Goodbye Blue Sky - Sinéad O'Connor - Bye 2013

Two classics to say goodbye to our beloved year 2013.

John N. Gray

(...)
"Barbarism," Gray believes, "is a disease of civilisation." All our institutions – "families and churches, police forces" – are incriminated by "human nastiness". It's absurd to place faith in the evolution of our species or in the progressive amelioration of society: in the Belgian Congo or Stalinist Russia or in contemporary Iraq, Iran and Syria, ideologues who rave about the regeneration of the world rely on mass slaughter to establish their personal version of heaven on Earth. In Gray's reading of history, men are the playthings of a blind and amoral fate, which decrees that the same mistakes will be made over and over again. The fictions and myths we elaborate in order to feel at home in this inimical or indifferent universe are at best "a scattering of dust", easily dispersed by the chilly blasts of Gray's invective. (...)

http://www.theguardian.com/profile/johngray

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_N._Gray
http://cultura.elpais.com/cultura/2013/12/11/actualidad/1386778011_263294.html

Alice Munro http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtwUyDPXROQ

Calling her a “master of the contemporary short story,” the Swedish Academy awarded 82-year-old Alice Munro the Nobel Prize in Literature last October,10. It is well-deserved, and hard-earned (and comes not long after she announced her retirement from fiction). After 14 story collections, Munro has reached at least a couple generations of writers with her psychologically subtle stories about ordinary men and women in Huron County, Ontario, her birthplace and home. (...)

http://www.openculture.com/2013/10/read-14-short-stories-from-nobel-prize-winning-writer-alice-munro-free-online.HTML

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/bios/alice_munro/search?contributorName=alice%20munro

Doris Lessing

We miss her already. One of my favourite writers she was and a must-read for all of you. Satisfaction is guaranteed.

Wonderful Doris Lessing has died (Nov. 17). You never expect such rock-solid features of the literary landscape to simply vanish. It's a shock. (...)
If there were a Mount Rushmore of 20th-century authors, Doris Lessing would most certainly be carved upon it. Like Adrienne Rich, she was pivotal, situated at the moment when the gates of the gender disparity castle were giving way, and women were faced with increased freedoms and choices, as well as increased challenges. (...)

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/nov/17/doris-lessing-death-margaret-atwood-tribute

http://www.dorislessing.org/
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/11/on-doris-lessing-and-not-saying-thank-you.HTML
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/nov/18/doris-lessing-five-best-novels

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/nov/17/doris-lessing