in the place where he had formerly been.

"To-day it was announced that the very gall

(E/N: The story stops here abruptly, as the author ran out available memory. I wouldn't like to enforce my interpretation of the story upon it, so I'm leaving it as written.)

I've recently realised I read a lot of American literature. I'd like to broaden my horizons so I'm wondering for fun if anyone out there can suggest an international (i.e non-US) counterpart for any of the following or just general non-US recommendations?

• Denis Johnson
• David Foster Wallace
• Flannery O'Conner
• Carson McCullers

Short link. Probably more to follow.

The Swedish Academy handed out two prizes this year, after they were forced to suspend the prize last year amid a metoo scandal which saw most of the Academy’s members either resign voluntarily or be forced to resign. There’s been a lot of speculation about how they were going to restore their reputation this year, and they spent a long portion of the press conference explaining their new process, whereas in past years they haven’t felt compelled to do so.

It was expected that at least one of the two prizes would go to a woman, with Margaret Atwood being one of the odds favorites (the bookmakers’ picks never win, so I don’t know whether we should put much stock in them, but they do reflect pre-award buzz). I’m not too familiar with either author, but it’s interesting that they chose Peter Handke. He’s one of Europe’s most controversial authors for his decades-long support of Serbia and Slobodan Milosevic’s actions during the Yugoslav Wars. He once compared Serbians to the Jews during WW2, visited Milosevic in prison when he was on trial for war crimes, and spoke at the man’s funeral. He’s also hailed as one of the greatest living German-language authors. It’s like the Academy decided to throw feminists a bone by awarding a woman the prize, but then couldn’t resist jumping headlong into controversy again right away.

I am currently enjoying a very thought-provoking semester of American Literature. Prior to this class, I wouldn't have considered fiction as useful in my everyday life, as opposed to something like a self-help book. What I've found is exactly the opposite, and I have found novels such as Great Expectations to be even more influential than anything I've ever read.

So I ask you all, what is the greatest lesson you've learned from classical fiction?

                                              #19 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

So rent a museum
and see yourself in mirrors-
In every room an exposition
of a different phase in your life
with all your figures and faces
and pictures of all the people who
passed through you
and all the scenes
you passed through
all the landscapes of living
and longing and desiring
and spending and getting
and doing and dying
and sighing and laughing and crying
(what antic gesturing!)
And walking through the house of yourself
you climb again to all
the rooms of youself
full of the other lives & selves
who passed through them
Rooms rooms rooms
piled up haphazard
in the architecture of time
And all the bodies clinging to each other
or rushing to windows
to break out of the room
which they boxed themselves into
All the people of your life
in one house in the night
all lights lit
like a cruise ship at sea
And you run up and down
knocking on all the doors
through which you hear
all the once-familiar voices
laughing or sobbing or singing
And you run to the roof
and look up to the mute night sky
And in the wheeling template of stars
see the faces of the figures
of the lovely lovers who
had once made time stand still
now all fixed
in their constellated relations
motionless in time

So that
some day
as time bends around
to its beginning again
you find them all again
and yourself

I've never read Marcel Proust, and I know very little about his work. But every serious reader of literature I know absolutely gushes over him, but never seems to be able to explain what's good about it or what the books are even about.

The scarce pop-culture references I see to his work (like in "Little Miss Sunshine") seems to cast an affection for Proust as kind of a mark of being an unmoored and depressive romantic.

So is he worth reading? The full collection of "Remembrance of Things Past" is nearly $100, so that's not a trivial amount to invest. Is there a recommended/definitive translation or edition I should read? What should I keep in mind or be open to if I do try giving it a shot?

By that last question I mean like, I'd have hated "Catcher In the Rye" if I wasn't told ahead of time to approach it from the mindset of a 15 year old boy. Or I kind of hated 'Madame Bovary" but when explained to me that this was Flaubert's exercise in trying to make people see themselves in an adulteress, a generally reviled archetype, and this was groundbreaking for the time lets me at least appreciate it for accomplishing what it's set out to do. Are there any literary contexts like I this should have in my head before I delve in?

I'm young, I'm looking to understand more ways of looking at the world. What books do you recommend people to read that had profound impacts on your world outlook, character, or anything else like that. Future me says thank you.

Edit List (Books listed so far by Title):
"Accelerando" by Charles Stross
"A Clockwork Orange" by Anthony Burgess
"A People's History of the United States" by Howard Zinn
"A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson
"Bardo Thödol" by Padmasambhava
"Brave New World" by Huxley
"Book of the Dead" by ?
"Cain" by José Saramago
"Capital vol.1" by Karl Marx
"Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software" by Charles Petzold
"Collected Fictions" by Jorge Luis Borges
"Crime and Punishment" by Dostoyevsky
"Die Grundlage der Allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie" by Einstein
"Divine Comedy" by Dante
"Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" by Philip K. Dick
"Don Quixote" by Cervantes
"Daughters of the Dragons" by William Andrews
"Ender's Game" by Orson Scott Card
"Ethics" by Spinoza
"Fables" by Aesop
"Fahrenheit 451" by Bradbury
"Faust" by Goethe
"Flowers for Algernon" By Daniel Keyes
"Fragile Things" by Neil Gaiman
"God and the State" by Mikhail Bakunin
"Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" by Douglas R. Hofstadter
"Good Omens" by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
"Great Books" by David Denby
"Harry Potter" by J.K. Rowling
"Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams
"History of Violence" By Édouard Louis
"Homo Deus" by Yuval Noah Harari
"How to Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie
"Illiad" by Homer
"Ishmael" by Daniel Quinn
"Kafka on the Shore" by Haruki Murakami
"Le contrat social" by Rousseau
"Les fleurs du mal" by Baudelaire
"Leviathan" by Hobbes
"Maus" by Art Spiegelman
"Naked Economics" by Charles Wheelan
"Name of the Wind" by Patrick Rothfuss
"Neuromancer" by William Gibson
"Odyssey" Homer
"On the Origin of Species" by Darwin
"Paid Attention" by Faris Yakob
"Personality-Shaping Through Positive Disintegration Processes" by Kazimierz Dąbrowski
"Player Piano" by Vonnegut
"Poetics" by Aristotle
"Republic" by Plato
"Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" by Yuval Noah Harari
"Shogun" by James Clavell
"Slaughterhouse-Five" by Kurt Vonnegut
"Tao Te Ching" by Lao Tzu
"Tales of Power" by Carlos Castaneda
"Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science" by Peter Godfrey-Smith
"The Ancestor's Tale" by Richard Dawkins
"The Bible" by :contentious_topic_here:
"The End of Eddy" By Édouard Louis
"The Goldfinch" by Donna Tartt
"The Handmaid's Tale" by Margaret Atwood
"The Lucifer Effect" by Philip Zimbardo
"The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" by Julian Jaynes
"The Prince" by Machiavelli
"The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins
"The Singularity Is Near" by Ray Kurzweill
"The Stranger" by Camus
"The Tao of Pooh" by Benjamin Hoff
"The Three-Body Problem Trilogy" by Cixin Liu
"Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" by Wittgenstein
"Traité d'atheologie" by Onfray
"Treatise of the Three Imposters" by ?
"Where Mathematics Comes From" by Lakoff and Nunez
"Where I'm Calling From" by Raymond Carver
"1984" by George Orwell

I'm learning Spanish and feel like reading is really helping me get to the next level. I've read 1984 and one part of Harry Potter in Spanish but now I'm thinking of trying some original, non-translated literature.

What Spanish-language books would you recommend (that are not too difficult to read)?

This is a short, experimental story I wrote. Hope it's interesting.

As I opened my eyes the whirl of indistinction calmed and I was standing there in a room paneled in wood, rich and dark and polished slightly. It was time for the oath. She stood at her lectern with her book open in front of the priest, who turned to the needed page and bid her to sing, which she did, sweet and calm and certain, without dramatics or pomp. Why would she need it? It was what she was to do. She smiled, I think, her form was not clear except for the vague impression of her gently rounded cheeks and lips the color of a rose too pale a pink to be said red. And now the priest was across from me and my book opened to its song page. Seven squares, (or was it nine?), filled mid grey onto the paper ruled across with needle fine lines the color of rust. It was old, plainly, but still strong. I felt looking at the page a feeling I had never known, not quite joy or determination or happiness or fear but an immensity as if I had for a heart now an infinitely faceted gem in whose faces you could find any color if you would only let it catch the light. It was like madness melded together with a certainty so strong anything less than “it is” fails to reach it. I feared I could not voice it, and said as much to the priest. To point at the page and utter “Sing.” was his only response. And I did, tremulously and weakly, but I sang, and through it came a sweetness despite me. And it was done. Through the haze now I remember the ascent up the stairs and my body collapsing onto the white couch my head landing in her lap, and her final exclaim “_______! We are!”.