Reading Paris

Reading Paris

“There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other. We always returned to it no matter who we were nor how it was changed nor with what difficulties nor what ease it could be reached. It was always worth it and we received a return for whatever we brought to it.” —Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

When faced with the unfathomable, we look to great writers to articulate how we feel and what we should do. We ask—we expect—them to carry the weight and to lighten it into something beautiful that transforms an event though a new understanding. An impossible task that writers surprise us by doing over and over and over. 

Reclamation: Juan Ramón Jiménez and The Poetics of Work

Reclamation: Juan Ramón Jiménez and The Poetics of Work

In our Reclamation series, we discuss writers who deserve renewed attention. In this installment, we marvel at Spanish Nobel laureate Juan Ramón Jiménez’s aphorisms.

“To work isn’t to do a lot in a hurry or, above all, many times; it is to make unique, very well made things.” —Juan Ramón Jiménez, The Complete Perfectionist

Anatomy of a Sentence: Don DeLillo's Underworld

Anatomy of a Sentence: Don DeLillo's Underworld

“The sound of the ash bat making contact with the ball reaches Cotter Martin in the left-field stands, where he sits in a bony-shouldered hunch.”
—Don DeLillo, Underworld

In today’s Anatomy of a Sentence, we explore sound and its ability to connect disparate people. Alongside a memorable sentence from Underworld, we look at passages in Lolita and Madame Bovary

Reading Around the World: Catalan

Reading Around the World: Catalan

"... life has so much more imagination than human beings, is never, even in the face of the most conclusive proof, predictable or definitive."
Flavia Company, The Island of Last Truth

In our latest Reading Around the World, we explore the Argentinian-born Catalan writer Flavia Company and her masterful slim novel The Island of Last Truth

Tête-à-Tête with Luke Terbutt (Bookseller Interview No. 1)

Tête-à-Tête with Luke Terbutt (Bookseller Interview No. 1)

For our first bookseller interview, we visit Alice's Bookshop and its proprietor, Luke Terbutt, to discover the stories behind second-hand books, the (real) job of booksellers and what we can learn from all that marginalia.

"There is often an intimate and, necessarily, emotional connection that people have with books. Some find it very difficult to part with their own, let alone those of a dear family member."
Luke Terbutt

Bibliophoria, or What to Read This Weekend: Patti Smith’s M Train

Bibliophoria, or What to Read This Weekend: Patti Smith’s M Train

“Why can’t things be just as they are? I never thought to psychoanalyze Seymour Glass or sought to break down ‘Desolation Row.’ I just wanted to get lost, become one with somewhere else, slip a wreath on a steeple top solely because I wished it.”
Patti Smith, M Train

Encounters: Yannis Ritsos and the Messages in the Bottle

Encounters: Yannis Ritsos and the Messages in the Bottle

"Yet we did not come into the world
only to die.
Since at dawn
it smells of lemon peel."
                       Yannis Ritsos

In this episode of Encounters, we follow Yannis Ritsos through his exile in Greek concentration camps and the purpose that kept him alive. 

Anatomy of a Sentence: Robert Penn Warren's All The King's Men

Anatomy of a Sentence: Robert Penn Warren's All The King's Men

Whatever you believe about reading, you know the ways that great sentences stay with us. They’re the ones that we find ourselves repeating as we walk down the street on a Wednesday afternoon long after the book has gathered dust on the shelf. The ones we underline or copy into a notebook for some future purpose we can’t name. The ones that send a charge up our spines.

We begin our new series Anatomy of a Sentence with Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men and our favorite third sentence.

Encounters: Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, Pasternak and the Bomb

Encounters: Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, Pasternak and the Bomb

We begin our new series Encounters with the strange tale of an Italian publisher and would-be terrorist.

"Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't."  Mark Twain, Following the Equator

Reading Around the World: Somalia

Reading Around the World: Somalia

We continue through Africa in our Reading Around the World series. This time, join us in Somalia with Nuruddin Farah and his masterful Hiding in Plain Sight

"If the paranoid regime of Siad Barre won't allow me to return because of my writing, then my work must be worth continuing. I must write something worthy of the challenge."  Nuruddin Farah

Reading Around the World: Algeria

Reading Around the World: Algeria

Our series on reading around the world continues in North Africa.

“You drink a language, you speak a language, and one day it owns you; and from then on, it falls into the habit of grasping things in your place, it takes over your mouth like a lover’s voracious kiss.”  Kamel Daoud, The Meursault Investigation

Tête-à-Tête with Phoebe Weston-Evans (Translation Interview No. 1)

Tête-à-Tête with Phoebe Weston-Evans (Translation Interview No. 1)

"It was a way for me to get as close to the writing as I could, to get in between every word, every letter, to inhabit the text in the most complete way. It was like moving inside it, or even ingesting it, in order to retell it in a different language."   Phoebe Weston-Evans