Monday, December 31, 2007

Articles of Note

Perhaps you've already seen these but on this last day of 2007 I thought I'd briefly mention some interesting articles I've read in the last month or so. TIME Magazine wrote about the death of French culture and Bernard-Henri Lévy responds in the Guardian. An essay by George Saunders on the Russian writer Daniil Kharms in the New York Times. Alissa Valles discusses her translation of the collected poems of Zbigniew Herbert in the Boston Review and W. Martin contributes a review of the work. And a number of articles at signandsight.com: Ukrainian writer Oksana Zabuzhko on Europe's need to understand the buried history of Ukraine, a discussion of recent literary successes from the Urals, a feature on the Romanian writer Mircea Cartarescu, and an article on the new wave of films from Romania.

3 comments:

Scot said...

Mr. Hayes,
Let me congratulate you on the blog. It's, how you say, sleek yet verbose? Seriously, good stuff.
SFM

Matt Bell said...

I'd never checked out Kharms before the Saunders article, but I really like him, and already ordered the book. He makes me think of a cross between Etgar Keret and James Tate, and that's a very good thing in my book.

Houyhnhnm said...

Though French culture does not have a great of a presence as it once did in America, I still believe that French culture is worth following. One of my favorite books of modern philosophy is: A Small treatise on the great virtues: the uses of philosophy in everyday life by André Comte-Sponville. I believe that the spirit and practice of real-world philosophy is alive and well in France.