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«Good stuff, if brief, twice as good.» – It was an Aragonese writer that said that (Baltasar Gracián)
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There are two good reasons why English learners should take interest in these expressions of oral tradition.
For one thing, they provide an extraordinary word bank you […]
Quick links to newspapers, magazines and other online reference materials:
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Φ This is what you´ll find next: 8 simplified versions of great books you can read online…
The same story has been adapted for three stages of learning.
¤ ELEMENTARY: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: ⇒ […]
The word “traduce” is a falso amigo for Spaniards. It actually means ‘calumniar’, ‘difamar’ [Eng. “slander”]. Need I say more?
What follows is some modern fiction passages translated into Spanish.
To start with, here’s my own translation of the beginning and end of …
♦ JD […]
♠ RUBBISH ⇓
♠ FOOD ⇓
♠ TRANSPORT ⇓
♠ COMPUTER GAMES ⇓
I read this in theprisma (The Multicultural Newspaper) on 16th August 2012. ¤ Planned Obsolescence – Death on the Instalment Plan
An idea that belongs to capitalism: producing goods that soon stop working (programmed death) and […]
♣ Three reading links at monologuearchive.com:
•→dramatic_men⇐ / •→comic_women⇐ / •→children⇐
¤ Bob Rafelson‘s «Five Easy Pieces» [1970]
⇓ Bobby Dupea’s (Jack Nicholson) monologue with his old mute father
Are […]
Very few films achieve a kind of subliminal greatness with cross-cultural impact, but Walkabout is one of those: a visual tone poem that functions more as an allegory than a conventionally plotted adventure.
Considered a cult favorite for years, Nicolas Roeg‘s 1971 film is about two British […]
A family heads to an isolated hotel for the winter where an evil and spiritual presence influences the father into violence, while his psychic son sees horrific forebodings from the past and of the future. Based on Stephen King‘s work of the same title
The Twins… ↓ «Come Play With Us…» [Stanley Kubrick, […]
◊ Under The Black Flag: Exploits Of The Most Notorious Pirates [Don C. Seitz]
Riveting account traces careers of buccaneers of many nationalities across 2 centuries and around the globe —from the West Indies to the South Seas.
A few true stories of such notorious brigands as . . .
Thomas […]
Julian Barnes contributes a previously unseen extract from his novel England, England.
Sir Jack Pitman creates a theme park on the Isle of Wight (=’England England’) that duplicates the tourist spots of England. Within easy walking distance are replicas of Big Ben (half size), Princess Di’s grave, Harrods, Stonehenge, and the white […]
«The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting» [Arthur Schopenhauer]
Since 2008, Be-a-Better-Writer.com has aimed to cultivate interest in Canadian and International fiction from new and emerging writers. They publish a broad range of adjudicated fiction, […]
Mullah Nasreddin (also spelled Nasruddin) has gathered stories from far and wide during his extensive travels. His peregrinations have taken him from Beijing to Boston, from Delhi to Delaware. He can’t remember where he was born: it was so long ago, and he’s been to so many places, that wherever he is he […]
1920 – 1994
American prolific poet, short story writer and novelist; author of ‘Notes of a Dirty Old Man’, ‘Love Is a Dog from Hell’, and the autobiographical novels, ‘Women’, ‘Hollywood’, and ‘Post Office’.
Generally speaking, you’re free till you’re about four years old. And then… five around, since you […]
1930 – 2009 ¤ JG Ballard‘s fertile imagination fancifully envisaged yet another World War where the British and the Americans fought on different sides. ⇒ This story, ⇒«Theatre of War» ⇐ was published in his book ‘Myths of the Near Future’, and it’s written in a style which looks much the same as a […]
[1910 – 1999] – •→http://www.paulbowles.org/ Paul Bowles was born in Queens, New York, in 1910. He began his travels as a teenager, setting off for Paris, telling no one of his plans. In 1930 he visited Morocco for the first time, with Aaron Copland, with whom he was studying music. His early reputation was as a […]
If you’ve read Iain Banks‘s novel, you’ll enjoy the BBC-Radio 4 interview.
→ http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b016w0nf
Includes an excerpt from Chapter 8 read by Iain Banks himself. Transcript below . . .
Iain Banks meets James Naughtie and readers at the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh to talk about his […]
¤ Director’s Cut: Underworld by Don DeLillo
For the 60th anniversary of the Shot Heard ‘Round the World, read an excerpt from
Pafko at the Wall ↓ the prologue to DeLillo’s American epic.
Another except from Underworld . . .
We were about thirty miles below the Canadian border […]
An international bestseller since its publication in 1978, The World According to Garp established John Irving as one of the most imaginative writers of his generation.
This is the life and times of T. S. Garp, the bastard son of Jenny Fields, a feminist leader ahead of her time. This […]
1930 – 2009
Frank McCourt was born in Brooklyn — he would later, much later, memorably describe the scene of his conception in his memoir — but he grew up in Ireland. His parents were both Irish immigrants, and they moved back there, to Limerick, in an effort to stay […]
Canadian writer Alice Munro grew up in Wingham, South West Ontario and has written short fiction since 1950. Her books consist of collections of short stories, and one book which has been published as a novel, although it is actually a set of inter-linked stories which falls between the two […]
1888 – 1959
In Raymond Chandler’s 1949 novel The Little Sister, Philip Marlowe takes on what seems like a fairly routine missing persons case. Orrin Quest was a young man from Manhattan, Kansas who arrived in LA and then disappeared from sight. His sister hires Marlowe to find him. The […]
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