Poetics
335 BC · 144 pages
Tragedy earns pity and fear through the mistake of a decent man, Aristotle argues, and plot matters more than character. Every screenwriting manual since has been repeating him.
★ 7.2
The Books canon
Sourced and shelved.
Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Hope Against Hope
1970 · 442 pages
Osip Mandelstam wrote sixteen lines mocking Stalin and died in a camp for them. His widow Nadezhda memorized the poems to keep them alive, then set down exactly how the fear worked.
★ 7.1
Letters to a Young Poet
1908 · 123 pages
Ten letters answer a nineteen-year-old cadet who asked whether his poems were good. Rilke declines to judge them and tells him to go into himself and ask whether he must write.
★ 6.9
The Poetics of Space
1957 · 268 pages
Bachelard reads the house as our first universe: the cellar holds our fears, the attic our reveries, and drawers, shells, and corners hold the rest. Architects have designed by it since the 1960s.
★ 6.6