“I am glad not to have been elected a member, because I have no desire to lay down twenty-five rubles in dues for the right to be bored.”
If I didn’t already have sufficient reason to admire Chekhov as a man and writer, that simple sentence would cinch it. The idea of joining anything is repellent, especially to a writer who values his time and independence. In this case, Chekhov has been invited to the formal opening ball for something called the Society for Arts and Literature in Moscow. He is writing to his friend and editor Alexi Suvorin on this date, Nov. 3, in 1888. Chekhov decides to attend the opening but not to join.
The job of the critic is changing, says Lionel Shriver. It's not to assess a book’s storytelling, but to castigate writers guilty of any Crimes of the Imagination
FORCED MARRIAGE: New Bride Accidentally Kills 17 People While Attempting to Poison Her Husband
Something Is Wrong On the InternetMedium. John S
At DeutscheWelle Gero Schliess has a Q & A with Elif Safak: 'Erdogan is the most devisive politician in Turkey's modern history' (and, yes, the DW copy editor missed that headline misspelling ...).
"These are liquid times", she notes (and, yes, the translators also maybe missed something there ...).
Something Is Wrong On the InternetMedium. John S
At DeutscheWelle Gero Schliess has a Q & A with Elif Safak: 'Erdogan is the most devisive politician in Turkey's modern history' (and, yes, the DW copy editor missed that headline misspelling ...).
"These are liquid times", she notes (and, yes, the translators also maybe missed something there ...).
To Live (tr. Michael Berry) and Chronicle of a Blood Merchant (tr. Andrew Jones) were translated into English in the 1990s, but I kept hitting a brick wall with the American publisher.
9 books to warm your cold, bitter heart this winter
‘Made for Love’ book review: Wildly funny tale of technology and love
"Last year at the annual computer graphics conference SIGGRAPH, they debuted a new version of the game, called I Am A Robot, that allowed groups of people to don headsets and become genderless robots at either a ballet recital, cocktail gathering, or dance party. The response from participants was surprising – men in suits who swore they wouldn’t dance became entirely different people when in the genderless VR world – but it was the experience of two volunteers that moved Daffy most: one had social anxiety and had struggled to enjoy herself at the conference until she put the headset on and, inhibitions gone, danced and laughed for the first time in days. Another said they felt comfortable being gender-free for the first time in their life." … [Read More]
In This Day And Age, Is There Any Point In Knowing The Bible? (Yea, Verily)…
As literary scholar Grant Shreve argues, themes, characters, and memes from the Bible are everywhere in American culture, even in 2017. (Besides, he says, knowing your Bible might have helped you figure out what the hell was going on in mother!.) … [Read More]
