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Front page of the San Francisco Chronicle, Nov. 30, 1900 Source: Sudden Death: Boys Fell to Their Doom in S.F.’s Forgotten Disaster (SF Weekly News)I took the boys to a history class today where Tobin Gilman talked about his book 19th Century San Jose in a Bottle. During the talk Gilman touched on the “Thanksgiving […]
Renata Adler’s “Letter from Selma”, about the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, is available at The New Yorker. The real magicians of Latin America looks at Machado de Assis and “the publication by Dalkey Archive Presshttps://dalkeyarchive.store/products/selected-stories?_pos=1&_psq=machado&_ss=e&_v=1.0 [scheduled for March] of a book simply titled Stories, which contains 13 of Machado’s stories, 10 […]
The End of the Old Times by Vladislav Vančura Translated by Edith Pargeter Artia Pocket Books (Prague: 1965) Something I get the feeling that when I say a book is a delight to read people seem to think I mean “lightweight” and “popular,” or possibly “frivolous.” I guess I’m sensitive because what’s available by Vladislav […]
I haven’t had much time for browsing this week, so only a couple of articles… The upcoming translation of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis by Susan Bernofsky has been well publicized. Here is an excerpt. And Creative Review has an article on the book’s covers. I missed this when originally published, but I completely agree with […]
OK, trying to get my posting legs again… Shin Dong-hyuk (born Shin In Guen) was born in a North Korean political prison camp and lived there until he escaped at the age of 23. He eventually made his way to South Korea and the United States. After I posted on Escape from Camp 14 by […]
Oh yeah, I signed up for FutureLearn’s course on Shakespeare’s Hamlet: text, performance, and culture. I’ll let you know how it goes. Join in! ABOUT THE COURSE: This course introduces the many ways in which Hamlet can be enjoyed and understood. Six weekly videos discuss the play’s fortunes in print, and its own representations of […]
Public Seminar has Andrei Platonov’s short story “Antisexus”, a provisional translation by Anna Kalashyan of an occasional piece by Platonov. In ‘Antisexus’ (1925-26), Platonov writes in a parodic vein about what Béatriz Préciado calls the sex-gender industrial complex. The production of gendered and sexualized bodies via technologies of the image and the orgasm appears here […]
I’d like to wish a happy new year to everyone. I’m looking forward to 2014 and I plan on showing my gratitude to all that stop by here by reinvigorating the blog. I’ve been reading a lot of interesting books lately and have many more lined up to read, so posting will resume soon. As […]
I read a fair share of out-of-print translations that I believe should be more widely available and I thought I would compile a slightly different “Top Ten” list for the year. You should be able to find these with a little digging or if you’re fortunate to have a library that provides inter-library services. There […]
Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West by Blaine Harden(Viking: New York City, 2012)ISBN: 978-0-670-02332-5 I had planned on reading three nonfiction books on North Korea this winter but everything got shuffled out of order when I impulsively grabbed Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s […]