The Poetical Common Place Book

A selection of favorite quotes that the celebrated literary critic has collected over the decades. From Dwight Garner, the New York Times book critic, comes a rollicking, irreverent, scabrous, amazingly alive selection of unforgettable moments from forty years of wide and deep reading. Garner’s Quotations is like no commonplace book you’ll ever read. If you’ve ever wondered what’s really going on in the world of letters today, this book will make you sit up and take notice. Unputdownable!

Poesi og prosa - og meget andet - i udvalg

In which the writings of the authors Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood are gathered together. This commonplace book includes faxes, notes, fledgling lyrics, sketches, lists of all kinds and scribblings towards nirvana, as were sent between the two authors during the period 1999 to 2000 during the creation of the Radiohead albums Kid A and Amnesiac. This is a document of the creative process and a mirror to the fears, portents and fantasies invoked by the world as its citizens faced a brave new millennium.

I read this on a sandwich board outside a coffee shop. I stopped, pulled out my notebook, and leaned against a shopfront. You're nothing but a piece of crockery and a bit of blood. - Epictetus How sharp and bloodtinglingly lovely on a clear early autumn day. The sun sharp on the shop panes, clear shadows on the footpaths, faces outlined in a way they are not in summer. Necks with knotted scarves, half-coats. Last year's shoes dusted and polished. I was impervious to the glances I got as I wrote down the words - perhaps I was mistaken for a reporter. Heaven forbid it should be a poet. But that harshness in Epictetus, the Stoic, how lovely. A bit of railway cup a train has run over. A bit of blood that has gone brown, perhaps from a nosebleed during a high fever. I put the notebook back in my purse and walked on, rejoicing. Elizabeth Smither has always kept her own collection of other people's words: quotations, extracts, poems and pensées, the found and overheard. In The Commonplace Book she shares these witty and wise quotations with us, interspersed with incidents and memories from her own writing and life, offering a sparkling glimpse into the influences and inspirations of a far-from-commonplace writer.

Ready? Line UP! FALL IN! And you'll fall for this timely and generous novel set on an Air Force base during the Iraq War, about an amazing teacher and the students she inspires. No one in her sixth-grade class knows quite what to make of Ms. Loupe, with her short hair, her taped square "stage" on the floor, and the interest in improvisational theatre. After all, their school is on an Air Force base--a place that values discipline more than improv. But her students soon come to love her fresh approach; and when her dear brother goes missing in Afghanistan, and Ms. Loupe herself breaks down, they band together to support their teacher. What starts as a class fundraiser expands into a nationwide effort for all injured troops, and an amazing vision of community and hope.

This pioneering exploration of Georgian men and women's experiences as readers explores their use of commonplace books for recording favourite passages and reflecting upon what they had read, revealing forgotten aspects of their complicated relationship with the printed word. It shows how indebted English readers often remained to techniques for handling, absorbing and thinking about texts that were rooted in classical antiquity, in Renaissance humanism and in a substantially oral culture. It also reveals how a series of related assumptions about the nature and purpose of reading influenced the roles that literature played in English society in the ages of Addison, Johnson and Byron; how the habits and procedures required by commonplacing affected readers' tastes and so helped shape literary fashions; and how the experience of reading and responding to texts increasingly encouraged literate men and women to imagine themselves as members of a polite, responsible and critically aware public.