Category Archives: News

Gjertrud Schnackenberg returns!

After a hiatus of nearly ten years, during which she published no poems that this reader could find, we receive this searing, soaring new book.  As always Schnackenberg’s poems are meticulously constructed and ornately referential: they inhabit their metaphors like a mote suspended in air.  But in Heavenly Questions Schnackenberg’s poems achieve a new degree […]

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Kathryn Davis, “Body-without-Soul”

Two snapshots from “”Body-without-Soul,” by Kathryn Davis Eager for more? Read the whole story, coming next month in My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales, edited by Kate Bernheimer of Fairy Tale Review. t was a suburban street, one block long, the houses made of brick and built […]

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“The Blood of Thought”: Zbigniew Herbert on Hamlet, first time in English

The mad Ophelia and the mock-mad Hamlet expressed the poet’s many-sided rebellion against the world’s ordinariness. For there is a kind of normality that is unacceptable, a base, comfortable normality that submits to reality, forgets easily. It is universal because some inner law of economics doesn’t allow us to experience reality to the full, to […]

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Celebrate! A new novel by Per Petterson

Not since Sebald has an author revitalized our sense of what’s possible in modern fiction as Per Pettersen has, in the humble opinion of Little Star.  In prose so simple as to be almost invisible, he renders characters (usually just one) who are achingly human in their moral limitations and yet panoramically aware. I Curse […]

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More Polish enthusiasms

The coming months will be boom times for Polish literature in English.  First July brought us the publication of Jerzy Pilch’s dizzying satire, A Thousand Peaceful Cities, excerpted on Little Star online.  Next Ecco springs Zbigniew Herbert’s Collected Prose upon us in August, and September will see new translations of Wislawa Szymborska by Clare Cavanagh […]

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Dear Reader, We bring you A Thousand Peaceful Cities, by Jerzy Pilch

Little Star was thrilled to encounter A Thousand Peaceful Cities, a mind-bending romp by Polish journalist and novelist Jerzy Pilch, miraculously translated by David Frick and published this month by Open Letter.  We here with pleasure offer a few choice morsels (with editorial emendations by ourselves). IN WHICH our hero’s father’s drinking companion, Mr. Traba, […]

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Sitting Still II: The Skeptic Meditates—from Tim Parks

Seeking relief from chronic and debilitating pains that conventional medicine could not cure, critic Tim Parks finds himself, much to his own surprise, attending a meditation retreat that involves sitting in crossed-legged silence for twelve and more hours a day. Although the retreat takes place in Italy, where Parks lives, the course leader, John Coleman, […]

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Sitting Still I: Paradoxical Relaxation — from Tim Parks

Exhausted by years of fruitless attempts to treat a battery of abdominal pains and urinary disorders with conventional medicine, Tim Parks tries a relaxation cure described in a book discovered on the net. He has the impression he is clutching at straws. Silence. More or less. How strange, I thought, after the fourth or fifth […]

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Rebecca West reflects on whether and why she is, or is not, a novelist

I know that had I been able to do what I liked, and that is just what I have not been able to do, I would have written nothing but novels. Fiction and poetry are the only way one can stop time and given account of an experience and nail it down so that it […]

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First Time in English! A Thomas Bernhard Story

“Two Tutors” will appear in a newly translated collection of Bernhard’s early stories, Prose, from Seagull Press this May (see our elated facebook post of April 28). Two Tutors While the new tutor has until now remained silent during our lunchtime walk, which to me has already become a habit, today from the start he […]

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