Interviews with Nabakov - scroll down for English interviews. Unfortunately, other than Lolita (and maybe his butterflies!), not many people have heard of Nabakov's other writings. These interviews should provide an insight into the man.
A Language (b)log
U Penn's Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing launches PennSound, an mp3 poetry library. Press release is here. Listen to sound files of single poems; read the manifesto; browse the author index; check out the webcast archive; and more (from the related Ubuweb) - (via Mefi)
Interview with Milan Kundera from 1985
Hari Menon reviews Twenty-Two Yards To Freedom: A Social History Of Indian Cricket by Boria Majumdar. An interesting way to explore the inter-relationship between cricket, so much a part of the ethos of India, atleast since independence, with the development of Indian society. Should make for an interesting read!
New York Review of Books and London Review of Books. More Book Reviews..
100 favourite literary characters.
Front List Books
Interview with Rebecca Goldstein, biographer of Kurt Godel
Literature for Children is a collection of the treasures of children's literature published largely in the United States and Great Britain from before 1850 to beyond 1950
Nineteenth-century novelist Emma Dunham Kelly-Hawkins, author of the little-read novels Megda and Four Girls at Cottage City, is getting relegated to the dustbowls of history and will be removed from The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers because she was probably white!" - (via Mefi). [Maybe it is (un)worthy enough to be forgotten because it is" dull, inane, and pedestrian"]
Oasis Books - an interesting bookstore in Chennai!
Article from NY Times on the World's Biggest Book Market - Beijing
Clarice Lispector, one of Brazil's most influential writers, described as the Kafka of Latin American fiction. Her works have been translated into film and dance and she is famous in literary circles. But she is almost unknown outside of them, particularly in the United States, where all her books combined sell a few thousand copies a year, mainly in Latin American studies courses on college campuses.
BooksWeLike collaborative book recommendations.
The Guardian's books to look forward to in 2005 and - 10 childrens books of the year
Nature Publishing Group's Connotea is an experimental bookmarking service for scientists. Created by Nature Publishing Group it lets you keep links to articles and websites you use and helps you find them again. It is also a place where you can discover new articles and websites through sharing links with other users. By saving your links and references to Connotea they are instantly on the web. (via Metafilter)
Who Let the Dogs In? : Incredible Political Animals I Have Known by MOLLY IVINS - "Covering the Reagan years to the present, this collection includes work from three Ivins books (not including Bushwacked) as well as other short published pieces. A proud liberal Texan, Ivins's best stuff hits close to home: she declares her home state "the National Laboratory for Bad Government" and pronounces Bush 43 a product of three Lone Star themes: religiosity, anti-intellectualism and machismo (she thinks the last trait faked)." - from Publishers Weekly
Loung Ung narratted her experiences growing up under the Khmer Rouge atrocities in her best-selling first novel, First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers. In her second book, Lucky Child, she narrates her experiences after coming to the US after fleeing Cambodia with her eldest brother and his wife and also the story of her sister, Chou, who remained behind in rural Cambodia. The book is a moving tribute to the strength of family and human resilience in the face of adversity, change, and uncertainty. View photos of author Loung Ung's 15-year journey to reunite with her family in Cambodia.
My lost city: Low Life author Luc Sante reminisces about a youth spent in the ruins of 1970s New York: Sante talked about the period a bit more in a 2004 interview with The Believer.
Read anything by Chinua Achebe , one of Africa's most influential writers
Writer's Almanac, a daily program of poetry and history hosted by Garrison Keillor on NPR
Kitabkhana
Reading Experience
Reader's Eye
If Thoreau had blogged!
I never was a sci-fi fan (books or movies!) but thought it interesting how, like in many other ventures, albeit for disparate reasons, women write under male pseudonymns over the years. Science fiction and fantasy author Andre Norton, who wrote the popular "Witch World" series, has died at age 93 of congestive heart failure at her home in Nashville. "Born Alice Mary Norton on Feb. 17, 1912, in Cleveland, she wrote more than 130 books in many genres during her career of nearly 70 years. She used a pen name - which she made her legal name in 1934 - because she expected to be writing mostly for young boys and thought a male name would help sales."
Pakistani paper seller gets Paris book deal for his life story
April 5th, 2005: Saul Bellow is dead.. His friend and protege Philip Roth has said of him, "The backbone of 20th-century American literature has been provided by two novelists William Faulkner and Saul Bellow. Together they are the Melville, Hawthorne, and Twain of the 20th century."
I often get confused between Bellow and JD Salinger (the wikipedia article on Salinger says that "he has been a life long student of Advaita Vedanta Hinduism, as described at length in An Adventure in Vedanta: J.D. Salinger's the Glass Family)
Bartleby.com poetry index
Project Gutenberg
Online-Literature.com
ebook archive PRIZE-WINNING BOOKS ONLINE Literature Online.
Also University of Adelaide Library E-Books and ManyBooks.net.
A great resource for Soviet Literature
And Bibliomania is the place I go to for free classic texts.
Classic Reader - Read Free Classic Books Online - currently includes 3061 works of literature (including 1703 short stories) by 320 authors.
The Penguin Classics Library Complete Collection
A good repository of information and e-books on Napoleonic warfare (from Metafilter). Like I mentioned elsewhere, I find information on wars and warfare to be of little interest but thought of bookmarking this repository for those that are interested in such things.
LibriVox - Free resource for public domain literature via podcast and soundfiles. Check out their catalog for the current list of available titles..
Full texts:
The Social Contract or Principles of Political Right & Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky
History of Pop-up & Moveable Books. Some great examples include:
- Alice in Wonderland (I remember reading an illustrated version in the mid-90s and had loved it. Am sure an illustrated book with pop-ups would be great.)
- The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: A Commemorative Pop-up by L. Frank Baum
- America the Beautiful: A Pop-up Book by Katherine Lee Bates
- The Night Before Christmas Pop-up by Robert Sabuda
- The Movable Mother Goose (Mother Goose Pop-Up) by Robert Sabuda
- The Twelve Days of Christmas : A Pop-Up Celebration by Robert Sabuda
- Cookie Count: A Tasty Pop-Up by Robert Sabuda
Bookcrossing is the practice of leaving a book in a public place to be picked up and read by others, who then do likewise and so the cycle continues. Works very well in the US...though the amazing system of public libraries here means almost everyone has access (with the negatives of duedate deadlines and overdue fines, ofcourse) to a large treasure trove of books...most of which, other than popular fiction like Grisham, Clancy, etc., go unread!(Maybe its just a really unique reading taste I have, but I cannot tell you the number of times I have been the first person to check out a book - ever!) Heard an interview with author, James Hynes about his latest book, Kings of Infinite Space on the Book Show. It sounds like an interesting read - mixing Dilbertian moments, moments from The Office (NBC's remaking the Peabody Award-winning British classic), with the supernatural, giving new meaning to the saying that "work is hell."
Blog entry on Robert Neuwirth's "Shadow Cities". "Neuwirth spent two years (courtesy of a MacArthur Foundation grant) living in four squatter neighborhoods around the world: Rocinha, in Rio, Brazil; Kibera, in Nairobi, Kenya; Sanjay Gandhi Nagar, in Mumbai, India; and Sultanbeyli, in Istanbul, Turkey. His time living in these neighborhoods has led to a book - Shadow Cities - and a blog, SquatterCity. His time in these communities has cemented his conviction that urban planners, NGOs and city governments need to stop thinking of squatters as outlaws and to start thinking of them as productive fellow citizens."
July 2005: Recently read an essay by Laura Hilldenbrand, published in the New Yorker last year (although I read it in The Best American Essays 2004 and it also made it to The Best American Magazine Writing 2004). Hilldenbrand is the author of the best selling book, Seabiscuit, which was made into a critically acclaimed movie. Her 1998 American Heritage article on Seabiscuit won the Eclipse Award for Magazine Writing, the highest award for Thoroughbred racing. In the essay she writes about her struggles with chronic fatigue syndrome (also known as Myalgic Encephalomyelitis), a near-debilitating condition that periodically leaves her bedbound and causes serious vision problems and vertigo.
The Invisible Library is a collection of books that only appear in other books. Within the library's catalog you will find imaginary books, pseudobiblia, artifictions, fabled tomes, libris phantastica, and all manner of books unwritten, unread, unpublished, and unfound. -(via Mefi)
World Literature Today Top 40 List: Celebrating 75 Years of Publishing Excellence: 1927-present
Very often a short story (even a novel, though its effect is more prominent in a short story) is defined by a great starting line. "I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to." starts 'Fat Girls in Des Moines', by Bill Bryson. It's one of 21 stories in the Granta Book of Travel. (link via Green Channel Blog)
Welcome to Bardworld - Leading Shakespeareans offer their contrasting views on the Bard. You can read his complete works online!
Save Our Short Story Campaign, initiated in 2002 by the writer Margaret Wilkinson to:
- Increase the number and visibility of high quality outlets for short fiction
- Give the short story form more prestige and a higher profile
- Enable writers to specialise in the short story form
- Encourage and promote exciting short fiction.
The Orange Prize for Fiction is UK's largest annual literary award for a single novel. This year's winner: Lionel Shriver for her seventh novel, We Need to Talk About Kevin.
The Irish author, John Banville brought off one of the biggest literary coups when he won the £50,000 Booker Prize for 2005 for his melancholy novel, The Sea, with the chairman's vote breaking a tie. Banville beat out such illustrious names as runner-up, Kazuo Ishiguro for Never Let Me Go , Julian Barnes for Arthur & George, Ian McEwan for Saturday, Salman Rushdie for Shalimar the Clown, J. M. Coetzee for Slow Man and Zadie Smith for On Beauty. - October 11, 2005
Harold Pinter has won the Literature Nobel Prize for 2005 - A great author, playright, screenplay writer, stage artist, and activist - but this quote was the best part for me...;) "I tend to think that cricket is the greatest thing that God ever created on earth - certainly greater than sex, although sex isn't too bad either"
Unable to attend the Nobel ceremony, Harold Pinter pre-recorded his lecture, in which he launched a scathing attack on George W Bush and Tony Blair, saying they must be held to account for feeding the public "a vast tapestry of lies." Most politicians "are interested not in truth but in power and the maintenance of that power" and politicians feel it is "essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives". the 75-year-old said. His speech was pre-recorded as Pinter was admitted to hospital this week.
Last year's word of the year was BLOG, as chosen by Merriam-Webster. This year the The New Oxford American Dictionary has chosen PODCAST. If you have been living under a rock (as I have been!), read more about it at the wiki entry on podcasting...
Couple of Interviews and links to reviews of books by the acclaimed Japanese author, Haruki Murakami
Sinclair Lewis's 1935 novel It Can't Happen Here envisioned an America in thrall to a homespun facist dictator. Newly reissued, it's as unsettling a read as ever. Reminds me of the other popular book of this year, The Plot Against America by Phillip Roth, which explores the fears, both imagined and real, experienced by a Jewish family after Charles 'Spirit of St. Louis' Lindbergh, an alleged "rabid isolationist, Nazi sympathizer, and a crypto-fascist" defeats FDR for the Presidency in 1940.
Turkish author, Orhan Pamuk faces charges of 'publicly denigrating the Turkish identity' for remarks about the alleged mass killing of Kurds and Ottoman Armenians - deaths Turkey insists cannot be classed as genocide. He writes and speaks eloquently about this forthcoming landmark trial. EurActiv offers a good overview of the international concern expressed around this trial, and even Amnesty has released a statement expressing their concern against this "threat to freedom of expression ... the frequent use of Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code (TPC) to prosecute human rights defenders, journalists and other members of civil society peacefully expressing their dissenting opinion". More information at these links.
At Slate Stephen Metcalf wonders: Is Nabokov's masterpiece still shocking ? -- and finds: Lolita turns 50 this year, and having stayed so perverse, it remains fresh as ever. To fully appreciate its perversity, though, one must first appreciate that it is not obscene.
Its that time of the year... meaningless 'lists of the year' but hey..atleast it provides a good compendium of books of interest to browse...some you may have heard of and some you may have missed given the large volume of published literature! It is amazing how difficult it is to publish even though thousands of books are published every year!
For starters, Books of the year from the Observer, The Independent's Books of the Year list and 100 Notable
Books of the Year from the New York Times.
A shorter list from NYT that deems to rank the top-10 books of the year...
Kafka On The Shore by Haruki Murakami. Review On Beauty by Zadie Smith. Review Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld. Review Saturday by Ian McEwan. Review Veronica by Mary Gaitskill. Review The Assassins' Gate - America in Iraq by George Packer. Review D E Kooning An American Master by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan.Review The Lost Painting by Jonathan Harr. Review PostwaR - A History of Europe Since 1945 by Tony Judt. Review The Year Of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. Review
Also see: The Books of the Year 2005 symposium at ReadySteadyBook The Underrated Writers Project at Syntax of Things (which admirably also offers useful links) The Year in Books at Slate Top Shelf 2005 - the 25 favorite books of the year of The Village Voice (-via Complete Review)
Ironical that while writing about a book which is trying to fight sexual stereotypes, this NY times article uses a title which does not really do justice to the theme of the book. The Almond by Nedjma, translated to English from the French by C. Jane Hunter, is not only a 'Story of sex by a Muslim woman' and is motivated by more than a desire to titillate. Obviously, the reviewer failed to follow the same. Read another review here. Other recent books of note from the Middle-East... In "The Lanterns of Seville," Abd el-Salam al-Ujayli spins a dazzling tale of a search for the lost richness of Arabic culture in Spain. In "Darkness" and "Ahem," Ibrâhîm Samû`îl illuminates the most repressive corners of a world without any such lanterns. In Haifa' Bitar's "Fatima" and Hasiba Abd al-Rahman's "First Breaths of Freedom," two powerful women writers explore the response of strong women characters to poverty and injustice. And finally, check out Assia Djebbar's L'Amour, la fantasia. (-via WordswithoutBorders.org). Ferial J. Ghazoul profiles Tuareg novelist Ibrahim al-Koni in Desert passions, and they also offer his address at a recent International Conference on Desert Literature, Miracles of regeneration. One of his books has been translated into English, as The Bleeding of the Stone. - Adapted from Literary Saloon
Ethiopian poet and playwright Tsegaye Gebre-Medhin died on Saturday in a New York hospital. Read a 1998 bio and interview by Wendy Belcher, which appeared in the Ethiopian Review. More about Tsegaye here and here and here. You can also read his poem Nile - Gleaned from Uma's blog post. Also, London, Ethiopian bloggers, and many others remember him..