Category Archives: News

Sewing and dreams: “Mr. Ferri and the Furrier,” by Cynthia Zarin

In the jewelry store I unwrapped the fabric. I had bought it the week before, in the pouring rain, in the garment district, in a shop I had visited obsessively years before. It was during a time in my life when the amount of time that I devoted to thinking about upholstery fabric was in […]

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Our new favorite book: The Way of the Dog, by Sam Savage, in bits

From the very beginning I found it difficult, debilitating and painful, to work for other people, with other people. As the years went by I found it increasingly difficult to work in the vicinity of other people, until that too became impossible. People recognized that I didn’t have a crowd, and they resented me for […]

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Entries from an Encyclopedia of A Life in Russia, via José Manuel Prieto

Operating under the pseudonym of Thelonius Monk, a refined but mostly aspirant Cuban witness to the final days of the Soviet imperium offers these clarificiations of several regional enigmas. Babionki (бабионки). There are, of course, women—or mujeres as I might prefer to call them—in Muscovy, but there are babionki, as well, and these latter are […]

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A Christmas poem, by Joseph Brodsky, translated by Derek Walcott

    …………………………………………………………To Elisabeth Leonskaya The air—fierce frost and pine-boughs. We’ll cram ourselves in thick clothes, stumbling in drifts till we’re weary— better a reindeer than a dromedary. In the North if faith does not fail God appears as the warden of a jail where the kicks in our ribs were rough but what you […]

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Introducing Bilge Karasu

We’ve just encountered the fascinating Turkish modernist Bilge Karasu, in a new translation from City Lights of his 1971 novel A Long Day’s Evening. This remarkable book considers agonizing internal struggles of faith among eighth-century Byzantine monks through the refracted, internalized prose of Joyce and Proust, giving them startlingly raw existential urgency. Something soul-plumbing for […]

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“Stanzas for an Imaginary Garden,” by Octavio Paz

The municipal government of Mexico City approached Octavio Paz with a proposal to build, in his childhood neighborhood of Mixcoac, a public garden whose gates and walls would be decorated with his poems. Mixcoac, once a charming village on the outskirts of the city, is now largely a desolate, anonymous corner of the spreading megalopolis. […]

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4 December 1941: Kluge, Richter

  There was a huge area of high pressure over the Atlantic with its center to the south-west of Ireland. A weak ridge extended in a north-easterly direction over Scandinavia as far as the Arctic Ocean. It separated an extensive low-pressure area over the Polar Sea from a weaker low-pressure area over Russia. At its […]

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“Epitaph,” by Kiki Dimoula

“One per cent of every kiss given, each one without exception, consists of eternity and all the rest the risk it may be the last.” Even if it’s the last it will be called a kiss all the more at least as long as memory on one hand and oblivion on the other pull it […]

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Kiki Dimoula is a brazen plagiarist

Kiki Dimoula, one of Greece’s preeminent poets, is just now being comprehensively translated into English for the first time thanks to the exemplary Margellos World Republic of Letters series at Yale University Press, an endowed series made possible by Cecile and Theodore Margellos to bring important works of world literature into English. They have already provided […]

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Gros-Jean ignores a warning, from “Moon-Child,” a play by Derek Walcott

Rare footage! Derek Walcott himself as the Narrator in a production of  “Moon Child (Ti Jean in Concert),” at the American Academy in Rome on April 4, 2011. Also wonderful: The silky Wendell Manwarren as the Planter and music by Ronald “Boo” Hinkson. NARRATOR Deep in the forest, thick, where precious creatures are: the dove, […]

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