A passage from Ryszard KapuÅ›ciÅ„ski’s Travels with Herodotus, originally published in Poland in 2004 and just published in English by Knopf. In this excerpt, the author talks about what it was like to read Herodotus–or, more specifically, why one did not have the privilege of reading Herodotus–in Poland in 1951: The Herodotus manuscript arrived at the press just as Western radio stations began speaking of Stalin’s serious illness. The details were murky, but people were afraid of a new wave of terror and preferred to lie low, to risk nothing, to give no one any pretext, to wait things...
Monthly Archives: June 2007
songs of the season
So I finally got around to watching I Gotta a Crush on Obama, wherein a voluptuous young woman who calls herself Obama Girl prances about in short-shorts singing about her thing for “B.” It’s hilarious and actually kind of on point. I may have muddled a couple of words here, but here’s a sample from the lyrics: “You seemed to float onto the floor/Democratic convention 2004/So I put down my Kerry sign/Knew I had to make you mine/I cannot wait til two thousand and eight/Baby you’re the best candidate/You’re into border security/let’s break the border between you and me/universal...
Logorrhea
Nice review of the anthology Logorrhea, edited by John Klima, by Mark Graham for the Rocky Mountain News: Highlights of the anthology include: Hal Duncan’s The Chiaroscurist about an artist who uses a local dwarf to represent the face of God in a fresco that takes nearly a decade to complete; the title story, Logorrhea,in which Michelle Richmond’s heroine is able to cure herself of her inane babbling when she meets a strange man whose flesh is composed of scales; and Tim Pratt’s From Around Here, which makes use of autochthonous (indigenous, native) as an earth spirit takes over...
Book Passage
I’ll be reading at Book Passage in Corte Madera tonight at 7:00 p.m.
When Yes Means Not Really
I remember in high school when the drivers’ ed. teacher asked me if I knew how to drive. “Yes!” I said. I didn’t want to be stuck in the simulator room with the kids who said “no,” avoiding crashes on the big screen when I could be avoiding them in real life. Problem was, I’d sounded so confident of my ability to drive that the teacher took me out onto Government Boulevard in an actual car and told me to do my thing. As I’d never been behind the wheel before, this was not pretty. When Steve Elliott asked...
The international bestseller about one woman’s search for a missing child…
"Mesmerizing." ~Library Journal, starred review.
Stop dreaming, start writing!
