fieldus

LRB · Benjamin Kunkel: Men in White

…there is, after all, just the one world or, for the individual, the one life. We also know that originality, in realist fiction, comes not only from capturing what’s historically new but also from correlating novelty with persistent inherited ways of acting, thinking and feeling. But the challenge posed […]

PJ Harvey interview on the official website of writer, Laura Hird
“I read a wonderful quote by Leonard Cohen not long ago where he was talking about how sad songs mean so much to people because everybody suffers defeat in their lives in some way, whether it’s they didn’t get the job they wanted, or when […]

Pictures of Fritz Hardenberg (Novalis) and his Sophie. Inspired to re-unite them after reading THE BLUE FLOWER.

Article on Novalis and german culture by Jeremy Adler in The TLS
NY Sun Profile of Novalis by Eric Ormsby
Blue Flower - NY Times review by Michael Hofmann
Penelope Fitzgerald Obit - The Guardian, 2000
Guardian profile of Penelope Fitzgerald, 2008
Penelope Fitzgerald […]

Last Night’s TV: Imagine…Doris Lessing – The Hostess And The Alien, BBC1
I approached the film a little warily, nervous that it might settle for the clichés of formidable old age, indifferent to social and cultural convention. I’d reckoned without Doris Lessing, whose entire life seems to have been conducted with a wild daring, and […]

Salon reviewDiary - in the LRBObserver reviewNew York Times reviewBookslut reviewLasdun interview @ identitytheory.com
Review by Scarlett Thomas in The Independent:
Nothing in this haunting novel is there by accident, just as no human behaviour, according to Freud, is truly “accidental” either. There is a reference to Freud’s notion of parapraxis (errors and slips created by […]

What Nabokov said about Chekhov, quoted with salience and commitment by the Chicago-based Bosnian writer Aleksandar Hemon in the course of an interview published on the Other Voices website.

Some interesting things to say about ‘imperial fiction’ - he’s not a big fan of Ian McEwan. Not having read McEwan since ENDURING LOVE, I’m not in […]

Quite a surprise to see what an old buffer Nabokov was around the time he published Lolita.

Technorati Tags: nabokov, trilling, lolita, discussion, video

Tags:  lit

Lucie Ceccaldi, mère de Michel Houellebecq (photo : éditions Scali).Courtesy of Le Figaro
The reptilian left eye… I’m on your side, Michel!
From Liberation:
Dans son ouvrage, Lucie Ceccaldi reconnaît avoir délaissé son fils, qui a été élevé par sa grand-mère paternelle. «La grand-mère Houellebecq était du genre prolétaire haineux», indique la dame de 83 ans.
and
Jusqu’à […]

Reflections: Letting Go: Reporting and Essays: The New Yorker
I once admitted this to a forensic pathologist (heaviness in the lungs). We were in the autopsy suite of a medical examiner’s office, and he responded by handing me a lung. It had belonged to an obese, light-skinned black man, an obvious heavy smoker, who was […]

Essay - Martin Amis and Islam - Books - Review - New York Times
Essay
Amis and Islam
By RACHEL DONADIO
Published: March 9, 2008
“I’m a passionate multiracialist and a very poor multiculturalist,” Martin Amis said a few weeks ago. He was on the phone from London, praising his hometown’s ethnic variety — “It’s exhilarating and moving […]