Category: World Literature

Wake Up!

Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav: “The world says that stories are good to put a person to sleep, but I say that with stories you arouse people from sleep.” — Sol Lipkin,  A History of Yiddish Literature

Perspective

Once an aging actress told [Abbé] Mugnier, “When I pass in front of my mirror, I cry out, ‘How beautiful I am!’ Is that a sin?” “No,” murmured the abbé, “It’s only an error.” –From…

A Request from Haiti

A friend in Haiti asked me to send her the following passage from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, and now I want to reread the whole novel again! Later, after getting used to Alyosha, Pyotr Alexandrovich…

Reply to Yüan Chen

You write out my poems, filling monastery walls, and I crowd these door-screens here with yours. Old friend, we never know where it is we’ll meet– we two duckweed leaves adrift on such vast seas….

Nawal El Saadawi: Uncalled-for-boldness

This year I have invited people to participate in an Arab Writers in Translation Reading Circle. Last month, several friends and I met to discuss Egyptian writer Nawal El-Saadawi’s 1983 Memoirs from the Women’s Prison,…

Word of the Day: Apokatastasis

Allen Ginsberg: …The conditions of revolution in late twentieth century are conditions unforeseen by any other civilization. We are going to the moon, we have drugs that go to the moon inside, we’ve recovered the…