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Featuring Arnon Grunberg Very few authors are awarded the same literary prize twice. That Arnon Grunberg managed such a feat, as well as the unique way he went about his success, are both vital in understanding the author’s personality and his role in the cultural life of the Netherlands. |
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Arnon Grunberg: Flying Females We went out to dinner one last time with Mrs Lopez and Emile. Elvira was with us. We had to convince her it was better if she went along. Her mother had on her five-inch heels again. |
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Arnon Grunberg: I Still Own Twenty Horses in Berlin My father was a stamp dealer, or at least that's what we I v I assumed, my mother and I. I'd been told by my mother that his father had owned a drugstore. A drugstore on a cart. He used to push this cart through Berlin all day long. "One day they found him lying dead on top of his cart," she said, "but it wasn't on account of the storm troopers. It was on account of the Neun' undneunziger vodka." A little later she said, "But my parents had a furniture store, in fact two in the end, and we didn't get a single cent for either, not a single cent." |
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Featuring Gary Snyder Kenneth Rexroth called him “…the leading ideologist and critic of the counter-culture… a poet whose values are exposed in the factual experience of the poem with the presentational immediacy of concrete happenings.” |
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Gary Snyder: “Can Poetry Change the World?“ Interview with Susan Deming in Caffeine Destiny |
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Gary Snyder: The Mountain Spirit´s True [No] Nature Wherever there are mountains, there are rivers. Wherever there are mountains and rivers, there are spirits. Even Buddhism, with its astringent skepticism toward the power of deities, finds itself dealing with nature spirits from the old days. Poets and storytellers have throughout time stepped in to mediate between gods, nature, religion, and society. |
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Gary Snyder: Coyote Makes Things Hard Foreword to The Maidu Indian Myths and Stories of hanc´ibyjim, by William Shipley (Heydey, 1991) |
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Gary Snyder: High peak haikus Gary Snyder was a teenage mountaineer, studied Oriental languages, became a Beat poet in San Francisco with Ginsberg and featured in a Kerouac novel. After moving to Japan he took the vows of a Zen monk and Buddhism remains central to his work, which links ecology to literary values. Now 75, he lives on a remote 100-acre ranch in the Sierra Nevada |
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Milan Kundera: The Curtain Milan Kundera (who writes these days in French) is perhaps the best, certainly the best-known, Czech fiction writer since Kafka (who was arguably more German than Czech anyway). This is his third book-length meditation on the novel, all three translated with precision and grace by Linda Asher. |
| 4.3.2007 |
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William T. Vollmann: The Poor Are Different Since William T. Vollmann’s idea of a long book is one that fills seven volumes (“Rising Up and Rising Down,” his extended critique of violence), it’s reasonable to wonder what he regards as a short one. “Poor People” provides an answer |
| 28.2.2007 |
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