Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a hero, “a symbol of freedom and the durability of the human spirit,” as his obit in today’s Post has it. But let’s face it, readers, he was not a very good writer.
Did you ever actually try to read The Gulag Archipelago? It’s like being trapped down at the end [...]
There’s a good Don DeLillo interview from Die Zeit magazine available online. If your German is rusty, you can read my English translation.
The 50th anniversary of Kerouac’s On The Road has inspired lots of articles recently (see “On the Road at 50″ (NYT), “Road Rules” (Newsweek), “On the Road at 50″ (NPR), etc, etc).
But no one seems to have noticed Kerouac’s eerie prescience. Readers, look at this quote from On The Road, Part Two, Chapter Two:
When [...]
Today Crazy Pammy is waxing lyrical about the worst novel ever written. Here are some highlights:
My blog is exemplar [sic] of A is A. That’s what I deliver here ….A.
What struck me was [sic] when I first read Atlas was living by the coda [sic] of moral values. Man’s moral value -his value [...]
Here, readers, is an offering sure to bring joy to the heart of any DeLillo fan who does not subscribe to Harper’s magazine: a collection of work by Don DeLillo, in PDF format, for you to download and enjoy.
Stories
“The Runner” (Sep. 1988) – (PDF, 1.2 MB)
“Pafko at the Wall” (Oct. 1992) – (PDF, 12 [...]
Today’s Daily Link is Canto One of The Wingnuttiad, a brilliant ode limning the heroic words and deeds of the right-wing blogosphere. This is some seriously funny stuff, readers:
“Check the kerning! link, link! and blather!
Years ago we got that bastard Rather!
If we cross-link enough, and fight fight fight,
In seven years we may once more [...]
An interview with Don DeLillo at Guernica magazine.
Don DeLillo: Absolutely. I was thinking about the impact of history on the smallest details of ordinary life, and I wanted to see if I could trace an individual’s interior life, day-by-day and thought-by-thought. It occurs to me that this could be the novelist’s initiative, even more [...]
I was disappointed, overall, with DeLillo’s Falling Man. I think Andrew O’Hagan nailed it in his NYRB review:
DeLillo the novelist prepared us for September 11, but he did not prepare himself for how such an episode might, in the way of denouements, instantly fly beyond the reach of his own powers. In a moment, [...]
A few weeks ago, I posted a link to an excerpt from Peeling the Onion, the newly-translated memoir of Günter Grass. There’s a review of Peeling the Onion in the NYRB.
When interviewers have pressed him on this issue [i.e. his Waffen-SS past], the answers have been vague and unsatisfactory. “It oppressed me,” he [...]
A new feature, readers — the Daily Link.
I really enjoyed “How I Spent the War” by Günter Grass. It appeared in the New Yorker several weeks ago, and I’ve been meaning to link to it here ever since.
Günter Grass, 1999 Nobel laureate (for Literature), shocked Germany and the rest of the world when he [...]
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