Jessica Zafra's Blog, page 26

The Bibliophibians Reading Group is now in session. This week: Memoirs of a Polar Bear.

This weekend it’s pouring rain and blazing sunshine, often simultaneously. It takes at least 30 minutes to get a Grab car, and the fare is high, and if you decide to take a taxi the driver blames you for the trouble in the world. Every restaurant you want to try in Poblacion seems to be […]

Yoko Tawada, author of “magnificently strange, profoundly empathic” novels, will give a talk in Manila on July 9. Everyone is welcome.

Yoko Tawada during a reading in front of the sculpture of Knut at Berlin’s natural-history museum. Credit Photograph from Yoko Tawada We’re doing a Bibliophibians Reading Group for her novel, Memoirs of A Polar Bear, beginning on Monday, July 2. You can join the discussion by posting in Comments. Then we will do an interview […]

Random poems for this rainy Monday

Image from wallpapervortex This one is by the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño, whose doorstop-sized novels I will read when I go to South America. And this by the Japanese poet Hideo Ogumi, whom I know nothing about, but whose gloriously unkempt hair inspires me to go uncombed today (So if you run into me I […]

Idea for a story: Herman Melville in Manila

Like many readers I’ve had a long and tortuous relationship with Herman Melville. Moby Dick IS my Moby Dick: I’ve attempted to read it several times and found it fascinating and absolutely bonkers, but lacked the stamina to read more than a couple of chapters. I finally listened to Moby Dick as read by Tilda […]

It’s Saffy’s 18th birthday! Today she is The Oracle.

Happy Birthday, Saffron Sassafras Saoirse Schmitz Zafra Safin-Sprungli! She is in excellent health, thank you. We thought that after she had several teeth taken out she would stick to soft food, but she still snacks on kibble and is especially fond of fried or roasted chicken. Saffy’s hobby is sitting on computer keyboards or notebook […]

Enlist in our next Writing Boot Camp, Aug 11-12 at Banaue View Inn in Ifugao (with great views of Thanos’s hut)

This is the inn And this is the view. Photo by Kayzee Luglug

When you have too many books left unread, it’s time for countermeasures.

You know how, when you have guests, and they look at your bookshelves and say, “Have you read all these books?” your opinion of them plummets and you start lumping them with the people who move their lips while they read? There’s something worse: Admitting that your answer to their stupid question is tilting towards […]

Don’t Eat Before Reading This: the piece that started Anthony Bourdain’s career as bullshit detector

Illustration by Adrian Gill I love the sheer weirdness of the kitchen life: the dreamers, the crackpots, the refugees, and the sociopaths with whom I continue to work; the ever-present smells of roasting bones, searing fish, and simmering liquids; the noise and clatter, the hiss and spray, the flames, the smoke, and the steam. Admittedly, […]

There’s a Jean-Pierre Melville retrospective at the 23rd French Film Festival which starts tomorrow

You need to see Army of Shadows, Melville’s masterful film about the Resistance. And Bob Le Flambeur. And Leon Morin.

Life, Death, Travel: The extraordinary Olga Tokarczuk has won the Man International Booker

In Poland I asked my guides to recommend a contemporary writer of literary fiction, and everyone gave me the same answer: Olga Tokarczuk. So I asked for her books in the excellent bookstores of Warsaw and Krakow, and they had her books, but not the English translations. Last week, Olga Tokarczuk won the Man International […]