Eastern European
by Levi Asher November 30th, 2009 7:31pm
International literature gets a decent workout in today's New York Times Book Review. I'm about to dive into The Book of Fathers, a 300-year family novel by Hungarian favorite Miklos Vamos, and I'm encouraged to hear that Jane Smiley thinks well of it.
by Dedi Felman October 12th, 2009 3:49pm
This week it was reported that in 1950, author Milan Kundera allegedly informed on Miroslav Dvoracek, and as a result, Dvoracek ended up serving 14 years in communist prison camps. (Story here.) In many ways, the news is reminiscent of the story of German author Gunter Grass and his admission that he served in the Nazi Waffen SS as a young man.
Milan Kundera's novels are punctuated by philosophical asides, and whether you agree with him or think he's full of crap (or fall somewhere in between), he provides plenty of fodder for keeping the hamsters running on the wheels in your brain. Like his other books, his novel Immortality contains several digressions. Or at first they seem like digressions, but in the end, they serve the whole in a maddeningly perfect way.
[Editor's Note: Lila Lizabeth Weisberger is a psychologist, a leading member of the National Institute for Poetry Therapy and the co-author of The Healing Fountain: Poetry Therapy for Life's Journey. She's also my mother. -- Levi Asher]
by Levi Asher September 26th, 2007 6:27pm
1. As promised, I went to see Augusten Burroughs and John Elder Robison, who read from Look Me In The Eye. The elder Burroughs/Robison brother has a good sense of humor and an appealing lack of self-consciousness on stage. He's almost as big a ham as Augusten, in fact, and that's a good thing. I recommend this book to anybody who enjoyed Running With Scissors and also to anybody interested in learning more about Asperger's syndrome.
by Jamelah Earle March 15th, 2007 4:09pm
I've liked Milan Kundera for awhile, but reading his novel Immortality sealed the deal for me. Now I am a full-blown fan, and think he's a wonderfully brilliant writer -- not just as a craftsman of prose, though that would be enough -- but as a builder of novels that are stunningly well put together. Since I'm a Kundera groupie, I was glad to see an excerpt from his latest, The Curtain on The Guardian recently.
by Levi Asher April 30th, 2006 7:25pm
Saturday, Noon I'm in the Bowery Poetry Club meeting Lyubomir Levchev, a poet famous in Bulgaria and mostly unknown around the world. He's here in New York City for an onstage conversation with hometown poet Bob Holman in Holman's own downtown dive, the Bowery Poetry Club. It's all part of the current PEN World Voices festival, which ends this weekend.
