Today, screenwriter and professor of film (and aficionado of all things Greek) Andrew Horton offers beautiful translations of two short poems by Greek poet Yannis Ritsos (1909-1990).
Happy Birthday to a Desert Island Favorite: Ryszard Kapuściński
Every reader shares some version of the fantasy. We play that Desert Island Game— what to pack when we’re finally allowed a holiday, a parade of days filled with nothing but the turning of pages. Titles tend to change with the passing of years. We discover new writers. We amend selections inside the box of books that always overflows despite our best logistical efforts.
New Work: Afterimages: Photographs by Annelies Senfter
Calling Joan Didion
What we need, what I’m begging for here, is for Joan Didion to do what she did in 1988. We need her observations and—let’s say it now—the enormous engine of her prose style to tell us how it is, to get inside “the process” of politics and the characters at the center of this “self-created and self-referring class, a new kind of managerial elite [who] tend to speak of the world not necessarily as it is but as they want people out there to believe it is.”
Anatomy of a Sentence: Yves Ravey's Alerte
Take a deep breath. Now read.
Translator Phoebe Weston-Evans discusses a breathless, surreal sentence from Yves Ravey's Alerte.
"There’s something about the unbridled energy of its form that blurs the notions of past and present and arranges them, briefly, uncomfortably, on the same plane." —Phoebe Weston-Evans
China in Words, Images and Song
Recently, while rearranging our bookshelves by region rather than alphabet, I noticed a major gap in my personal geography of literature. While it didn’t surprise me that Poland, South Africa and Chile take up so much shelf space, the near-absence of an entire continent—Asia—felt shameful.
This year, I’m working to correct this oversight.
Reading Slow, Reading Slower
In Search of a Collective Noun for all of those Unread Books
Musing on Mardi Gras, Or I thought I knew what it meant to miss carnival
Reading Around the World: Syria
Tête-à-Tête with Tom Piazza (Fiction Interview No. 1)
Tom Piazza’s new novel, A Free State, chronicles two runaways—one black, one white, each masquerading to claim his own life.
"...we enacted our imagined scenes of plantation life, our comic dialogues, our walk-arounds and our solo routines, our 'Boatman Dance' and 'Clare de Kitchen,' assuming a set of alternate identities behind the burnt cork, and we found a freedom there, behind the dark mask. The bitter irony of it all was as yet invisible to us. We were innocents, and yet we were complicit in a monstrous evil, in ways we could not see." —A Free State
On Air: Kent Wascom, Secessia
When Kent Wascom published his debut novel, The Blood of Heaven, in 2013, readers witnessed the arrival of a visionary writer, one in his twenties but already likened to Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy.
In this installment of On Air, he discusses and reads from his latest novel, Secessia, set in Civil War New Orleans.
Read, Kookaburra, Read: On Australian Literature
To mark Australia Day, we asked some of our favorite book people—novelists, booksellers, librarians and critics—to write about the Australian books they love the most, or the ones they find quintessentially Australian, or that they find essential to the Australian canon. Some of their picks will be familiar. Others will surprise you, much as they surprised us. They’ve given us lots to look forward to in our future reading and re-reading.
On the Melancholy of Resistance
In this new Encounter, Andrés Hax discovers a writer and a filmmaker who jolt his memories of place and help define his relationship with fictional locations.
"It is a deep pleasure to read an author without any critical preconceptions because you are absolutely free to live inside of the work, to come to it on your own terms, to evaluate it as something new."
Literature, or The Place Where History Becomes Immortal
Literature reminds us that we should never be afraid to look at something as though we’re witnessing it for the first time, however well we think we know it. This is one reason great books offer endless company and sanctuary. Each expedition into them reveals new vistas: the book becomes more intelligent as we grow alongside it.
