“The Fall”
by
Russell Edson
There was a man who found two leaves and came indoors holding them out saying to his parents that he was a tree.
To which they said then go into the yard and do not grow in the living-room as your roots may ruin the carpet.
He said I was fooling I am not a tree and he dropped his leaves.
But his parents said look it is fall.
For his 8th book, What the Dead Can Say, Philip Graham limited it to a print run of 1000 and distribution was entirely through stashing them in Little Free Libraries around the entire country.
From the author :
What the Dead Can Say is my eighth book. Over the course of my career, I’ve published books with Random House and Scribner, and fiction in the New Yorker. But for this most recent novel, I was no longer interested in chasing the prestige that such literary icons confer, no longer wished to jump through traditional publishing’s increasingly narrowing hoops. Instead, I decided to privately print a 1,000-copy limited edition run—then undertake a 10,000-mile journey through 28 states to give away every copy.
It’s a fascinating and moving story. You read all about it right here. And you can get a digital copy right here.
I have been an enormous fan of the visionary writing of Octavia E. Butler for decades. The American science fiction writer won numerous awards for her works, including Hugo, Locus, and Nebula awards. In 1995, Butler became the first science-fiction writer to receive a MacArthur Fellowship. These days her Parable series seems eerily prescient. Whether you are already a reader, or just interested in an amazing writer’s personal story, you can download a free digital version of a new Butler biography for free. Just click on this link .
Japan is selling off its national emergency rice reserve for the first time since 1995 because prices have doubled, and they are blaming tourist visitors for eating too much rice.
France 24 reports that record numbers of visitors are partly to blame for Japan’s current rice shortage, along with a brutal heat wave in 2023 that damaged crops and some panic buying after earthquake warnings. The situation is so dire that a humble 5-kilogram bag of rice now costs 4,206 yen ($29) — double what it cost last year, as reported by AFP. Some shifty merchants are apparently sitting on their rice supplies too, waiting to cash in when prices climb even higher.
I promise to avoid onigiri from konbinis while I’m in Japan to save the rice.
“We are all living in Orwell’s world now” – The New York Times, 29 March
The Orwell Festival is returning to Bloomsbury, London, this month with an interesting line-up of events exploring some of the urgent themes and questions arising from Orwell’s work and legacy, from the future of Europe to our new age of propaganda, the politics of football, the “genius myth”, national identity, and Orwell’s own reception in China.
Bringing together leading writers, journalists and public figures, including Kim Darroch, Helen Lewis, and Philippe Auclair, and guided by Orwell’s values of decency, integrity and fidelity to truth, the Festival will culminate in the announcement of the winners of The Orwell Prizes, the UK’s most prestigious awards for political writing and reporting, on 25 June 2025.
The Orwell Festival is hosted by The Orwell Foundation and based at University College London, home of the UNESCO-registered Orwell Archive. We are delighted to welcome Arvon, the Frontline Club, Pushkin House, and Waterstones as event partners this year, alongside our founding sponsors The Political Quarterly.
The Orwell Prize 2025 shortlists will be announced on 14 May with further participants and events to be announced then.
via The Orwell Foundation
“Report on Heaven and Hell”
by
Silvina Ocampo
translation by Edith Grossman
Heaven and Hell, like the great auction galleries, have heaps of objects accumulated in their passageways, objects that will not surprise anyone because they are the same things usually found in the galleries of this world. But it is not enough to speak only of objects; there are also cities, towns, gardens, mountains, valleys, suns, moons, winds, seas, stars, reflections, temperatures, tastes, perfumes, sounds, for Eternity provides us with every kind of sensation and spectacle.
If it seems to you that the wind roars like a tiger and if in the glance of the heavenly dove you see the eyes of a hyena, if the well-dressed man who crosses the street is wearing shameless tatters, if the prize-winning rose offered to you is a faded rag as drab as a sparrow, if your wife’s face is dulled, raw, and angry-your eyes, and not God, have made them that way.
When you die the demons and the angels (they are equally intent and know that you are sleeping halfway between this world and some other one) will come to your bed in disguise and, stroking your head, will permit you to select the things you preferred during your lifetime. At first, in a kind of sample display, they will show you nutural objects. If they show you the sun, the moon, or the stars, you will see them in a painted crystal ball and you will think that the crystal sphere is the world; if they show you the sea or the mountains, you will see them in a stone and you will think that the stone is the sea and the mountains; if they show you a horse it will be a miniature, but you will think that the horse is real. The angels and the demons will distract your spirit with pictures of flowers, shining fruits, and candies; making you think that you are still a child, they will sit you in a kind of sedan chair, called the queen’s chair or the chair af gold, and they will carry you, their hands intertwined, down those corridors to the center of your life where your preferences dwell.
Be careful. If you select more things from Hell than from Heaven, you may go to Heaven; on the other hand, if you select more things from Heaven than from Hell, you run the risk of going to Hell since your love for celestial things will imply mere greed.
The laws of Heaven and Hell are capricious. Whether you go to one place or the other depends on the most insignificant detail. I know of people who have gone to Hell because of a broken key or a wicker cage and of others who have gone to Heaven because of a sheet of newspaper or a cup of milk.
Travel Between The Pages 