Recent content by liehtzu

1. Hamsun 2. Seferis 3. Kawabata 4. Solzhenitsyn 5. Bunin or something like that.

This might tickle one or two of the non-Polish language readers amongst us. I know it got a quiet "bravo!" from me: http://yalebooks.co.uk/display.asp?K=9780300118063

Oh great and enlightened Sultan! Oh all-seeing and all-knowing One! A thousand humble apologies [much obsequious bowing] from your pitiful servant! Naturally I meant that Goethe is of superior intelligence to everyone but you! Oh this poor pitiful toad is ashamed! [Yawns] Moving on: Anyone...

An interesting item in the latest Atlantic: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/6868/ I often feel a lot of the same effects described therein. If I spend three hours a day on a computer I feel like a zombie afterward. Anyone else?

We all belonged to the same category marked down for absolute destruction. The astonishing thing is not that so many of us went to concentration camps or died there, but that some of us survived. Caution did not help. Only chance could save you. —Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Abandoned Nadezhda...

His work is a beginning, a renewal which nothing before him could have made us foresee. Our first astonishment as we read him is to find ourselves present at the birth of a new, free, living, spontaneous French, more so than it has ever been since the sixteenth century. Every word with him seems...

Perennial Nobel contender. As I've said elsewhere, based on the three of his books I've read, I would not be opposed at all to giving the award to Mr. Magris: This is the text of a talk by Magris at the Almost Island Dialogues:Two, New Delhi, March, 2008 Translated from the Italian by Nick...

Italian writer, journalist, artist, and doctor, whose first documentary novel, Christ Stopped at Eboli (1945), became an international sensation and introduced the trend toward social realism in post-war Italian literature. Although Levi's masterpiece was set in the times of Fascist...

Section of the Wikipedia entry: Kaikō published his first work, Na no nai machi (Nameless City, 1953) in the literary magazine Kindai Bungaku soon after his move to Tokyo. It was largely ignored by critics. However, his second work, a short story titled Panniku (Panic, 1957) published in the...

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/forgotten-authors-no-8-william-sansom-949090.html Here's a truly forgotten author, all but expunged from literary history. William Sansom was once described as London's closest equivalent to Franz Kafka. He wrote in...

They're all available at the Nobel website, handily. Some decide not to give a lecture, but do deliver a banquet speech. Others just say thanks, grab the Oscar, and walk back to the airport. Others grumble at what a bother it is, or are ill, and don't show up. Pasternak wasn't allowed to...

I'll chip in another name for the lot: Milan Fust's (I'm not even going to try for the accent over the U, as there are enough ? marks on this page already) The Story of My Wife, which got a printing from Vintage International in the States once upon a time. Alas, I've yet to read it, but the...

From German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, a 20-volume set published in 1910s (so not overly much 20th century included), all of which is available online at www.archive.org I have a fondness for old-school writers of Heyse's sort, and am going to try to read some more of...

Source of the oft-quoted The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. The essence of American literature, according to Lawrence, is the conflict between puritan ideals and violent impulse. The old clash. The best American writers are often the most torn. A giddy...

How good Clara was, said Mrs. Trollope, what a nice woman, one felt comfortable with her. I said: 'Clara is all right as long as she feels herself admired: she will play up to you. But she is treacherous, underhand, turbulent, and a plotter.' Though championed by Saul Bellow, this is a...