Reviews, anniversaries & re-issues

Antonina Pirozhkova, an engineer who designed several stations in the Moscow subway system, and who was Isaac Babel's common-law wife, and about whom I learned from Elif Batuman's funny book, The Possessed

A map of Turkey's reading culture. Among the findings: the most popular Turkish authors are Ömer Seyfettin, Ayşe Kulin and Orhan Pamuk, and people in the northern province of Tokat prefer detective novels. No word on William S. Burroughs' popularity -- one of his books is being investigated in Turkey for 'incompliance with moral norms' and 'hurting people’s moral feelings.'

The Hindu's review of Orhan Pamuk's Naive and Sentimental Novelist: the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures. Here's Alberto Manguel discussing the same book. 

There's a Nabokov Museum in St. Petersburg

An article by Gerard Smyth in the Irish Times on the centenary of Czeslaw Milosz's birth

Chandrahas Choudhury on George Szirtes' translation of Sandor Marai's Portraits of a Marriage

Marjorie Perloff reviews a new book on Georg Trakl: 'Christian Hawkey’s brilliant Ventrakl, which puts Trakl’s tragic life squarely into the poetic equation, testifies to the enormous change that has come over lyric poetry in the twenty-first century.'

A clip from Barbara Gowdy's 1993 interview with Leonard Cohen:

Robert Boyers reviews Anthea Bell's translation of Stefan Zweig's Journey into the Past.

Jesse Freedman reviews Stefan and Lotte Zweig's South American Letters

Amelia Atlas on Joseph Roth's Radetzky March

Willard Spiegelman on The Leopard: 'If one mark of a great novelist is the ability to forgive everything by understanding everything, then [Giuseppe] Tomasi [di Lampedusa]'s only rivals are George Eliot, Tolstoy and Proust.'

A review of a collection of lectures by Natsume Soseki (published by Columbia Univ Press)

Finnegan's Wake on-line, with glosses for the puzzling words and phrases

Nicholas Allen reviews R. F. Foster's Words Alone re. Yeats' intellectual origins

A newly recovered story by Daphne du Maurier 

Brendan Behan at the pub:


Jane Smiley on the re-issue of Nancy Mitford's novels

Paul Theroux on the 'the trouble with autobiography'

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy

Here's an extensive site by the Australian Broadcast Corporation (with several audio clips) to mark the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible 

Three talks by the Archbishop of Canterbury on Narnia

Loads o'links on theology, philosophy & lit

At Bloggingheads, Daniel Schultz and Peter Beinart discuss Reinhold Niebuhr. Elsewhere, Schultz chides David Brooks for misinterpreting Niebuhr (one of President Obama's favourite philosophers). Here's Mike Wallace interviewing Niebuhr in 1958. And here's a discussion of Niebuhr by Gary Dorrien and Kevin Mattson from last November on Minnesota Public Radio

Ernst Cassirer -- Emily Grosholz on his humanism (with a quick survey of the neo-Kantians)

Heidegger makes it into Wired 's science blog

Vivian Gornick reviews Michael Sandel's book on justice, which is also reviewed by Richard Reeves (along with Sen's book on justice). Sen devoted his Demos Annual Lecture to the topic 'Power and Capability'

And here's a justice free-for-all (with Sandel, Walzer, Nussbaum, Pollitt, etc.)

David Harvey's guide to Marx's Capital

Judith Butler interviewed (ht Silliman's Blog)

Alan Saunders interviews Alan Hájek on probability on Aussie radio

On Bernard Baars' 'global workspace' theory of consciousness
A. J. Ayer's doctor has spoken about Ayer's near-death experience
A review of the Archbishop of Canterbury's book on Dostoevsky

Speaking of stimulating Anglicans, John Polkinghorne was interviewed (ht Books, Inq.)

A. N. Wilson wrote an introduction to the Gospel According to Matthew (ht 3:AM)

Baudelaire & the Beats (several neat YouTube clips of pop depictions of beats)

A biography of Dr. Seuss

Will Self on Bulgakov's White Guard

The English trans. of Michael Maar's book Speak, Nabokov received a couple of good reviews

On the Hungarian lit front, Deborah Eisenberg likes Dezso Kosztolanyi's Skylark

And the Neglected Books site has a piece on Miklos Bánffy's Transylvanian trilogy, about which the Telegraph raved in 2007 (and again in 2010)

Reading Uwe Johnson in NY

Vertigo digs up an early review of Sebald's Emigrants by Gabriel Josipovici
I hope Patrick White wins the 'lost' Man Booker Prize -- it'll serve him right

Denis Donoghue on Yeats, Pound and Eliot

I linked to reviews of these two books in my last load o'links: Germania is reviewed in the WSJ and John Gray reviews World That Never Was

The Economist on Moses Montefiore: "He joined forces with middle-class religious dissenters and evangelicals to help end the slave trade, underwriting along with Rothschild a £15m loan to finance abolition in the West Indies."

Elaine Showalter reviews Hilary Spurling's book on Pearl Buck. Here's Claudia FitzHerbert's review

Someone's started a reading group for At Swim--Two Birds
When I read something by Theodore Dalrymple, I want either to stand up and cheer or to punch my pillow. He's interviewed here

On-line discussion forum for the Chicago Manual of Style. (This marks me as deviant, but I really fell in love with this manual while writing my dissertation.)

China Miéville on J. G. Ballard's Complete Stories

Patti Smith interviewed on KCRW. (ht 3:AM)

Three reviews of a new book on Irving Thalberg, Sr., along with an interview with the author of an older book on him. Thalberg's son, Irving Thalberg, Jr., was a philosophy professor in Chicago