詳細はこちら | 🤡pullinginward@protonmail.com🌏 |From morn till eve allies, associates they; Companions, friends—till night gave place to day.

HOME / MUSIC / LIT / ANIME / MANGA / TV / FILM / COMICS / TOONS / VIDYA / ART

Philosophy | Literary fiction | Shorter stories | Magical realism | Nonfiction | Light novel | Unsorted

Genres are difficult, you can understand that much, right? There's never going to be a perfect way to organise all this stuff so please forgive any indiscretions. Take your time to have a look around and definitely send me an email if you think something is amiss.

Philosophy and such

• [1878] Friedrich Nietzsche - Human, All Too Human: A Book For Free Spirits (2000) | PDF / EPUB / MOBI
"Thus, then, have I evolved for myself the "free spirits" to whom this discouraging-encouraging work, under the general title "Human, All Too Human," is dedicated. Such "free spirits" do not really exist and never did exist. But I stood in need of them, as I have pointed out, in order that some good might be mixed with my evils (illness, loneliness, strangeness, acedia, incapacity): to serve as gay spirits and comrades, with whom one may talk and laugh when one is disposed to talk and laugh, and whom one may send to the devil when they grow wearisome. They are some compensation for the lack of friends."

• [1938] Jean-Paul Sartre - Nausea | AZW3 (2000, Penguin Books) / MOBI (2013, New Directions)
“There is nothing much to say: I could not pick up the paper, that’s all. I very much like to pick up chestnuts, old rags and especially papers. It is pleasant to me to pick them up, to close my hand on them; with a little encouragement I would carry them to my mouth the way children do. Anny went into a white rage when I picked up the corners of heavy, sumptuous papers, probably soiled by excrement. In summer or the beginning of autumn, you can find remnants of sun-baked newspapers in gardens, dry and fragile as dead leaves, so yellow you might think they had been washed with picric acid.”

• [1942] Albert Camus -The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays (1991, Justin O'Brien) | EPUB / MOBI
"At any streetcorner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face. As it is, in its distressing nudity, in its light without effulgence, it is elusive. But that very difficulty deserves reflection. It is probably true that a man remains forever unknown to us and that there is in him something irreducible that escapes us. But practically I know men and recognize them by their behavior, by the totality of their deeds, by the consequences caused in life by their presence. Likewise, all those irrational feelings which offer no purchase to analysis."

• [1973] E. M. Cioran - The Trouble with Being Born | EPUB / MOBI
"What right have you to pray for me? I need no intercessor, I shall manage alone. The prayers of a wretch I might accept, but no one else’s, not even a saint’s. I cannot bear your bothering about my salvation. If I apprehend salvation and flee it, your prayers are merely an indiscretion. Invest them elsewhere; in any case, we do not serve the same gods. If mine are impotent, there is every reason to believe yours are no less so. Even assuming they are as you imagine them, they would still lack the power to cure me of a horror older than my memory."

• [2010] Thomas Ligotti - The Conspiracy against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror | EPUB (2018, Penguin Publishing Group / AZW3 (2011, Hippocampus Press)
"For ages they had been without lives of their own. The whole of their being was open to the world and nothing divided them from the rest of creation. How long they had thus flourished none of them knew. Then something began to change. It happened over unremembered generations. The signs of a revision without forewarning were being writ ever more deeply into them. As their species moved forward, they began crossing boundaries whose very existence they never imagined. After nightfall, they looked up at a sky filled with stars and felt themselves small and fragile in the vastness. Soon they began to see everything in a way they never had in older times."


Literary fiction

• [1932] Louis-Ferdinand Céline - Journey to the End of the Night | EPUB (2006, New Directions) / MOBI (2011, New Directions)
“But I also realize that to flee this would mean to overcome it or repudiate it, and I’ll never overcome it, because I don’t go beyond it in reality, and I’ll never repudiate it, because no matter what I dream, I always remain where I am. And my dreaming! The disgrace of escaping into myself, the cowardice of reducing my life to that refuse of the soul which others experience only in their sleep, in the posture of death as they snore, in that stillness when they look like highly developed vegetables! I can’t make one noble gesture that’s not confined to my own soul, nor have one useless desire that’s not truly, utterly useless!”

• [1947] Malcolm Lowry - Under the Volcano | EPUB / MOBI | Supplemental material
“Slightly to the right and below them, below the gigantic red evening, whose reflection bled away in the deserted swimming pools scattered everywhere like so many mirages, lay the peace and sweetness of the town. It seemed peaceful enough from where they were sitting. Only if one listened intently, as M. Laruelle was doing now, could one distinguish a remote confused sound—distinct yet somehow inseparable from the minute murmuring, the tintinnabulation of the mourners—as of singing, rising and falling, and a steady trampling—the bangs and cries of the fiesta that had been going on all day.”

• [1982] Fernando Pesso - The Book of Disquiet | EPUB (2002, Penguin Classics translation by Richard Zenith) / MOBI (2002, Penguin Classics translation by Richard Zenith)
  [1982] Fernando Pesso - The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition | EPUB (2017, New Directions translation by Margaret Jull Costa) / AZW3 (2017, New Directions translation by Margaret Jull Costa)
  “Vicente Guedes endured his empty life with masterly indifference, the foundations of his mental attitude ebing built on the stoicism of the weak. He was constituionally condemned to suffer all kinds of anxieties, but fated to abandon them all. I never met a more extraordinary man. He had abdicated everything to which he was by nature destined, but not out of any kind of asceticism. Though naturally ambitious, he savoured the pleasure of haivng no ambitions at all.”
  

  You should talk a little about the difference between versions.

  Shorter stories

• [1949] Shirley Jackson - The Lottery and Other Stories (2005) | PDF
"The world of Shirley Jackson is eerie and unforgettable. It is a place where things are not what they seem; even on a day that is sunny and clear, “with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day,” there is the threat of darkness looming, of things taking a turn for the worse. Hers is the ever-observant eye, the mind’s eye, bearing witness. Out of the stories rises a magical somnambulist’s ether—the reader is left forever changed, the mark of the stories indelible upon the imagination, the soul."


Magical realism

• [1994] Haruki Murakami - The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Jay Rubin translation) | EPUB / MOBI
"The mound of sardines was untouched from last night. No, the cat had not come back. I stood there looking at our small garden, with the early-summer sunshine streaming into it. Not that ours was the kind of garden that gives you spiritual solace to look at. The sun managed to find its way in there for the smallest fraction of each day, so the earth was always black and moist, and all we had by way of garden plants were a few drab hydrangeas in one corner-and I don’t like hydrangeas. There was a small stand of trees nearby, and from it you could hear the mechanical cry of a bird that sounded as if it were winding a spring. We called it the wind-up bird."

• [2017] Mizuki Tsujimura - Lonely Castle in the Mirror (2021 Phillip Gabriel translation) | EPUB / MOBI
"In another world, we were already friends. There’s nothing special about me. I’m not athletic, and I’m not smart. There’s nothing about me anyone would envy. It’s only that we had the chance to meet before, and form a special bond. We go everywhere together: when we move to a different classroom, when we go for break, and when we walk through the school gates at the end of the day. Sanada’s gang may be dying to be friends with them, but all the student says is, ‘I’m with Kokoro-chan.’ So I am no longer alone. I’ve been hoping something like this will happen for such a long time. Though I know it never will."


Hey, there's a film of this coming out in a couple months or so?



Nonfiction

• [1968] Kwame Nkrumah - Handbook of Revolutionary Warfare | PDF
"Revolutionary warfare is the logical, inevitable answer to the politcal, economic and social situation in Africa today. We do not have the luxury of an alternative. We are faced with a neccessity. Throughout the world, the escalation of imperialist aggression is making the issues clear, and the exploitation can no longer be disguised. In Africa, a point of explosion against imperialsm has been reached. But only a massive and organised will to fight can spark it off. Time is running out. We must act now."

• [1978] Hunter S. Thompson - The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time (Gonzo Papers, Volume 1) | PDF
"So if I decided to leap for The Fountain when I finish this memo, I want to make one thing perfectly clear -- I would genuinely love to make that leap, and if I don't I will always consider it a mistake and a failed opportunity, one of the very few serious mistakes of my First Life that is now ending. But what the hell? I probably won't do it (for all the wrong reasons), and I'll probably finish this table of contents and go home for Christmas and then have to live for 100 more years with all this goddamn gibberish I'm lashing together."

• [2005] David Foster Wallace - Consider the Lobster and Other Essays | EPUB / MOBI
“THE AMERICAN ACADEMY of Emergency Medicine confirms it: Each year, between one and two dozen adult US males are admitted to ERs after having castrated themselves. With kitchen tools, usually, sometimes wire cutters. In answer to the obvious question, surviving patients most often report that their sexual urges had become a source of intolerable conflict and anxiety. The desire for perfect release and the real-world impossibility of perfect, whenever-you-want-it release had together produced a tension they could no longer stand.”


Light novel

• [2010-2013] Kokoro Connect | EPUB / MOBI
"Yes, the fourth floor was home to the Cultural Research Club, or CRC for short. They had been saddled with the school’s least popular location—undesirable only because lazy teenagers cared about avoiding stairs more than natural light or a nice view—for good reason: their club was only recently established this year, and by a group of five first-year students at that. In other words, they were the lowest rung on the ladder."