Luke > Recent Status Updates

[B.] Traven decides to be a mystery, so that no bureaucracy can label him. All the better to mock a world where the marriage contract and inheritance matter more than love and death.

—1923: Tampico

Terrorism is the symptom, not the disease.

Rui Barbosa believes in the law, and bases his belief on erudite quotations from imperial Romans and English liberals. But he doesn't believe in reality.

—1910: Rio de Janeiro

Let's remember this day, even when we don't know each other anymore.

"Ah, madame," he said, "I put [your letter] there with my own hands so none but myself would have the honor of presenting it to the renommée Josephine Bay-kère-r-r-r-r—" And he almost wept as he gave it to me.
A few seasons ago I went to see my namesake performing on the New York stage. I can see why he was so cut up about it.

Could property, wealth, status, religion, plus education not hold a family together?

You, who will seek the truth about words emitted by a voice, look first for the body behind the voice. The voice merely rationalises the needs, whims, caprices, of its owner, the master. Better therefore to know the master in whose service the intellect is and you'll be able to properly evaluate the import and imagery of his utterances. You serve the people who struggle; or you serve those who rob the people. In a...

Mrs. Capozzi might be puzzled to find a perfect stranger dropping in to tell her how to take care of her perfectly well baby, but there was probably as much point in learning the American way of caring for babies as there was in learning the American way of talking.

If what we have to say doesn't "sell," will we still say it?

After months of waiting for this copy to be returned, I am finally reading this. Here's hoping that it's worth the wait (something tells me that it very much is).

[W]ho was better off, the peasant in a forgotten village or the city dweller thrown onto these rubbish heaps they called locations?

Pity would be no more
If we did not make somebody Poor.

—William Blake

Announcements for Nobel Prizes for Lit for 2018 and 2019 coming 10/10/2019: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/lit...

That's the way literary recognition works, at least to a certain degree. It's all a matter of rumor, a rumor that multiplies like a virus until it becomes a collective affinity.

'Margaret Atwood Fans Rejoice as Amazon Completely Screws Other Retailers' - https://gizmodo.com/margaret-atwood-f...

It's your body, you can treat it however you please. The only area where you're free to do just as you like. And even that doesn't turn out how you wanted.

Much as I appreciate all the pages of notes, including that of an old engraving, what I could really use right now is a map.

The longer the introductory material, the more interesting the work, or so I've found. The relevant pages for this one clock in at 32 in number.

The crowd generated 100 Best Books by Women in Translation (into English) of 2019 has been posted! How many of your favorites made it in? http://biblibio.blogspot.com/2019/08/...

"Annoy a child and you'll discover the adult in him[...]Please an adult with gifts and the child therein re-emerges."

Strange to say, one could obtain freely in prison a number of books which had long since been withdrawn from public libraries.

I honestly just want to know what all the fuss is about and why this has practically ten times the number of reviews as does Human Acts (yeah, I know this won some award, but I like to sometimes think that readers have more brains than do lemmings).

May I never experience all that it is possible to get used to.

How had it happened that when choosing the men and women who were to be torn from this subjugated plain, the hand of destiny had strayed so far inland, away from the busy coastlines, to alight on the people who were, of all, the most stubbornly rooted in the silt of the Ganga, in a soil that had to be sown with suffering to yield its crop of story and song? It was as if fate had thrust its fist through the living...

This essay on Benjamin Moser, translator of Clarice Lispector, is very much worth reading: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/b...

Be sure to nominate your favorite Women in Translation before August 25th! Details at the link: https://mobile.twitter.com/Read_WIT/s...

In the course of the trial it had become almost laughably obvious to Neel that in this system of justice it was the English themselves—Mr Burnham and his ilk—who were exempt from the law as it applied to others: it was they who had become the world's new Brahmins.

If they arrested people like you they'd have to lock up the whole Party[.]

If you aren't already, consider installing the Library Extension app (on Chrome and other browsers) and streamline your free reading process on Goodreads, Amazon, and a number of other book categorizing sites. Here's some news about the latest app updates: https://www.libraryextension.com/rele...

I can feel my brain expanding as I read, which is an enjoyable experience.