The Veldt by Ray Bradbury

The Veldt

by Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury / La sabana

1

    ‘George, I wish you’d look at the nursery.’
    ‘What’s wrong with it?’
    ‘I don’t know.’
    ‘Well, then.’
    ‘I just want you to look at it, is all, or call a psychologist in to look at it.’
    ‘What would a psychologist want with a nursery?’
    ‘You know very well what he’d want.’ His wife paused in the middle of the kitchen and watched the stove busy humming to itself, making supper for four.
    ‘It’s just that the nursery is different now than it was.’
    ‘All right, let’s have a look.’

Kaleidoscope by Ray Bradbury

 

Kaleidoscope

by Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury / Calidoscopio

    The first concussion cut the rocket up the side with a giant can opener. The men were thrown into space like a dozen wriggling silverfish. They were scattered into a dark sea; and the ship, in a million pieces, went on, a meteor swarm seeking a lost sun.

The Long Rain by Ray Bradbury

 

  

The Long Rain

by Ray Bradbury 

Ray Bradbury / La lluvia

The rain continued. It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and steaming rain; it was a mizzle, a downpour, a fountain, a whipping at the eyes, an undertow at the ankles; it was a rain to drown all rains and the memory of rains. It came by the pound and the ton, it hacked at the jungle and cut the trees like scissors and shaved the grass and tunneled the soil and molted the bushes. It shrank men’s hands into the hands of wrinkled apes; it rained a solid glassy rain, and it never stopped.

The End of the Beginning by Ray Bradbury

 

The End of the Beginning

by Ray Bradbury

    He stopped the lawn mower in the middle of the yard, because he felt that the sun at just that moment had gone down and the stars come out. The fresh-cut grass that had showered his face and body died softly away. Yes, the stars were there, faint at first, but brightening in the clear desert sky. He heard the porch screen door tap shut and felt his wife watching him as he watched the night.

‘A spy in the land of the privileged / Why Eve Babitz’s cult Hollywood memoir still matters 50 years on

Eve Babitz

‘A spy in the land of the privileged’: why Eve Babitz’s cult Hollywood memoir still matters 50 years on

This article is more than 4 months old

In 70s LA, Eve Babitz partied with everyone from Salvador Dali to Jim Morrison, but she was also a trailblazing writer. As a new generation discover her work, her sister and agent celebrate her originality, ambition and lust for life

Kat Lister

Saturday 10 August 2024

In the mid-50s, when Eve Babitz was 13 years old, she asked her mother, Mae, if she would buy her a leopardskin rug. “A real one, you know?” Babitz’s sister, Mirandi, reminisces on a video call from her home in Los Angeles – laughing at her elder sibling’s spunky request. Their mother said no. But she cushioned the blow by offering to get her a leopard print swimsuit instead. “There’s a picture of her wearing it reading Elinor Glyn,” Mirandi continues. “I mean, there you go,” she chuckles. “That’s what she gravitated to.”

‘She won’t disappear’: Gisèle Pelicot’s lawyers on what she will do next

The 72-year-old is relieved but takes ‘no satisfaction’ in seeing other families broken up, lawyer 

Kim Willsher in Avignon

Sat 21 Dec 2024 17.32 

It took just over four years, and 67 days in court, but Gisèle Pelicot is said to feel “relieved and appeased” about the judges’ decision to convict all the men accused of raping or sexually assaulting her while she was drugged and unconscious.

 

Gisele Pelicot has become a feminist icon

• Clement MAHOUDEAU

Gisele Pelicot's ex-husband jailed 20 years in France mass rape trial

• Isabelle Wesselingh and David Courbet
 
• Dec 19, 2024
 

A court on Thursday sentenced a French man to the maximum term of 20 years jail for committing and orchestrating the mass rapes of his now former wife Gisele Pelicot with dozens of strangers he recruited online.

 

Alan Garner

Where to start with

Where to start with: Alan Garner

As the master of myth and fantasy turns 90 today it’s a good time to look at his wide ranging canon – from Booker-nominated novels to children’s fiction, poetry and essays

Erica Wagner

Thu 17 Oct 2024 07.00 EDT

Celebrated author of mythical and fantasy stories Alan Garner turns 90 today, a week after the publication of his 28th book, the essay collection Powsels and Thrums. Though best known for his children’s novels, his fiction for adults has brought him acclaim, too, with a Booker prize shortlisting for his 2021 novel Treacle Walker. If you haven’t yet dipped your toe into the glorious world of Garner, Erica Wagner, the editor of First Light: A Celebration of Alan Garner, suggests some good ways in.

An Interview with Alan Garner

 

Alan Garner

An Interview with Alan Garner B. Renner

Introduction: Alan Garner needs interviewing for the readers of elimae for two reasons -- first, because he is quite clearly one of the few great writers of English to emerge after World War II, and second, because most American readers either know nothing about his work or only remember reading his work in childhood. (Worse yet, some may have encountered his novels in paperback in the early '80s, when they were ghettoized as adult science fiction and fantasy.) But while one can fairly easily argue that his first three novels are clearly "children's books," the next three -- The Owl Service (1967), Red Shift (1973) and The Stone Book Quartet (1976-1978) -- are nothing of the sort: they are instead work which share with Alice in Wonderland or Grimm's Fairy Tales the ability to appeal to, and have meaning for, adults as deeply as children. His seventh novel Strandloper (1996) is "officially" an adult novel, but one which is obviously built upon the stylistic foundation of his so-called children's work.

Alam Garner

Alan Garner

Interview

‘It can feel quite mysterious’: Alan Garner on writing, folklore and experiencing time slips in the Pennines

At 90, the author reflects on his friendship with Alan Turing, quantum realities and how his grandfather inspired his latest book

Justin Jordan

Saturday 14 December 2024

Alan Garner is a few days from his 90th birthday when we meet, and his plan for the day itself is “to be very quiet”. He says, “I sound antisocial but I’m not. I’m very sensitive to people and I don’t like more than three or four people in a room at a time.” Since The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, published in 1960, he’s had a long and singular writing life, with a certain amount of gregariousness forced on him by its extraordinary late flowering over the last dozen years.

Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc / No way out

 

No way out

JoAnn Wypijewski is disturbed by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's outsider's chronicle of life in the New York ghetto, Random Family

JoAnn Wypijewski
Saturday 13 December 2003

Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble and Coming of Age in the Bronx
by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc 
408pp, Flamingo, £17.

Someone once said, apropos nonfiction, that every writer betrays her subject. Intentions have nothing to do with it. Even fuelled by the best of them, "the story" is no longer the subject's but a processed thing, the real-life character's mixed-up narrative of history, memory, self-deception or protection made a coherent commodity, tradeable, by the writer, for cash, prestige, prizes. Any professional who has ever written about poor people especially has had to face this. I imagine Adrian Nicole LeBlanc must have done so more than once over the 11 years she spent assiduously recording the big events, daily goings-on, small-time joys and agonies of the "random family" of which, by her own account, she became a part in the course of her research. Then she wrote herself out of the story, becoming in the process its most provocative character: the voyeur who is everywhere and nowhere, watching and telling as things fall apart.

Banksy's 'Balloon Girl' beats paintings by Constable and Turner to be named Britain's favourite artwork

Balloon Girl
2002
by Banksy

Banksy's 'Balloon Girl' beats paintings by Constable and Turner to be named Britain's favourite artwork

Album covers for the Beatles, Pink Floyd and the Sex Pistols also feature among top 20

Katie Archer
Tuesday 25 July 2017 14:16 BST

Graffiti artist Banksy has beaten the likes of Turner and Constable in a poll of the nation’s favourite artwork.

His famous 2002 daubing on the wall of a Shoreditch shop, Balloon Girl, came top of a list of British art preferred by 2,000 people who were given a shortlist drawn up by arts editors and writers to choose from.

Meta’s digital censorship targets art from the Leopold Museum in Vienna

'Self-Portrait with Model' by Christian Schad, from 1927, one of the works blocked by Meta.CHRISTIAN-SCHAD-STIFTUNG ASCHAFFENBURG/BILDRECHT

Meta’s digital censorship targets art from the Leopold Museum in Vienna

According to the prestigious institution, the works of established artists such as Egon Schiele and Christian Schad have been blocked by Instagram and Facebook

David Granda
Vienna, 15 July 2024

In 2021, museums in Vienna launched a witty campaign to protest the censorship of art on social media: they opened an account on OnlyFans, a platform that monetizes pornographic content. That year, a short video featuring the 1914 painting Liebespaar by Koloman Moser — made to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the founding of the Leopold Museum — was rejected by Facebook and Instagram as “potentially pornographic.” Three years later, the Leopold Museum in Vienna has launched a new campaign against Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook. This time it goes straight to the point: “Do you think this work of art should be censored?” it asks in a social media post featuring works by Egon Schiele and Christian Schad. “Meta does!”

Afarin Sajedi / Women

Afarin Sajedi

WOMEN

Japan’s Literary Treasures

A Poet for All Seasons: Yosano Akiko and Same-Sex Love

Janine Beichman

10 August 2021

Poet Yosano Akiko’s painfully honest and moving account of her passionate crush on a classmate at her school for girls raises questions about how love and sexuality are viewed in different eras.

The Age of Acceleration / An Interview with Martin Amis

 

Martin Amis

The Age of Accelaration: An interview with Martin Amis

Martin Amis on poetry versus the novel and the vicissitudes of a literary career.

By Scott Timberg

June 21, 2018

WHILE HE’S BEST KNOWN for his novels — The Rachel Papers (1973), Money (1984), The Information (1995) — Martin Amis is one of the finest essayists and critics working in English today. His latest collection, The Rub of Time (2017), assembles pieces going back to 1994. It ranges across familiar subjects — favorite writers like Philip Larkin, Saul Bellow, and Vladimir Nabokov; his late friend Christopher Hitchens; his father, Kingsley Amis — and some less obvious topics, like John Travolta’s Tarantino-era comeback or Southern California’s pornographic film industry.