Beyond The Dragon Daughter and Other Lin Lan Fairy Tales May 02, 2022 The lack of Chinese fairy tales in English translation has been a reality that hinders not only academic studies of the fairy tale, but also the cross-cultural understanding of Chinese traditions in general. Read More
Kafka’s “Ultimate Things”: A new reading of the Zürau aphorisms April 27, 2022 As Princeton University Press celebrates the launch of a new annotated and freshly translated edition of Kafka’s aphorisms, the Press has invited me to supply a couple of amuse-bouches from the two introductory passages to the collection, namely my Translator’s Note plus a brief excerpt from Reiner Stach’s Foreword. Read More
A Vertical Art: On Poetry April 26, 2022 In A Vertical Art, acclaimed poet Simon Armitage takes a refreshingly common-sense approach to an art form that can easily lend itself to grand statements and hollow gestures. Read More
Poems from After Callimachus April 20, 2022 In After Callimachus, esteemed poet and critic Stephanie Burt’s attentive translations and inspired adaptations introduce the work, spirit, and letter of Callimachus to today’s poetry readers. Read More
A look inside Lives of Houses March 31, 2022 The writing of lives often involves writing about houses. Bringing a house to life through observation, familiarity, memory, or excavation can be a vital part of narrating the life of an individual, a family, or a group: life-writing as housework. Read More
Arnold Weinstein on The Lives of Literature January 29, 2022 The Lives of Literature: Reading, Teaching, Knowing as the subtitle suggests, is after large game: why we go to literature, what its value might be in a world increasingly devoted to “information,” and what a career in teaching has taught me, as well as my students. Read More
Bambi: The lonely destiny of outsiders January 14, 2022 Today, almost all the animals in the world do not and cannot determine their destinies. It was not always like this. Before the emergence of human beings thousands of years ago, animals were free to roam the planet as they wished. Read More
“Bambi” isn’t about what you think it’s about January 05, 2022 Most of us think we know the story of Bambi—but do we? The Original Bambi is an all-new, illustrated translation of a literary classic that presents the story as it was meant to be told. Read More
Billy Wilder on Assignment December 19, 2021 Before Billy Wilder became the screenwriter and director of iconic films like Sunset Boulevard and Some Like It Hot, he worked as a freelance reporter, first in Vienna and then in Weimar Berlin. Read More
Jane Austen’s beginnings December 10, 2021 There is an excellent cartoon, first published in Punch magazine, that depicts Jane Austen sitting in her publisher’s office and getting what we might call some mixed feedback on her latest submission: ‘We like the plot, Miss Austen, but all this effing and blinding will have to go’. Read More
Listen in: Now Comes Good Sailing December 03, 2021 The world is never done catching up with Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), the author of Walden, “Civil Disobedience,” and other classics. A prophet of environmentalism and vegetarianism, an abolitionist, and a critic of materialism and technology, Thoreau even seems to have anticipated a world of social distancing in his famous experiment at Walden Pond. Read More
Bob Dylan’s “Murder Most Foul” and National Memory November 22, 2021 This week marks the 58th anniversary of the assassination of JFK. Last year’s anniversary went nearly unnoticed in the press. Read More
Roger Luckhurst on Gothic: An Illustrated History October 28, 2021 How can you hope to navigate a genre that starts with a bunch of gloomy British poets brooding in crepuscular graveyards in the 1740s and ended up recently delivering us the sixth film in the Sharknado franchise (where killer sharks get hurled around by tornados, obviously)? Read More
Edgar Allan Poe’s suburban dream October 27, 2021 If there were ever an American writer you would not associate with the suburbs, it’s Edgar Allan Poe. His popular image tends to be that of an isolated figure, oblivious to his surroundings. Read More
Hosts and Guests: Readings by poet Nate Klug October 07, 2021 Nate Klug has been hailed by the Threepenny Review as a poet who is “an original in Eliot’s sense of the word.” In Hosts and Guests, his exciting second collection, Klug revels in slippery roles and shifting environments. Read More