Books
Consider these few notes my handing The Porcupine of Mind off to you — you read it, you write about it, then we’ll come back and talk.
Though written in 1984, The House of Jasmine’s description of widespread political corruption and social decay in the Sadat era is powerfully relevant to the uprisings of 2011 when Mubarak was ousted and that are still roiling Egypt today.
George Harrar is not really a mystery or suspense writer, per se. His work is noir and tension-filled, but there is a philosophical and psychological sub-strata that’s more reminiscent of Kafka than Robert Parker.
Literary history credits Rainer Maria Rilke with establishing European poetry’s seminal concern with the duality between inner and outer worlds. Could it be that Comtesse Anna de Noailles was his precursor in this regard? Translator Norman Shapiro and Black Widow Press should be thanked for bringing her back into the discussion.
For those who missed this evening, pick up Roz Chast’s “Theories of Everything,” which is a wonderfully huge collection of her cartoons published in “The New Yorker.”
In an age where technology has made the improbable perfectly plausible, squeezed out spontaneity, and raised skepticism about the nature of reality, how can we still believe in miracles? This is the crux of the novel, made delightfully vivid and comic by César Aira’s prose.
In 1853, the Czech scholar Karol Jaromír Erben published “A Bouquet of Folk Tales,” which became a source-book for artists and composers, and “one of the three foundational texts of Czech literature.”
David Ferry’s voice is quiet but never shirks. It admits directly and indirectly that the world is a perplexing place.
Editor Bharat Tandon guides us expertly through “Emma,” stopping along the way to augment the text by clarifying usages, concepts, and references that may stump the 21st-century reader.
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