Category: World Literature

Reading “Job”

There were ample precedents in Dostoevsky’s work for his thematic focus on the problem of theodicy raised by Ivan—the problem of the existence of evil and suffering in a world presumably created by a God…

Today’s One-Liner (#81)

“He did a multitude of good deeds as secretly as bad ones are usually done.” Said about Jean Valjean, in Victor Hugo,  Les Misérables, translated by Charles E. Wilbour

Today’s One-Liner (#76)

“She has a rare quality of taking full responsibility in the moment for everything she does and says.” –Grigory Dashevsky, quoted in Maria Stepanova’s introduction to Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope, Everyman’s Library, 2023

Dear Annie and Lindsay

I was earlier going through a 2016-17 Moleskine commonplace book I kept, and came across the following passages I transcribed from Harold Bloom’s book, How to Read and Why. I hope you may enjoy at…

Today’s One-Liner (#74)

Think, when you look at people, at their recent birth, their childhood, or their imminent death—and you will love them: such frail creatures.  –Abram Tertz (Andrei Sinyavsky), A Voice from the Chorus

The Demise of Kindness

There were once many kind people, and even unkind ones pretended to be good because that was the thing to do. Such pretense was the source of the hypocrisy and dishonesty so much exposed in…

Genres

[Alexander Kluge’s two books] are sobering inventories of a catastrophe, cool, dry and therefore more gripping.  A card index of all imaginable inhumanities.  Kluge’s books consist of excerpts from diaries, telegrams, official reports, sermons of…

Today’s One-Liner (#70)

“And I shall also tell you, dear mother, that each of us is guilty in everything before everyone, and I most of all.” –Markel, in Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov