At Russia Beyond the Headlines novelist Zakhar Prilepin has written a broadside against the neglect of contemporary Russian literature, ongoing simplifications of Russia he sees coming from the West, and makes a case for a non-parodic, traditional, conservative form of Russian writing as it existed in the time of Tolstoy and Chekhov. Well, he is […]
In the latest issue of The Literary Review Alex Stein has an interview with Egyptian poet Yahia Lababidi that orbits around the figures of Georges Bataille, Baudelaire and Kafka. The first notable thing about this piece is that Stein has opted to rewrite some of Lababidi’s words to, as he states at the outset, “make […]
The literary blogosphere has been putting on its collective gas mask, or surgical mask, or whatever kind of mask protects us against epidemics. Jacob Silverman’s article “Against Enthusiasm” deriding the “epidemic of niceness in online book culture” at Slate has been getting around, presumably read, probably even debated a bit. It’s example of everyone’s friend, […]
At The Brooklyn Rail, English philosopher Simon Critchley takes on the subject of contemporary art in an article entitled “Absolutely-Too-Much.” It’s a fascinating article, but what struck me was his outright dismissal of the novel’s cultural import: “It is simply a fact that contemporary art has become the central placeholder for the articulation of cultural […]
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 […]
Unless a writer is translated into one of the big languages – English, French, German, Spanish – then it becomes very hard to get translated into the smaller languages. Three EU Literary Prize winners – the Czech Republic’s Tomáš Zmeškal, Bulgaria’s Kalin Terziiski and Romania’s Răzvan Rădulescu, talk about the challenges facing writers from smaller languages […]
Part I of literary confinement dealt with the conformist aspect of needing to put translated literature into “the conversation” and what is lost when everyone reads virtually the same books. In Part II a couple critical takes on these issues from the world of theater were added to the mix, along with similarly conformist impulse […]
In a recent article on revivals of plays by Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, Los Angeles Times theater critic Charles McNulty uses the occasion to identify some shortcomings in contemporary theater that apply equally, if not even more closely, to contemporary fiction. He distinguishes the work of these two modern greats not only in degree […]
On the BBC’s “A Point of View” writer Will Self takes on readers and critics who oppose the use of difficult words, and by extension, of difficult art altogether. The main thrust of his critique is that educators, critics and the reading public are demanding that the bar be lowered from a level of reading […]
literalab 