Does literature, and specifically reading novels, lead to a more tolerant and non-violent world? This seems to be the argument implied in Elaine Scarry’s unfortunately titled “Poetry Changed the World” in The Boston Review. Scarry writes about “literature’s capacity to reduce harm,” extrapolating her points from Steven Pinker’s much-publicized recent work of scholarly wishful thinking, […]
Ruth Franklin has an excellent article on Gombrowicz at The New Yorker (subscription required), placing the new translation of his diaries in a context that provides the requisite history without weighing the reader down (as most critics seem to) with the obligatory yet incomprehensible need to go on and on about his Polishness the way […]
At Requited, Daniel Green writes a very interesting review of We Wanted to Be Writers: Life, Love and Literature at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. While definitely not being one of those MFA assassination pieces that have triggered such hot debate (I know that’s an exaggeration, but that’s how they’ve been referred and responded to) he […]
Scott Esposito tossed this softball up at Conversational Reading earlier and I feel compelled to join him in giving it a Baseball Furies swing because, wow, this is dumb! First of all, this reads like a teenager’s Facebook post/phone conversation transcribed to make a “literary” article, describing a novel: “ … by a writer who […]
For many people the idea that we invent ourselves is, at the very least, an uncomfortable truth, while for others it is nothing less than blasphemy, a dirty secret to be warded off by waving crosses and national flags. We are where we come from, they say, formed by the way our parents raised us […]
You can never really say too much about Franz Kafka and Bruno Schulz. Not that there isn’t a lot of pure BS and cliché written about Kafka by people who don’t have a clue why he is considered such an important writer – in fact, maybe that’s one more reason why an exhibition putting Kafka […]
I write about the American-European literary divide often enough, and just as often hear from people convinced that no such thing exists. Yesterday though another compelling piece of evidence that it does reached my inbox. It was the announcement of the winner of the Boston Review’s 2012 Aura Estrada Short Story Contest. Now I realize […]
The European Commission has come out with its list of translation grant recipients, otherwise known as “Strand 1.2.2 : Support for Literary Translations: selection results.” You can go to the official website and click on the link to a bunch of PDF charts and graphs that are about as unliterary as you can get, or […]
Russian writer and journalist Vlas Doroshevich is not the only writer of parablelike stories exploring issues of justice and power who died in the 1920’s and whose work seems to illuminate the much darker period of history that followed his death, when the liquid that smoothed the grinding wheels of bureaucracy was revealed to be […]
B O D Y A new Prague-based international literary magazine has just come out. B O D Y is run by editors Joshua Mensch, Christopher Crawford, Stephan Delbos and contains a selection of poetry, fiction and an essay on three neglected American women poets from the early 20th century by poet, writer and translator Richard […]
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