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The Heaven & Eart...
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by James McBride (Goodreads Author)
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William2 William2 said: " James McBride is a wonderful writer. But everybody has their models. I am reminded very much reading this novel of the stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer, both the early phantasmagoric stories and the later pogrom tales.

McBride tells a story here that
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The Devils of Loudun
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William2 William2 said: " Oliver Sacks mentions this work in his book Hallucinations for its depiction of groups experiencing mass delusions. I do not know if Arthur Miller read this when working on his play The Crucible, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

Chapter 3 is unreadable. S
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  (page 147 of 368)
Jun 19, 2026 07:15PM

 
Mythology
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Fyodor Dostoevsky
“[T]here is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and good for life in the future than some good memory, especially a memory of childhood, of home.”
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

Martin Amis
“A writer’s life is half ambition and half anxiety, and there has to be both. It is no good writing a novel and feeling fine, and it is no good writing a whole novel feeling miserable. It has to be both, that mixture of anxiety and ambition, and you get that with every novel, but more so when you write about these epics of human suffering. I felt that just as much when I wrote about the Gulag. Every writer knows what that is. The process goes… you have to think: ‘This novel I am writing is no good.’ Then you have to think: ‘All my novels are no good.’ And then, when you reach that point, you can begin.”
Martin Amis

Norman Mailer
“I find it’s more fun to write about something that you don’t know completely and that you will discover on route. A dear friend of mine...once said: 'The only time I know anything is when it comes to me at the point of my pen.' So I think that if you start to write about things that you know half well, that you’re fascinated by, that you sense you have an appreciation of that others might not have, but you do have to acquire the knowledge as you go, you discover a great many things at the point of a pen. And it keeps the writing alive in itself in a way.
(in an interview with Martin Amis, 1991, see YouTube)”
Norman Mailer

Amos Tutuola
“When we traveled for two and half days, we reached the Deads' road from which dead babies drove us, and when we reached there, we could not travel on it because of fearful dead babies, etc. which were still on it.”
Amos Tutuola

Jonathan Swift
“Whatever reader desires to have a thorough comprehension of an author's thoughts cannot take a better method than by putting himself into the circumstances and postures of life that the author was in upon every important passage as it flowed from his pen; for this will introduce a parity and strict correspondence of ideas between the reader and the author. Now, to assist the diligent reader in so delicate an affair, as far as brevity will permit, I have recollected that the shrewdest pieces of this treatise were conceived in bed in a garret; at other times (for a reason best known to myself) I thought fit to sharpen my invention with hunger; and in general, the whole work was begun, continued, and ended under a long course of physic and great want of money.”
Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub

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