During a recent search for public domain art to spruce up this blog, it came to my attention that there are a lot of fantastic portrayals of women and girls reading—or at least holding books while being interrupted or drifting—out there. In a different kind of article, I might theorize as to why it is … More 16 Great Old Paintings of Women and Girls Reading
Patricia Highsmith is a literary wildcard. Her work may be considered amateurish by book snobs whose primary concern is high art, and too fully-formed for genre fans whose primary concern is entertainment. But I’ve gotten the impression that neither of these phenomena is the norm. Rather, it seems like readers generally love her for having … More Patricia Highsmith’s Novels: The Best, the Worst and the Weirdly Intriguing
I discovered manga author Inio Asano years ago through one of the inter-language accidents of fate I love: I picked up Volume One of What a Wonderful World! in a used bookstore, translated from Japanese into French, in an edition that I can today not even find on Amazon.fr. At the time, I didn’t know anything about … More Inio Asano’s Tokyo On-screen: E-reading “Solanin” and “What a Wonderful World!”
Last year at the Milwaukee Festival of Films in French, I saw Tom à la ferme (Tom on the Farm), the new Xavier Dolan flick at the time. I enjoy the sharp visual appeal and colorful, intimate light of Dolan’s directorial style, and this was no exception. The previews made the movie look like something akin to Louis … More Bilingual Theatrics of Identity and Grief in “Tom à la Ferme” by Michel Marc Bouchard
Writing a novel is easy. That’s not my opinion. In fact, it goes against my own now-educated opinion, but it’s the impression you might come away with after reading Her Father’s Daughter by Marie Sizun. To be precise, I’m talking about the translation of Sizun’s novel by Adriana Hunter (who I’ve figured to the best of my … More A Fairy Tale Day with “Her Father’s Daughter” by Marie Sizun
Whatever your opinion of Paul Auster, he’s an interesting guy. His translations, his autobiographical writings (like the endearingly funny Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure) and his novels (including The New York Trilogy, a surrealistic take on noir thrillers) all offer different pieces of what may not even be a single puzzle. While I … More New Huge Paul Auster Novel Coming in 4 3 2 1…
Recently, I had a dream that I believe was brought on, at least in part, by the recent English-language release of the novel Voroshilovgrad by Ukrainian lit superstar Serhiy Zhadan, translated by Riley-Costigan Humes and Isaac Wheeler for Deep Vellum Publishing. In this dream, I was working at a job I had years ago, only it wasn’t years ago, … More Going Off the Rails with Serhiy Zhadan’s “Voroshilovgrad”
You may have heard that a lot of English words come from French. That’s interesting in theory, but what would it actually look like if you could see it? What if you could see linguistic influences in colors, like an etymologist with synaesthesia? I started to wonder about this and also wondered what would happen … More Insidious Intent: “J. Alfred Prufrock” as an Etymological Map
Every so often, an interesting book comes out of nowhere. In much the same way, the two main characters in PTG Man’s A Very Human Place are apt—or perhaps more accurately, doomed—to appear unannounced in town after town and sow their own weird brand of destruction. Samil and Lilit (otherwise known as Sam and Lil) … More “A Very Human Place” in the Middle of Noplace
Edith Wharton was a brilliant writer whose work remains relevant today. House of Mirth explored the constraints of economic and social structures in her own branch of New York high society in a believable and intriguing way. However, to tell it like it is, she had a tendency to put her characters through arguably unnecessary shit. … More 5 Reasons Why “Ethan Frome” is 50 Shades of Dreary, Dreary Gray
LIT ALL OVER 