Literary Links

Ernst Weiss

Podcasts with Richard Powers, Rebecca Goldstein, August Kleinzahler, Orhan Pamuk, and many, many more

Eileen Battersby on Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin, followed by an interview with Fallada's son
An excerpt from Herta Müller's Everything I Own I Carry With Me

David Auerbach on László Krasznahorkai

Video of Thomas Mann at the beach (wearing a tie)

The Canetti family: "In some Jewish families, the least admirable member may be the one who wins a Nobel Prize."

Stephen Vizinczey on Central European classics

William Gass on Knut Hamsun

Coverage of the latest pieces on Robert Walser

A description of P. D. Smith's Metaphor and Materiality: German Literature and the World-view of Science 1780-1955 (on Goethe, Büchner, Stifter, Musil & Brecht)
Christopher Byrd on Ernst Weiss' Georg Letham

Geoffrey O'Brien on Kleist

Coetzee on Sebald and the Uncanny

Providentia blogs on the Kaspar Hauser story

David Askew on Jonathan Swift
Kevin Hartnett on Haruki Murakami

Colin Marshall on the 'scientifically surreal, eerily erotic novels of Kobo Abe'
Joshua Willey on Orhan Pamuk's Museum of Innocence

CIM is collecting the tributes to David Markson

Allan Massie on a new collection of essays about Jane Austen

Jim Thompson -- 'a dime-store Dostoevsky'?

Kierkegaard, ignoble alchemists & battling medievalists

Mikhail Bulgakov

Northwestern University Press will soon release a book by Daniel L. Medin called Three Sons: Franz Kafka and the Fiction of J. M. Coetzee, Philip Roth, and W. G. Sebald. I can't find it on the Northwestern site yet, but it looks like it'll be issued some time this month or next.

Mr. Waggish has a new post on Coetzee.

Emmanuel Levinas' Notebooks in Captivity

Auden on Kierkegaard (1944), Updike's review of a Kierkegaard biography (2005), a review of a new book on Kierkegaard (on faith & love), and (though I linked to this before) a review of Hannay's new translation of Concluding Unscientific Postscript

I don't like Nietzsche, but lots of great philosophers do. Here are the recordings of papers given at a Nietzsche conference in Chicago (ht Leiter Reports)

Hans Gabriel reviews Vincent Kling's translation of Gert Jonke's Blinding Moment: Four Pieces about Composers (see this old post for links to more of Kling's work on Jonke)

Laurence Mackin on Mikhail Bulgakov's novels

The 'curiously relevant prose of von Kleist,' and Michael Dirda on Kleist (ht Books, Inq.)

In the Telegraph, John Lanchester on the fading of work-life from novels along with reviews of books on a WWII spy ruse involving Ian Fleming and on Simon Winder's Germania, which was also reviewed in the Financial Times, in The Scotsman and in the Spectator
A review of four books about German artists (Kirchner, Dix, Richter & Corinth)

Several prominent latter-day alchemists (economists) nominated for Ignoble Prize (ht Leiter)

Hugely ticked & mightily peeved medievalists fight back, with many philosophers on their side -- or: how the dogma that 'Market value is the only value' is distorting academia in the UK (ht BF's Omnivore). The broader Benthamite (or perhaps Reavers') assault on the humanities in the UK inspired this impressive broadside by Simon Blackburn.

Liz Phair driving through the desert to a NASCAR race & eco-consciousness-raising conference (ht BF's Omnivore)

Kay Redfield Jamison interviewed on Aussie radio
Herta Müller and 'the evil of banality'

Review of Jay Rubin's new translation of Natsume Soseki's Sanshiro (with an Introduction by Haruki Murakami)

Sebald, Shakespeare, Josipovici, Bentham's mummy and so on

Theda Bara

A neat article on Prague and Kafka

An interview with Susan Bernofsky on translating Robert Walser

A roundup of choice Walser links from the past few years

Another review of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky's Memories of the Future

A new translation of Theodor Fontane's poem, 'The Tragedy of Afghanistan' (1859)

A review of Hannay's translation of Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript

Gladstone: the grandest of old men

Via Maitresse, the new translation of de Beauvoir's Second Sex has errors, hopefully to be corrected in time for the US release of this work

Will Self's Sebald Lecture

'Weavers, scholars, and writers, Sebald claims, tend “to suffer from melancholy and all the evils associated with it, [and] it is understandable given the nature of their work, which forced them to sit bent over, day after day, straining to keep their eye on the complex patterns they created.”'

The Mookse & the Gripes on Sebald's Rings of Saturn

'Love Across the Borders' by Gabriel Josipovici

Notes on Josipovici's Everything Passes by Paul Griffiths, Mr. Waggish, Stephen Mitchelmore, Richard Crary, and Dan Visel.

Aussie radio is on to Albert Camus, the James Dean of philosophy

More antipodean radio -- this time on David Eagleman, neuroscientist & novelist

Bellow-ing away at depression

A brief review of Breon Mitchell's new translation of The Tin Drum

Herta Müller's folk (with a tantalizing remark in the 4th paragraph about the roots of the Dracula story)

A three-week workshop on writing theology with Marilynn Robinson in Princeton (ht F&T)

Issa rocks out with a jukebox full of lit rock (ht Books, Inq.)

Bentham's mummy, Ginsberg and Kafka in one post

'There are more things in heaven and earth than ...,' -- okay, now let's look at some philosophers on Shakespeare. Here's a review (via Books, Inq.) of Colin McGinn's book on the bard, and McGinn's review of a book on Iago, and Martha Nussbaum's review from last year of McGinn's book along with Nuttall's and Zamir's

Stücke

Lotte Lenya

20 of Trakl's poems translated by James Wright & Robert Bly

3 of Walser's stories translated by Damion Searls (ht Wandering with Robert Walser)

Bildung Mendelssohn

Carolyn Kelly's article on Herta Müller

"Ernst Weiss ... was a physician and creative writer [who] found a way to integrate the disciplines. The best of his books concern medicine and medical workers .... Weiss was born in 1882 outside Brünn, Austro-Hungary, now Brno, Czech Republic, and grew up in towns throughout Moravia and, later, in Prague and Vienna, where he obtained his medical degree in 1908. After practicing in Berne, Berlin, and Vienna (in the last under Dr. Julius Schnitzler, Arthur’s brother), he contracted tuberculosis, and went to recover on voyages aboard the liner Austria to India and Japan."

Thomas McGonigle recommends works by Heimito von Doderer (and Peter Handke among others): "He is equal of Robert Musil and has the advantage of having completed his great books."

'The Dark Side of the Enlightenment' -- "Romantics, Expressionists and Existentialists have all claimed [Heinrich von Kleist] as an inspiration. Kafka called him a "blood-brother." But Kleist belongs to no literary school and remains, as Thomas Mann observed, in a class uniquely his own. Outside the German-speaking lands, he is all too little read." (ht Dave Lull via Books, Inq.)

Mr. Waggish on Musil and Kant

Dan O'Hara interviews the creators of Hochhaus, a radio adaptation of Ballard's High-Rise

Update (Dec. 29): George Steiner on Thomas Bernhard

A logophilist on Herta Müller's The Passport