Archive for the “Literature” category
Joyce to Ibsen, 1901
by budparr on June 16, 2010
James Joyce wrote to Henrik Ibsen when Joyce was nineteen years old and Ibsen in his seventies and at the end of his career. Joyce had managed to publish a review —his very first formal publication — of Ibsen’s play When (…)
#FridayReads – Incantation by Laughter and The Thing Around Your Neck
by budparr on May 21, 2010
We had a little party the other night to celebrate the release of The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry. Twenty or so people gathered in a beautiful Manhattan apartment with the treat of having the renowned poet, and president of (…)
“The Black Minutes” at the PEN World Voices Festival
by budparr on May 7, 2010
We have a bunch of PEN World Voices Festival posts at Words Without Borders, including my post on discovering Martín Solares’s novel The Black Minutes. Read them all at Words Without Borders.
A Jazz Lexicon – “A unique and rebellious way of speaking…”
by budparr on March 22, 2010
Another find while packing (see my previous post on Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable) is Bob Gold’s A Jazz Lexicon from 1964. My copy is signed “To the Richardson All-Stars – Richie, Johnnie, Jon & Brooke – with love, (…)
“Take the scenic route to knowledge” – On Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase & Fable
by budparr on March 19, 2010
Packing my books away for our move, I keep running into great things I’ve not looked at in a while. One of them is Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase & Fable. I love dictionaries and reference books in the first place–have (…)
History is the blood…
by budparr on March 4, 2010
This quote rings true… “History is the blood running through the river while life goes on on the banks.” I’ve been reading — at the rate of about 10 pages per day — Hugh Thomas’s The Spanish Civil War, a (…)
Your Face Tomorrow: Dance and Dream, by Javier Marias
by budparr on November 7, 2008
How to describe Your Face Tomorrow? Its title tells us nothing about what happens in the book and the subtitles of the individual volumes (it’s a three volume novel, two of which have so far been translated into English and (…)
Dominique Fabre’s The Waitress Was New
by budparr on June 2, 2008
“They never forget what they are, or all the things they have to do, but for a few minutes, maybe an hour or two, they put themselves between parentheses, and I bear the name of that thing in their lives.” (…)
The Art of Indulgence: Notes on Witold Gombrowicz’s Bacacay
by budparr on August 6, 2007
First published in 1957 in Poland, Bacacay is a collection of twelve short stories by Witold Gombrowicz (1904-1968), one of the major European literary figures of the 20th century. “The only way to get rid of a temptation is to (…)
The People’s Act of Love, by James Meek
by budparr on January 18, 2007
“Could we not say of all such examples that… the monstrous always excites wonder.” - Longinus, On the Sublime While at one of my favorite bookstores, Three Lives and Company, “The People’s Act of Love” came up. Several of us (…)