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Sorry for this late reply but I just saw your post. The reason that non-latin letters and diacritical marks are not often used in English translation of names is that there are few English readers who would understand the pronunciation they represent.

This short novel is well worth reading for its detailed and loving "insider's" picture of a people whose ancient way of life, which used to be called primitive by "outsiders," is slowly being being modernised and, according to the author, morally corrupted. The Chukchi people of northeastern...

I decided on a whim to go to Boston (USA not UK) for a few days - in November! Does anybody know the city to recommend things? There is a Degas exhibition at the museum. Good bookstores?

Knots – Nuruddin Farah It was interest in a fictional picture of life in the war-ravaged, ungoverned city of Mogadishu (Mogadiscio here) that drew me to this novel; I find, however, that there is not only no glimpse of life, fictional or real, among the ruins, but there is hardly any novel here...

Where is everyone? I've never seen such a scarcity of posts as in the last five or six days. Even Eric has disappeared! Congratulations if you're working too hard at real jobs to blog.

A new rival to the Man Booker. Excellence not compromised by "readability" apparently. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-15265212

Petina Gappah is an international trade lawyer, of all things, but is also a very good short story writer. Her collection, An Elegy for Easterly is (so far, a few stories in) admirably low key, yet moving and full of interesting looks into Zimbabwean life. I like her work a lot.

Does anybody know the source of this phrase? Or something like it, "Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Zoroastrians, Holy Rollers(etc.) and International Jewel Thieves." I had thought it was D.H. Lawrence but I can't find it anywhere. Anybody have any quotations that need identifying? This is...

Where is the cursor in new threads box? It's like walking in a thick fog. And you can't go back except by erasing what you've done.

I just discovered this writer in a collection of stories called "In Corner B." Apparently very famous and important in South Africa and in France, at least, he is compared to Nelson Mandela as a leader of the anti-apartheid movement. His voice is astonishingly gentle, considering the violence...

I can't send quick replies because of "database error," whatever that is. Only advanced box works. A search led to a dbe, as well.

Thanks, Lionel. That article goes some way to explaining it. What seemed most strange to me was that the stories themselves are not structurally confusing but they are read through a kind of intricate lacework of words. I'm not sure that that helps to convey the meaning or even the ambiguity or...

I've just read Marie Ndiaye's Trois Femmes Puissante and found it particularly difficult to read. I'm not a fluent reader but I was more often stumped by the syntax in this book than in almost any French book I've read. Is it just me, or does anyone else who reads her in French notice this...

I've always wanted to scoop one of these: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-13890900

I've always wanted to scoop one of these: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-13890900

Uniko Kimmo Pohjonen (Artist, Composer), Kronos Quartet (Artist), Samuli Kosminen (Artist, Composer) | Format: Audio CD Does anyone know of this Finnish composer? Liam?I recommend this work to anyone who listens for emotion in new "serious" or "classical" music (classifying genres...

Literature in music is all very well - harrumph! - but what about music in literature? I haven't found a thread for this so I'll start one. It goes something like this . . . Tolstoy's novella, The Kreutzer Sonata, in which Beethoven's sexy work leads to an adulterous affair.

look up the word "atmosphere" in a dictionary.

Just read The Vera Wright Trilogy by Elizabeth Jolley, Anglo-Australian writer. It's a partly autobiographical set of novels in which the female protagonist has several relationships that might be understood as bisexual, although it's a bit vague. The sexual tension in a nurse's residence is...

I am just reading some of Nadine Gordimer's non-fiction pieces. She talks of re-reading War and Peace and says that if you want to know about the Napoleonic wars, you should read War and Peace and not the history books because it gives a more philosophically illuminating meaning to the...