Margaret Drabble reviews Barbara Pym's An Academic Question: "How I wish we had met properly, with time to talk over these matters. One thing she and I share is an irresistible urge to quote poetry in our fiction, often quite inappropriately, a tendency she seems to have restrained in An Academic Question. Was this deliberate? We shall never know, and it’s too late to ask."
Arndt Britschgi looks back at Katherine Mansfield's 'The Garden Party'.
John le Carré interviewed on April 3 on the CBC.
Sam Jordison blogs at the Guardian about Elizabeth Taylor,'one of the best English novelists of the 20th century.'
David Vaughan interviews Zdeněk Beran about Charles Dickens' influence on Czech literature: 'Jaroslav Hašek, the author of The Good Soldier Švejk, was inspired by one of Charles Dickens’ characters, the unforgettable Sam Weller from The Pickwick Papers. It’s sure that he modelled his Good Soldier Švejk on this character, and even the conversation strategies, I would say, are taken from the character of Sam Weller.'
"Daniel Medin and Scott Esposito discuss the melancholy and pleasure in the most recent collection of W.G. Sebald’s poetry to appear in English, Across the Land and the Water: Selected Poems 1964-2001. ... In the second half of the episode, Scott Esposito interviews Benjamin Moser, author of Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector."
From the Irish Times: "The wonderful French writer Jean-Paul Kauffmann followed the exiled Napoleon to his final lair on St Helena in The Dark Room at Longwood (1991). Now he sets off to explore a country that no longer exists, Courland, a strangely empty buffer state and part of present-day Latvia."
Two on Krasznahorkai: from last March, Adam Levy's review of László Krasznahorkai's Satantango. From May 9, Theo Tait's review of same.
Dezsö Kosztolányi's Skylark reviewed at Hungry Like the Woolf (with links to more reviews). Amy Henry on Kosztolányi's recently translated Kornél Esti (written in 1933). Here's an overview of that collection on a site dedicated to Hungarian literature.
By Steve Moyer: "Stefan Żeromski, who lived and wrote in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Poland, created superb novels and yet is little known in the English-speaking world."
