February 2011
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“Behold them now and repent your sins!
First is the hell of Ever-renewing...”
– The Nine Great Hells, according to Kan’ami [1333-1384] in the Noh play Motomezuka.
Okay, I made one of those hells up.
January 2011
36 posts
“… the shadow of this tall black tree hides the forest that was your life.”
– Eduoard Levé, Suicide (via invisiblestories)
I shouldn’t have been allowed to read this book.
“And I said to myself: Everyone is attached to his own lament
as to a parachute....”
– Yehuda Amichai, from “Yad Mordechai,” Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld, translators. (via aubade)
Amichai. You’d be hard pressed to find me better than him.
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HMH Literature in Translation: The longlist for... →
mcnallyjackson:
hmhlit:
The longlist for 2011 Best Translated Book was announced today by Three Percent.
The 2011 BTBA Fiction Longlist (in alphabetical order by author):
The Literary Conference by César Aira, translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver (New Directions)
The Golden Age by Michal…
Aira, Ajvaz’s The Golden Age, and Walser’s Microscripts were all store favorites.
...
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“And though the calendar appeared to be continuing its slow plod whenever she...”
– Ida Hattemer-Higgins, The History of History
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“In one corner, piles of CD periodicals stood out from the jumble by their...”
– Love you, 2030s as imagined by 1990.
From Greg Egan’s story “The Caress”, published in Asimov’s, January of that year.
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There are Glaciers
David Vann’s new novel Caribou Island is the story of one family, four couples—transplants most—in the stubborn near-wilds of Pacific Alaska. It’s a novel about the ways they overlap and collapse and drive each other to folly. It’s an instantly endearing book, and that endearment is also perhaps the engine behind its few failings.
The book itself is attractive....
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“[T]he poet constitutes a definite disturbance to the business built up around...”
– Robert Musil, Posthumous Papers of a Living Author. Peter Wortsman translation.
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Cover Dilemmas
With the metal penis and semen/surf explosion, or without?
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“Presented with the alternative of love or a garbage disposal unit, young people...”
– Ivan Tchechgov, “Formulary for a new Urbanism”.
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Herman Melville Likes Your Beard
Or as he calls them, in order, in two chapters of White Jacket:
beards
the crop
suburbs of the chin
homeward-bounders
fly-brushes
long, trailing moss hanging from the bough of some aged oak
love-curls
Winnebago locks
carroty bunches
rebellious bristles
redundant mops
yellow bamboos
long whiskers
thrice-noble beards
plantations of hair
whiskerandoes
nodding harvests
viny locks
...
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A peek at the upcoming Cesar Aira
I basically just reblog New Directions now? Want this book so badly. Talked to another customer (the one I made buy Ghosts) about it yesterday and she can’t even read it until June. I’m not sorry.
newdirectionspublishing:
The cover for The Seamstress and the Wind by César Aira designed by Rodrigo Corral.
Coming your way June 2011. Easily his most mind-blowing concept for a...
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How to display ND Pearls (and other small books) →
Ridiculous. New Directions, there is no respectable bookseller wondering how to shelve your books. They are not out there building polyedra with gum and beeswax, hoping to somehow stack them into something like a functioning igloo. They are books. One imagines that if a body can’t figure out the complexities of displaying small books, one would perhaps also be kept away from infants and open...
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“I do advise keeping Phlebas. In fact I more’n advise. Phlebas is an...”
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Eliot/ Melville/ Escape
Eliot’s The Waste Land
Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell
And the profit and loss.
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
he passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel...
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“Are there no Moravians in the moon, that not a missionary has yet visited this...”
– Herman Melville, White Jacket.
Melville bemoaning warfare, prefiguring Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land and doubting, a century early, about Sagan’s absence of evidence.
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“The books we don’t read are full of warnings.”
– Javier Marias
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