Subscribe
Archives
- March 2018
- February 2018
- February 2017
- December 2015
- November 2015
- October 2015
- September 2015
- July 2015
- June 2015
- February 2015
- January 2015
- November 2014
- October 2014
- September 2014
- August 2014
- July 2014
- June 2014
- May 2014
- April 2014
- March 2014
- February 2014
- January 2014
- December 2013
- November 2013
- October 2013
- September 2013
- August 2013
- July 2013
- June 2013
- May 2013
- April 2013
- March 2013
- February 2013
- January 2013
- December 2012
- November 2012
- October 2012
- September 2012
- August 2012
- July 2012
- June 2012
- May 2012
- April 2012
- March 2012
- February 2012
- January 2012
- December 2011
- November 2011
- October 2011
- September 2011
- August 2011
- July 2011
- June 2011
- April 2011
- March 2011
- February 2011
- January 2011
- December 2010
- November 2010
- October 2010
- September 2010
- August 2010
- July 2010
- June 2010
- May 2010
- April 2010
- March 2010
- January 2010
-
Recent Posts
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Tagged Nativity Poems, Poetry, Russian
Comments Off on A Christmas poem, by Joseph Brodsky, translated by Derek Walcott
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 […]
“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. […]
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 […]
Tagged German fiction, photography
1 Comment
“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 […]
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 […]
Tagged Greece, Poetry
3 Comments
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, […]
Tagged Poetry, Theater, West Indies
Comments Off on Gros-Jean ignores a warning, from “Moon-Child,” a play by Derek Walcott