(I didn’t make it to the Brooklyn Book Festival this year, but Tara Olmsted did, and here’s her report! — Levi)
The Brooklyn Book Festival can be a mixed bag. At its worst the annual autumn event is complete chaos: no consistent theme, hot and crowded rooms, poorly moderated panels, … Read the rest
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Miguel de Cervantes, perhaps the first great novelist in the history of literature, was a natural-born metafictionalist. His Don Quixote was a multi-layered masterpiece, a lost story within a found story within a supposedly true story … about a man whose mind was destroyed by reading. After the book became … Read the rest
(This book review is the Litkicks debut of Tara Olmsted, who runs BookSexy Review, a blog with a special focus on international and translated literature.)
Attending college in New York City in the mid-1990’s left me with some distinct memories of the city. De La Vega chalk tags on … Read the rest
(This introduction to a too-little-known French author is the Litkicks debut of Eamon Loingsigh, whose novella An Affair of Concoctions can be sampled here).
I didn’t come across Comte de Lautréamont right away. I found him only after a long search for the most furious literature I could find, … Read the rest
1. Kafkaesque: Stories Inspired by Franz Kafka
2. And the Nobel Prize in Literature goes … Read the rest
Mexico. The land of intrigue south of the border. The place where Dean and Sal headed for ultimate kicks. The destination of choice for taking it on the lam, as in “I’m goin’ way down south, way down to Mexico way” in the Hendrix reading of “Hey Joe”. So many … Read the rest
1. Scientists have discovered linguistic signals indicating that sperm whales may refer to themselves by names when they speak. Sounds like the kind of fact Herman Melville would have been interested to hear. It also makes me think of T. S. Eliot’s cats with their “ineffable, deep and … Read the rest
Here are three books I’ve recently enjoyed. I’ll cover a couple more next week as well.
The Shadow of What We Were by Luis Sepulveda
Chilean novelist and activist Luis Sepulveda lived through his nation’s greatest political humiliation — the overthrow of its democratically-elected leader Salvador Allende by rightists (backed … Read the rest
