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No. Sparknotes and Cliffnotes tell you what to think. Kills critical thinking.

Just read and stop whining.

But, please, what was the 'old world' you were talking about?

So, if I stand on the top of my roof does that count? Because if god is in the sky, that would technically mean I'm closer to him, right? What if I'm on an airplane and look out of the window?

Excuse me! Sartre mediocre? Please enlighten me as to how you arrived at that conclusion. And fyi, he never "graced" the stage. Sartre declined the award.

What world is this? The 'old word'? The middle ages when women and non-believers were burnt at the stake? When Africans were torn from their homes and shipped to the US and Europe for slavery? When...

What, pray, is God's love?

I know where you're coming from, but I would be a little careful with this assessment. Hemingway's reputation for creating one-dimensional female characters, I think, is blown out of proportions and...

Oh, please do elaborate. I'm just so excited to see what you conjure up.

Winesburg, Ohio is a very underrated book, considering the fact that it is perhaps the most essential American short story collection of the 20th Century. Every short story writer is indebted to...

Richard Yates, of course, is the most underrated great writer there is.

Charles R. Jackson wrote at least two excellent novels that should have immortalized his name. Now he's out of print.
...

Zweig is great. Confusion was dazzling. I haven't read anything written so passionately in a long time.

For short stories in the tradition of Cheever and Updike, those New Yorker-esque stories that I love, I'd recommend the following.

Richard Yates - "Builders"
J.D. Salinger - "A Perfect Day for...

Obviously you need to broaden your horizons. Start with Virginia Woolf who is an absolute master. Then try the likes of Flannery O'Connor, Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore and Carson...

Obviously you have not read Out of Africa. It does not read like Hemingway at all.

Evelyn Waugh is the master. Read The Loved One.

If we don't believe in some form of free will, then all is lost. Democracy is a lie and determinism becomes an excuse to do anything we want.

His stories are better, much better. But a good novel.

Ha-ha. Seriously?

Priceless, priceless.

How could I possibly resist it? It was served on a silver platter, adorned with lovely seasoning. It tickled and itched in every fibre of my body. I had to.

Oh, and I believe Comedians aren't the...

I'd be more careful using the phrase "in fact" when, in fact, none of what you said is in anyway a fact.

Certainly capable of both evil and benevolence, like any human being. I wouldn't consider myself either (who would?) and on most days feel endlessly fallible, but able and capable of acting in the...

Pay attention to detail, to dialogue, to the subtleties. And, as T.S. Eliot would have it, the objective correlatives.

Ah, yes. Of course. So you know the working's of God's mind, do you? I'll just turn a cheek to all the horror that happens everyday because, though I will never find any proof for it or reason to...

Steve. They call him Steve. He works at Walmart.

Yawn.



No, you still don't seem to get it. Variety is good, you say, and I agree. That is why I read a Turgenev novel one week and then, let's say, a Flannery O'Connor story collection the...