Places of Interest
August 8, 2008
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
July 16, 2008
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 b?rba?ilor/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
July 14, 2008
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.
Belgium’s La Libre writes: The Theater of ideas: fifty five debaters for the understanding of the zest and the agonies of a disoriented world.
The Life After (La Vie D’Apres) is the story of the author’s mother, Louanne Antrim, spaced in the saga of a dysfunctional family shaken by divorce, alcohol, illness. Via Cyberpresse, Canada.
Places Of Interest
July 11, 2008
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.
John Sutherland, Blogs at The Guardian: So farewell then, lit-crit
But this traditionally vibrant sector, with its myriad outlets, is on the wane. Terminally, it would seem. Pages are falling away, like leaves in autumn. They used, for example, to call the literary pages in the New Statesman “the back half”. Now it’s “the back sixth (in a good week)”. Why is lit-crit - as a main item in our cultural diet - going down the tubes? Some hypothetical answers may be suggested:
Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children Wins The Best of the Booker
July 11, 2008
By Anca
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.
Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road
- 1995
Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda
- 1988
JM Coetzee’s Disgrace
- 1999
JG Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur
- 1973
Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist
- 1974
Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children - 1981
Midnight’s Children brought Salman Rushdie to fame, the Indian-British novelist, since 1981 when it won the Booker Prize first time, this year’s win setting it as the only novel that won the prize twice.
At the exact time when India become independent (August 1947, at midnight), Saleem Sinai is born and the book follows his personal and national history.
Places Of Interest
July 10, 2008
»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.
I Love You (italics mine)
July 8, 2008
By Anca
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 book raises language difficulties even when it does use plain English. The twist of phrase and the use of terms that require a dictionary are accompanied by a great number of Yiddishisms, Frenchisms and German language insertions. Some others languages as well.
The absurd and the humor it engages don’t always cook for an easy digestion, but personally I am quite fond of the genre.
Max Endorphin (the names would make a good subject for a full article) levitates, but the narrator, quitting too early from the spiritual courses hasn’t acquired the full process procedure. Can’t stop levitating. To Err is Human – To Float, Divine
“I am greatly relived that the universe is finally explainable. I was beginning to think it was me.”; so starts Strung Out, the paragraph where in the pre-purchasing process, Mere Anarchy randomly opened at.
“You’re fine, like rare wine. I love you (italics mine)” – Attention Geniuses – Cash Only
While The Herald Tribune “Even when it creaks, “Mere Anarchy” is nostalgically enjoyable, and most of it sounds timelessly bright.” and LA Times “Like so much in Allen’s unfailingly entertaining, mostly brilliant collections, the notion manages to be at once painful, surreal, obsessive and, lest we forget, seriously funny.” go for a tender approach of the collection, The Guardian goes as far as “Woody Allen should try this material out on a paying audience, to see if he can put it across. If he can, then he’s still a formidable performer, but he needs to hire a better writer.”
The Rat Killer - Alexander Terekhov
July 1, 2008
By Anca
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.
The novel can be difficult to follow when it changes time, space an rhythm all of a sudden. On the other hand, some pieces of dialogue are savory enough to recharge your attention.
The political aspect, the very obvious parallel between the human society and the rat’s society are at the center of The Rat Killer
»Here you can purchase The Rat Killer
Places of Interest
July 1, 2008
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.
They published translation of Vian’s novels like the famous Foam of Daze and Autumn in Pekin, Serge Gainsbourg’s Evguenie Sokolov and Considerations on the Assassination of Gérard Lebovici
by Guy Debord.
»The Paris Review
is another place on the web that I visit often and appreciate dearly. The Paris Review is a gold mine of interviews dating back to 1950s.
Our Q&A encounters with the great writers of our times have come to be recognized as a sort of literary genre unto themselves: the Paris Review interview. More than fifty years—and more than three hundred interviews—later, the archive continues to grow with each new issue of the magazine.
I was happy to read an interview with Vladimir Nabokov featured in their summerfall 1967 issue.
Boris Vian
Serge Gainsbourg
Guy Debord
The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan
June 25, 2008
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.
Every movie, developed esthetically, brings with itself its own context, builds up it`s own spectators, turns to them in specific way. It`s worth to get to know how, by McGowan, Kubrik`s, Spike Lee`s, Michael Mann`s or Fellini`s movies turn to us.
