MJ Nicholls
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2309 reviews
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MJ Nicholls

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Russian Beauty
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Émile Zola
“From the moment I start a new novel, life’s just one endless torture. The first few chapters may go fairly well and I may feel there’s still a chance to prove my worth, but that feeling soon disappears and every day I feel less and less satisfied. I begin to say the book’s no good, far inferior to my earlier ones, until I’ve wrung torture out of every page, every sentence, every word, and the very commas begin to look excruciatingly ugly. Then, when it’s finished, what a relief! Not the blissful delight of the gentleman who goes into ecstasies over his own production, but the resentful relief of a porter dropping a burden that’s nearly broken his back . . . Then it starts all over again, and it’ll go on starting all over again till it grinds the life out of me, and I shall end my days furious with myself for lacking talent, for not leaving behind a more finished work, a bigger pile of books, and lie on my death-bed filled with awful doubts about the task I’ve done, wondering whether it was as it ought to have been, whether I ought not to have done this or that, expressing my last dying breath the wish that I might do it all over again!”
Émile Zola, The Masterpiece

Paul West
“What’s that dreadful phrase? Reader-friendly? It isn’t reader friendly; it’s saying to the reader, “I bet you can’t take this, and if you can you’re the kind of reader I want and you’ll stay with me. If you can’t take it, I don’t want you to read me anyway.”
Paul West

Anthony Burgess
“Their hair belonged to some middle crinal zone between aseptic nord and latinindian jetwalled lousehouse.”
Anthony Burgess, The Clockwork Testament, Or, Enderby's End

Raymond Federman
“And so, for me, the only fiction that still means something today is the kind of fiction that tries to explore the possibilities of fiction beyond its own limitations; the kind of fiction that challenges the tradition that governs it; the kind of fiction that constantly renews our faith in man's intelligence and imagination rather than man's distorted view of reality; the kind of fiction that reveals man's playful irrationality rather than his righteous rationality.”
Raymond Federman

Paul Ableman
“An artist in this nuthouse century is like a man running an obstacle race fitted out with all the gadgets of our riotous technology. He gets blown a mile into the air on a jet of liquid helium, shuttles about on little rocket tubes, plunges into the deeps of the ocean, shoots out again a hundred miles into the space while lurid sights and sounds shred his senses. Every year, every month, and ‘panoptic’ work appears and warps his consciousness into a new shape. Knowledge itself is in a molten, a plasmatic state and what titanic electromagnetic grip of intellect would be required to lock it solid long enough to reach artistic fusion point? The damned language becomes obsolete as it clatters from the typewriter.”
Paul Ableman

80277 The Kindred Spirits — 300 members — last activity Sep 23, 2025 07:28AM
Place to meet and talk about anything.
97302 The BURIED Book Club — 947 members — last activity Feb 27, 2026 06:22PM
TODAY BOOKS ARE NOT BURNED. THEY ARE BURIED. WE SHALL UNEARTH THEM.
79311 Completists' Club — 544 members — last activity Mar 25, 2026 12:59PM
A group for those attempting to complete, or who have completed, the canons of their favourite writers. Share your canon-wide knowledge and opinion wi ...more
88667 Alexander Theroux Ville — 118 members — last activity Jan 07, 2026 03:01PM
The Theroux revival continues. This group counts as a village forum for discussing the works of Alexander Theroux. Both scholars and the naive and cur ...more
118024 Dalkey Archive Press reads — 155 members — last activity Apr 18, 2020 05:39AM
Hi everyone, Join our Backlist of the Month discussions! What is Backlist of the month, you ask? It's something we'll tell you all about on Faceboo ...more
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