“He seemed to be quite unexpectedly (for human despair seldom leads to great truths) on the verge of a simple solution of the universe but was interrupted by an urgent request.” Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin.
According to the Literary Encyclopedia, Pnin is the most accessible of Nabokovs novels. I personally found it rather boring, but even in his less interesting works (again, a subjective matter) little beauties can be found.
When fellow Portuguese writer, Jose Saramago, won the Nobel prize in 1998, many people called to congratulate him, after they had called Lobo Antunes to tell him that the prize should have gone to him instead.
It is hard to find anything worthwhile in English on the Portugese writer Antonio Lobo Antunes. Luckily the writer Gonzalo Bar made up for this great loss on his own blog; Gonzalo Bar, all rights reserved
To Greeks of the generation that fought the Persian Wars, memorizing vast swaths of the Homeric poems and being able to comment on them with facility constituted a liberal education in itself.
More on Alberto Manguel’s new book at The Washington Post
Podhoretz detected a suppressed cry of brutality in the Beats , which he summarized as kill the intellectuals who can talk coherently, kill the people who can sit still for five minutes at a time, kill those incomprehensible characters who are capable of getting seriously involved with a woman, a job, a cause.
More on the generation of 58 at New York Times
What is Casanova’s biographer to do? The retired libertine did the job so well himself in his Histoire de ma vie that no one could possibly improve on his story.
His first sexual encounter was with a pair of sisters whom he enjoyed simultaneously; much later he would enjoy his own daughter in the same bed as her mother.
A review of a new biography on Casanova by Ian Kelly at Telegraph
The New Yorker asked several authors to read a short story. In this episode Richard Ford reads Reunion a story written by John Cheever
You can also subscribe to the monthly fiction podcast to hear the New Yorker archives chosen by a current fiction writer like Richard Ford .
A royal personage was making a tour through his provinces and noticed a man in the crowd who bore a striking resemblance to his own exalted person. He beckoned to him and asked: “Was your mother at one time in service in the Palace?” “No, your Highness,” was the reply, “but my father was.”
Mary Beard discusses two books on laughter and jokes in the NYRB?Cartoon by SCHOT
You’re dealing with nuance and ear and meter, and one syllable off in something I write in a gag ruins the laugh. . . . In actual one-liners, there’s something succinct, you do something that you do in poetry.
Lennard Davis discusses the man behind Woody Allen in The Common Review
