Author: Dwight

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A gift and an old friend

I was happy to get the perfect birthday gift this year—Vladislav Vančura’s The End of the Old Times (Konec starých časů). I have been looking for a copy to call my own since I read the book about 4½ years ago. My comments on the book are here. It’s a wonderful novel, enjoyable at both […]

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Immortality by Andrei Platonov

Illustration by Ragni Svensson From Platonov’s Chevengur: The Ambivalent Space by Natalia Poltavtseva The May 2018 edition of e-flux contains the Andrei Platonov story “Immortality,” translated by Lisa Hayden and Robert Chandler. It is a fairly simple but moving story of the railway station chief Emmanuil Semyonovich Levin tirelessly working to keep trains running on […]

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Being There by Jerzy Kosinski

Being There by Jerzy Kosinski Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.: 1970 A few months ago I watched one of my favorite movies, Being There (1979), and realized I had never read Kosinski’s novel on which he based his screenplay. If you’re unfamiliar with the storyline, Chance is a simple-minded man living at the townhouse of a […]

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To Know a Fly by Vincent G. Dethier

To Know a Fly by Vincent G. Dethier Foreword by N. Tinbergen Illustrated by Bill Clark and Vincent Dethier Oakland, California: Holden-Day, Inc., 1962 Although small children have taboos against stepping on ants because such actions are said to bring on rain, there has never seemed to be a taboo against pulling off the legs […]