What to Read When You’re in Russia
Sally McGrane, author of the debut novel Moscow at Midnight, shares a reading list!
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Posts Tagged: tolstoy
What to Read When You Want to Curl Up with a Good Book
Rumpus editors share their favorite winter reads.
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A Language in Constant Rebellion: Talking with Aura Xilonen
Aura Xilonen discusses her novel, Gringo Champion, the realities of immigration, translating texts, and her love of cinema.
...moreThe Rumpus Interview with Larissa MacFarquhar
Larissa MacFarquhar discusses her book Strangers Drowning, why she finds nonfiction so compelling, and how she gets inside the minds of her subjects.
...moreGaitskill on Tolstoy
Mary Gaitskill wrote for the Atlantic on Tolstoy’s classic Anna Karenina and the complexities of personality: Everyone says Anna Karenina is about individual desire going against society, but I actually think the opposite is stronger: the way societal forces limit the expression of the individual.
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The Rumpus Interview with Paul Griner
Paul Griner talks about his newest novel, Second Life, his just-released story collection Hurry Please I Want to Know, putting real life into fiction, and whether creative writing can be taught.
...moreBar Reading
At The Millions, Edward Mullany regimentally tries to read War and Peace. Instead, he has a conversation with a stranger at a bar.
...moreStop Worrying About What Comes Next
At The Millions, Jonathan Russell Clark analyzes several last sentences from well-known novels by Hemingway, Tolstoy, Morrison, and Roth. He pays particular attention to the craftsmanship necessary to write these sentences, and considers how last sentences work to reinforce larger themes within a novel: For writers, the last sentences aren’t about reader responsibility at all — it’s […]
...moreIt’s War and Peace, Charlie Brown
For the Kenyon Review blog, Meg Shevenock writes about how Charlie Brown made her scared of Tolstoy’s classic and how she worked to overcome her fear.
...moreThe Unhappy Marriage Rule
For the New York Times‘s Bookends column, authors Charles McGrath and Leslie Jamison share their thoughts about what they perceive to be the best portrayals of marriage in literature. While McGrath argues that the more interesting literary marriages tend to be unhappy and failing, Jamison explores relationships within Jack Gilbert’s poems, which characterize love “as a state of […]
...moreA Sonata’s Variation
So now, 125 years after Kreutzer’s 1889 publication, Tolstoy’s wife gets to have her say. Sofiya Tolstoy, indignant about the violent and misogynistic plot of her husband’s The Kreutzer Sonata, wrote a novella in response to the book from the female’s character point of view. Over at Slate, Ron Rosenbaum writes about this long believed lost text, […]
...moreIn Defense of The Novel
For the New Yorker, Adelle Waldman responds to David Shields’s Reality Hunger, primarily using Anna Karenina to defend the powers of the novel.
...moreExploring the “Russian Soul”
For the New York Times, Francine Prose and Benjamin Moser share their experiences reading 19th century Russian literature. While Prose shows an appreciation for the timeless themes of Tolstoy and Gogol, Moser contends that what makes 19th century Russian writers distinctive is the way their work “echoed their particular national history.”
...moreSelf-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.
...moreThe Science of Why You Can’t Read Good Literature
Writer Michael Harris discusses digital distraction and reading War and Peace at Salon: But there’s a religious certainty required in order to devote yourself to one thing while cutting off the rest of the world. We don’t know that the inbox is emergency-free, we don’t know that the work we’re doing is the work we […]
...moreBringing Tolstoy to the West
More people were reading Tolstoy than any other author in translation at the beginning of the 20th century, but as late as the 1880s, few non-Russians had even heard of him. Translators were deterred partly because of the length of his works and complexities of language, not to mention his overwhelming Russian-ness. At the Financial Times, Rosamund […]
...moreThe Art of the Novella Subscription Series
Forget magazines—for a small subscription fee, Melville House will send you two novellas every month in whatever format you prefer. It’s the perfect way to finally get around to reading classics like Gustave Flaubert’s A Simple Heart and Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Also there are five novellas called The Duel, so if […]
...moreWhat We Become
Péter Nádas’s Parallel Stories illustrates the haphazard, psychological violence of a century of ideology, disruption, and the search for the meaning of personal freedom.
...moreThe 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.
...moreFrom Russia with Love
Elif Batuman offers a rogue’s gallery of Russian writers, scholars, and literary characters—the only oddball missing is herself.
...moreOne More Thing That Literature Is Good For
A few weeks ago, I went to a dermatologist to have something on my nose removed. He said less than two sentences to me, asked me one question he didn’t listen to the answer to, ignored my protests, had a nurse hold me down, stuck a large needle in my nose with no warning, and […]
...moreCrown of Sonnets
An anthology of stories from the new Russia shows the continuity between contemporary writers and their canonical predecessors
...moreFifteen Thousand Pages in Three Minutes
Roberto Bolaño’s überbook inspires a speed-read through literary history.
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