Jessica Zafra's Blog, page 92

László Krasznahorkai has won the Booker International Prize

The Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai, whose sentences roll out over paragraphs in what his translator George Szirtes has called a “slow lava flow of narrative, a vast black river of type”, has won the Man Booker International prize for his “achievement in fiction on the world stage”. Chair of judges Marina Warner, the academic and […]

Help for young book nerds

Are you between the ages of 6 and 16? Do you read a lot of books? Have you read The Lord of the Rings and/or Dune and/or The Once and Future King? If you have not read any of these, you are not the nerd we are looking for. Are you bored and/or insulted by […]

Money, morals and Mayweather

Anyone who cares about boxing knows that a number of its participants have criminal pasts—and, for that matter, criminal presents and criminal futures. In Mayweather’s case, the news of his latest assault and concomitant jail sentence was sometimes treated as yet one more episode in a colorful life. A few months after the sentence came […]

You can write between the lines of Pride and Prejudice.

The “lines” on the pages are the text of Jane Austen’s novel in small print. (Note: Not the complete novel.) If you can’t bear to read what you wrote, you can read Jane, or Charlotte, Bram and others. Also available: Persuasion, The Wizard of Oz, Tales of the Brothers Grimm, Dracula, Jane Eyre, The Adventures […]

If you wished Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life were longer, your wish has been granted.

Saffy says: As Felis imperator I hereby declare a moratorium on book-buying. We didn’t even know a new Kate Atkinson novel was due! Thank you, publisher. According to the blurbs this is a companion to Life After Life, in which Ursula Todd lived her life over and over with variations to allow her to do […]

Wolf Hall: The realpolitik of sex and power

On the day of execution, the prisoner is led out of the tower to a small stage in front of an eager crowd. The prisoner, a woman who once had the King of England under her thumb, looks pale and child-like. As she approaches the stage, trailed by her ladies-in-waiting, she opens her wallet and […]

Mad Max returns—faster, more furious, and exuberantly insane.

Holy crap, it’s really Mad Max. George Miller is still George Miller, 30 years after the last Mad Max. We thought, Okay, if he wants to cash in he’s earned the right because he made Max and Babe, and anyway how do you reboot a series that ended with Mel Gibson facing Tina Turner’s Auntie […]

Mad Max returns: We love the smell of gasoline and sand.

Holy crap, it’s really Mad Max. George Miller is still George Miller, 30 years after the last Mad Max. We thought, Okay, if he wants to cash in he’s earned the right because he made Max and Babe, and anyway how do you reboot a series that ended with Mel Gibson facing Tina Turner’s Auntie […]

The couch where psychoanalysis was born

The couch in Dr. Freud’s office We didn’t get to read The Interpretation of Dreams, which we’d packed for our trip to Vienna. There was so much to see that we could not look at pages. And then we took lots of photos at the Sigmund Freud Museum, which used to be the Freud family […]

Please bring strange things: A poem for wanderers

Prater, Wien Initiation Song from the Finders’ Lodge by Ursula K. LeGuin, from her novel Always Coming Home Please bring strange things. Please come bringing new things. Let very old things come into your hands. Let what you do not know come into your eyes. Let desert sand harden your feet. Let the arch of […]