Where Books and Readers Come Together
“To do great work,” write the authors, “you need to feel that you’re making a difference. That you’re putting a meaningful dent in the universe. That you’re part of something important.”
If you think Khaled is the boy Amir who witnesses his servant and childhood friend, Hassan, being anally raped in an alley and does nothing and then seeks a life-long journey of redemption, then I am afraid your credulity may make it difficult to separate fact from fiction in any story or event.
An Essay
A book you’d like to keep by your bedside to read a chapter each night before sleep or upon waking early in the morning.
Aleph is an inspirational story
A Poem of Redaction
An Essay
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1871) by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson illustrate the child-ego’s attempt to mature and understand its own mortality in a world often found morally strange and ridiculous, a world that adults eventually learn to accept as normal.
The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) by Joseph Campbell is the book that awakened in writers and storytellers in publishing and in screenwriting to the larger scope of mythology as metaphor and to the underlining structure of stories.
A Review of a Review
The Stranger or L’Etranger (1946) by Albert Camus (who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957) is translated from the French in my edition of the book by Matthew Ward.
A guide for writers based on the work of Joseph Campbell and the years of research and contribution to storytelling Vogler spent in Hollywood.
One of the last sections is “The Functioning of Myth” and Campbell goes into great deal to extrapolate the introductory section. “The ends for which men strive in the world,” writes Campbell, “are three — no more, no less; namely: love and pleasure (kāma), power and success (artha: pronounced ‘art-ha’), and lawful order and moral virtue (dharma).”
Much of the book is loosely based on experiences of racism in Monroeville, Alabama.
Reading Lolita in Tehran by Dr. Azar Nafisi is a memoir of a woman teaching literature in Islamic Iran.
