Notes, Reviews and Opinions

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I’m an Earthling myself

Kalvar’s pieces are short drama acts in which the characters are oblivious that they were assigned a role to act, a story far from their daily reality to sustain. A different role for each different viewer.

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December 13, 2008 | Read the story »

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The Meaning of Sarkozy

Week in layoffs. From  the New Yorker Blog on how bad the economical crisis hit the publishing world.

What happened so far:
Gannett employees across the country are sending information about layoffs.
HarperCollins [...] has frozen wages and is reportedly considering layoff.

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December 6, 2008 | Read the story »

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Burroughs on Addiction, Miller on other type of drug: possessions

As a result of my good habit of browsing the Paris Review interviews archive, I came across The Art Of Fiction, Issue 35, Fall 1965. William S. Burroughs interviewed by Conrad Knickerbocker.

Burroughs admits, with blunt honesty, that he didn’t start writing out of a strong desire towards it. “I had nothing else to do. Writing gave me something to do every day.”

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November 29, 2008 | Read the story »

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Serge Gainsbourg, Kafka, Jewish American Literature

For the German readers: Buch Wien started two days ago. For the French readers: Salon Du Livre De Montreal is still running till 24.

Call It English The Languages of Jewish American Literature, Hana Wirth-Nesher

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November 22, 2008 | Read the story »

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Somebody: The Reckless Life and Remarkable Career of Marlon Brando.

Booker passed. Apart from the controversial, which has become the regular guest, I did not took a special interest in the event, nor did I rush to the library to pay an indecent amount of money on the winning novel.

What I would spend my money on is the latest Marlon Brando bio: Somebody: The Reckless Life and Remarkable Career of Marlon Brando. One could argue that is the cover and I could not disagree entirely.

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November 15, 2008 | Read the story »

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Places of Interest

Vivian Gornick explores the relationship between Jewish writers and misogyny in her interview with Boston Review. [...]Roth and Bellow suffer from feeling like such outsiders in gentile culture that savaging women seems justified.[...]

Sounds very familiar the way Kathryn Huges pictures the personal space as a book-lined room and how the load of books turns into unwanted load when one desires to switch place. Literary Review.

Moscow Times features Solzhenitsyn biography as the favourite candidate to win Russia’s biggest literary award, The Big Book.

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August 8, 2008 | Read the story »

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Romanian Literature in Translation

Romanian The Cultural Observer (Observatorul Cultural) launched a translation project which ‘will host Romanian fiction, poetry, literary criticism and literary history, and news about Romanian writing abroad, all translated into English, French, German, Italian and Spanish starting in May 2008′.

The project inaugurates with Stefan Banulescu’s Men in Winter. As a whole, Iarna barbatilor/Men in Winter offers a specifically local variety of magic realism, discovered in Romania in the 1960s through the intermediation of the South Americans—a trend at once oriental, Balkan and southern: fabulatory in the extreme. The essence of this “magic” is dislocation.

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July 16, 2008 | Read the story »

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Caution: Might Contain French

The literary space covered by English online resources is vast, yet the flavour of the news broad-casted in other languages can’t be ignored.

France’s Le Figaro presents every Tuesday a writer that made the headlines. And this Tuesday is Max Gallo, and his discourse upon his election into the French Academy (L’Académie française) where he emotionally mentions his origins, Italian immigrants, in order to highlight the French openness in matters of national identity.

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July 14, 2008 | Read the story »

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Places Of Interest

The Believer: Interview with Tom McCarthy

The Smart Set: Nobody’s a Critic

Criticism isn’t powerful anymore. It doesn’t drive anything, it doesn’t define what is good and bad in culture.

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July 11, 2008 | Read the story »

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Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children Wins The Best of the Booker

It’s all over the international press: Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children Wins The Best of the Booker.

In order to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Booker Prize, six previous winners of the award were shortlisted by a panel of judges and submitted for public vote in order to be awarded the Best of the Booker title.

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July 11, 2008 | Read the story »

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Places Of Interest

»BOOKFORUM

With five issues per year and sustained by daily posts that link to subjects covering visual art, political life, or literary subjects, book forum is certainly a place to visit with the morning coffee, at lunch break and later, in the afternoon, as a companion for the second coffee treat of the day.

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July 10, 2008 | Read the story »

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I Love You (italics mine)

Prayers sold on eBay auctions; a musical set after the Yellow Pages; anti-depressant, aromatic high-tech textiles; Max Endorphin’s levitations; trouble in Disneyland; the revenge gone wrong of a rich family against the nanny that is on the verge of publishing embarrassing facts about her employers and more, are all found in the last book of Woody Allen, Mere Anarchy.

A collection of humorous 18 short-stories, Mere Anarchy, the first of its kind published by Woody Allen in the last 25 years was received with mixed reviews.

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July 8, 2008 | Read the story »

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The Rat Killer - Alexander Terekhov

Svetloyar is an untractive town with no history, build under Stalin’s regime.

More, it appears of being infested with rats. When the town sees in the near future the chance of being included in the “Golden Ring” famous tourist route, it will stop at nothing to grab it. The circumstances induced are at times ridiculous and sad, but also highly humorous.

Svetloyar will undergo absurd preparations for the event, going as far as inventing an archeological site, displacing the population and using actors instead, as well as hiring, for an enormous sum of money, two rat killers from Moscow to clear a specific building where rats are falling from the ceiling.

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July 1, 2008 | Read the story »

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Places of Interest

It’s been a long time since I have bookmarked these links with th purpose of sharing them.

»Tam Tam Books

is a publishing house that came to my attention after reading the review of The Dead All Have the Same Skin” by Boris Vian, in LA Times.

TamTam Books is a publishing house that specializes in 20th Century international literature and is devoted to the purpose of reprinting lost masterpieces and presenting them to a large English speaking audience.

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July 1, 2008 | Read the story »

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The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan

Summarised by Fusinha

Here the author develops a psychoanalytic theory of the movie, which took the movie as a starting point. Avoids telling about historical context of film production as well as it`s reception.

When McGowan says about the audience he doesn`t mean the empirical spectator, but the one which is expected by movie text himself. Of course none of the movies ignores its historical context as well as context of those who watch it, but neither the context nor the spectator don`t exist out of the movie text.

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June 25, 2008 | Read the story »

International Press

Life’s deeper mysteries January 24, 2009

At my age I’m about as far from childhood as... 

Karinthy’s Kafkaesque Classic In Translation At Last January 4, 2009

Things have changed a bit since Metropole was first... 

When you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas December 20, 2008

Kafka never sent this letter to his father, but instead... 

Blog Talk

Save the Book World Petition January 24, 2009

Signatures are being gathered for a petition to save... 

Ferenc Karinthy: Metropole January 4, 2009

If it isn’t Hell, it’s certainly a private hell... 

Publishers’ disappointments and regrets December 20, 2008

‘Kate Figes finds out which books were left on... 

Fairs Festivals Events

12 - 15 February 2009 Baltic Book Fair

15 - 20 February 2009 Jerusalem International Book Fair

- 21 February 2009 Independent Booksellers Forum

The Underdogs: A Novel of the Mexican Revolution by Mariano Azuela Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Marriages by Katie Roiphe Screening Sex by Linda Williams The Bromley Boys by Dave Roberts Our Lady Of The Artichokes by Katherine Vaz Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitlaism
by Fredric Jameson Behind the Pink Curtain: The Complete History of Japanese Sex Cinema by Jasper Sharp A History Of Women Photographers Naomi by Rosenblum Attempts At A Life by Danielle Dutton Secular Devotion Afro-Latin Music and Imperial Jazz by Timothy Brennan Anti Nietzche by Malcolm Bull Coco Chanel by Edmonde Charles-roux The Bald Soprano and Other Plays by Eugene Ionesco Playing the Victim by Oleg Presnyakov