Jozef Imrich, name worthy of Kafka, has his finger on the pulse of any irony of interest and shares his findings to keep you in-the-know with the savviest trend setters and infomaniacs.
''I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.''
-Kurt Vonnegut
“An American lawyer asked Paddy, ‘Why is it that whenever you ask an Irishman a question, he answers you with another question?’. “Who told you that?” Paddy replied
The truth about the Irish is much harder to pin, and much more elusive than they’re given credit for. There's even a line - attributed to the great Sigmund Freud telling - that says, “This is one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever.”
"None of these novels draws on familiar tropes of Australian literature,” State Library of NSW Mitchell Librarian Richard Neville said on behalf of the judges, “yet each brings a distinctive pitch of truth and insight into the Australian experience. (They) explore the restorative power of love, the pernicious influence of the past on the present, the tragedy of the present avoiding the past, the challenge of unconventional identities, the interweaving of lives across communities, the devastation of grief, and the war zone that is the media, masculinity and a small country town.”
In 2012, state of Queensland voted in a new premier – Campbell Newman. Carrottopish, Camp Newman, scrapped the state's Premier's Literary Awards so last year everyone laughed when a major publisher publicly rejected Newman's memoir and bookshops refused to stock book about him ...
Janos and his family are flying over the country. Janos says to his wife, "Luca, why don't I throw out a hundred-forint bill and make somebody happy?" "Oh Janos, why don't you throw out two fifty-forint bills and make two people happy?" His daughter chimes in, "Oh Pappa, why not throw out ten ten-forint bills and make ten people happy?" Then his son says, "Gee Pappa, why don't you just jump out and make everybody happy?"
Chicken paprikas, porkolt, pacal, szalonna, gyulai kolbasz, teli szalmi, hungarian paprika helps you to identify Hungarians culinary-wise. Best jokes about Hungarians are inside Morava River ...
A quirky Hungarian romance about two slaughterhouse workers who fall in love has surprisingly won the $60,000 Sydney Film Festival competition
Coincidences are funny things. Yesterday I read an old joke from Stalin’s time: Stalin has lost his pipe, and sends off Lavrenti Beria, the head of the KGB, to find it. A day later Stalin summons Beria to tell him that he has found the pipe, which had fallen into his boot. ‘But Comrade Stalin,’ expostulates Beria,’ I have already found five prisoners who have confessed to stealing it!’
The day before I heard another joke from a somewhat later period. ‘Why don’t Hungarian workers work?’ ‘Well, the working class is now, under Communism, the ruling executive class, and the executive class don’t work!’
Here’s another. ‘Why do the KGB go about in threes?’ ‘Well, one of them can read, and one can write. The third one is there to keep an eye on the two intellectuals!’ (auditing team analogies galore ;-)
Hungary's On Body and Soul, a tender love story set in a slaughterhouse, won the Golden Bear top prize Saturday at the Berlin film festival, Europe's first majorcinema showcase of the year
When eccentric novelist Ava Langdon, the heroine of Mark O’Flynn’s novel, leaves her manuscript in a Katoomba cafe, her frantic response is one any writer will understand.
After a waitress tells her that people forget to take umbrellas and jackets all the time and “one woman even left her baby here”, Ava retorts: “Well, you can always have another baby.” “I absolutely sympathise with that,” O’Flynn said yesterday after his novel, The Last Days of Ava Langdon, was shortlisted for the $60,000 Miles Franklin Literary Award. “I once accidentally deleted 30,000 words and was horrified, mortified.” O’Flynn, who has two adult children, is on an intriguing shortlist for the nation’s most important book prize. Not one of the five authors has been in contention before. “It’s gobsmacking,” O’Flynn said of his inclusion.
The other authors are Ryan O’Neill, who pinched the title of Miles Franklin’s most famous book for his satirical novel about Australian writers, Their Brilliant Careers, Emily Maguire for An Isolated Incident, Josephine Wilson for Extinctions and Philip Salom for Waiting.
Australian journalist and author Robert Wainwright has won the Biography of the Year at the 2017 British Sports Book Awards for his book Maverick Mountaineer (HarperCollins, published in the UK by A&U)
Wainwright’s book tells the story of George Finch, an Australian mountaineer, scientist, concert pianist and father of actor Peter Finch.
Former UK cricketer Mark Nicholas, who works as a cricket commentator in the UK and Australia, won Cricket Book of the Year for his memoir A Beautiful Game (A&U) The winners were announced at an event in London on 24 May. To see the full list of winners, click here
Walkley-nominated Australian journalists Robert Wainwright and PaolaTotaro “ knew or ought to have known” that when Martin Bryant's mother ...
It’s been a great year for the Labour party … from a literary perspective anyway. The 2016 parliamentary book awards, which were handed out on Tuesday, all went to left of centre authors or subjects: Alan Johnson’s The Long Winding Roadwon best memoir by a parliamentarian; Called to Account byMargaret Hodge (right), about the government’s use of public money, was the best non-fiction; Melvyn Bragg’s novel Now is the Time was the best fiction; and John Bew’s biography of Clement Attlee, Citizen Clem, won the title of best political book by a non-parliamentarian. The winners were voted for by parliamentarians and the ceremony presided over by Gisela Stuart MP, a former bookseller.
Ed Balls sadly didn’t score a 10 with these judges, but in September he proved to be popular with the book-buying public (though not as much as he was with the salsa-loving electorate of Strictly Come Dancing). His book Speaking Out was a bestseller, and is currently a fixture in books of the year lists. On the other hand, Ken Clarke’s memoir Kind of Blue was expected to be a hit, but fell rather flat, and was described in a review in this newspaper as “clumsy”, “shallow”, “smug” and “boring”.
Perhaps Labour figures are just more appealing to the book trade. Back in the summer, Theresa May was rearranging the bookshelves in No 10 before publishers realised that nobody had yet commissioned a biography of her. “In the last Labour leadership contest we had biographies of Yvette Cooper, Andy Burnham and Jeremy Corbyn ready to go,” confided Iain Dale of the publisher Biteback, whose Theresa May: The Path to Power by Rosa Prince will be published in January 2017. Perhaps biographies of May will do well in next year’s parliamentary book awards. Assuming, in these turbulent political times, that she is still prime minister by then ...
Gitka's Zdiar
