Michael Ugarte, translator of Shadows of your Black Memory by Donato Ndongo, was recently interviewed by Syndicate Mizzou about his research on Spanish colonialism in Africa, the literature of exile, and democracy after colonization.
Staten Island has the lowest profile of the five New York boroughs, but from The Godfather to The Wu Tang Clan, it has cemented its place in New York character and history. New York Calling essayists will talk about the fascinating culture of the Island on Saturday, November 3 at 8:00 p.m. at the Everything Goes Book Cafe, 208 Bay Street, in the Tompkinsville neighborhood on Staten Island.
Staten Island native essayist Steve Maluk, Village Voice food critic Robert Sietsema, and photographer and New York Calling co-editor Brian Berger will lead a lively evening of words, photos, and discussion that's sure to interest everyone. The event has garnered local attention, including on Dan Icolari's Walking Is Transportation blog.
New York Calling event at Everything Goes Book Cafe
Check out more postings about Staten Island on Brian Berger's official New York Calling blog
Learn more about New York Calling
New York Calling essayists Luc Sante, Tim McLoughlin, and Brian Berger will be reading from their pieces on Wednesday, October 24th at 7:00 p.m. at Spoonbill & Sugartown, 218 Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn, NY. An audience Q&A and book signing will follow the sure to be lively reading, which has already been previewed on several local Brooklyn blogs.
Spoonbill & Sugartown Books
Check out the author's official New York Calling blog
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Newly published this month is The Other Venice, a lyrical collection of nonfiction essays written by prolific essayist Predrag Matvejević and translated by Russell Valentino. Matvejević plumbs the depths of Venice's canals and peers into its narrow alleys, reimagining this ancient city through the people, places, and ideas that flourished within its confines. Whether the trattoria and taverns that line the canals, the culinary history of regional bread and breadmaking, or the excavation of islands and ships from swampy lagoons, The Other Venice infuses the city with the mystery and intrigue of ancient traditions and treasured secrets. An intimate and compelling travel memoir, The Other Venice sweeps us into an unfamiliar cityscape where the mysteries of the Old World mingle with modern life.
Read The Other Venice press release.
Learn more about The Other Venice.
New York Calling essayists Tom Robbins, Margaret Morton, and Brian Berger will be reading this Friday, October 19th at 7:00pm at Bluestocking Books, 172 Allen Street in New York City.
Time Out New York recently praised the book saying, "With Rudy running for President and Hilly Kristal dead, the timing couldn't be better for New York Calling: From Blackout to Bloomberg. This fascinating, enlightening and sometimes irritating collection of essays pokes through the rubble of the past three decades and asks: What is the Apple without its worms—without its grifters, goombahs, B-boys, bohos and bums?"
Read the Time Out New York review
Check out the New York Calling author blog
Learn more about New York Calling
Publisher's Weekly reviewed Reaktion's forthcoming New York Calling: From Blackout to Bloomberg edited by Marshall Berman and Brian Berger in the July 9th, 2007 issue.
Publisher's Weekly highlights the "bonding of firsthand recollection to broader historical issues," and suggests that "this multivoiced collection establishes itself as a unique document of the city's last three decades."
Julia Keller recently reviewed Bodleian Library's The First English Dictionary, 1604 in the Chicago Tribune. She writes that "few books are as delightful as this compendium. . . ."
Bran Nicol, author of Stalking, recently wrote an article entitled "Mad About You: Modern day stalking, and old fashion passion" for American Sexuality Magazine, a publication of the National Sexuality Resource Center.
Nicol argues that "Stalking . . . is one of the signature crimes of our age," and that it is mostly a recent phenomenon. "The term itself, referring to systematic harassment, only enters the language in the 1960s and 1970s. . . ."
However, Nicol goes on to point out, ". . . [W]hile stalking is in one sense 'new,' a symptomatic crime of the late-twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries, it reveals that we are still in the grip of some very 'old' and unshakable attitudes about men and women and sexual desire."
Liverpool University Press author David Supino will be giving the second annual Bernard Breslauer Lecture at the Grolier Club in New York City on Wednesday, May 23rd at 6pm. The event is open to the public and co-sponsored by the American Trust for the British Library. Supino will be discussing his bibliographical work on Henry James. Supino is author of Henry James: A Bibliographical Catalogue of a Collection of Editions to 1921.
All RSVPs and reservations are to be made through Maev Brennan at the Grolier Club, tel. 212-838-6690, ext. 7, or e-mail: mbrennan@grolierclub.org.
The Grolier Club is located at 47 East 60th Street, New York City (between Park and Madison Avenues).
Maureen Moran's Catholic Sensationalism and Victorian Literature recently received attention on the Brontë Blog.
Exotic, corrupt, and dangerous, Roman Catholicism functioned in the popular Victorian imagination as a highly sensationalized and implacably anti-English enemy. Maureen Moran's lively study considers a wide range of key authors—including Charlotte Brontë, Robert Browning, Wilkie Collins, and George Eliot, as well as a number of non-canonical writers—to give a detailed account of the cultural tensions between Catholics and Protestants. Moran shows that rather than representing a traditional religious schism, the demonizing of Catholics resulted from secular fears over crime, sex, and violence.
Andrea Walker reviewed Catherine Spooner's Contemporary Gothic in the April/May issue of Bookforum. She credits Spooner for her "attempts . . . to examine the subculture in all its multiplicity." Walker goes on to note, ". . . [I]t is somehow affirming to know that someone is keeping tabs on the goth population in places like Australia, where parasols are reportedly employed to keep complexions pale."
Walker does criticize Spooner's reliance on critical theory, suggesting that her study reflects ". . . the ideas she brings to the discussion rather than allow[ing] new insights to emerge." However, we wonder whether it is possible to properly assess the disparate themes and tendencies of a multifarious subculture without the aid of some theory. How exactly did a band of "working class stiffs" who disliked the "gothic" label end up inspiring later generations of "neo-romantic wraiths"? What holds them together, and why?
Alistair John recently reviewed Bran Nicol's Stalking on the UK-based Culture Wars site. John focuses on the long history of stalking, its connection to romance, and its surprisingly recent emergence as a crime under various legal systems.
Although John faults Nicol for not extending his history of stalking to include the pre-history of stalking, he goes on to praise the book:
Ultimately, however, Nicol offers a fascinating analysis of one [of] our epoch's most ubiquitous and fascinating facets. What is clear is that regardless of how much we may speak of the phenomenon, and how ubiquitous a phenomenon we may think it, stalking is more ingrained in our culture than we think it , or wish it, to be.
Swan Isle translator and editor Christopher Maurer will be speaking at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City at 6:30pm on Monday, March 26th.
The event is part of Guggenheim's "Looking with Literature" series. Christopher Maurer will be giving readings of classical and contemporary Spanish texts in the museum's galleries and exploring the intersections of the literary and visual art worlds.
Looking with Literature: Christopher Maurer at the Guggenheim
Monday, March 26th
6:30pm
$25 ($20 members, students, and seniors)
Public Programs take place in the Peter B. Lewis Theater of the Sackler Center. For more information, call the Guggenheim Box Office at (212) 423-3587.
Sebastian Peake, son of Mervyn Peake, recently reviewed Peter Winnington's The Voice of the Heart: the working of Mervyn Peake's imagination on The Mervyn Peak Blog. Sebastian Peake calls The Voice of the Heart, ". . . a very welcome and highly illuminating addition to an ever-growing biographical canon."
Peake goes on to credit Winnington's analysis:
Instead of repeating the known facts, . . . Winnington elects to examine themes from Peake's life as disparate as islands, animals and birds, solitude, love, and evil.. . . Winnington grasps completely the idiosyncratic open individualism and generosity of spirit which produced the work. . . .
The Unsullied and Undismayed blog recently posted an entry on Chris Lehmann's Revolt of the Masscult: "This little pamphlet Revolt of the Masscult was an interesting read. Easy to read in a brief sitting and thoughtful. . . ."
The post goes on to praise Prickly Paradigm's whole series of pamphlets for their accessibility.
Lars Svendsen, author of A Philosophy of Boredom, recently spoke on To the Best of Our Knowledge on Wisconsin Public Radio. Svendsen shares his research into the long history of boredom, the types of boredom, and some solutions to boredom.
What is it that makes you bored? Who were the first bored people? What is the meaning of boredom? Are we responsible for our boredom? Are there any benefits to boredom? Tune in. Find out. Stay engaged.
A.N. Wilson recently reviewed David Goodway's Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow: Left-Libertarian Thought and British Writers from William Morris to Colin Ward in the UK's Daily Telegraph. Wilson proclaims that Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow is, "A splendid survey of 'Left-libertarian thought' . . . . Though it is very learned, it isn't dry."
From William Morris to George Orwell, left-libertarian thought has long been an important but neglected part of British history. In Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow, David Goodway seeks to recover and revitalize that indigenous anarchist tradition.
Angela Bennie recently reviewed Stephen Connor's Fly in Melbourne's The Age, calling it, ". . . an intriguing monograph on our humble companion through life." Bennie calls out some of the more enlightening facts about the humble fly, but situates Connor's book in the context of his larger philosophical project of ". . . tracking the way the seemingly small, the ignored, the taken-for-granted phenomena of the world we live in impinge upon our senses and our understanding of ourselves."
Lucía Charún-Illescas' Malambo was recently reviewed by Miriam DeCosta-Willis, Ph.D. in the Fall 2006 issue (No. 10) of PALARA: Publication of the Afro Latin American Research Association. Both Charún and translator Emmanuel Harris II receive praise:
This is an important novel because it is the first work of fiction by an Afro-Peruvian woman, and it is one of very few Afro-Hispanic novels that have been translated into English. . . . Smooth, fluid prose. . . . An excellent translation, which captures the rhythm and flavor of an important work of art. For although it is a fictional account of Afro-Peruvian life in colonial Peru, Malambo calls into question hegemonic assumptions about Spanish American history by underscoring the role that African-descended people played in shaping that history.
Stalking remains popular today. Edel Kennedy writes in the Irish Independent that "Our modern attitude to love and relationships is breeding a generation of lusty stalkers," and quotes Bran Nicol's recently released Stalking from Reaktion Books: "Stalkers can find it particularly hard to read the implicit codes."
John Allemang recently reviewed Bran Nicol's Stalking in the Globe and Mail. Allemang praises the "lively work," which shows how ". . . our cultural artifacts not only reflect our growing social anxieties but also come to define them."
While Allemang points out that the Greek gods could be the original stalkers, he credits Nicol with successfully analyzing our current "Age of Stalking:" "Nicol builds a strong case that our era has aided and abetted a peculiar obsession to the point where it is accepted as an everyday phenomenon."
Clarisse Zimra of Southern Illinois University recently reviewed Debra Kelly's Autobiography and Independence: Self and Identity in North African Writing in French in the online H-France Review:
With this book, professor Debra Kelly, who teaches at the University of Westminster, proffers a richly researched study on four authors raised as subjects of Empire in North Africa during the first half of the twentieth century: Algeria's Mouloud Feraoun, a Kabyle born in 1913 and Assia Djebar, an Andalusian-Berber born in 1936; Albert Memmi, a Tunisian Sephardim born in 1923 and Abdelkébir Khatibi, a Moroccan Arab born in 1938. None had French as a native tongue. All wrote in the language of the colonizers. Trained in the schools of their colonial masters, witnesses to their countries' access to full independence, their writings have been stamped by a personal experience profoundly marked by the cultural and political trauma of colonial history. Such history has defined them and shaped their craft. Therefore, Kelly posits, these four must be read along two simultaneous axes of interpretation: (a) the biographical connection that sees their works as the painful coming of age of the colonized self seeking agency; and (b) the socio-political context against which they define and eventually achieve their own private and public decolonization.
In 2004, alarm bells sounded nationwide with the release of the National Endowment for the Arts' report "Reading at Risk." The report declared that less than half of the American adult population read literature for pleasure and thus American literary culture was in dire straits. But now there is hope with the publication of The Reader, a witty and engaging literary magazine that celebrates the act of reading and the joys of literature in all their facets.
This newest issue examines "Americans" on the literary stage, with a fascinating range of articles that ably tackle the broad subject. Features include essays on Carson McCullers, Anne Bradstreet, and Toni Morrison; a piece by Lawrence Weschler on Rebecca Solnit; and an essay on the Brooklyn Bridge by Erica Wagner. The issue also contains regular features such as a literary quiz, book reviews, new fiction and poetry, and a publishing industry gossip column "Our Spy in NY." A rich and engaging quarterly for the book lover and bibliophile, The Reader throws open the door of the literary world to readers from all walks of life.
Read the Press Release