508-552-3456
https://mywpl.org/?q=article/dial-story#:~:text=Listeners%20can%20reach%20Dial%2DA,from%20their%20favorite%20WPL%20librarians.
Haha jk u r gay. Suck my fucking balls, I won the national book award. U r a worm.
I mean, seriously. That book (short story? novella?) was GREAT! A story of man confronted with his death, his life, his regrets, and the culture around death that he lives in, the Death of Ivan Ilyich is genius. I’m more than happy to discuss it with anyone who wants to in the replies or DMs. This story has shaken me and made me so uncomfortable in an incredible way. However, however great the shaken-ness is, I am still shaken which is… fun? This was my first work of Tolstoy and you can bet not my last.
(Mention of SA, no detail).
I have so many mixed feelings about this. Like of course, good for her! Young author with heaps of fans yay!! But at the same time, she wrote a book about college rape and virtue signalling when myself and a few of my other friends in the same year were dismissed from College because of almost the exact same plot. I was told I was starting drama, I was told I wasn't resilient enough, I was told that I wasn't trying hard enough to fit in to these elite circles that operated on networking and millions upon millions of dollars in donations.
She was head girl at one of the most exclusive schools in my city. Her parents are extremely wealthy. She had tutors and peer support and wasn't kicked out of college after a year of battling the worst mental health crisis of her life.
I'm bitter and I'm hurt and it's really painful seeing peers read her book and celebrate it, when her "writing what she knows" is literally a privelaged person writing about the awful awful things that happened to HER peers at the same time she was flourishing. It's very hard to celebrate what is obviously a well written book when it is taking advantage of the stories of survivors who weren't given the same grace.
I remember sitting across from her in an english lit class, and being almost paralysed by anxiety, yet she was speaking to the tutor like an old friend. Why? Because he had literally taught at her school. He was gushing over germanic influence in the development of the english language, and in a class of 20, and I felt so alienated by the assumed knowledge that just seemed almost impossible to teach myself in the space of 8 weeks. She had been given the heads up. She scored the highest in the cohort. I absent failed because of my SA case being dismissed and told by college administrators that I wouldn't be able to afford it anyway, so may as well move on.
Not at all bitter that my childhood dream of being a published author (which was quashed several times when I couldn't afford the publishers fee as a kid, then my manuscript was accidentally permanently lost) feels like it will now forever be compared to the "new voice of a generation", knowing that I've had almost a decade of my life wasted because of what happened in that first year of university.
Two characters are named Arthur and Clarke!
Since her rise from single mother to literary superstar, J.K. Rowling has used her talents and stature as a writer to fight inequality on both a local and global level. Herself the frequent object of censorship in schools and libraries across the globe, as well as online targeting, Rowling has emerged as a vocal proponent of free expression and access to literature and ideas for children, as well as incarcerated people, the learning disabled, and women and girls worldwide. -- PEN AMERICA
https://youtu.be/S18D6pc38aU
NBCCA finalists announced. And after reading samples from the fiction finalists, looks like another year of mediocre literature. Any thoughts on fiction finalists this year or what books you thought deserved recognition from 2021?
