Recommendations from our site
“Pessoa was a Portuguese writer of all sorts of things, a poet, and a journalist. He was a man of mystery in many ways. He had a large number of what he called heteronyms, noms de plume I suppose is how we’d understand it. He invented personalities and characters and backstories and so on for all of his heteronyms, and he would write under any one of these different names. What for? I don’t know. Perhaps he just liked being rather mysterious. The Book of Disquiet seems to be the work of a bookkeeper called Bernardo Suarez, who is, of course, Pessoa.” Read more...
Philip Pullman, Children's Author
“This is a book of ideas. It’s not a book about the internet. It was written much earlier, in the 20th century, and written in Portuguese. It’s really a book of meditations. It’s very philosophical. It applies to the internet in that the main point is how much joy you can take in small things and small changes and the true drama of life can be extraordinarily minute in scale, and this, I think, gets at the idea that the internet and the stories we follow are, to a lot of us, extremely important and exciting and meaningful, though really they are just a few changes of characters on a little screen somewhere.” Read more...
Tyler Cowen, Economist
