Notes, Reviews and Opinions
If You Are UK Resident
Grab the chance Abe Books gives you to win 25 P.G. Wodehouse novels from the Everyman Wodehouse Collection - the largest collection of P.G. Wodehouse’s works in print - with an estimated value of £275 GBP.
“Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, KBE (15 October 1881 – 14 February 1975) (IPA: /?w?dha?s/) was a comic writer who enjoyed enormous popular success during a career of more than seventy years and continues to be widely read. Despite the political and social upheavals that occurred during his life, much of which was spent in France and the United States, Wodehouse’s main canvas remained that of pre-war English upper-class society, reflecting his birth, education, and youthful writing career. (Quote from Wikipedia.org)“
Muses
No item of clothing has endured for longer than the dress. Yet the last century alone has seen the most radical changes of style - hemlines swinging from ankle to thigh; outlines alternating between the body-hugging and the bell - and our fascination with the ‘frock’ has not gone away. From Gres’ draping to Dior’s New Look, from Mary Quant’s mini to Hussein Chalayan’s mechanical marvels, this book looks at the dress in twentieth century fashion. Thematic chapters (Changes, Feminine, Sex, Must-haves, Fantasy, Classical and Art) set out the inspirations and implications for each new change alongside the stunning photography.
From the Publisher: Fabulous Frocks, by Sarah Gristwood
The Best Crime Stories from the Pulps During Their Golden Age — The ’20s, ’30s and ’40s
With a table of contents that includes: The Creeping Siamese, Stag Party, The City of Hell!, Two Murders, One Crime, Killer in the Rain, Dance Macabre, The Jane from Hell’s Kitchen, this new collection of mystery tales, said so thick that a bullet couldn’t pass through it, sounds irresistible.
The 52 crime stories are from the great depression era that made it possible for the pulp genre to flourish. Authors forced by money shortage to write stories on word count in order to survive usually resumed to producing mystery novels, crime stories with dames in distress and brave, cynic detectives.
Read the story »
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.
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.
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.”
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Places Of Interest
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.
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 Rat Killer - Alexander Terekhov
Svetloyar is an untractive town with no history
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.
Places of Interest
It’s been a long time since I have bookmarked these links with th purpose of sharing them.
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.
The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan
Summarised by Fusinha
Here the author develops a psychoanalytic theory of the movie
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.
International Press
Life’s deeper mysteries January 24, 2009At my age I’m about as far from childhood as...
Karinthy’s Kafkaesque Classic In Translation At Last January 4, 2009Things have changed a bit since Metropole was first...
When you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas December 20, 2008Blog Talk
Save the Book World Petition January 24, 2009Signatures are being gathered for a petition to save...
Ferenc Karinthy: Metropole January 4, 2009If it isn’t Hell, it’s certainly a private hell...
Publishers’ disappointments and regrets December 20, 2008Fairs Festivals Events
12 - 15 February 2009 Baltic Book Fair
15 - 20 February 2009 Jerusalem International Book Fair
- 21 February 2009 Independent Booksellers Forum
