The Original of Laura
More on Nabokov’s last and maybe-about-to-be-destroyed novel/novel-fragment, The Original of Laura, from Slate: But the essence is this: Dmitri says he reached a decision after an imagined ghostly conversation with his dead father—one in a far different key from Hamlet’s talk with his dead ...
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Where are the Women?
But I’ve realised something: when I think about the great novelists translated into English from other languages, disproportionately few of the names I come up with are women’s. For every Isabel Allende there’s a raft of José Saramagos, Gabriel Garcia Marquezes, Mario Vargas Llosas and Pablo Nerudas. ...
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Serve the People!
Serve the People! is the story of Wu Dawang, a peasant from the countryside who has joined the Red Army, and who, after distinguishing himself in his division as a politically proper soldier, has achieved the relatively privileged rank of Sergeant of the Catering Squad. Wu Dawang is assigned to be General Orderly for the ...
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Random House, they're maybe starting to get it
According to Mark, Random House is letting you download—free of charge, those generous scamps—Charles Bock’s Beautiful Children, although only for a limited time. I guess once the time expires everyone’s PDFs…just disappear, or something. Its a nice gesture, anyway, and we’d like to see ...
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Library of Congress and Microsoft
The Library of Congress has decided to use Microsoft’s Silverlight to build their new website. LibraryThing has something to say about it: Most disturbingly, users are locked in, too: anybody using an iPhone, an old version of Windows, any version of Linux, or any other operating system or device not supported by ...
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Dubravka in The Guardian
The Guardian had a nice profile/overview of Dubravka Ugresic’s life and work in this weekend’s edition: During the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Dubravka Ugresic was denounced, she says, as “a whore, a witch and a traitor”. A reluctant citizen of newly independent Croatia, she took a stand ...
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Times Bolaño Review
The NYT reviews the newest Bolaño: “Nazi Literature in the Americas,” a wicked, invented encyclopedia of imaginary fascist writers and literary tastemakers, is Bolaño playing with sharp, twisting knives. As if he were Borges’s wisecracking, sardonic son, Bolaño has meticulously created a tightly woven ...
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