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The Last Days . . . has nothing much to do with tennis or with Roger Federer, who appears sparingly in these pages . . . [nor is it] “intended to be a comprehensive study of last things, or of lastness generally.”
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Sally McGrane, author of the debut novel Moscow at Midnight, shares a reading list!
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Eileen Myles on recording her new poetry record Aloha/irish trees, the relationship between poetry and comedy, and finding safety in social media.
...moreAt The Millions, Edward Mullany regimentally tries to read War and Peace. Instead, he has a conversation with a stranger at a bar.
...moreFor 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.
...moreAuthor Alan Moore, best known for graphic novels like The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and V for Vendetta, has just finished the first draft of his second novel, Jerusalem, a manuscript with a million words. The Guardian reports that Moore’s latest work beats out classic long reads like Samuel Richardson’s 970,000 word Clarissa or Tolstoy’s 560,000 word War and Peace. There […]
...moreWriter 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 […]
...moreMore 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 […]
...morePéter Nádas’s Parallel Stories illustrates the haphazard, psychological violence of a century of ideology, disruption, and the search for the meaning of personal freedom.
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