Václav Havel’s legacy
“Havel’s Specter,” my essay on Václav Havel’s philosophy as manifested in his essays, his plays, and his political career, is published in the 9 April 2012 issue of The Nation. If anyone wants to know...
View ArticleThe adventure of life
At the New Yorker’s Page-Turner blog, I’ve written a memoir of my Czech professor, Peter Kussi.
View ArticleBookish; Eiger, Mönch & Jungfrau; and an Italian translation
At the website Bookish, the novelist Charles Finch has listed Necessary Errors in a round-up of “Great Expatriate Stories.” On the brand-new literary blog Eiger, Mönch & Jungfrau, there’s an...
View ArticleI’ll be reading at Greenpoint’s Word for Lambda, and talking about Hrabal at...
I’ll be taking part in two events in New York in the next week or so. Please come! On Thursday, May 1, at 6pm, I’ll be one of twenty nominees for Lambda Literary awards reading from their word at...
View Article“Errori necessari” and other book news
This fall, my novel Necessary Errors will be published in Italian by 66th and 2nd. I’m afraid I can’t speak or read Italian myself, but to judge by the kind of questions she’s asked me, my translator,...
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“Errori necessari” arrives this week
Necessary Errors is coming out in Italian this week, as Errori necessari. The publisher is 66th and 2nd, the translator is Federica Aceto, and the illustrator of the charming cover is Philippine...
View ArticleHindsight is 20/20
Ronald Reagan is often credited, especially among historians on the right, with having defeated the Soviet Union by challenging it to an arms race so costly that the Soviet economy collapsed, taking...
View ArticleForget the future
Peter recently bought a copy of Gregory Hays’s 2002 translation of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, published by the Modern Library, and flipping through it, I found a passage that made me laugh out...
View ArticleA Conversation about Pey’s “Treasure of the Spanish Civil War”
Tuesday night, at 7:30pm, I’ll be having a conversation with Donald Nicholson-Smith about his translation of Serge Pey’s The Treasure of the Spanish Civil War, just published by Archipelago Books. The...
View ArticleThe Translation Game: Thomas Mann and Du Fu
[An issue of my newsletter Leaflet] In The Three-Cornered World, a novel by Sōseki, the Japanese novelist I wrote about last week, a painter aims to “separate and discard the scratchy sand of human...
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