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.
From Princeton Press. Call It English identifies the distinctive voice of Jewish American literature by recovering the multilingual Jewish culture that Jews brought to the United States in their creative encounter with English.
Revenge of the Domestic :Women, the Family, and Communism in the German Democratic Republic, Donna Harsch
From Princeton Press. Revenge of the Domestic examines gender relations in East Germany from 1945 to the 1970s, focusing especially on the relationship between ordinary women, the Communist Party, and the state created by the Communists, the German Democratic Republic (GDR).
Excavating Kafka, James Hawes
From Quercus Books, is still causing stirs. And I still did not put my hands on it.
From Sp!ked, on the incapacity of reading Kafka due to the power of the K-myth, the Kafkaesque that transforms Kafka’s works into pre-read :
‘Indeed, such is the potency of the K-myth that it has even generated its own adjective – Kafkaesque – to refer to anything that resembles oppressive state bureaucratic persecution. [...]the K-myth. It transforms Kafka’s works into pre-read, pre-packaged prophesies of totalitarianism, baleful intimations of the Shoah. The K-myth ‘makes people – even highly educated German scholars – incapable of reading what Kafka actually wrote’. ‘Superb writing’, says Hawes, is lost to idolatry.’
And some more Kafka from The London Review of Books.
Serge Gainsbourg: A Fistful of Gitanes, Sylvie Simmons
From Da Capo Press, a book on the one who made an art out of bad taste.
Here is an extract: He was an ugly man who loved some of the world’s most beautiful women, a shy man who spent most of his life in the spotlight – and a prankster who knew exactly how to outrage the public. Ten years after his death, Sylvie Simmons celebrates France’s pop genius, Serge Gainsbourg.
