A Super Hangover
You’re not really reading this, are you? You’re skimming these words with your eyes, aren’t you? Yes, you are. And it’s all because you’re paying attention to your… feelings? Admit it, today you’re either feeling sour over your team’s loss, jubilant over your team’s victory, or completely apathetic, because you could give a hoot about either team, the sport of football in general, and all the glitzy commercialism that goes along with last night’s prime time extravaganza. Any way you slice it, you’ve got football on the brain. Here to help, we present the Super Bowl of literature news. Bolaño’s mystery novel hits American shelves and has critics dancing in the end zone. We all know Chekhov is the Lombardi of literature. But why does his his legacy endure? Find out in the Guardian. There’s an instant replay of the tale of two Turkish writers who shared a jail cell for years, a flag thrown over the imprisonment of a Vietnamese dissident author, and an official inquiry into the generational merit of J.D. Salinger. Finally, Nick Flynn and Aleksandar Hemon head into the broadcast booth for a series of questions from The Millions and Guernica. Game on. — Kevin Murphy
– The beauty of Roberto Bolaño’s slender mystery novel “Monsieur Pain,” originally published in 1999 and now translated from the Spanish by the estimable Chris Andrews, is that it doesn’t behave much like a mystery novel. By the end of the book, which Bolaño wrote in either 1981 or 1982, the mysteries remain unsolved, the ostensible victim may or may not have suffered from foul play and the protagonist intent on figuring out who done it (if anyone did anything at all) appears incapable of doing so. — Roberto Bolaño in the NY Times
Man, Myth, Legend
– This elusiveness – a feature of both the life and the work – is a large part of what gives him his enduring fascination, as well as his striking modernity. In Chekhov literature seems to break its wand like Prospero, renouncing the magic of artifice, ceremony and idealisation, and facing us, for the first time, with a reflection of ourselves in our unadorned ordinariness as well as our unfathomable strangeness. — Anton Chekhov in the Guardian
– Iron sharpens iron. When two of Turkey’s literary greats share a cell together in Bursa Prison, the result can only be an amazing combination of words that will shape the nation for a few generations. Bengisu Rona, a Turkish professor, lectures in Turkish literature at the famous School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London. She says one of the major themes of her course is “the way politics shaped the literary canon.” Of course, she goes on to observe that “nowhere is this more evident than in the writings of two people: Nazım Hikmet in poetry and Orhan Kemal in prose.” — Orhan Kemal in Sunday’s Zaman
– Tran Khai Thanh Thuy and her husband, Do Ba Tan, had denied the charges, saying they had been the victims of the attack and not the perpetrators. Thuy is a known critic of the government and has publicly expressed her support for democracy campaigners. Rights groups have accused the authorities of trying to silence her. The Hanoi court sentenced Thuy to 43 months in prison, including time served since October. — Tran Khai Thanh Thuy in the BBC
– J. D. Salinger’s long silence, and his withdrawal from the world, attracted more than the usual degree of gossip and resentment—as though we readers were somehow owed more than his words, were somehow owed his personal, talk-show presence, too—and fed the myth of the author as homespun religious mystic. Yet though he may seem to have chosen a hermit’s life, Salinger was no hermit on the page.– J.D. Salinger in the New Yorker
Sit-Chew-It
– When Nick Flynn drives around his hometown, Scituate, Massachusetts, he inevitably passes the houses he lived in with his mother and brother—six of them within the first five years of his life. In the past few decades, unsurprisingly, money has been pumped into Scituate, a small coastal city, but amid the explosion of seaside wealth, every house Flynn lived in looks worse for the wear. “They’re all still there,” he tells me, “sort of falling apart, with the same paint I painted on them just peeling off in sheets.” — Nick Flynn in The Millions
– Hemon—he prefers to be called Sasha—and I spent much of that day together, so the conversation we had on-stage was an extension of several hours of lively discussion on the future of the book as object, the way immigrant writing is reshaping American letters and the different relations we have with our respective home countries. It was remarkable how many Bosnians introduced themselves to the author before the event, so when Hemon later says, “I’m in touch with Bosnia in many ways, not just that I go back, but because I’m connected to the diaspora,” that bond was certainly evident that night. — Aleksandar Hemon in Guernica
Video: Interview with Aleksandar Hemon
