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, […]
The structuralist notion of texts without authors is given a non-theoretical equivalent in ongoing Saudi book fair participation The recently held Seoul International Book Fair presented some new and upcoming translations of Czech writers, but another connection between the two distant countries is that the guest of honor in Seoul was the same controversial guest […]
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 […]
Banned Books Week was recently celebrated in the US but the Russian Orthodox Church is choosing to mark the occasion with a somewhat different approach. Moscow Patriarchate PR director Vsevolod Chaplin stated that Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov and One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez should be banned because they “romanticize perverted passions that […]
When I hear of looted cultural artifacts I think of the image of train cars stuffed with Old Master paintings and objets d’art steaming back in the opposite direction of equally packed troop trains. Then come accusations and bitter quarrels, pleas of national patrimony and then lawsuits and more lawsuits. In fact many of the […]
In Reading literary nihilists in Tehran I speculated that having an officially-sanctioned, award-winning, condemnatory literary critical book on absurdist, nihilist fiction might find its largest audience among the country’s future nihilists. Seeing some of the surprising titles that are being translated in Iran these days makes it look like these 21st century apostles of nothingness […]
One might be tempted to think that literature commonly characterized as absurdist or nihilist would not get much official attention in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Still less would anyone think that it could serve as a springboard to reaching the rarefied heights of literary prizes. Yet, as absurd and potentially nihilistic as it sounds, […]
Eastern European literature snuck its way into the pages of The Guardian last week when former Granta-editor Ian Jack revealed the hoax behind Albanian writer Jiri Kajane. Following publication of Kajane’s stories in American literary magazines such as Glimmer Train, the Chicago Review and the Michigan Quarterly Review in the mid 90s, Jack became interested […]
There must be something other than pollen in the air, because literary disputes have been both more frequent and more heated than usual: the novel isn’t dead, one earnest article claims, it just happens to be the focus of a rearguard attack by the defenders of privilege. The ongoing debate over the value or worthlessness […]
Part I – On Best European Fiction 2011 and the Euro-American debate over literary adventurousness The publication of the inaugural Best European Fiction collection by Dalkey Archive Press in 2010 resulted in a bit of American literary defensiveness over claims that European fiction was more adventurous and experimental than its new world counterpart. Zadie Smith’s […]
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