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Jude Stéfan, one of the most accessible and enjoyable French poets, despite not being Catullus as he once regretted, went to Mount Parnassus last month. He was 90 years old. THE SHADOW MAN from the dogs of night to the morning absences already passengers forever wedded in a dress's dead leaves...

Albert Uderzo, co-creator of Astérix and Obélix, died yesterday. As you can guess by my avatar, I loved his work.

Bacchante with a Panther — Camille Corot

Inspired by argumentative old git's list of his favorite 100 books, I'd like to list my favorite 150 novels. I split the list into 2 parts. 100 novels from before 1950, and 50 novels from after. So here goes the first part in roughly chronological order: 1. Satyricon by Petronius 2. The...

Reporters and assorted newspaper editorialists complain about their work being mistitled upon publication. We could turn this practice into a fun game of 'Let's mistitle that literary work'. For example, consider this poem taken from Tagore's Gitanjali as translated by James Talarovic with a...

Alain Mabanckou has received the Prince Pierre Prize for literature for the whole of his work. http://www.lemonde.fr/livres/article/2013/10/02/alain-mabanckou-recoit-le-prix-prince-pierre-de-monaco_3488661_3260.html This prize has a solid track record with many distinguished laureates since...

I hope y'all had a great Rosh Hashanah. Here's some David Broza to celebrate: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHndiWsfc2U&list=RD02BmqTFrYh0QY

Sad news, everybody, crime novelist Elmore Leonard has died. http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/elmore-leonard-dies-get-shorty-author-was-87/2013/08/20/97c0b550-d404-11e0-80dc-31dd431b1e4b_story.html

Some websites are built around the idea of comparing things. Which cover version of a song is better?, hot or not?, who wore it better?, etc. I'd like to try a similar approach by comparing poems that share a common topic. There's something about the idea of us being more than what we think we...

From a post on David Foster Wallace at the brilliant Il Corvino blog: http://ilcorvino.blogspot.com/2013/07/hablemos-de-david-foster-wallace-y.html With the rise of Twitter, blogs became an anachronistic space. Nowadays bloggers, instead of being literary assassins, have become those...

The interesting thing about the best of late Renaissance and early Baroque sonnet writers is that they were all to a large extent writing variations on the themes that Petrarca trail-blazed. Let's consider first the topic of the effects of love upon the poet: Petrarca: S'amor non è, che dunque...

Via Grasping Reality with both hands, a breathtaking set of images of the other planets placed at the same distance as our moon: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2345679/Photographer-Ron-Miller-creates-incredible-pictures-look-like-planets-closer.html

There is a certain kind of provocateur poet who mischievously writes antipoems. Poems which could be titled So, There!, or In Your Face. Their craft was first named in the words of Huidobro: Here he lies, antipoet and conjurer. They write both versions of the famous poem from Gombrowicz'...

Via the excellent Brain Food blog, the first funny buzzfeed I've ever read: You might as well face it, you're addicted to books. http://www.buzzfeed.com/summeranne/signs-youre-addicted-to-books-reading Dorothy : Tell me about it!

I recently wrote somewhere else (cough, Concocted Forest, cough) about what a mean and exacting judge of literary merit the great poet Philippe Jaccottet is. Well, Jaccottet's favorite Portuguese poet, Nuno Judice has been granted Spain's Queen Sofia's Prize for Poetry...

http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/08/microsoft-mulling-nook-media-llc-purchase-for-1-billion/ Dang this bad economy, killing entire cultural ecosystems.

So, last night I was at this little get-together with some friends: web-designers, painters, literary people, and other assorted artists. I'm usually the philistine of the group, being a humble engineer; but since I tutored a couple of them on math during their college days, they put up with me...

Music collection management programs, like iTunes, are wonderful things. Recently I filtered classical pieces out of my 'Top 30 most played songs' smart playlist. I was surprised by what it revealed. Turns out what I like the most is fluffy pop, with a touch of singer songwriters. How about...

Having had our fun with the best of 20th. Century Spanish-language novels, perhaps the best Portuguese-language books deserve some consideration, too. While Spanish-Americans show great interest on the internet in making 'best of' lists and on canon-establishing for their best books, the same...

Posting a poem on Sundays is a nice feature of other sites; so, since the most sincere form of flattery is imitation, let's do that here too. My poor attempt at translating one of the most beautiful poems of the Spanish language: Jaime Gil de Biedma, I will never be young again from Poemas...