Languor Management

Who?

Awarding the international Man Booker prize this week to the Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare, the critic John Carey complained that foreign literature is 'neglected' in Britain. Is it? The Guardian asked some experts to select ten writers we should be reading. Here's one:

As a novelist, Dubravka Ugresic displays the eerie genius for detail that can be found in her essays The Culture of Lies (1998) and Thank You For Not Reading, published last year. Once negligible facts or events suddenly reveal themselves as central to the tragedy - an element of the Balkan catastrophe familiar to anyone who witnessed it (Ugresic is Croatian, but prefers not to be identified as a "Croatian novelist"). In Ugresic's novel The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, a photo album is the one object the narrator cannot bear to part with; in her forthcoming novel The Ministry of Pain a class of refugee literature students constructs a shrine to familiar objects from "home". These connections, pathetic and all-important, are the foundations of identity and home, of their construction and their loss. If fiction is to build bridges, it must surely communicate that whatever identity we may have is composed not merely of ourselves but of the otherness of others. Few novelists succeed more poignantly at this than she does.

Time Decides to Hand Over Notes of Reporter Facing Prison

This is chilling.

Vintage Future Modern Classics

Vintage has selected 100 of its books which would still be read in 100 years, and has asked various reading groups to choose 15 of these which will be deemed 'Modern Classics.' 19 of these 100 are books in translation: Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, Colette's Gigi, Louis de BerniÞres's Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's The Leopard, Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, Günter Grass's The Tin Drum, David Grossman's See Under: Love, Michel Houellebecq's Atomised, Franz Kafka's The Trial, Andrey Kurkov's Death and the Penguin, Halldór Laxness's The Atom Station, Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, Yukio Mishima's The Sailor who Fell from Grace with the Sea, Haruki Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Amos Oz's My Michael, Georges Perec's Life: A User's Manual, W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. View the full list here.

I think I need to start today on a positive note

Do brawling with a fellow drunken Irishman in a cab, getting thrown off of a beer barge with an ex-girlfriend, watching another one perform at the Pink Pussycat Lounge, and passing a regrettable evening of inviting a young Greek waitress to do shots of Pedron with you in the space of a couple of weeks add up to a life gone off the rails? 

Therapy starts next week!

No Absinthe No Fits!

Jamie from Translation Exchange informs us that the latest Absynthe, a print journal devoted to featuring contemporary European writers who have not been widely translated into English, is now available, featuring Tegan Matthias Göritz, Rafael Ballesteros, Ilhan Berk, Pablo Garcia Casado, Flavia Cosma, Lidija Dimkovska, Jaromir Nohavica, Daniel Oliver Bachmann, Roger Derham, Sergey Gandlevsky, Saulius T. Kondrotas, Olga Tokarczuk, and Jean Tardieu.

Hours of fun!

Or at least hours of waiting for these pages of Soviet-era images to download...

[Spaceeba, D--, a valiant participant in Saturday night's mutiny on the drinking barge.]

She chatters away endlessly

Also in the Guardian:

A fourth Sapho poem found in an Egyptian tomb!

Written more than 2,600 years ago, the 101 words of verse deal with a theme timeless in both art and soap operas; the stirrings of an ageing body towards the nimbleness, youth and love it once knew.

A good model, then, not likely to do harm

James Fenton looks at English translations of Dante in the Guardian:

For much of the last century, Dante has served as a touchstone for poets writing in English. It is not entirely obvious why this should be so. Petrarch was just as famous in his day, and was once a far more pervasive influence on the English tradition. Influence itself is something of a mystery. I never quite understand how it has come about that, if you look at the poetry shelves in an American bookshop, you will always find a volume or two of Rilke. He has been taken to heart, it appears, through some deep affinity.

Storytelling that goes back to Homer

According to Albanian author, Ismail Kadare, winner of this year's International Man Booker Prize, totalitarian regimes favor mediocre writers, and there usually are only a few writers of true literature in a totalitarian country.

"The people entitled to speak about that period are the people who did something and not the people who kept silent and have retrospective nostalgia."

A Chinese ritual ultimately yielded Shishkin's name

Mikhail Shishkin's novel Maidenhair (Venerin Volos) was named the winner of Russia's  National Bestseller prize. Compared with Russia's other such prizes, the "Natsbest," as it is known, is the least literary and the most oriented toward popular tastes.

Like Shishkin's previous book, "The Taking of Izmail" (Vzyatiye Izmaila), which won the Smirnoff Booker Prize in 2000, "Maidenhair" draws on numerous sources. These include the stories of Shishkin's interviewees, Siberian creation myths, Xenophon's history of the Greek-Persian war and the author's own impressions of Switzerland. One of the book's most intense parts is the diary of a singer, modeled after music legend Izabella Yuryeva. This diary, which starts in 1914, is both deeply personal and a shocking record of its era.