Book jacket design is an ever interesting topic which exhibits an often sharp difference of aesthetics among its practitioners. I have written about it before in interviewing Peter Mendelsund about his designs for a recent edition of Kafka’s works. On his own blog Mendelsund has recently offered an insider’s view of designing book covers in […]
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 […]
After arresting him and then throwing him out of the country the (admittedly different, i.e. not quite Soviet) Russian government is redressing the poetic balance by opening a museum to poet Joseph Brodsky in his former St. Petersburg apartment. The catch – the city government owns all the rooms of the apartment except one, and […]
A Japanese expert on German-Jewish intellectual history refers to Kafka’s obsession with Yiddish theater in a lecture and the end result is a 28,000 word Japanese-Yiddish dictionary that you can own for the bargain basement price of $770. A fascinating article on Yiddish in Japan, from early Russian-Jewish emigrants to WWII refugees saved by Japanese […]
The Guggenheim Museum has put 65 art books and exhibition catalogues online. They can be read online or downloaded in a number of different formats – and all for free. The selection covers a wide range of Modern Art but from literalab’s geographical focus the highlights are a heavy dose of Kandinsky. Besides his 1911 […]
“The ambulances’ ominous horns wailed in the black tunnels of the streets, like a lonesome scream for help. The dancing stopped here and there and the unsettled crowd quickly dispersed to their homes. In Montparnasse, the Latin Quarter and a few other districts inhabited by foreigners, dancing continued. The horns howled relentlessly, mournful and terror-stricken.” […]
Czesław Miłosz is known primarily as a poet, then essayist and man of ideas. What he is definitely not thought of as is a writer of science fiction. Yet according to his biographer Andrzej Franaszek, as reported in Polish weekly Przekrój (and translated by Project Forum website Salon), he was working on a science fiction […]
The latest issue of The Hungarian Quarterly is out and contains an interview with László Krasznahorkai, whose novel Satantango is due to be published in February. The issue also has an excerpt from the book. Other articles of interest include an interview with pianist and regular NYRB contributor Charles Rosen talking quite a bit about […]
The PennSound collection of audio recordings of writers and artists includes readings and discussions with contemporary Russian poets as well as archival recordings featuring poets from Yeats to Mayakovsky. The University of Pennsylvania’s PennSound collection is an extensive archive of poetry readings, discussions, film clips and other related material and links. Contemporary Russian poets have […]
A selection of non-fiction about Central and Eastern Europe noted by critics in the year’s “Best of” lists The best Central and Eastern European non-fiction books of 2011 differ significantly from the fiction in that with only a couple of exceptions they are written about the region in English rather than being from the region […]
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