Fifty-Two Stories serve up a new short with a difference – One of Monday’s ‘Book Bites’ is sure to be the announcement of another FREE short story posted at Harper Perennial’s short story website. Here is that announcement but this week Harper P. are doing things a bit different, by posting a short story submission from one of its readers. This offering is called The Copy Family and it’s from the unpublished (for now) pen of Blake Butler. Congrats on getting your story up there Blake. I look forward to reading it.
French writers (not surprisingly) think Proust is the best – Valerie Merians over at Mobylives, the most excellent news column over on the Melville House Publishing website, has posted on a recent survey which ran in the French newspaper Télérama (link in French), asking 100 French writers what their ten favourite books were. The outright winner by a mile was Marcel Proust with of course A la recherche du temps perdu – yep the title in English known as Remembrance of Things Past (or In Search of Lost Time depending on which translation you choose).
Valerie goes on to reveal some of the other titles chosen by the writers in the survey (and I suggest you go over to the post to find out), but one thing in her article struck me. Valerie comments on one of the French litt sites saying of the survey and Proust “It’s definite, Marcel Proust has ruined a generation of writers!”. This is a timely and important comment for me to discover. It was only earlier today I was stealing a chapter or two of de Botton’s ‘How Proust Can Change Your Life’ and de Botton was commenting on how Virginia Wolff, although adoring her new discovery of Proust at the time, was left feeling inadequate of her own abilities, and noted in her diary that she struggled to string together any sentences which she considered good enough. Amazing stuff, and it goes to show just how incredible Proust is, and the incredible affect he has on others (and I’m so glad I’m discovering this for myself right now).
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