In 1962, Samuel Beckett wrote “Play.” Originally intended to be a stage production, the piece has now been adapted as a short film starring Alan Rickman, Kristin Scott-Thomas and Juliet Stepherson. Come for the Beckett writing (full text can be found here), but stay for the disembodied heads-in-urns.
“Yes, strange, darkness best”
Tuesday New Release Day: Waldman, Kline
A pair of debuts are making waves this week. Amy Waldman’s The Submission ponders an alternate present in which a Muslim man is the anonymous winner of the search for a design to build the 9/11 memorial at Ground Zero. Ernest Kline’s Player One is a “genre-busting,” pop culture-infused take on the virtual reality future that awaits us.
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“Too pretty, dreamlike mimicry!”
Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil. And earlier: Bishop, translation, and the transmutation of loss.
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Plant That (Literary) Flag
“In no particular order, except one of hallelujah, here’s a necessarily partial list of some other living Korean American writers whose work or person, or both, I’ve had the great good luck of encountering”….you’ll have to read the interview for the lengthy list as well as the thoughts of four Korean American writers who gathered at the behest of R.O. Kwon to discuss the influence and impact of Alexander Chee. It’s full of beautiful insights from Kwon, Nicole Chung, Alice Sola Kim, and Matthew Salesses such as “Alex said he ‘wanted to plant that flag in the culture,’ and until he said that I don’t know if I’d thought about it as a reason to write. The need to exist in the canon, in the literary world. I found that very powerful, and very brave”. Chee’s newest book is an essay collection, How to Write An Autobiographical Novel, that we eagerly anticipated last month.
Bookstore Boon
The shuttering of Borders locations across the country, an “unusually vibrant selection” of new releases, and “customers who seem undeterred by pricier titles” have contributed to “surprisingly strong sales for many bookstores” across the country.
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Hardly “has now”. This was released in 2002 as part of the Beckett on Film project.
Yep. The whole series is worth viewing, though, particularly Atom Egoyan’s take on KRAPP’S LAST TAPE.
I was going to say the same–Krapp’s Last Tape is fantastic, as is most of the Beckett on Film series.
Strange little article here but sharing this adaptation of “Play” can never be a bad thing. And, as mentioned, the DVD collection this is from is a great introduction to Beckett’s work.