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Recent Posts
Category Archives: News
“The Attic,” by Danilo Kis
Dalkey Archive in the next few weeks brings us a bumper crop of new translations of the great Danilo Kiš (pronounced quiche), including his first novel, Mansarda, translated here as The Attic, written in Belgrade in 1962 and finding its twenty-seven-year-old author in an unfamiliarly buoyant mood. Brodsky wrote of the later, darker Kiš that […]
New translation of the Bhagavad Gita!
A new translation of the Bhagavad Gita from Norton by Gavin Flood and Charles Martin sent me into Namaste on 14th Street for a comparison. Flood and Martin’s introduction is welcoming and informative; I took note especially of their description of the poem’s form, which echoes the larger epic, the Mahabharata, in which it sits. […]
Walser’s Trakl
In February we considered the poetry of Georg Trakl on the occasion of several new translations of his work. Now another door opens on this literary moment with Christopher Middleton’s Thirty Poems of Robert Walser, including this tribute to Trakl (first published in Michael Schmidt’s indispensable PN Review). Walser, whose growing recognition in English owes […]
A miracle from Anakana Schofield
—Mam. It had been years, and by the time the day came, she was ripe for it. Off the bus from college this Friday evening, home he was to her, stood in her kitchen, looking helpful—helpful was the way Jimmy looked. —Mam. I’ve something to tell ya. A silence brewed that she swiftly interrupted. It […]
In the Dasgupta Institute, Tim Parks
Beth: People are fidgeting. Kristin has arrived to my left, Marcia to my right. Even without seeing, I feel who is there. I know them, I know the space. I know the vibrations they send, the way the air changes when they sit. Someone starts to breathe very deeply, rhythmically, behind us, some new student […]
John Cheever would have been 100 today
John Cheever would have been 100 years old today, raising the disquieting prospect that the world he described may be transforming into history. Thinking about the real and the created: In his forthcoming How Literature Saved My Life, David Shields writes Driving around, I heard a Cheever story on the radio and found it so […]
Tagged American fiction
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Up Today: Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading
We love this idea! Starting today the innovative folks over at Electric Literature bring you Recommended Reading, a weekly dose of meaty writing chosen for you by notable authors and editors. This week: “Watching Mysteries With My Mother,” a story by Ben Marcus; next week, a new translation of Clarice Lispecter, chosen by New Directions. […]
Tagged Electric Literature
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A Little Chess Table, new from Jerzy Pilch
It was a sweltering August in the year 1962. I was ten years old, and I was at the apogee of all possibilities. After some dozen months of incessant soccer playing, I had become a consummate forward. In a thick journal with a green binding, which I had received for my birthday, I was writing […]
A Self-portrait, by Karl O. Knausgaard
There is, in London, a painting that moves me as much every time I go and see it. It is a self-portrait painted by the late Rembrandt. His later paintings are usually characterized by an extreme coarseness of stroke, rendering everything subordinate to the expression of the moment, at once shining and sacred, and still […]
“Stella Polaris,” by Viktor Kulle
Russian poet Viktor Kulle is fifty today, today being April 30 in his part of the world. We congratulate him! His is a voice resonating with Russia’s deep classical past. In 1996 he defended Russia’s first doctoral dissertation on Joseph Brodsky (here it is). We offer his poem “Stella Polaris” in a translation by Little […]