Dear Alexandra (and of course you can use my first name 🙂

I’ve read the Latin American authors in Spanish a while ago but judging by the quality of the publishing houses they should be good translations. I found a couple of Bolaño’s essays in The New York Review of Books if you are…[Read more]

Dear Carlos (may I?), thank you!

I’d be delighted about a contribution from you. To my shame, I haven’t read any of your suggestions — and now I will, asap.

Starting the journal was worth it for all recommendations in these forum alone.:)

Indeed!

Ah, speaking of Latin writers, how about Horace, On the Sublime?  Short, and big.

Hi Alexandra,

Your project sounds really cool, I hope I can send a contribution in the future.

As for suggestions, I thought of Orhan Pamuk’s The Naive and Sentimental Novelist and to include the Latin American tradition in the conversation: Roberto Bolaño’s Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles, and Speeches, 1998-2003, García Marquez’s Li…[Read more]

Thank you so much!

I’ve actually met Glyn Maxwell and we had a great talk on poetry (and yes, I’m very much into it; the topic of my own first book, Brodsky Translating Brodsky, was poetry in self-translation).

Do have a look at readingsjournal.net, it might suit you. (I’m starting this journal more or less on my own, in my spare time, and am…[Read more]

Thank you!

To which I would add the nonfiction of Kundera, Testaments Betrayed and The Art of the Novel.

Wonderful question, wonderful answers–I’ll just toss in four more: Borges, Seven Nights, Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, and in case anyone out there still considers poetry part of what we mean by “literary” (many non-litterateur friends of mine do, but I’m drawn to poetry-lovers), Muriel Rukeyser’s The Life of Poetry and Glyn M…[Read more]

I love Artful!

Such a pleasure to share tastes; I’d be delighted if you submitted to readingsjournal.net

Dear Steve,

thank you very much! All your suggestions are either books I like, or (incl. the beguilingly entitled work of your own) books that I probably will like. You are very warmly invited to join the journal I’m launching  as an author and/or reviewer.:)

Call for Papers and Reviewers

Best,

Alexandra

If you do recommend Azar Nafisi’s “Reading Lolita in Tehran,” I would also strongly recommend that you suggest that they read Fatemeh Keshavarz’s trenchant critique of it, “Jasmine and Stars: Reading More Than Lolita in Tehran.” Nafisi’s book is full of problems and, as Keshavarz argues, it–like Khaled Hosseini’s “Kite Runner” and many other…[Read more]

Reading Lolita in Tehran never grabbed me, but it sure resonated with a broad public and has been translated into many languages. Ali Smith’s Artful is a strange amalgam, in which a well-done, ghoulish narrative of grief drives some otherwise not terribly interesting literary remarks, but the novelty of the form deserves a look. Then there are…[Read more]

Hi Alexandra,

Books such as Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer come to mind, as do Jane Smiley’s 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel and Charles Dickens: A Life. In general it looks like literary biographies and collections of author letters are most likely to be read for pleasure. A good example is Phyllis Rose’s Parallel Lives: Five Victorian…[Read more]

Hi Alexandra,

Books such as Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer come to mind, as do Jane Smiley’s 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel and Charles Dickens: A Life. In general it looks like literary biographies and collections of author letters are most likely to be read for pleasure. A good example is Phyllis Rose’s Parallel Lives: Five Victorian…[Read more]