Recommended Reading: This Atlantic article on the life of Henning Mankell, author of the Kurt Wallander series. The author said, “When I write, I always try to reflect the reality we live in, a reality that is becoming rougher and more violent. This violence and its impact on people around it is what I try to reflect in Wallander. But reality always surpasses the poem.”
Remembering Mankell
Everyone has his problems
With a deep look at the history of pronouns and a close reading of the lake has no saint, Dana Levin provides a thoughtful look at the everyday problems caused by “he,” “she,” and “they”.
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RIP, Shirley Hazzard
“Ms. Hazzard’s fiction is dense with meaning, subtle in implication and tense in plot, often with disaster looming: A shipwreck tears away the parents of tiny children. A man who has waited a lifetime for a woman loses her at the last moment.” Novelist Shirley Hazzard, whose several books – including The Transit of Venus and the National Book Award-winning The Great Fire – received much acclaim, has died at 85, reports The New York Times. Also worth reading, her “Art of Fiction” interview with The Paris Review from 2005.
Talking to Ourselves
“Like walkie-talkies that require a button be pressed to speak and released to hear, does reading require that either the voice of the author or the voice of the reader’s consciousness be silenced at any given moment? Such an analogy suggests that reading is an act of hospitality toward another’s mind, in which we silence our voice in courtesy to the voice of another’s consciousness, a voice that alternates with our own in conversation.” John Biguenet on silent reading.
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China Miéville Interviewed by BLDGBLOG
BLDGBLOG, which has “always been interested in learning how novelists see the city,” interviewed China Miéville about “the conceptual origins of the divided city featured in his… award-winning novel The City & The City,” among other things. Architects, fans of urban decay, and general lit nerds are going to have a field day with this link, I promise you.
A Chinese Finnegan
“May God give me the courage to finish it:” The London Review of Books profiles one woman’s attempt to translate Finnegans Wake into Mandarin Chinese.
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