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Any funeral is poignant. But that’s particularly the case for those who die anonymously, unclaimed by friends or family. In the Netherlands, city poets have responded to the tragedy of “lonely funerals” by researching each deceased person and writing a tailored poem. The poems are short, stark, and moving speculations on identity and loss.
A part of me believed that the amount of books I read revealed whether I had a good year, whether I’d done more than I expected or had failed to keep up.
From its bloody beginnings to its glorious establishment, America has always been a country of immigrants, of diverse groups, of different skin tones and dialects, of the tired and poor. What made America great, and what could make America great again, is this multitudinous quality, this possibility, this richness of variety.
Chronicle of the Murdered House is certainly Cardoso’s best-known work, and also a bold one, in that it is not the most accessible of books. So it is both an obvious starting point, and a difficult one. Perhaps that is why it has taken to so long to bring to readers in English.
There are so many traumas coming to the center of our political life now, and what I am attempting to say, through the hundred breakdowns of speech, is that there are places where language is undone. The horror of it is always there, lives in the breath and the street, the news and the document.
ARRIVAL has been hailed for carving a space for the “literary science fiction movie,” and rightly so. Director Denis Villeneuve achieved the nearly impossible feat of making a compelling, relatively crowd-pleasing movie about linguistics, complete with a new alien language composed of 100 logograms, while also weaving in themes of international cooperation, humanism, and empathy.
Eric Moe is a pianist with a penchant for eclectic harmonies, provocative rhythms, melody lines that curl and cling to the listener’s ear. He’s also developed, over the course of a rich career, a kind of perfect pitch for incorporating text to music.
It’s been impossible to ignore the furor surrounding the revelation of Elena Ferrante’s identity last month. Some consider it an inevitability, yet the majority of her fans seem to feel that it is enough to have been given the gift of her writing, without expressly violating her wishes.
Lady sorceresses are vessels of fear through their bodies , or representations used to translate terror. A witch’s greatest strength is her body, as when Circe seduces and distract Odysseus from his journey; it is her greatest weakness, too, as when the Wicked Witch of the West is destroyed: doused in water, her body disintegrates.
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