Ernest Hemingway's Advice to a Young Writer

What words of wisdom would you give to a new writer?  Perhaps to write every day?  Write what you know?  Try to build a world for your characters?  All these would be appropriate advice. 

Interestingly, in October 1925, a young writer named Ernest Hemingway wrote a letter to a younger Canadian author named Morley Callaghan.

Callaghan was frustrated with his writing life and wrote to his friend: “Have a lot of time and could go a good deal of writing if I knew how I stood.”

Hemingway’s response is included in volume two of The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, out this month. It is terrific advice for writers of any age…

Christ don’t be an ass and say you could go on and write if you know how you stand etc. God knows you’re in the most depressing and discouraging surroundings–but that’s what makes a writer. You have to catch hell. You’ve got to take punishment … Write a lot–but see a lot more. Keep your ears and eyes going and try all the time to get your conversations right.

        Never one to mince words, Hemingway called them as he saw them.  This, of course, was no exception.  The other question then is :  What happened to Morley Callaghan?   He was apparently concerned late in life that people would remember him for one minor achievement: the little Canadian had knocked down the macho Ernest Hemingway in a boxing match refereed by F. Scott Fitzgerald.  Although Callaghan preferred to be known for his novels, it's his short stories that are his lasting legacy. Along with the fact that he knocked down Hemingway in a boxing match refereed by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Scary Halloween Books to Download for Free!

Looking for some scary books to get in the Halloween mood? Below, GalleyCat  (Jason Boog) has collected 25 free scary books you can download right now.   How much scary fun is that! 

Have a look at the video at the end of the post!

In 2010, novelist Neil Gaiman created the “All Hallow’s Read,” literary holiday, a night to give someone you love a scary book. The writer explained the new tradition in the video embedded above–here’s more from the official site:

Obviously, we support bookshops and authors, but more than that, this is about making a holiday tradition of book-giving. So feel free to give second-hand books or books from your own shelves. And feel just as free to buy a beautiful new book from a small independent bookseller, or from online or… look, there’s no wrong way to buy a book. You can even gift it to their Kindle … If you do not know what scary book to give someone, talk to a bookseller or a librarian. They like to help. Librarians will not mind even if you admit that you are not planning to take out a book, but instead you are going to buy one and give it to someone.

Top 25 Free Horror eBooks on Project Gutenberg

1. Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

2. Dracula by Bram Stoker

3. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

4. The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe

5. The Monkey’s Paw by W. W. Jacobs

6. The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux

7. The Vampyre; a Tale by John William Polidori

8. The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Ward Radcliffe

9. Varney the Vampire by Thomas Preskett Prest

10. The Monk; a romance by M. G. Lewis

11. The Wendigo by Algernon Blackwood

12. Dracula’s Guest by Bram Stoker

13. Lair of the White Worm by Bram Stoker

14. The Willows by Algernon Blackwood

15. Wieland: or, the Transformation, an American Tale by Charles Brockden Brown

16. Edgar Huntly by Charles Brockden Brown

17. The Jewel of Seven Stars by Bram Stoker

18. The Beetle by Richard Marsh

19. The House of the Vampire by George Sylvester Viereck

20. The Lady of the Shroud by Bram Stoker

21. The Damned Thing by Ambrose Bierce

22. The Damned by Algernon Blackwood

23. The Parasite by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

24. Clarimonde by Théophile Gautier

25. Curious, if True by Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

Who Is Your Favorite Nobel Prize Winning Author?

Who is your favorite Nobel Prize winning author? The Nobel Prize for Literature website listed the “Most Popular Literature Laureates” on its website, and some of the names might surprise you.

This blogger's favorite winner is Winston Churchill's The Second World War, given in 1953.  Run down the list to see if there is one that draws you.

Since 1901, 105 Nobel Prizes in Literature have been awarded to 109 laureates. The average age of these laureates is 64 years old and only 12 women have received the prestigious prize.

Below, is the the entire list–complete with links to their biographies at the Nobel Prize website.

Year	Author	Famous for
1901	Sully Prudhomme	Parnassian poetry
1902	Theodor Mommsen	History of Rome
1903	Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson	Synnöve Solbakken
1904	José Echegaray	El gran Galeoto
1904	Frédéric Mistral	MIRÈIO
1905	Henryk Sienkiewicz	Quo vadis
1906	Giosuè Carducci	Rime Nuove (New Rhymes) , Odi Barbare (Barbarian Odes)
1907	Rudyard Kipling	Jungle Books
1908	Rudolf Eucken	The Problem of Human Life as Viewed by the Great Thinkers
1909	Selma Lagerlöf	The Wonderful Adventures of Nils
1910	Paul Heyse	Children of the World
1911	Maurice Maeterlinck	The Blue Bird
1912	Gerhart Hauptmann	Die Weber
1913	Rabindranath Tagore	Gitanjali
1915	Romain Rolland	Le Théâtre du peuple
1916	Verner von Heidenstam	Karolinerna
1917	Henrik Pontoppidan	Lucky Peter
1917	Karl Gjellerup	The German Student
1919	Carl Spitteler	Olympian Spring
1920	Knut Hamsun	Growth of the Soil
1921	Anatole France	The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard
1922	Jacinto Benavente	The Bonds of Interest
1923	William Butler Yeats	The Wild Swans at Coole
1924	Wladyslaw Reymont	Chłopi
1925	George Bernard Shaw	Arms and the Man
1926	Grazia Deledda	Anime Oneste
1927	Henri Bergson	The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
1928	Sigrid Undset	Kristin Lavransdatter
1929	Thomas Mann	Buddenbrooks
1930	Sinclair Lewis	Arrowsmith
1931	Erik Axel Karlfeldt	Arcadia Borealis
1932	John Galsworthy	The Forsyte Saga
1933	Ivan Bunin	The Gentleman from San Francisco
1934	Luigi Pirandello	Lumie di Sicilia
1936	Eugene O'Neill	Anna Christie
1937	Roger Martin du Gard	Les Thibault
1938	Pearl Buck	The Good Earth
1939	Frans Eemil Sillanpää	People in the Summer Night
1944	Johannes V. Jensen	Poems 1906
1945	Gabriela Mistral	Piececitos de Niño
1946	Hermann Hesse	Siddhartha
1947	André Gide	Fruits of the Earth
1948	T.S. Eliot	The Waste Land
1949	William Faulkner	The Sound and the Fury
1950	Bertrand Russell	A History of Western Philosophy
1951	Pär Lagerkvist	Fruits of the Earth
1952	François Mauriac	Thérèse
1953	Winston Churchill	The Second World War
1954	Ernest Hemingway	The Old Man and the Sea
1955	Halldór Laxness	Independent People
1956	Juan Ramón Jiménez	Platero and I
1957	Albert Camus	The Plague
1958	Boris Pasternak	Doctor Zhivago
1959	Salvatore Quasimodo	Giorno Dopo Giorno
1960	Saint-John Perse	Exile
1961	Ivo Andric	Anxieties
1962	John Steinbeck	The Grapes of Wrath
1963	Giorgos Seferis	Turning Point
1964	Jean-Paul Sartre	Nausea
1965	Mikhail Sholokhov	And Quiet Flows the Don
1966	Nelly Sachs	Eli: A Mystery Play of the Sufferings of Israel
1966	Shmuel Agnon	The Bridal Canopy
1967	Miguel Angel Asturias	The President
1968	Yasunari Kawabata	Snow Country
1969	Samuel Beckett	Waiting for Godot
1970	Alexandr Solzhenitsyn	One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
1971	Pablo Neruda	Canto General
1972	Heinrich Böll	Billiards at Half-past Nine
1973	Patrick White	Riders in the Chariot
1974	Harry Martinson	Aniara
1974	Eyvind Johnson	Here is Your Life!
1975	Eugenio Montale	Occasions
1976	Saul Bellow	The Adventures of Augie March
1977	Vicente Aleixandre	Shadow of Paradise
1978	Isaac Bashevis Singer	Gimpel the Fool
1979	Odysseus Elytis	Worthy It Is
1980	Czeslaw Milosz	The Captive Mind
1981	Elias Canetti	Crowds and Power
1982	Gabriel García Márquez	One Hundred Years of Solitude
1983	William Golding	Lord of the Flies
1984	Jaroslav Seifert	The Plague Column
1985	Claude Simon	The Flanders Road
1986	Wole Soyinka	The Bacchae of Euripides
1987	Joseph Brodsky	Love Song
1988	Naguib Mahfouz	Chitchat on the Nile
1989	Camilo José Cela	The Hive
1990	Octavio Paz	Collected Poems, 1957–1987
1991	Nadine Gordimer	The Conservationist
1992	Derek Walcott	Omeros
1993	Toni Morrison	Beloved
1994	Kenzaburo Oe	A Personal Matter
1995	Seamus Heaney	The Spirit Level
1996	Wislawa Szymborska	Some Like Poetry
1997	Dario Fo	Archangels Don't Play Pinball
1998	José Saramago	Baltasar and Blimunda
1999	Günter Grass	The Tin Drum
2000	Gao Xingjian	One Man's Bible
2001	V. S. Naipaul	In a Free State
2002	Imre Kertész	Fatelessness
2003	J. M. Coetzee	Disgrace
2004	Elfriede Jelinek	The Piano Teacher
2005	Harold Pinter	The Birthday Party
2006	Orhan Pamuk	The Black Book
2007	Doris Lessing	The Grass is Singing
2008	Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio	The Interrogation
2009	Herta Müller	The Land of Green Plums

*This information is also provided at GalleyCat by Jason Boog.

47% of Americans Participated in Some Type of the Arts Last Year

Here is an interesting slice of across the board arts consumption of adult in the U.S. in 2012.  You may be surprised.

The National Endowment for the Arts released its annual Public Participation in the Arts report, revealing that 54 percent of adults read books that were not required for work or school last year. Are you surprised?

Beyond that figure, 45 percent of adults read novels or short stories. As you can see by the chart embedded above, electronic media was the dominant medium for art consumption.

Adults are included in this category if they did at least one of the following types of reading in the preceding 12 months: Books not required for work or school (54 percent of adults) Literary reading (47 percent of adults). Types of literature may have included: Novels or short stories (45 percent of adults) Poetry (7 percent) Plays (3 percent) … adults’ rates of literary reading (novels or short stories, poetry, and plays) dropped back to 2002 levels (from 50 percent in 2008 to 47 percent in 20.)

Pleasure Reading Significantly Improves a Child’s School Performance.

Here is an interesting study from GalleyCat, written by Jason Boorg.

The University of London’s Institute of Education Children has released a study showing that reading for pleasure can “significantly” improve a child’s school performance.

Most dramatically, the researchers ruled that “reading for pleasure was found to be more important for children’s cognitive development between ages 10 and 16 than their parents’ level of education.”

Dr. Alice Sullivan and Matt Brown led the study, examining the performance of 6,000 young people in the 1970 British Cohort Study. They measured test score performance at five, 10 and 16 years old.

Reading for pleasure improved math, spelling and vocabulary performance in children between 10 and 16-years-old–comparing their progress to kids who don’t read regularly. Here’s more from the release:

The researchers, who are based in the IOE’s Centre for Longitudinal Studies, compared children from the same social backgrounds who had achieved the same test scores as each other both at ages 5 and 10.

They discovered that those who read books often at age 10 and more than once a week at age 16 gained higher results in all three tests at age 16 than those who read less regularly. The combined effect on children’s progress of reading books often, going to the library regularly and reading newspapers at 16 was four times greater than the advantage children gained from having a parent with a degree.

 Children who were read to regularly by their parents at age 5 performed better in all three tests at age 16 than those who were not helped in this way.

Did Certain Books Creep You Out When You Were a Kid?

Did you have any books that scared you as a kid? I have to admit that I did not.  But here is an interesting video by video blogger Vsauce.  It's called “Why Are Things Creepy?,” exploring the nuances and science of scariness.  Along the way, he cites the great Stephen King and shares a few scary books.


Please see the video at the bottom of this post.

What does it take to make a book scary? Vampires, ghosts, serial killers, zombies, mean parents, all of the above?  Your turn.  Talk to the readers and to me in the comment section. 

Below, is a list of books that scared Vsauce as a kid. Please add your suggestions in the comments section.

Some Books That Scared Us When We Were Kids

1. Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz
2. The Works of Edgar Allan Poe (read the complete eBook for free)
3. It by Stephen King
4. Fear Street by R.L. Stine
5. Remember Me by Christopher Pike

How We Can All Help Save a Timbucktu Library

A group of brave librarians are raising money to save a collection of manuscripts (some are 700 years old) rescued from Timbuktu last year. Jason Boog brings the story to light. Here is the remarkable story:

Be sure to see the amazing video at the post's end!

In 2012, under threat from fundamentalist rebels, a team of archivists, librarians, and couriers evacuated an irreplaceable trove of manuscripts from Timbuktu at great personal risk. The manuscripts have been saved from immediate destruction, but the danger is not over. A massive archival effort is needed to protect this immense global heritage from loss … Though removed from immediate threat, the manuscripts are still jam packed in footlockers used for their evacuation and the current environment of this precious world heritage is significantly more humid than Timbuktu. There are already signs of damage and exposure to moisture.

Tamasheq craftsmen learning
Book and Paper Conservation

These librarians are struggling to store a set of priceless manuscripts in an “archival, moisture-resistant manner” before they are damaged by moisture. They hope to raise $100,000 on Indiegogo, but it is a flexible funding campaign–so every contribution will help.

The purpose of this campaign is to fund the preservation effort required to store the manuscripts in an archival, moisture-resistant manner during their exile from Timbuktu.  If physical harm from the current packing situation continues and if mold and mildew  spread in the corpus due to increased humidity, the damage will be devastating.

About the Libraries in Exile Project

The corpus of Manuscripts

Libraries in Exile is sponsored by T160K, an international initiative forged in the evacuation of these treasures from Timbuktu and dedicated to protecting and preserving them until they can be returned to their home. It is the center of a growing global family who have pledged to this urgent effort.
Funds contributed to this project will be used to purchase moisture traps, archival boxes, and the additional footlockers required to safely store these manuscripts, as well as to cover the significant labor effort required to unbox and re-pack the manuscripts for preservation.

A book of genealogy

The libraries of Timbuktu

The corpus of Timbuktu dates back for generations, with numerous private libraries that have been handed down from generation to generation for over 700 years, creating a record of commerce, poetry, scholarship, law, and everyday life that has undiminished power to teach and inspire today. 

The libraries include manuscripts form Andalusia and Southern Europe, Arabia, Egypt, the Arab trading ports on the Indian Ocean, and Morocco and other centers of medieval learning, as well as the region of Timbuktu itself. Timbuktu is a traditional crossroads of culture and has played a peacekeeper role in the region. The manuscripts chronicle this role. They represent an astounding diversity of topics and authors, including a significant number of women’s voices.


A cultural heritage of this magnitude has incredible power to bring people together. We saw this power when people from all walks of life, whole villages, and speakers of every language in the region gave their time and effort, even under considerable risk, to help us evacuate them to the south. We believe that securing these manuscripts is a positive step towards a process of enduring peace and a reduced toll of human misery for this entire region.

Elementary School Kids Exchange Toys for Books

In Hayward, California, an elementary school had kids exchange their toy guns for a book during “Strobridge Elementary Safety Day.”

According to Mercury News:

Strobridge Elementary Principal Charles Hill maintains that children who play with toy guns may not take real guns seriously.  He has devised a way to help kids think seriously about gun control in their own way:

All youngsters attending will be given a ticket to exchange for a book.

The event has drawn criticism from conservative corners, but nobody seems to be talking about the book part of the day. 

 No matter what one thinks about the political statement behind the event, remember that reading books over the summer can help kids of all backgrounds beat the summer slide that can be so devastating to a young reader.

Ernest Hemingway's List of Books to Read

Jason Boog, editor of GalleyCat and managing editor of AppNewser, has written an interesting piece on Hemingway's list of books to read.

In 1934, the great novelist Ernest Hemingway made a list of books that all aspiring writers should read. Below, we’ve linked to free copies of most of the books on his massive list.

Open Culture has an article about how a young hobo and aspiring writer named Arnold Samuelson ended up getting writing advice from Hemingway himself. Check it out:

Hemingway advised Samuelson to avoid contemporary writers and compete only with the dead ones whose works have stood the test of time: “When you pass them up you know you’re going good.” He asked Samuelson what writers he liked. Samuelson said he enjoyed Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. “Ever read War and Peace?” Hemingway asked. Samuelson said he had not. “That’s a damned good book. You ought to read it. We’ll go up to my workshop and I’ll make out a list you ought to read.”

Free Books Recommended By Ernest Hemingway Himself:
 
The Blue Hotel by Stephen Crane (Part of The Monster & Other Stories collection)
The Open Boat by Stephen Crane (Part of Men, Women & Boats Collection)
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Dubliners by James Joyce
Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Enormous Room by E.E. Cummings
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
Far Away and Long Ago by W.H. Hudson
The American by Henry James

If you want to get a real glimpse into the literary life of Ernest Hemingway, find a book or two in this list.  Be a Hemingway voyeur of sorts, and have fun!