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 […]
Part I: where American conservative Charles Murray’s scientific assessment of periods of cultural greatness is held up to a closer scrutiny than he would probably care for. The further Murray’s essay goes on, the more his conditions for cultural greatness fall into a deeper and deeper murkiness. At one point he sets up a hypothetical […]
In this season of bitter political squabbling you would think that art and culture could provide a refuge from the name calling and finger pointing that seems to have taken the place of legitimate debate. Think again, because whether it’s Hungarian plans to ceremonially rebury the fascist writer Jozsef Nyiro or Dmitri Medvedev adding to […]
Are English and American writers missing an opportunity to write political novels? And Jo Nesbø talking about the ethics of a fictional treatment of last year’s mass killing in Norway. Last week was rough for novelists. First their ability to write philosophical novels was questioned, now they are being taken to task for their inability […]
Two nominees from Belarus have been put forward for the Nobel Prize in Literature and the names reflect the split between the Lukashenko-friendly, officially sanctioned and its opposite in the country. The official nominee of the Union of Writers of Belarus is Georgi Marchuk, his third time in the running. The head of the official […]
The story of Dickens baring his soul Russian-style to a visiting Dostoevsky looks to be as invented as any of their respective novels The influence of Charles Dickens on the novels of Dostoevsky seems fairly evident. In his study of the Russian writer’s work Joseph Frank recounts the impression made on Dostoevsky by reading Dickens’ […]
One of the features of Franz Kafka’s writing that some critics have had the biggest difficulty coming to terms with is his ability to take the reader from dark, despairing moments to scenes of almost slapstick comedy and then back again, sometimes in an instant, revealing parallels that both mock our sense of tragedy and […]
You cannot make this stuff up. It requires multiple Kafka organizations, Kazakh embassy press services and lazy, incompetent journalists to create the right effect. Less than a month ago I wrote about the shadowy European “Franz Kafka” Circle Prague, which seems to award its Franz Kafka Medal just before the internationally renowned Franz Kafka Society […]
It seems Russian book banning mania has not abated since I last wrote about the subject not all that long ago. The latest target – novelist Boris Akunin, author of the successful Erast Fandorin detective series among others. On October 27 the news got out that the senior investigator of the Moscow branch of the […]
Earlier this year Vasyl Shklyar refused the Shevchenko Prize and the $32,000 in prize money as a protest against what he considers the anti-Ukrainian policies of current Minister of Education Dmytro Tabachnyk. In an essay I linked to previously novelist Andrey Kurkov referred to Black Raven as “a rare literary scandal,” for being nominated for […]
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