Recently, Marta Figlerowicz interviewed Olga Tokarczuk, a young Nobel Prize winner for the Spring 2023 edition of the Paris Review. Ms. Tokarczuk received this prestigious award four years ago for “a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life.”
“Saint who?” I asked. “Eh-meh-ren-tsya,” Olga Tokarczuk repeated. Saint Anne’s mother. I was nonplussed. The mother of the mother of the Virgin Mary? Tokarczuk blew out cigarette smoke at high speed, then inhaled with excitement and impatience. I needed a lesson.
“How does lyric poetry move through the world? What place does it have in our cultural, social, political worlds? And why do lyrics—whether understood as literary masterpieces or the words to our favorite songs—continue to touch us in both ‘body and soul’?”
Comparative Literature student Anne Gross’ recently published article in The Yale Daily News, “Do You Know How to Read,” examines the art of reading.
Professor Tsu talks about why the west and China misunderstand each other — and how culture can bring them closer together.
Professor Robyn Creswell’s English version of Iman Mersal’s The Threshold has been longlisted for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. The Threshold was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in October and has received many enthusiastic reviews. In The New York Review of Books, Ange Mlinko writes, “[Mersal’s] voice is so inviting, so familiar, so confiding that it’s even easy to forget that these are translations: Creswell renders her as a perfect contemporary…To...
6 New Paperbacks to Read This Week
By Miguel Salazar, Reporting for the NYT Books desk
“Our picks this week include Bob Woodward’s third book about the Trump administration, a reissue of James Baldwin’s investigation of the Atlanta child murders and much more…”
KINGDOM OF CHARACTERS:
The Language Revolution That Made China Modern, by Jing Tsu.
Tsu’s account details the challenges that linguists, librarians and others faced in their efforts to standardize and adapt Chinese...