March 2012
33 posts
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“Guardian: What is the funniest book you’ve read?
Anne Enright: I remember...”
– Anne Enright: ‘Love is a great punishment for desire’ | Books | The Observer Troubles by J.G. Farrell
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“We had conversed in class, but all I really knew about her was that she shared...”
– A Way of Life, Like Any Other, Darcy O’Brien (via kelsfjord)
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'Proud Beggars' and portraits of Albert Cossery
(photo credit: Pedro Uhart)
What is fascinating is that via this novel we enter into a world of beggars – where it is not only a choice for some, but a desired lifestyle. Poverty worn as a sign of pride. Of course there is anxiety in knowing where one is going to sleep that night, or where the next meal will come from (if any at all), but the sense of freedom that goes with the lifestyle is...
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The Invention of Morel and Vertigo
The Invention of Morel has been mentioned as the influence for Lost (1, 2) and Last Year at Marienbad, but it also may be an inspiration for Hitchchock’s Vertigo.
In 2008 the Stanford Humanities Center put out a symposium on the 50th Anniversary of Vertigo, which featured Professor Jean-Pierre Dupuy’s lecture on the themes of The Invention of Morel and Hitchcock’s narrative - -...
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'Amsterdam Stories' in Fiction Writers Review
…these stories are also very funny. His story ‘The Freeloader’ describes the narrator’s memories of Japi, a vagabond and scrounger, a man who continuously attempts to avoid all effort. ‘I am nothing and I do nothing,’ Japi explains, and he disrupts these bohemians’ lives by revealing just how much stress and responsibility they have accepted. Japi has a...
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Sasha Frere-Jones on Elaine Dundy's Writing
Dundy’s sentences are rhythmically subtle and easily devoured. It is not a bad thing to be reminded that your postcollege years can be infinitely ill-considered without doing too much damage.
The New Yorker’s music critic Sasha Frere-Jones, in The Paris Review’s blog, talks about the books that focus “purely on that new onset of confusion immediately after leaving the...
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Sylvia Townsend Warner, Discovering a Forgotten...
I guess you could say I like an aura of mystery but really what I think I like is the idea of reclaiming these writers from dusty shelves. As the amazing British novelist Sarah Waters (who never gets enough love on American lit-sites) wrote recently, Warner’s obscurity ‘baffles, frustrates and, I think, secretly pleases her admirers, for she’s the kind of novelist who inspires an intense...
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'Alice James' by Jean Strouse
Alice James’ spirit is imbued with the talent for a turn of phrase that the male contingent of her family is famous for. Her family was celebrated for its tireless effort not to be bores, but to be extraordinary. The James family dinners are that of legend—children arguing with parents, members pushing back their chairs and pacing the room as they formulated arguments. Those discerning enough to...
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Hemingway on Blaise Cendrars
… the only poet I had ever saw there was Blaise Cendrars, with his broken boxer’s face and his pinned-up empty sleeve, rolling a cigarette with his one good hand. He was a good companion until he drank too much, and at that time, when he was lying, he was more interesting than many men telling a story truly.
—A Moveable Feast
Maybe if Cendrars brought his cat along to The...
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'The Invention of Morel' in 'Death+Taxes'
There is perhaps no other work of fantastic, surreal fiction that has had such a great influence, yet remains so absurdly unknown as Adolfo Bioy Casares’ brilliant novella The Invention of Morel.
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The novella, which follows a criminal castaway on a mysterious island, plays with notions of reality, simulacra, immortality, future technology, the surreal, melancholy, and love, and does...
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Children’s Photobooks: Not Just for Children →
As an adult, I have always loved children’s books. Before I had kids, I used to position myself close to other people’s children in bookstores as I indulged my picture book habit. The idea was to give the appearance that I was somehow connected to someone else’s unsuspecting child and therefore ‘vetted’ as a children’s book browser … Finally, a few years later, with my own children...
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What to read after 'The Hunger Games'?
I had often gone along the top of it, but seldom explored on the farther side. For some reason I regarded the country there as foreign—not so much hostile, as outside my territory. But there was a place I had discovered where the the rain, in running down the far side of the bank, had worn a sandy gully. If one sat in the start of that and gave a good push off, one could go...
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Amsterdam Stories in The Millions
Amsterdam Stories easily merged with my own canon, like a flood born stream joining the river. I’ve mentioned ‘For Esmé – with Love and Squalor,’ but Nescio also reminded me of ‘The Hunger Artist,’ ‘White Nights,’ and the last few pages of The Great Gatsby. Stories like epic landscape paintings. Stories like a quiet chat on a river bank with a confidant....
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Pub day for Nescio's 'Amsterdam Stories'
We are thrilled to be publishing Nescio’s Amsterdam Stories, translated into English from the Dutch for the first time by Damion Searls. Nescio, Latin for “I don’t know,” was the pen name for J.H.F. Grönloh, a businessman with the Holland-Bombay Trading Company and father of four. No surprise then that he did not write much, only a series of short stories and novellas...
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Vladimir Sorokin's 'Ice Trilogy'
(Photo: Dominique Nabokov)
What on earth does Sorokin’s weird Ice Trilogy mean? In April 2005, as he was finishing 23,000 [the last book in the trilogy], Sorokin published an article headlined “Mea Culpa?” in the newspaper Nezavisimaya gazeta, venting his irritation with the way Ice and Bro [the first two books of the trilogy] had been received by academic Slavists. He rebuked his friend the...
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Elizabeth Taylor, the novelist, in The New...
Kingsley Amis, who did more than anyone to undo her wallpapered-parlor image through a series of powerfully worded, almost angry reviews during her lifetime, still wrote defensively after her death in 1975 that Taylor’s ‘deeply unsensational style and subject-matter saw to it that, in life, she never received her due as one of the best English novelists born in this century. I hope she...
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Porter Square Books's picks from the NYRB Classics...
A shady circus, people who think they’re Jesus, post-WWII Russia, Singapore & Berlin & Vikings! @nyrbclassics Ebooks: portersquarebooks.com/ebooks-for-sale
— Porter Square Books (@PorterSqBooks) March 8, 2012
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International Women's Day - Elizabeth Hardwick
Elizabeth Hardwick is the only writer I have ever read whose perception of what it means to be a woman and a writer seems in every way authentic, revelatory, entirely original and yet acutely recognizable. She seems to have seen early on that the genteel provincial tradition of ‘lady’ novelists and essayists served mainly to flatter men, that there would be certain wrenching...
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Are we finally getting the hang of foreign... →
And in the same Sam Jordison article he praises the recently released The Adventures of Sindbad by Gyúla Krudy and translated by George Szirtes: “The first thing to notice (and Szirtes’ translation must partly be to thank here) is how beautifully it is written. The prose drips autumnal richness: colourful, sensual descriptions; a sense of warmth and languor, of plenty and fruitfulness....
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Happy Birthday Gabriel García Márquez
To celebrate the birthday of Gabriel García Márquez, we wanted to share a paragraph from Clandestine in Chile: The Adventure of Miguel Littín, a report of the filming of a documentary about life in Chile under Pinochet by Littín, the famed and exiled Chilean filmmaker who illegally snuck back into his country to film the documentary, called Acta General de Chile. The photo above has the writer...
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John Wray reviews An Ermine in Czernopol
Ermine has been likened by the novelist John Banville to both The Tin Drum and One Hundred Years of Solitude, although a more instructive comparison might be to the European novels of Vladimir Nabokov. Like Nabokov, Rezzori was a refugee from the Soviet transfiguration of his homeland, and as such the chronicler of a world lost twice over: in mourning their respective childhoods, both authors’...
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“A writer may write for a variety of reasons, and many of them lie about what the...”
– William McPherson, the editor and Pulitzer prize–winning critic whose novel Testing the Current we’ll be publishing next year, has a brand-new blog (McPherson’s Lament). You should most certainly follow it. The man knows a thing or two, and his voice is a delight.
“Time to leave now, get out of this room, go somewhere, anywhere; sharpen this...”
– —Stefan Zweig, The Post-Office Girl, ca. 1935
(via oindividuation)
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The Mirador reviewed in the TLS
It was almost fifty years before Gille felt able to confront the life and death of her talented mother, and she chose to do so not in the form of a memoir but as an imagined autobiography, as written by Némirovsky herself. It draws heavily on Némirovsky’s published and unpublished works, as well as her letters, notes and diaries, though it is softer than much of her mother’s work in tone. The...
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There’s was a lot of excitement at the...