Reddit mentions: The best american literature criticism books

Not Australian, so i can't help you with the Australian issues, but I can help out with the first part.

Your statement "the way I wrote it is less journalistic and more telling a story, most of it reads like a novel, it's probably not very professional." I am a staff writer at a magazine where I write long pieces, so here are some thoughts on that:

The "professionalism" or journalistic nature of your piece has nothing to do with the structure, but its intent; just because it's not a hard news piece with an inverted pyramid structure, does not automatically disqualify it as professional or journalistic

For example, this random Washington Post story on a new budget proposal has all the elements of a "professional" news story immediately recognizable: a broad lead that lets readers know exactly what the story will be, followed by specifics, data, info, context, etc. Here's its lead:

President Obama’s new budget proposal calls for ten of billions in new spending and several revisions to the nation’s tax code, all of which could have a sizable impact on new and small businesses.

But then check out this piece: Frank Sinatra Has a Cold by Gay Talese for Esquire in 1966. It's widely known as one of the best pieces of American magazine writing by one of the best writers of the generation. This is journalism, too. It sets scenes, and uses detail you're just not going to find in a newspaper piece, and it reads significantly more like a novel. Here's its lead:

FRANK SINATRA, holding a glass of bourbon in one hand and a cigarette in the other, stood in a dark corner of the bar between two attractive but fading blondes who sat waiting for him to say something. But he said nothing; he had been silent during much of the evening, except now in this private club in Beverly Hills he seemed even more distant, staring out through the smoke and semidarkness into a large room beyond the bar where dozens of young couples sat huddled around small tables or twisted in the center of the floor to the clamorous clang of folk-rock music blaring from the stereo. The two blondes knew, as did Sinatra's four male friends who stood nearby, that it was a bad idea to force conversation upon him when he was in this mood of sullen silence, a mood that had hardly been uncommon during this first week of November, a month before his fiftieth birthday.

There's a significant value for people who can tell stories beyond the inverted pyramid structure, and I particularly appreciate people who can write non-fiction stories with with such vivid detail and unique writing style.

If you're more passionate about the storytelling aspect of non-fiction stories, instead of hard news, I'd recommend perusing the longform.org site for links to present-day stories that do it well. I'd also recommend these books for some inspiration and for intro into authors you may dig:

The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight by Marc Weingarten

The New New Journalism by Robert Boynton.

Feel free to send me a PM.

Classics: Tristram Shandy, Moby Dick, The Great Gatsby, Pride and Prejudice, The Grapes of Wrath. All wonderful in their own ways. Tristram Shandy is very 'post-modern' in feel depite being from the 1700's

I'm also rather fond of 'classic' short stories, so I can reccommend various collections like this or this or this - all collections I've read and enjoyed. Cheever, O'Hara, Chekov, Carver are all well worth your time.

Borges is fascinating and strange - a great conversation starter.

Mystery/Thrillers: James Ellroy's LA Quartet, George V. Higgins (The Friends of Eddie Coyle, etc.), Chandler's The Long Goodbye, Ross MacDonald's The Chill, Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me...

There's loads of great sci-fi out there - start with a Gardner Dozois "Best of" and branch out. Philip K Dick (Ubik is a good start). Charles Stross Accelerando. William Gibson. Collections of short stories are great: Rewired, Mirrorshades, various 'best of' collections. Swanwick, Sterling, Egan.

As mentioned Douglas R Hofstadter's stuff is great non-fiction (philosophy? linguistics? cogsci? AI?) with a decidedly playfull streak that makes it a joy to read.

I have a mild case of ADD, so I can kinda empathize with you. I would reccomend books by Eric Hoffer. They are nonfiction, but still very fascinating. You can pretty much pick up his books and start on any sentence and enjoy his writing.

I would recommend you start with Reflections on the Human Condition or The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, although Reflections on the Human condition is less structured and more ADD friendly.

The advantage to his books is you don't have to finish them. You read what you want and enjoy it. Daydreaming inspired by his books is something I would encourage.

TL;DR: found out my great-uncle has a secret son with a terminal illness, and he still won’t acknowledge him. My grandparents (and everyone else in New Mexico) are related to each other.

I’ll share 2 stories related to 23andMe testing I had done. I tested my father, my mother’s father, and my mother’s mother’s brother (because my grandma has already passed on). So from this point I pretty much equate my maternal great-uncle with my grandma.

My father had a 1st cousin listed in his relatives who we didn’t recognize. Eventually the cousin reached out to me and asked me if I knew [name] which he had heard from his mother, and I said yes, that is my dad’s uncle. So this guy had been searching for his biological father because he had a type of end-stage disease which was genetic, and no one on his mother or supposed father’s side had it. This confirmed it, because my great-uncle and great-grandfather suffered from the same disease. I wanted to help him, so I secretly found out as much as I could and told him everything. The cousin tried contacting my great-uncle, but he didn’t want a relationship with him at all- the responses were not straight-up denials of being his father, it was like “good luck with your disease! Laters.” But I now have a long-lost cousin and we’re friends on Facebook.

Whew. Story 2. In New Mexico there’s a strong Hispanic culture that goes back hundreds of years. The DNA testing showed that my mom’s father and maternal uncle were distantly related- they share 0.92% of their DNA. 0.92% should be third-ish cousins, which I was sure they were not that closely related. My tree was already pretty far along at this point, but I HAD to find out how my grandma and grandpa were related, they weren’t even from the same part of the state. Eventually I was able to make so many connections, like 8th cousins, 7th cousins once removed, etc. I guess all those cross-relations added up, they shared so much DNA it looked like they were 3rd cousins. My coolest tree I made though, starts with one guy Miguel Quintana (1675-1748). It shows that my mom’s FOUR grandparents all lead back to this one guy. So all four of my great-grandparents are related to each other. So I have a very strong hunch that ALL Hispanic New Mexicans are related if you dig hard enough.

(A few are still unidentified, if anyone recognizes any.)

What Nature
Edited by Timothy Donnelly, B. K. Fischer and Stefania Heim

Poetry that grapples with the intersection of natural and cultural crises.
Shifting its focus from what has already been lost to what lies ahead, What Nature rejects the sentimentality of traditional nature poetry. Instead, its texts expose and resist the global iniquities that create large-scale human suffering, a world where climate change disproportionately affects the poorest communities. The intersection of natural and cultural crises—like Standing Rock's fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline and the water crisis in Flint, Michigan—are confronted head on. These poems, lyric essays, and hybrid works grapple with political unrest, refugeeism, and resource exploitation, transforming the genre of ecopoetics.



https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/what-nature




The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America's National Parks
by Terry Tempest Williams

America’s national parks are breathing spaces in a world in which such spaces are steadily disappearing, which is why more than 300 million people visit the parks each year. Now Terry Tempest Williams, the author of the environmental classic Refuge and the beloved memoir WhenWomen Were Birds, returns with The Hour of Land, a literary celebration of our national parks, an exploration of what they mean to us and what we mean to them.

From the Grand Tetons in Wyoming to Acadia in Maine to Big Bend in Texas and more, Williams creates a series of lyrical portraits that illuminate the unique grandeur of each place while delving into what it means to shape a landscape with its own evolutionary history into something of our own making. Part memoir, part natural history, and part social critique, The Hour of Land is a meditation and a manifesto on why wild lands matter to the soul of America.

https://www.amazon.com/Hour-Land-Personal-Topography-Americas/dp/0374280096



What Future: The Year's Best Ideas to Reclaim, Reanimate & Reinvent Our Future
by Torie Bosch (Editor), Roy Scranton

One of The Smithsonian Magazine's Best Science Books of the Year
The future is here and, frankly, it sucks. Without doubt, our culture is at a crossroads. Political strife and economic crises are byproducts of a larger looming challenge, one in which we will have to ask ourselves what constitutes a meaningful life. We must do the hard work of imagining a different kind of reality for ourselves. It's work that anticipates the worst but sees hope on the other side of catastrophe, or at least possibility; that presumes disaster and says, now what?

A best-of-the-year anthology, What Future is a collection of long-form journalism and essays published in 2016 that address a wide range of topics crucial to our future, from the environmental and political, to human health and animal rights, to technology and the economy.

What Future includes writing from authors Elizabeth Kolbert, Jeff Vandermeer, Bill McKibben, Kim Stanley Robinson, as well as the scientists, journalists, and philosophers who are proposing the options that lay not just ahead, but beyond, in prestigious magazines and journals such as The Atlantic and The New Yorker.

https://www.amazon.com/What-Future-Reclaim-Reanimate-Reinvent/dp/1944700455



The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America
by Mark Sundeen


“An in-depth and compelling account of diverse Americans living off the grid.” —Los Angeles Times

The radical search for the simple life in today’s America.

On a frigid April night, a classically trained opera singer, five months pregnant, and her husband, a former marine biologist, disembark an Amtrak train in La Plata, Missouri, assemble two bikes, and pedal off into the night, bound for a homestead they've purchased, sight unseen. Meanwhile, a horticulturist, heir to the Great Migration that brought masses of African Americans to Detroit, and her husband, a product of the white flight from it, have turned to urban farming to revitalize the blighted city they both love. And near Missoula, Montana, a couple who have been at the forefront of organic farming for decades navigate what it means to live and raise a family ethically.

A work of immersive journalism steeped in a distinctively American social history and sparked by a personal quest, The Unsettlers traces the search for the simple life through the stories of these new pioneers and what inspired each of them to look for -- or create -- a better existence. Captivating and clear-eyed, it dares us to imagine what a sustainable, ethical, authentic future might actually look like.

https://www.amazon.com/Unsettlers-Search-Good-Todays-America/dp/1594631581



Silent Spring
by Rachel Carson

Silent Spring began with a “fable for tomorrow” – a true story using a composite of examples drawn from many real communities where the use of DDT had caused damage to wildlife, birds, bees, agricultural animals, domestic pets, and even humans. Carson used it as an introduction to a very scientifically complicated and already controversial subject. This “fable” made an indelible impression on readers and was used by critics to charge that Carson was a fiction writer and not a scientist.

Serialized in three parts in The New Yorker, where President John F. Kennedy read it in the summer of 1962, Silent Spring was published in August and became an instant best-seller and the most talked about book in decades. Utilizing her many sources in federal science and in private research, Carson spent over six years documenting her analysis that humans were misusing powerful, persistent, chemical pesticides before knowing the full extent of their potential harm to the whole biota.

Carson’s passionate concern in Silent Spring is with the future of the planet and all life on Earth. She calls for humans to act responsibly, carefully, and as stewards of the living earth.

http://www.rachelcarson.org/SilentSpring.aspx



Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene
by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

Living on a damaged planet challenges who we are and where we live. This timely anthology calls on twenty eminent humanists and scientists to revitalize curiosity, observation, and transdisciplinary conversation about life on earth.

As human-induced environmental change threatens multispecies livability, Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet puts forward a bold proposal: entangled histories, situated narratives, and thick descriptions offer urgent “arts of living.” Included are essays by scholars in anthropology, ecology, science studies, art, literature, and bioinformatics who posit critical and creative tools for collaborative survival in a more-than-human Anthropocene. The essays are organized around two key figures that also serve as the publication’s two openings: Ghosts, or landscapes haunted by the violences of modernity; and Monsters, or interspecies and intraspecies sociality. Ghosts and Monsters are tentacular, windy, and arboreal arts that invite readers to encounter ants, lichen, rocks, electrons, flying foxes, salmon, chestnut trees, mud volcanoes, border zones, graves, radioactive waste—in short, the wonders and terrors of an unintended epoch.



Thoreau and the Language of Trees
Richard Higgins

Trees were central to Henry David Thoreau’s creativity as a writer, his work as a naturalist, his thought, and his inner life. His portraits of them were so perfect, it was as if he could see the sap flowing beneath their bark. When Thoreau wrote that the poet loves the pine tree as his own shadow in the air, he was speaking about himself. In short, he spoke their language.

In this original book, Richard Higgins explores Thoreau’s deep connections to trees: his keen perception of them, the joy they gave him, the poetry he saw in them, his philosophical view of them, and how they fed his soul. His lively essays show that trees were a thread connecting all parts of Thoreau’s being—heart, mind, and spirit. Included are one hundred excerpts from Thoreau’s writings about trees, paired with over sixty of the author’s photographs. Thoreau’s words are as vivid now as they were in 1890, when an English naturalist wrote that he was unusually able to “to preserve the flashing forest colors in unfading light.” Thoreau and the Language of Trees shows that Thoreau, with uncanny foresight, believed trees were essential to the preservation of the world.


https://www.amazon.com/Thoreau-Language-Trees-Richard-Higgins/dp/0520294041

Catullus

https://www.amazon.com/Love-Betrayal-Catullus-Bruce-Arnold/dp/0130433454/ref=sr_1_fkmrnull_1?crid=22K0V9X7X9C74&keywords=love+and+betrayal+a+catullus+reader&qid=1558536403&s=gateway&sprefix=love+and+betrayal+%2Caps%2C150&sr=8-1-fkmrnull

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Ovid

https://www.amazon.com/Love-Transformation-Reader-English-Latin/dp/067358920X/ref=sr_1_1?crid=28WT9VPC88Q7S&keywords=love+and+transformation+an+ovid+reader&qid=1558536463&s=gateway&sprefix=ovid+love+and+trans%2Caps%2C157&sr=8-1-spell

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https://www.amazon.com/Ovids-Amores-Book-One-Commentary/dp/0806141441/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=amores+book+1+ovid&qid=1558536435&s=gateway&sr=8-2

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https://www.amazon.com/Ovid-Metamorphoses-VIII-Latin-Texts/dp/1853997226/ref=sr_1_11?keywords=ovid+metamorphoses+8&qid=1558536602&s=gateway&sr=8-11

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Cicero

https://www.amazon.com/Cicero-Pro-Caelio-Marcus-Tullius/dp/0865165599/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=cicero+pro+caelio&qid=1558536500&s=gateway&sr=8-1

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I really enjoyed Ovid at your level, which is why he is over-represented in this list. I know Perseus has commentaries on all the Catullus poems except the more risque ones. Unfortunately, those are also left out of the book I posted here. I would probably go with the Catullus one or the first/second Ovid books, just because I think love poetry is entertaining. The Cicero was definitely more difficult, but had a lot of juicy insults and was also quite fun. I used all of these and they definitely helped me improve my Latin, so whatever you choose will be good, just pick something you'll have fun reading. Good luck and enjoy!

As someone who does a lot of meta and academic literary discussion on comics, I am 100% certain that a paper exists about psychopathy and the Batman universe; it might not be about Bruce and psychopathy (most essays about psychopathy related to Batman that I've read have focused on either the Joker or Two-Face), but there have definitely been papers written about the philosophy, ethics, morality, and psychology of Batman and the Batfamily. You're going to find most of these types of discussions in the field of comics studies and academic historical/literary criticism rather than psychology due to the nature of the topic. For some interesting paper/essay collections, see:

• Batman and Philosophy
  
• Batman and Psychology
  
• Batman and Ethics
  
• The Psychology of Superheroes
  
• Superheroes and Philosophy: Truth, Justice, and the Socratic Way
  
• Even A Superhero Needs Counseling: What Superheroes and Super-Villains Teach Us About Ourselves
  
• War, Politics and Superheroes: Ethics and Propaganda in Comics and Film
  
• What's the Matter With Batman?: An Unauthorized Clinical Look Under the Mask of the Caped Crusader
  
• The Joker Psychology: Evil Clowns and the Women Who Love Them
  
• The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture
  
• Batman Unmasked: Analyzing a Cultural Icon
  
  It uh....honestly might also be worth it to read into the 'Seduction of the Innocent' controversy and relevant academic papers about the work, given that it directly involved Batman comics. Books like Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code and The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America would be particularly helpful there.
  
  Edit: Also just as a sidenote, as you mentioned in another comment Batman as a psychopath isn't even a hot take; it's a lukewarm take made by people who don't actually read comics. Batman, as he is generally portrayed in mainverse comics, is decidedly not a psychopath.

In terms of anthologies, my best luck so far has been with "The Best American Poetry [year]" I also love the "Best New Poets of [year]" series.

They are absolutely amazing.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Best-American-Poetry-2013/dp/1476708134


http://www.amazon.com/Best-New-Poets-2011-Emerging/dp/0976629666

For criticism of HPL's works i would highly recommend:

Dissecting Cthulhu

A Subtler Magick: The Writings and Philosophy of H.P. Lovecraft

Lovecraft: Disturbing the Universe
or any volume in the Lovecraft Annual




For Biography on Lovecraft:

H.P. Lovecraft: A Life

...or the expanded version of the above I Am Providence




And Lovecraft's letters (edited and compiled by Joshi) are really the best way to get deep into Lovecraft, although I'll warn you, you really are reading HPL's conversations with his friends, so there is a tremendous amount of biographical detail, but not a terrible amount in the way of talk about his own work. Some of the best:

Letters to James F. Morton

A Means to Freedom: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard

O Fortunate Floridian: H.P. Lovecraft's Letters to R.H. Barlow

It is actually very interesting the way Webster proposed to change the language and in reality the logic is admirable. A Lot of people think that Americans changed the spelling of English deliberately to make themselves different from England. Webster however was already in the process of proposing the changes before the Revolution occurred. The Revolution perhaps helped to shed light upon his efforts and lend them support, but it was not in itself a cause for the changes.

If you like the idea of the history of the language an easily readable book on it is called The Adventure of English and though it sounds geek supreme, it is actually and easy read that teaches a lot.

What's wonderful and frustrating about the English language is that there's no single standard and all of those books out there that try to tell you that there's one absolute rule of English are full of it.

The English language is amazing because of its ability to adapt, change, absorb other languages and remain fluid-- I'd recommend checking out Bragg's Adventure of English to anyone interested in the history of the language as it paints a wonderful picture of the language being in flux.

While I was trained in a "prescriptivist" approach to grammar, I've now fallen fairly firmly in the "descriptivist" camp. That doesn't mean that we should accept anything that anyone writes as being "correct"; it means that there's a purpose and logic behind grammar and that understanding how language works gives you power to communicate more effectively.

Grammar should help illuminate the author's purpose, add meaning, and clarify ambiguities-- not drive us all insane. We should think of grammar as a set of tools to use, not a set of laws to be obeyed and feared.

I believe that the oxford comma generally clarifies the meaning of a sentence, so I use it. But if I'm reading something that's perfectly clear that doesn't use it, I'd be in no way offended, and I don't think anyone else should be.

/rant

I view The Broom of the System as, like you said, him trying to prove to his professors just how smart he was. He had dropped out of Amherst twice due to depression and he had already written another thesis on philosophy (which you can apparently buy [here] (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Fate-Language-David-Foster-Wallace/dp/0231151578))- he really had to step up to the plate to prove himself as a writer. Nevertheless, I view it as an admirable feat of writing, especially at such a young age. I think it is important to keep in mind just how much writers progress over time, as they gather life experience, knowledge, and skill.

Lots of other writers kind of do something similar. Take a look at James Joyce's Dubliners. Compare that to Ulysses or Finnegans Wake. It is a walk in the park in comparison to what those two texts offer to the reader, and it sometimes seems downright amateurish. However. The text itself is still pretty good. And even in a non-literary genre, authors still grow amazingly quickly. JK Rowling's skills increased greatly over the Harry Potter series, both in terms of prose and plot complexity.

I don't know, man. The Broom was not my favorite, but I respect it because DFW did it when he was only 22 or 23. Besides, it would be unfair to DFW to hold all of his work to the level of Infinite Jest or Hideous Men, only to excuse The Broom as nothing special; it was good for what he was doing at the time, and he grew beyond it.

tl;dr- writers grow up and get better.

fun fact: we use the french term because of when the french invaded/conquered england in 1066. all the aristrocrats spoke french, while their servants spoke english. so the english servants would be all talking about cows, but when the meat got to the table the french would call it boeff (sp? my french is rusty). neat eh? i read that in a book called "the adventure of english" by melvyn bragg. very neat book if you're into etymology.


http://www.amazon.com/Adventure-English-Biography-Language/dp/1611450071/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1302927494&sr=8-1

In Russia Serfs were predominantly local poor people - not imported from foreign nations - the system was of indentured servitude - whereby a serf would work on land for his or her entire life in exchange for the right to live in a house on the owner's property and in exchange for basic food, clothing etc. Serfs were treated like property and could only marry, move, have kids etc with the approval of their owners. Corporal punishment was used to keep them in line if they dissobeyed landowners, and because they were considered as property, they had virtually no rights pre-1861.

Serfs were an integral part of country life like slaves on plantations in the US. They would raise the children (along w/ foreign language professors for richer families - usually young girls from France) The "nanny" who was often an old serf woman who is no longer suited for work in the fields plays a central role in much Russian pre-20th century litterature. She is a key figure in Pushkin's works (ex: "Eugene Onegin") and is present in "War and Peace" "The Brothers Karamazov" as well as numerous other works. After the Emancipation of the Cerfs in 1861 - see wiki article - Serfs gained many rights de jure, but de facto because they still had debts to their masters and had few ways of getting out of indetured servitude, continued to function along the same lines, up until the 1917 revolution.

Bottom line : if you want to know about how serfs were treated look to Russian litterature from the 1700 + 1800s - Pushkin, Gogol (Ukraine), Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy etc - there are also films that were made based on their works but no specific Cerf film / cultural movement that is comparable to the one in the US with Slaves / African-Americans.

The only explanation I can think of is that in Russia it was about money and bloodlines - not about difference of ethnicity and culture.

Nannies - numerous Russian sources and a [book on Amazon :] (http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/0985569816)

VERY interesting book that I will now be enticed to order : comparing African-American and Russian slaves/cerfs plight from a cultural heritage perspective :

Giorgio Agamben (Routledge Critical Thinkers) is a good intro-level text.

The introductory chapter by Andrew Norris in Politics, Metaphysics, and Death: Essays on Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer is quite good.

The Figure of This World: Agamben and the Question of Political Ontology is less digestable, but seems to have a great reputation.

If you're looking for relatively breezy books on continental politics (and ethics), Mari Ruti's Between Levinas and Lacan is a good choice. You could also look at Todd May's Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction (though the May book covers more than just politics).

https://www.amazon.com/Account-Relacion-Recovering-Hispanic-Literary/dp/1558850600

This is the book I read in college. It is non-fiction, but his version of events are a little too fantastical for real life. It's formatted like a novel. It reminded me so much of David Brin's The Postman.

Now I'm going to have to buy it and read it again. I really enjoyed it 20 years ago. I might be biased, though, because it was a big deal at my alma mater. One of the original copies is in the library, and several of my professors and classmates went out and settled the dispute regarding which route he took through Texas and Mexico.

nemo. My passion is reading. This book looks awesome. Thank you for the link. here is the book I would like.

I just read "First We Read, Then We Write" which I loved. The book synthesizes Ralph Waldo Emerson's thoughts on the creative process from his many essays and journals and channels it into a great hundred page book.

http://www.amazon.com/First-We-Read-Then-Write/dp/1609383478

I suggest that you utilize your school's library and database searches instead of searching Amazon. Modern literature analysis is not really a thing; people focus on specific aspects or rising trends (such as the representation of autism: https://www.amazon.com/Representing-Autism-Fascination-University-Representations/dp/1846310911) more than trying to analyze everything. If you are wanting to look at something specific (for example fanfiction and modern literature) you'd just plug those words into the database. Doing it using my own university search finds the following text you could look at: https://www.amazon.com/New-Narratives-Storytelling-Frontiers-Narrative/dp/0803217862 . Please note that I have collected these sources with minimal vetting and that you will need to handle the rest yourself (preferably with the help of a librarian). Good luck!

I'm still not fully decided and have to read more. Can't say I've seen like a definitive piece on it unfortunately, but I definitely recommend reading up on the WPA to see a glimpse of what massive jobs programs have looked like in America in the past. Here are a couple of books about it.

https://www.amazon.com/Soul-People-Writers-Uncovers-Depression/dp/0470403802

https://www.amazon.com/American-Made-Enduring-Legacy-When-Nation/dp/0553381326

And below is a book I recently read that is a product of the WPA writer's program. It's a collection of oral histories and stories from New Mexican women in the 30s. It's the kind of invaluable historical resource that there's just no financial incentive to produce.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/155885312X/ref=x_gr_w_glide_bb?ie=UTF8&tag=x_gr_w_glide_bb-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=155885312X&SubscriptionId=1MGPYB6YW3HWK55XCGG2

Carlisle was a fucking travesty.

It isn't strictly Cherokee but the book [Native American literature] (https://www.amazon.com/Native-American-Literature-Lawana-Trout/dp/0844259853) is an awesome collection of works from writers of many tribes and genres. It's definitely worth a read.

I'm in the same boat. My work involves a lot of academic reading and I had got out of reading for pleasure in the past couple of years because it was such a slog during the day. I've started again recently, beginning with short story compilations to make it easier to keep my attention. It also gives me an idea of authors whose work I'd like to explore further.

The Oxford Book of American Short Stories

That Glimpse of Truth

The Oxford Book of American Short Stories - A lot of classics, and a range of genres and styles.

More Classics - and it contains "To Build a Fire" which is one of my all-time favorite short stories.

I prefer my sci-fi in neatly digestible bites - there are some great ones in The Oxford Book of Science Fiction Stories if you want some genre options.

Joyce Carol Oates edited The Oxford Book of American Short Stories (1994 edition). I studied it in college and found it a great introduction to the short story in general.

the funny thing is, the dude the quote is from wrote a book on that too

http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/0231151578

If you do not want to commit to the full length Joshi biography this might be a good alternative. An earlier, more compact version of Joshi's biography.

I think by the whole ‘nobody is an atheist’ thing, he means that nobody is without a captivation toward something exterior or bigger than themselves (i.e. God, a project, a deity, sports team etc.). All people are worshipers of something. Therefore, there are no people who are without or indifferent to (a—) an object (God) (—theist) of worship/attention/praise. Nothing about this is weak logical reasoning—you just have to see into the meaning through how the terms are used. That’s a very brief Wittgensteinian analysis of this, at least, who was a great philosopher and was a massive influence on DFW. Though I could be mistaken here, since you’re use of ‘literal’ might be more narrow. Although, I don’t see what’s not literally obvious about what he was intending.

As to you’re later point about him not being a philosopher nor a logical thinker, I’d really push back. The dude had an undergrad in philosophy, published work (see here) and went to graduate school for a short time—all of which was primarily centered around symbolic logic and semantics.

My interpretation of what you were getting into could be wrong and perhaps you have countless other examples of his logical lacking ‘rigour.’ I realize that this is the exact kind of fan-boy analysis one would expect to defend DFW. This isn’t meant to be that. I just think you’re mistaken.