Self-Help That’s No Help
At The New Republic, Esther Breger takes a look at literary self-help books, including How Proust Can Change Your Life and Give War and Peace a Chance.
Posts by tag
proust
33 posts
The Trouble with Translating Proust
For the Boston Review, Leland de la Durantaye assesses the latest edition of Proust’s Swann’s Way. Writing more than just a book review, Durantaye outlines some of Proust’s early struggles,…
The Accidental Buddhist
“When writing a book once about the Dalai Lama, I was startled to realize that the very core of one of his lessons was expressed for me by none other…
“Ginger Is Good For Taking Care of Yourself”
“It feels like cheating,” Larissa Pham says in a Gawker essay titled “In My Shopping Cart,” “to write about culture by writing about food.” But it reads like anything but…
BAKED MEMORIES
Proust left out one important detail: the recipe. And no one ever asked him for it. We all know the famous passage of Marcel Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past” in…
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
Like Proust, David Mitchell examines how the incidents of a person’s life fit together, how the different parts of the world come to form one world.
Your Occasional Roundup Of Death
Writing and reading does me a lot of good because it acquaints me with death in totally vicarious ways. Which is good, because I love life more than I know…
Fifteen Thousand Pages in Three Minutes
Roberto Bolaño’s überbook inspires a speed-read through literary history.