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Martin Chalmers Is a translator and editor. --
A lyrical travelogue charting Tomas Espedal's journeys to and ruminations around the world, from his native Norway to Istanbul and beyond. "Why travel?" asks Tomas Espedal in Tramp, "Why not just stay at home, in your room, in your house, in the place you like better than any other, your own place. The familiar house, the requisite rooms in which we have gathered the things we need, a good bed, a desk, a whole pile of books. The windows giving on to the sea and the garden with its apple trees and holly hedge, a beautiful garden, growing wild." The first step in any trip or journey is always a footstep--the brave or curious act of putting one foot in front of the other and stepping out of the...
First published in German in 1967, these stories were written at the same time as Bernhard's early novels Frost, Gargoyles and The Lime Works and they display the same obsessions, restlessness and disarming mastery of language.
A boy's coming of age to become a writer is set against the backdrop of the profession of writing and the importance of the family.
The extraordinary career of Franz Liszt (1811-86) as a composer, conductor, and virtuoso pianist--whose incomparable skill and personal charisma dazzled audiences all over Europe, from London and Paris to Berlin, Moscow, and even Constantinople--made him the nineteenth-century equivalent of a modern international pop star. In the spirit of Liszt's own innovative compositions and sparkling piano transcriptions of other composers' work, John Spurling here takes up the ambitious task of writing a fictionalized biography of Liszt's life. Liszt himself once said, "My biography is more to be invented than written after the fact," and Spurling's fifteen self-contained chapters--themselves virtuoso ...
The companion volume to Espedal's Against Art, written in his characteristic poetic prose. In contemporary Norwegian fiction Tomas Espedal's work stands out as uniquely personal; it can be difficult to separate the fiction from Espedal's own experiences. Against Nature, a companion volume to Espedal's earlier Against Art, is an examination of factory work, love's labor, and the work of writing. Espedal dwells on the notion that working is required in order to live in compliance with society, but is this natural? And how can it be natural when he is drawn toward impossible things--impossible love, books, myths, and taboos? He is drawn into the stories of Abélard and Héloïse, of young Marguerite Duras and her Chinese lover, and soon realizes that he, too, is turning into a person who must choose to live against nature. "A masterpiece of literary understatement. Everybody who has recently been thirsting for a new, unexhausted realism, like water in the desert, will love this book."--Die Zeit, on the Norwegian edition
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The contentious discourse around world literature tends to stress the ‘world’ in the phrase. This volume, in contrast, asks what it means to approach world literature by inflecting the question of the literary. Debates for, against, and around ‘world literature’ have brought renewed attention to the worldly aspects of the literary enterprise. Literature is studied with regard to its sociopolitical and cultural references, contexts and conditions of production, circulation, distribution, and translation. But what becomes of the literary when one speaks of world literature? Responding to Derek Attridge’s theory of how literature ‘works’, the contributions in this volume explore in diverse ways and with attention to a variety of literary practices what it might mean to speak of ‘the work of world literature’. The volume shows how attention to literariness complicates the ethical and political conundrums at the centre of debates about world literature.
This book links world-literary studies with anthropology and ethnography. It shows how ethnographic narratives can represent a compelling point of departure for world-literary explorations. The volume compares the travel writing and fiction of Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling as colonial ethnographic narratives; the militant writings of Carlo Levi and Mahasweta Devi; and the travelogues and ethnographic fiction of Amitav Ghosh and the literary journalism of Frank Westerman. Each of these readings focuses on a set of social, political and historical circumstances and relies on a dialogue with anthropological theory and history. This book demonstrates how imperialism, colonialism, capitalism and ecology are interdependent, and contributes to methodological debates within both anthropology and world-literary studies.