David Foster Wallace on Commercial literature and reading: #literature

British author Doris Lessing has been awarded this year's Nobel Prize for Literature.

The secret allure and the greatness of literature, the secret that sends us to it over and over again, with enthusiasm and a longing to find refuge and meaning, is that literature can repeatedly redeem for us the tragedy of the one from the statistics of

...those that from a long way off look like flies.

If there's nothing different about UNIX people, how come so many were liberal-arts majors? It's the love of words that makes UNIX stand out.

...Jesus, who never laughs in the canonic Gospels, is constantly laughing in this one, and it’s obviously one of those sardonic, significant, how-little-you-know laughs, like the laugh of the ruler of a dubious planet on “Star Trek.”

a 2005 meta-best-of list

a compilation

Harold Bloom

on Samuel Johnson

Annie Proulx

Pinter's Nobel prize speech

Ali Smith