Gerald Thomas meets Samuel Beckett

Photographs taken in Paris, 1984

Gerald Thomas talking with Samuel Beckett. Paris, 1984.

Gerald Thomas talking with Samuel Beckett. Paris, 1984.

Matthew Feldman has kindly drawn my attention to two rare photographs of playwright Gerald Thomas talking to Samuel Beckett in a café in Paris. [Source]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett

Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich / The Devil

Two compelling short works by the Russian master

Leo Tolstoy. Portrait: Gay Nikolay Nikolayevich (1884, The Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow)

If War and Peace is just too long for you, The Guardian website's Nicholas Lezard offers an easier way to get acquainted with Tolstoy's work. He recommends two shorter tales: The Death of Ivan Ilyich and The Devil, recently published in a twin-edition by Oneworld. Lezard dramatically describes the first of these stories as 'probably his best-known work after War and Peace – and with good reason. It is one of the most lacerating works of literature ever written, a hard, pitiless stare into the abyss, not just of death, but of human nature. It is one of those works that's essential: not because reading it means you can tick off a cultural milestone [...], but because without it you're missing part of the picture of what it means to be human'. Lezard goes on to wonder whether 'Beckett's Malone Dies was written as a comic counterpoint to this work – light relief, as it were'. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• The Greatest Writer of All Time?
• 'Accursed Questions': Translating Russian Literature
• Peter Mendelsund's Book Designs

Thomas Bernhard on self-discipline

Bernhard on reading, writing and rising early

Thomas Bernhard

An extract from 'The Cellar: An Escape', part of Thomas Bernhard's autobiography, Gathering Evidence:

From my grandfather I had acquired the habit of rising early, almost always before five. It is a ritual I still preserve. Despite the unremitting force of inertia and in full consciousness of the pointlessness of everything we do, the seasons are met with the same unchanging discipline every day. For long periods I live in isolation, isolated both in mind and in body. I am able to cope with myself by subjecting myself completely and unswervingly to my needs. Periods of absolute productivity alternate with others in which I am utterly unproductive. Subject to every vagary of my own nature and of the universe - whatever it is - I can get through live only with the help of a precise daily routine. I am able to exist only by dint of standing up to myself - in fact, of consistently opposing myself. When I am writing I read nothing, and when I am reading I write nothing. For long periods I read and write nothing, finding both equally repugnant. There are long periods when I detest both reading and writing, and then I fall prey to inactivity, which means brooding obsessively on my extremely personal plight, both as an object of curiosity and as a confirmation of everything I am today, of what I have become over the years in circumstances which are as routine as they are unnatural, artificial, and indeed perverse.

Thomas Bernhard, Gathering Evidence: A Memoir

Translated by David McLintock

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Thomas Bernhard

George Craig, Writing Beckett's Letters

A new book on the translation of Beckett's correspondence

George Craig, Writing Beckett's Letters

The title of George Craig’s recent book, Writing Beckett’s Letters, is both playful and paradoxical. And it prompts the question: how can Craig claim to be the author of someone else’s correspondence? The answer is both simple and complicated: Craig is a translator. He has spent the last fifteen years as part of a band of scholars, translating literally thousands of letters written by Samuel Beckett from French into English. It is a job that few are cut out for, involving long hours of arduous transcription and the seemingly endless search for that most elusive of things: the right word.

The work forms part of a hugely ambitious project, culminating in a four-volume edition of Samuel Beckett’s Letters. The first part, released in 2009, covered much of Beckett’s early period: intellectual development, his move to Paris, his encounters with James Joyce and the European literary scene. Its publication ushered a new period in the scholarly appreciation of Beckett’s work, whilst offering a rare glimpse into the personal and artistic life of this most private of writers.

As Cambridge University heats up its Press for the second volume, to be published this September, Craig offers a privileged peek into one of Beckett’s most fertile creative periods. The next in the series will span 1941 to 1956, covering the writer’s war years, his famous Trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable) and the first performances of Waiting for Godot. Writing Beckett’s Letters offers an almost tangible sense of Beckett’s artistic notions during this period, no doubt aided by the abundance of high-quality colour reproductions of letters and postcards that illustrate the volume. Craig’s dedication to the project is apparent from the beginning, and the book becomes a meditation on the importance of language in Beckett’s writing, and the task of the translator.

Craig begins with an overview of Beckett’s correspondence with art historian and critic Georges Duthuit. The letters begin in pre-war Paris, span the Occupation, and culminate with Beckett’s post-war experiments with French prose. For Craig, Duthuit was something like the ‘ideal interlocutor’ to Beckett, a person to whom ‘anything could be said’. As a result, the letters grant a very rare insight into Beckett’s artistic development throughout this crucial period, and form the basis of what was later published, in drastically abbreviated form, as the Three Dialogues. Craig suggests that these letters be considered a powerful and creative body of work in their own right, ranked alongside Beckett’s revolutionary work in drama and prose.

Alongside reflections on Samuel Beckett’s literary work are observations on the process of translation. To begin, for instance, is the challenge of an accurate transcription: at times, nothing short of impossible. Craig writes that ‘Beckett is the first to recognise how difficult his hand is (“my Ogham”), and the letters abound in promises to be more careful, to do better. But these are like New Year resolutions: well intended, but never binding.’ The task of the translator is further complicated by Beckett’s use of multiple languages, a common practice in his correspondence that is never signalled. Craig addresses these problems engagingly with examples from the letters themselves, and manages to make the tricky elements of his work into fascinating points of discussion.

There are also several interesting insights into Samuel Beckett’s character. There’s a hint of his fondness for gardening, for instance. An impression of his opinions of criticism and academic discourse: ‘Even Maurice Blanchot, one of the very few critics of whom he speaks with real approval, will lose him by being, in Beckett’s view, too theoretical.’ And, among several of Beckett’s quirks, Craig identifies his tendency to resist flattery whenever possible: he scanned ‘descriptions of human behaviour (particularly his own) for signs of flattery, or indeed of anything complimentary, and [replaced them with] correspondingly unfavourable descriptions’. Beckett’s self-deprecatory gestures are finely illustrated by an anecdote concerning French publisher Jérôme Lindon: Beckett suggested that if Lindon would insist on publishing his unsatisfactory early work, Mercier et Camier, it might comprise part of a larger compilation entitled Merdes posthumes (posthumous shit).

The post-war European landscape held a profound and inevitable influence on Samuel Beckett’s writing, whether in prose, poetry, or performance, and Craig draws attention to its fragmentary, spectral presence in the letters. Twentieth century violence and atrocity hover in the margins of some of Beckett’s signature texts, from Waiting for Godot and Endgame to The Lost Ones and Catastrophe: but contemporary historical or political issues are never discussed explicitly in the work. Craig identifies a similar pattern in Beckett’s letters, where references to the Holocaust are briefly mentioned, but never expanded upon. In one letter, Beckett writes ‘Robert Desnos (Corps et biens) died like Péron on his way home from deportation’. As Craig rather hauntingly puts it, ‘There is no further comment’.

For me, the most fascinating elements of George Craig’s slim, compact volume are his comments on the influence of French on Beckett’s body of work. From the mannered speech of the Parisian intelligentsia to the rural argot of farmers and manual labourers, all voices find a home in Beckett’s texts.

Whilst George Craig’s book is neatly timed to anticipate the next volume of Beckett’s Letters, it is more than just a preview of things to come. To Beckett scholars and enthusiasts, the appeal of this book is obvious, tightly-woven with rare insight and beautiful reproductions. But it is also a thoughtful and engaging introduction to the problems of translation, and a testament to the status of correspondence as a kind of art-form. To paraphrase Craig’s description of Beckett and Duthuit’s correspondence, this is a work that abounds in strange, unexpected things.

George Craig, Writing Beckett’s Letters
16 in The Cahiers Series
Sylph Editions and the Centre for Writers and Translators at the American University of Paris
ISBN 978-0-9565092-7-7

Website

• Sylph Editions: George Craig, Writing Beckett's Letters
• Centre for Writers and Translators at the American University of Paris

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1941-1956
• Samuel Beckett's Letters
• J. M. Coetzee on Beckett's Letters
• Beckett's Handwriting

Verso and The Essential Žižek

Verso publish new volumes in The Essential Žižek series

Slavoj Žižek's Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? and Revolution at the Gates

As part of Verso's Essential Žižek series, two new volumes are scheduled for publication on 29 August 2011: Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? and Revolution at the Gates.

Press Release

Slavoj Žižek, the maverick philosopher, is the author of over 30 books, most recently Living in the End Times. Acclaimed as the ‘Elvis of cultural theory,’ he is today’s most controversial public intellectual. His work traverses the fields of philosophy, psychoanalysis, theology, history and political theory, taking in film, popular culture, literature and obscene jokes—all to provide acute analyses of the complexities of contemporary ideology as well as a serious and sophisticated philosophy. His recent films The Pervert's Guide to the Cinema and Žižek! reveal a theorist at the peak of his powers and a skilled communicator.

Now these two classic titles, that stand as the core of his ever-expanding life’s work, are being made available as the latest new editions in The Essential Žižek series in addition to The Sublime Object of Ideology, The Ticklish Subject, The Plague of Fantasies and The Fragile Absolute, which reflect the four pillars of his work: Lacanian psychoanalysis, Hegelian philosophy, a Marxist theory of ideology, and Christian theology.

Each is beautifully repackaged, including new introductions from Žižek himself. Simply put, they are the essential texts for understanding Žižek’s thought and thus cornerstones of contemporary philosophy.

Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?

Totalitarianism has always had a precise strategic function: to guarantee the liberal-democratic hegemony by dismissing the Leftist critique of liberal democracy as the two-faced twin of Right-wing dictatorships. Instead of providing yet another systematic exposition of the history of this notion, Žižek looks at totalitarianism in a way that Wittgenstein would approve of—finding it a cobweb of family resemblances.

He reveals the consensus view of totalitarianism, in which it is invariably defined in terms of four things: the holocaust as the ultimate, diabolical evil; the Stalinist gulag as the alleged truth of the socialist revolutionary project; the recent wave of ethnic and religious fundamentalisms to be fought through multiculturalists tolerance; and the deconstructionist idea that the ultimate root of totalitarianism is the ontological closure of thought. Žižek concludes that the devil lies not so much in the detail but in what enables the very designation totalitarian: the liberal-democratic consensus itself.

Revolution at the Gates

The idea of a Lenin renaissance might well provoke an outburst of sarcastic laughter. Marx is OK, but Lenin? Doesn’t he stand for the big catastrophe which left its mark on the entire twentieth-century? Lenin, however, deserves wider consideration than this, and his writings of 1917 are testament to a formidable political figure. They reveal his ability to grasp the significance of an extraordinary moment in history. Everything is here, from Lenin-the-ingenious-revolutionary-strategist to Lenin-of-the-enacted-utopia. To use Kierkegaard’s phrase, what we can glimpse in these writings is Lenin-in-becoming: not yet Lenin-the-Soviet-institution, but Lenin thrown into an open, contingent situation.

In Revolution at the Gates, Slavoj Žižek locates the 1917 writings in their historical context, while his afterword tackles the key question of whether Lenin can be reinvented in our era of “cultural capitalism.” Žižek is convinced that, whatever the discussion—the forthcoming crisis of capitalism, the possibility of a redemptive violence, the falsity of liberal tolerance—Lenin’s time has come again.

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Alain Badiou on Slavoj Žižek
• Slavoj Žižek on Ridley Scott's Alien
• Slavoj Žižek on Samuel Beckett
• Slavoj Žižek on Philosophy
• Slavoj Žižek on life, happiness and Hegel

Alain Badiou, Wittgenstein's Antiphilosophy

Badiou dissects the work of the towering twentieth century philosopher

Alain Badiou, Wittgenstein's Antiphilosophy

Verso has published Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy, a new book by Alain Badiou, translated with an introduction by Bruno Bosteels.

“A figure like Plato or Hegel walks here among us!” — Slavoj Žižek

“An heir to Jean-­Paul Sartre and Louis Althusser” — New Statesman

About the book

• Alain Badiou is one of France’s most influential radical thinkers – one of the ‘last men standing’ out of the great generation who witnessed the revolution of 1968. Best known for his political philosophy, he has recently been engaged with re-orientating the radical left with his Communist Hypothesis. He has also written several plays and a novel, and various volumes of cultural criticism, the latest of which is Five Lessons on Wagner.
• Now he turns his attention to Ludwig Wittgenstein, legendary maverick thinker and one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century. He was part of Bertrand Russell’s Cambridge circle in the early 20th century and became one of the key figures of analytic philosophy and standard-bearer of the “linguistic turn”. His work was hailed by many as ‘the end of philosophy’ and indeed he referred to himself as the ‘last philosopher’.
• Wittgenstein’s great work was Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Written in his twenties, it had a huge impact on modern thought, and in particular the use of language and logic in analytic philosophy. Badiou dissects the Tractacus, and finds Wittgenstein to be an exemplar of antiphilosophy.
• Antiphilosophy is defined by Badiou as a way of doing philosophy which questions or attacks the very basis of philosophy itself. Other key antiphilosophers would include Nietszche, Kierkegaard and Lacan.
• Badiou addresses the crucial seventh proposition in Tractacus Logico-Philosophicus where Wittgenstein argues that “what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence”. Badiou argues that this mystical act reduces logic to rhetoric, truth to an effect of language games, and philosophy to a set of esoteric aphorisms.
• In the course of his interrogation of Wittgenstein’s antiphilosophy, Badiou sets out and refines his own definitions of the universal truths that condition philosophy. Antiphilosophy shows the philosopher what he is: a political militant, hated by the powers that be and their servants; an aesthete; a lover, whose life is capable of capsizing for a woman or a man; and a savant. It is in this effervescent rebellion that philosophers produce their ideas.
• Bruno Bosteels’ introduction shows that this encounter with Wittgenstein is central to Badiou’s overall project – and that a dialogue with the exemplar of antiphilosophy is crucial to the continuing development of modern thought.

Praise for Alain Badiou

Scarcely any other moral thinker of our day is as politically clear sighted and courageously polemical, so prepared to put notions of truth and universality back on the agenda… Badiou has launched a transformative new intervention, which deserves to provoke a persisting response.

Terry Eagleton

Badiou is at his strongest in pointing to the inconsistencies of a facile multiculturalism, the pluralism of the food court and the shopping mall, which wilts in the face of any genuine expression of cultural hostility to liberal values.

Radical Philosophy

Alain Badiou could be the most important philosopher alive today

Irish Left Review

Badiou is by turns speculative, provocative…and droll.

Times Literary Supplement

Barry McCrea, In the Company of Strangers

Family and Narrative in Dickens, Conan Doyle, Joyce, and Proust

Columbia University Press have published Barry McCrea's recent study, In the Company of Strangers: Family and Narrative in Dickens, Conan Doyle, Joyce, and Proust:

In the Company of Strangers shows how a reconception of family and kinship underlies the revolutionary experiments of the modernist novel. While stories of marriage and long-lost relatives were a mainstay of classic Victorian fiction, Barry McCrea suggests that rival countercurrents within these family plots set the stage for the formal innovations of Joyce and Proust. Tracing the challenges to the family plot mounted by figures such as Fagin, Sherlock Holmes, Leopold Bloom, and Charles Swann, McCrea tells the story of how bonds generated by chance encounters between strangers come to take over the role of organizing narrative time and give shape to fictional worlds—a task and power that was once the preserve of the genealogical family. By investigating how the question of family is a hidden key to modernist structure and style, In the Company of Strangers explores the formal narrative potential of queerness and in doing so rewrites the history of the modern novel. [Read More]

Columbia University Press

Alexander Solzenitsyn's Short Stories

9 stories to be published in English for the first time

Alexander Solzenhitsyn

A collection of stories by Russian writer Alexander Solzenitsyn, author of Cancer Ward and A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, are to be published in English for the first time. According to Dalya Alberge, the collection will be entitled Apricot Jam and Other Stories, and has been 'described by scholars as ranking alongside his best work' [Read More]

The Ultimate Hitchcock Cookbook

Students pay homage to the master of suspense

The Casual Optimist has posted a wonderfully playful short film by Felix Meyer, Pascal Monaco, and Torsten Strer, students at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Hannover (link via Quipsologies) [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Truffaut and Hitchcock Audio Interviews
• Alfred Hitchcock on The Dick Cavett Show
• Alfred Hitchcock and his Signature Style

Life of a Dostoyevsky Translator

New documentary explores the fascinating life of Svetlana Geier

Ukranian translator Svetlana Geier. Photograph: Cinema Guild

NPR reviews Vadim Jendreyko's documentary, The Woman with the Five Elephants, based on the life of literary translator Svetlana Geier. Perhaps best known for her translations of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novels (from the original Russian into German), Geier's work has been tempered by her experiences of the Second World War. The documentary explores not just the epic scale of what would ultimately become Geier's life's work, but draws connections between the themes of Dostoyevsky's writing and twentieth century atrocity:

Puttering around her old-fashioned home, translator Svetlana Geier compares the intricacy of Dostoevsky's writing to what used be to termed "women's work," like cooking and lace-making. "Text" and "textile" have the same root, she notes. But the huge novels that give The Woman with the Five Elephants its title aren't just intricately crafted. They're also full of murder and madness. What does this stooped Freiburg great-grandmother know of such things?

Quite a bit, Vadim Jendreyko's quietly astonishing documentary reveals. Born in Kiev, Geier lived through Stalinist repression and Nazi invasion. She survived the latter thanks to her knowledge of German, which her mother called her "dowry." In the film, the 85-year-old is shown balancing between two cultures, both of which have left her many bitter memories.

Dostoevsky was arrested and sentenced to death in 1849, almost a century before Geier's father was purged by Stalin. Neither died in government custody, but Geier's father returned from prison battered and dying. Her mother was working to support the family, so Geier was assigned the hopeless task of nursing him back to health. She was 15.

Two years later, German troops occupied Kiev. One of Geier's childhood friends was among the 30,000 Jews massacred by the SS at Babi Yar, just outside the city. Yet Geier was rescued by the invaders, who gave her a scholarship to study in Freiburg despite her lack of Germanic ancestry. She never left.

For this cinematic portrait, Geier undertakes her first trip back to the Ukraine since 1943, accompanied by a solicitous granddaughter — and haunted by her son's current health. The journey yields some evocative moments, but mostly Geier finds her old haunts unrecognizable or simply impossible to locate. When she addresses some Kiev high school students, the gap seems unbridgeable. [Read More]

Mark Jenkins, 'Surviving To Conquer Dostoevsky's 5 Elephants'

NPR, 19 July 2011

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• 'Accursed Questions': Translating Russian Literature
• Byatt on Dostoyevsky and Execution
• Dostoyevsky on Politics and Personal Vanity
• Dostoyevsky: A Writer In His Time

Patricia Highsmith, The Cry of the Owl

New reissue is 'one of her most unsettling'

Patricia Highsmith, November 20, 1975. Image: AFP/Getty Images

Richard Rayner reviews a reissue of Patricia Highsmith's relatively unknown The Cry of the Owl (link via Susan Tomaselli): 'Guilt was Patricia Highsmith's great theme. In her books even the good know they're not innocent, and they carry an apprehension that they too will be found out. "Night was falling quickly, with visible speed like a black sea creeping over the earth," reflects Robert Forester at the beginning of The Cry of the Owl (Grove: 272 pp., $14), one of her lesser-known works from 1963 and one of her most unsettling. Which is saying plenty.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Patricia Highsmith's Greenwich Village

W. G. Sebald's Writing Style

Notes on a Voice

Illustration: Kathryn Rathke

A.D. Miller discusses the work of W.G. Sebald as part of More Intelligent Life's 'Notes on a Voice' series (link via 3 Quarks Daily): 'The essential theme of W.G. Sebald’s books is memory: how painful it is to live with, how dangerous it can be to live without it, for both nations and individuals. The narrators of his books—of which Austerlitz and the four linked narratives of exile in The Emigrants are the most compelling—live in a state of constant reminder. Everything blends into everything else: places, people, their stories and experiences, and above all different times, which seep into each other and blur together, often in long, unmoored passages of reported speech. The narrator of Vertigo gives a concise account of this method: “drawing connections between events that lay far apart but which seemed to me to be of the same order”.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue

• W. G. Sebald interviewed on Bookworm
• W. G. Sebald: Writing Pictures
• Coetzee on Sebald and the Uncanny
• Will Self on Sebald and the Holocaust

Jack Kerouac Playing Pool

Footage of the acclaimed Beat writer

The New Republic has posted a brief clip of Jack Kerouac playing pool (link via TheBookSlut) [Source]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Jack Kerouac's On the Road as iPad app
• Kerouac and Ginsberg Correspondence
• Carolyn Cassady on the Beat Generation
• Writers' Autographs
• The Photography of Tom Palumbo

Burroughs vs. Capote

Burroughs placed a curse on Capote for perceived misuse of talent

At Reality Studio, Thom Robinson reveals that William S. Burroughs attempted to place a curse on Truman Capote's writing career: 'Burroughs suggests Capote could have made positive use of his talents, presumably by applying them to the expansion of human consciousness (“You were granted an area for psychic development”). Instead, Burroughs finds that Capote has sold out a talent “that is not yours to sell.” In retribution for having misused “the talent that was granted you by this department”, Burroughs starkly warns “That talent is now officially withdrawn,” signing off with the sinister admonition, “You will never have anything else. You will never write another sentence above the level of In Cold Blood. As a writer you are finished.”' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: William S. Burroughs

Sigmund Freud and Cocaine

Did the use of stimulant drugs aid Freud's creative process?

Howard Markel, The Anatomy of Addiction: Sigmund Freud, William Halsted and the Miracle Drug, Cocaine

Laura Miller reviews Howard Markel's An Anatomy of Addiction: Sigmund Freud, William Halsted and the Miracle Drug Cocaine over at Salon.com: 'Markel's provocative book is a dual addiction biography of Freud and his contemporary, William Halsted, arguably the greatest surgeon of his time, a founding professor at Johns Hopkins Hospital and deviser of at least a half-dozen revolutionary surgical techniques and procedures still employed today, such as the use of rubber gloves. Both were unquestionably great men, but they also wrestled with dangerous drug habits that imperiled their work. Both sought to conceal or downplay their drug use and, as a result, information on that use and how, if at all, they managed to stop it is pretty sparse on the ground.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method: Official Trailer (HD)

Shiberhur adapt Kafka's In the Penal Colony

Kafka's short story performed in London

Shiberhur's 2011 production of Franz Kafka's 'In the Penal Colony'

ShiberHur perform a theatrical adaptation of Franz Kafka's short story 'In the Penal Colony' at the Old Vic in London. Michael Billington reviews the production in The Guardian: 'Where the earlier play was a raw, moving lament for a lost Palestine, this is a well-honed, more literary piece about torture and injustice: one that would, I suspect, have even more resonance if seen on its home soil.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Franz Kafka

David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method: Official Trailer (HD)

New Cronenberg film explores birth of psychoanalysis

David Cronenberg's new film, A Dangerous Method, dramatizes the relationship between Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. It stars Viggo Mortensen as Freud, Michael Fassbender as Jung, and Kiera Knightley as Sabina Spielrein. The film is scheduled for release in the UK on 10 February 2012.

The Unmade Films of J. G. Ballard

On the cinematic qualities of Ballard's work

A still from Chris Petit's The Unmade films of JG Ballard (1990)

UBUWeb are hosting a fragment of Chris Petit's The Unmade films of JG Ballard [1990], a film possibly also known as Moving Pictures: JG Ballard. The website describes the film as an 'essay on Ballard's fiction, and its unrealised cinematic potential, with particular reference to David Cronenberg's (yet to be filmed) Crash, featuring an interview with the director, prior to making of his film.' (link via Ballardian) [Watch the Film]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: J. G. Ballard
• Chris Petit on J. G. Ballard
• Chris Petit: Content and Radio On
• Chris Petit: Watch Radio On

Lars Iyer talks to Biblioklept

Featured online interview

Biblioklept is featuring a fascinating interview with Spurious author Lars Iyer [Read More]

Marcel Proust: Funny Man

Was Proust the funniest man in Paris?

Tim Carmody has written a profile of Proust over at HiLoBrow: 'By all accounts, Marcel Proust (1871-1922) was the funniest man in Paris. During France’s Belle Époque, the decades before World War One that historian/Proustian Roger Shattuck calls “The Banquet Years,” Proust haunted both litterateurs and the nobility in their salons with his caustic wit and almond-eyed stare.' (link via Susan Tomaselli) [Read More]

J. G. Ballard's Crash and Cocaine Nights

'Crash is a hymn to psychopathy'

A still from Harely Cockliss' The Atrocity Exhibition (1970). J. G. Ballard pictured left.

David Blackburn considers Ballard's Crash and Cocaine Nights on the Spectator Book Blog: 'Ballard, the author, has been crowned as a visionary who warned against the dictatorship of technology and consumerism, those crushing benzodiazepines of modernity. But Crash seems to hark back, deep into the heads of man’s darkest sexualities. It recalls Bakunin’s maxim that the "lust for destruction is also a creative desire"; that transgression is erotic; and that post-Lapsarianism is latent in mankind. Is there a substantive difference between deliberately crashing cars for kicks and the calculated depravity of, say, Sodom and Gomorrah? As Ballard admitted to Will Self in the early nineties, "Crash is a hymn to psychopathy".' (link via Susan Tomaselli) [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: J. G. Ballard

Corrected Proof: Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

Corrected page proof of Woolf's classic modernist novel

A document from the Smith College Archives (link via Susan Tomaselli). [Source]

W. G. Sebald Interviewed on Bookworm

Audio interview free to stream online

Biblioklept have posted a link to an online audio interview with W. G. Sebald, recorded just days before his death in 2001 [Read More]

Alan Moore cites Beckett as an influence

New chapter of Jerusalem 'in the style' of Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett is an artistic influence on Alan Moore's most recent work: 'The chapter [of Jerusalem] I’m doing at the moment is in the style of a Samuel Beckett play, so I’m having fun with that. It’s a Samuel Beckett play that actually has Samuel Beckett as a character [...]' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett

James Joyce's Family Passport

Unique document to be auctioned

James Joyce's family passport

Eoin Burke-Kennedy of The Irish Times reports: 'James Joyce's wartime family passport, recording the writer’s movements across Europe as he penned his masterpiece Ulysses, is to be auctioned at Sotheby’s in London next month.' [Read More]

Roland Barthes and The Preparation of the Novel

'How does a novel persuade itself into completion?'

Roland Barthes

David Winters reviews Roland Barthes' The Preparation of the Novel for 3:AM Magazine:

As Raymond Federman once wrote, ‘everybody is writing a novel these days,’ even if, and perhaps because, ‘nobody knows why.’ We live in a world where the wish to write, or, more often, to have written, speaks only of some other, inner wish, whose sense is left unspoken. The novel, real or projected, achieved or abandoned, exists in the mind of its writer less as a literary object than as a wish underwritten by other wishes. In this sense, The Preparation of the Novel takes the measure not of a set of texts, but of a nested structure of desires.

‘By the end of the 1970s,’ writes Kate Briggs in her preface to these lectures, ‘apparently “everyone knew” that Roland Barthes was writing a novel.’ Yet at the time of his death in 1980, Barthes had barely begun to plan his “Vita Nova”; the book remained a sketched hypothesis. This volume, comprising his third and final set of lectures at the Collège de France, could be said to plot the gulf between the project’s, any project’s, intention — its biographical or existential coordinates, conceived as a dense network of points — and its terminus as a felt form, whether fully grown or aborted, or both at once.

‘Will I really write a Novel?’ Barthes enquires at the outset of the course. ‘I’ll answer this and only this. I’ll proceed as if I were going to write one.’ He will prepare as if preparation were an end in itself, inhabiting the mad fantasy of a writing that falls short of its own composition, ‘pushing that fantasy as far as it will go.’ Only then will he breach or break, or get broken into, the recognition (kenshō) that writing is nothing but its wants and longings, that ‘the product is indistinguishable from the production, the practice from the drive.’ This is the reason why he must preserve the indeterminacy of each of the terms in his title. He speaks of a preparation that is neither ‘of’ nor ‘for’ a novel, and of a novel that is not a novel, nor a set of notes for a novel never to be written. [Read More]

David Winters, 'Everybody is Writing a Novel'
3:AM Magazine, 28 June 2011

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• TLS on Barthes' The Preparation for the Novel
• Roland Barthes, The Preparation for the Novel
• Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary
• Neil Badmington on Roland Barthes and Mythologies
• Michael Wood on Roland Barthes
• Reading on Roland Barthes on Reading
• Roland Barthes on Cafés
• In Theory: Barthes' Death of the Author
• An Almost Obsessive Relation to Writing Instruments

Beckett's Germany

The artistic and philosophical influence of German culture on Beckett's writing

Rembrandt, The Money Changer (1627)

Derek Scally surveys a new way of thinking about Samuel Beckett's work:

After Beckett’s death, in 1989, his nephew, Edward, discovered six notebooks in a trunk: diaries from his first German phase, a six-month journey through the country in 1936-7.

It was a sensational find: 500 handwritten pages of the only diary Beckett ever kept, extracts of which were first published in Prof James Knowlson’s 1996 biography, Damned to Fame.

Since then the diaries, though studied and cited by academics, have remained unpublished and are a matter of speculation, dispute and friction among Beckett scholars. How best to reconcile the known Beckett, the Irish Nobel Prize literary laureate who lived in France, with the unknown, “German” Beckett?

“The idea of Beckett as the Irish Frenchman is deeply entrenched and may be difficult to dislodge, both in academic and non-academic circles,” says Dr Mark Nixon, a Beckett scholar and the head of the Beckett International Foundation at the University of Reading.

But, slowly, efforts are gaining momentum to establish Germany next to Ireland and France as part of a triumvirate of Beckett’s cultural influences.

For Beckett scholars Germany is no longer just a place where his work was well received after he became a name, but a cultural spring from which Beckett drank thirstily in his formative years.

Erika Tophoven produced Beckett’s Berlin, in 2005, an illuminating and accessible volume putting his first stay in the capital in its historical context. Last month Nixon published the first critical analysis of Beckett’s German diaries. Now Beckett’s German publisher, Suhrkamp, has secured agreement with Edward Beckett, executor of the estate, to publish a three-volume annotated edition of the diaries.

Two decades after his death, what Knowlson calls Beckett’s “artistic pilgrimage” has moved into the limelight, offering an intriguing portrait of the artist as a young Germanophile.

“People will be surprised,” says Knowlson, “at how much Germany had an impact on him and how much some of his later attitudes – politically as well as aesthetically – were nurtured and moulded at this stage.”

[...]

“He is formulating an aesthetic,” says Knowlson. “He is going into a whole zone of being that has not been explored by artists, the zone of loneliness, the inner world, probing into the inner world, probing a whole area of ignorance and impotence, and I think that began in Germany.” Although he spent much time alone – “how I ADORE solitude” – Beckett left his Baedeker guidebook bubble and forced himself to meet locals to improve his spoken German.

“How absurd,” he wrote, “the struggle to learn to be silent in another language.”

After learning French and Italian he began a serious effort to teach himself German around 1930. To his friends’ amusement, he was soon ploughing through heavy fare such as the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer.

“Beckett liked the precision of the German language, which the French language didn’t have,” says Nixon. “He liked reading Schopenhauer for his style rather than content.”

Before his departure for Germany he began an exhaustive course of German art and culture while trying to teach himself German. In a lengthy trawl of German literature, he studied closely Goethe’s use of the autobiographical in his work just as he, Beckett, was struggling with his own “self-writing”.

He had much to do in his tour: after visiting public galleries, often dismayed at works deemed “degenerate” and removed by the Nazis, he had introductions to meet artists forbidden from exhibiting.

Despite the intense earnestness of his endeavour, a sociable and humorous Beckett emerges from the diaries, too. In Hamburg, his first stop, the diary is filled with bar jokes and lewd remarks spotted on toilet walls. Scribbled over a men’s urinal: “Come closer to prevent envy arising.”

Artist Roswitha Quadflieg, who used Hamburg diary extracts in a 2006 exhibition in the city, says, “It was all so exhausting for him because trying to register, filter, retain everything.” Her show caused a sensation, she says, because Beckett’s youthful diary entries were such a contrast to what she calls the humourless “grey eminence” that emerged from the later German translations of his work.

Beyond his deep immersion in the language, his German trip infused Beckett with a rich store of images he would draw on throughout his career, stored in a “photographic memory”, says Knowlson. The stage set of Krapp’s Last Tape , he suggests, is a “virtual reproduction” of Rembrandt’s The Moneychanger , which Beckett saw in Berlin.

In Dresden, Beckett records in his diary a “pleasant predilection” for a painting by Caspar David Friedrich, Two Men Observing the Moon , reflected in the staging of Waiting for Godot.

On his final stop, in Munich, Beckett records a memorable encounter with Karl Valentin, a tragic comedian located somewhere between Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, whose trademark shambling style may equally have fed into Godot.

Beckett left Nazi Germany on April 1st, 1936, physically and emotionally exhausted, but with a rich cultural-linguistic collage forming in his head. It changed him as an artist and left indelible marks on him as a man, too. [Read More]

Derek Scally, 'Beckett's Berlin'

The irish Times, 9 July 2011

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• Samuel Beckett's German Diaries to be Published
• Samuel Beckett and Germany
• 'As The Wind Takes Me': Beckett in Hamburg, 1936

David B. Livingstone on J. G. Ballard

An updated interview with the British writer

J. G. Ballard

David B. Livingstone remembers interviewing J. G. Ballard just over ten years ago, and reflects on the writer's insightful perspectives on Western culture (link via Spike Magazine):

“This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do not publish!”

It was with these ironic words that an editor at J.G. Ballard’s publisher futilely urged the suppression of Crash over a quarter-century ago, a book which many have since come to see as a visionary masterpiece. Though perhaps the first, this unnamed editor was by no means the last person to be discomfited by Ballard’s nightmarish, frequently grotesque tale of a small cadre of car-crash fetishists prone to getting their sexual kicks by staging smashups which resulted in very-real injuries and deaths. And given the impending release of horror director David Cronenberg’s film adaptation, it seems a certainty that the moral outrage is due for an exponential increase; media mogul Ted Turner and British cabinet minister Virginia Bottomley have already registered their howls of righteous indignation.

Considering his being “beyond psychiatric help,” the amiable, articulate, and consummately-logical James Graham Ballard has managed pretty well: His output to date consists of fifteen novels, seventeen collections of stories and essays, and substantial critical work for esteemed British newspapers such as the Guardian, London Times, and The Independent. Moreover, Ballard has come to be seen as one of science fiction’s principal intellectual luminaries, and his work as perhaps the best argument for the genre’s consideration as “serious” literature. The prophetic Crash, with its prescient foreshadowing of western culture’s latter-day fixation upon violence as entertainment, attests to the author’s acuity as a social critic.[Read More]

David B. Livingstone, 'J.G. Ballard, Prophet With Honor – Redux'

davidblivingstone.com, 10 July 2011

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: J. G. Ballard

Paul Auster, Book of Illusions

Part of Faber's new Secrets and Lies series

Paul Auster, Book of Illusions

Faber & Faber have repackaged Paul Auster's novel, Book of Illusions, as part of a new series of works, connected by the theme 'Secrets and Lies': 'Drawing new readers to our classics is the thinking behind the annual summer paperback series. The books for our Secrets and Lies promotion this year were chosen for the deception or hidden truth at the heart of each story.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Paul Auster

Gary Gutting, Thinking the Impossible

A survey of French philosophy since 1960

David Winters reviews Gary Gutting's Thinking the Impossible: French Philosophy Since 1960 over at ReadySteadyBook: 'Apart from its pedagogical context, what makes French thought ‘French,’ for Gutting – what unifies it, what sets it apart - is its persistent attention to a single, underlying theme: ‘thinking the impossible.’ This is the metaphilosophical meat of the book: the argument that, where analytic philosophers at least ‘act as if’ everything can be conceptually understood, the French are fascinated by limit cases, and are ‘sceptics about conceivability.’ [Read More]

Hermione Lee's Virginia Woolf

Jacqueline Rose weighs Lee's biography

In The London Review of Books, Jacqueline Rose reviews Hermione Lee's 1996 biography of Virginia Woolf [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Virginia Woolf's Late Essays

Samuel Beckett on Youtube

A selection of new and unusual productions

A new website, Samuel Beckett on Youtube, is promoting new and unusual productions of the Nobel laureate's work. As the title suggests, all productions are publicly available on the social networking site, Youtube: [View the site]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett

J. G. Ballard's Shepperton House for Sale

Ballard's former home 'in need for refurbishment'

J. G. Ballard's former home in Shepperton

Rob Sharp of The Independent reports that the home of writer J. G. Ballard is now for sale: 'Mr Ballard's former partner, Claire Walsh, has told friends the house is finally on the property market following the writer's death in 2009. Estate agent Haart is carrying an advertisement for the property, a "spacious three-bedroom semi-detached house situated just moments from Shepperton High Street" which is "in need of refurbishment". Ballard did little work on it, according to his neighbours. The asking price for this piece of literary history is just under £320,000.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: J. G. Ballard

William Shakespeare Folio Exhibition

Runs until 3 September 2011

Andrew Councill for The New York Times

The Folger Library in Washington mounts an impressive exhibition of Shakespeare's Folios:

Underground, not far from the handsome Great Hall at the Folger Shakespeare Library where a fascinating exhibition is on display, just beyond the institution’s reading rooms, down its back stairs and through a vault door that seems far more imposing than the “rocks impregnable” Shakespeare invoked in a sonnet, there is a wall on which more than 70 volumes lie flat on mounted shelves.

Each book has a different color; each has different dimensions. Some are boxed, others bound in goatskin. But once they were nearly identical. Each was printed in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death. And despite the motley array, these shelves hold one-third of the world’s surviving copies of a book that one scholar called “the greatest contribution made in a single volume to the secular literature of any age or country.”

That book is the Shakespeare First Folio. Beginning in 1893, and for the next 35 years, 82 copies were obsessively purchased by the library’s founder, Henry Clay Folger. Only 232 such folios still exist anywhere. And since the highest price paid for one was more than $6 million in 2001, the fiscal value of Folger’s collection may be getting closer to the worth of the literary riches found within.[Read More]

Edward Rothstein, 'Shakespeare Folios as Venerated Relics'

The New York Times, 7 July 2011

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Humanity and King Lear
• Hamlet: Play or Novel?
• Reading Shakespeare's Sonnets
• Shakespeare and Punk
• Shakespeare's Hamlet: Polonious on Conduct

Becoming Tennessee Williams: Exhibition

1 February - 31 July 2011

The Harry Ransom Center has launched a centenary exhibition of Tennessee Williams, which ends 31 July 2011. Catch it if you can:

The Harry Ransom Center celebrates the 100th anniversary of American playwright Tennessee Williams' birth with the exhibition "Becoming Tennessee Williams." The exhibition runs from Feb. 1 to July 31 at the Harry Ransom Center, a humanities research library and museum at The University of Texas at Austin.

Featuring more than 250 items, the exhibition draws on the Ransom Center's extensive collection of Williams manuscripts, correspondence, photographs and artwork to explore the idea, act and process of artistic creation, illuminating how Thomas Lanier Williams became Tennessee Williams.

With his plays "The Glass Menagerie" (1945) and "A Streetcar Named Desire" (1947), Williams (1911–1983) reinvented the American theater.

"There is no more influential 20th-century American playwright than Tennessee Williams," said Charlotte Canning, curator of the exhibition and professor in the Department of Theater and Dance at The University of Texas at Austin. "He inspired future generations of writers as diverse as Suzan-Lori Parks, Tony Kushner, David Mamet and John Waters, and his plays remain among the most produced in the world."

Williams peopled his plays with characters grafted from life onto imagination. As he explained to his literary agent, Audrey Wood: "I have only one major theme for my work, which is the destructive impact of society on the non-conformist individual."

His keen insights gave rise to a body of work unequaled by almost any other 20th-century playwright. Although he was also a gifted poet and short story writer, it was the metamorphic possibilities of live performance that most inspired him.

The exhibition is organized into five sections that explore the "Battle of Angels" theme in Williams' works; the creative process behind "The Glass Menagerie," the development of "A Streetcar Named Desire" and the character of Blanche DuBois, themes of masculinity in Williams' work and the adaptation of his plays from stage to screen. [Read More]

'Becoming Tennessee Williams'

Harry Ransom Center

Exile, Literature and Freedom

Writers share their experiences

Over at Publishing Perspectives, authors exiled from Iran, Cuba, Afghanistan, Egypt, Algeria and the Congo discuss oppression, inspiration, and freedom [Read More]

After Hegel

A discussion on philosophy and critical theory

Nonsite has posted an interview with Robert Pippin, conducted by Omair Hussain of Platypus collective on 14 March 2011 (link via 3 Quarks Daily):

Robert Pippin: Hegel is the first to argue that philosophy has an historical and a diagnostic task. A traditional understanding of philosophy is distinguished by two central, normative questions, and its conviction that these questions can be answered by the exercise of pure human reason: What ought we to think, and what ought we to do? To Hegel, this conception of philosophy is insufficient and, in the Kantian sense, un-critical—that is, not aware of the conditions of its own possibility. Instead, Hegel argues that philosophy’s task is the comprehension of its own time in thought. That’s an extremely powerful and influential formulation, although it is not at all clear exactly what it means. Certainly, Hegel has in mind the self-justification of the use of coercive violence by a single authority in the state against all other members, otherwise known as politics. Under what justification could the coercive power of law, the ability to take away one’s freedom, operate? Hegel was skeptical of the “pure,” practically rational inquiry into this problem undertaken, say, by Plato’s Republic or Hobbes’s Leviathan. Human rationality, to Hegel, is not a faculty possessed by human beings, like sensibility or the imagination, which they exercise in isolation as monadic units. He thinks of rationality as the considerations we offer each other when our actions affect what others would otherwise be able to do. Rationality is a social practice and it has a history, as do the elements connected with it, such as the concept of subject or agent. [Read More]

Robert Pippin, 'After Hegel: An Interview with Robert Pippin'

nonsite.org, 18 June 2011

Truffaut and Hitchcock Audio Interviews

Nearly 12 hours of conversation

François Truffaut and Alfred Hitchcock

Open Culture have spotted a wonderful collection of audio interviews with Alfred Hitchcock, conducted by French New Wave frontrunner François Truffaut. Recorded in the autumn of 1962, the audio tapes run to nearly 12 hours of conversation, and form the basis of Truffaut's book on the British director's work, Hitchcock/Truffaut. [Listen]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Alfred Hitchcock on The Dick Cavett Show
• Alfred Hitchcock and his Signature Style

Dorothy Parker Telegram

'I can't look you in the voice'

Dorothy Parker in 1943. Photograph: George Platt Lynes

The endlessly fascinating Letters of Note has unearthed a dejected telegram sent by Dorothy Parker to her editor, Pascal Covici in 1945 (link via Maud Newton):

WESTERN UNION

1945 JUN 28 PM 4 37

NBQ209 78=NUJ NEWYORK NY 28 422P
PASCAL COVICI.VIKING PRESS=
18 EAST 48 ST=

THIS IS INSTEAD OF TELEPHONING BECAUSE I CANT LOOK YOU IN THE VOICE. I SIMPLY CANNOT GET THAT THING DONE YET NEVER HAVE DONE SUCH HARD NIGHT AND DAY WORK NEVER HAVE SO WANTED ANYTHING TO BE GOOD AND ALL I HAVE IS A PILE OF PAPER COVERED WITH WRONG WORDS. CAN ONLY KEEP AT IT AND HOPE TO HEAVEN TO GET IT DONE. DONT KNOW WHY IT IS SO TERRIBLY DIFFICULT OR I SO TERRIBLY INCOMPETANT=

DOROTHY.

Source: Letters of Note

Albert Camus' The Outsider: Illustrated

'Getting inside The Outsider'

Artwork for Albert Camus' The Outsider. Image: Matthew Richardson

Melville House Publishing report on a recent competition to illustrate Albert Camus' classic existentialist novel, The Outsider (link via Vol. 1 Brooklyn):

In London last night, House of Illustration and The Folio Society announced the winner for their inaugural Book Illustration Competition: Matthew Richardson. Richardson, winner of the ’Getting inside The Outsider’ competition, won a £4000 commission to complete the illustrations in a new edition of Camus’s L’Étranger. Below are a few of the images by Richardson and the other contest finalists. For more illustrations and illustrator information visit House of Illustration. [Read More]

Nathan Ihara, 'Illustrator wins the “Getting inside The Outsider” competition'

Moby Lives, 5 July 2011

Franz Kafka, A Message From the Emperor

A new translation

Mark Harman has created a new translation of Franz Kafka's 'A Message From the Emperor', now freely available to read at the New York Review of Books online blog:

Kafka’s “A Message From the Emperor” made its first appearance in the Prague Zionist journal Die Selbstwehr (“Self-defense”) in September 1919, the year the thirty-six-year-old Kafka composed his famous letter to his father. Hauntingly oblique, the story weaves together child-like hopefulness and stoical resignation, metaphysical yearning and psychological insight, a seemingly Chinese tale and covert Jewish themes. When the composer Martin Bresnick asked me for a new version that he could set to music, I was mindful of the fact that Kafka often read his stories aloud with the “rhythmic sweep, dramatic fire, and a spontaneity such as no actor achieves” (Max Brod). I wanted to create a text that could be read aloud in English since the very sound of Kafka’s German and the pattern of his syntax evoke the at-first unimpeded progress of the emperor’s messenger and then the obstacles that begin to clog his path. [Read More]

Franz Kafka and Mark Harman, 'Kafka’s “A Message From the Emperor”: A New Translation'

NYR Blog, 1 July 2011

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Franz Kafka

W. H. Auden on Franz Kafka

Is Kafka destined to be read by 'the wrong public'?

W. H. Auden

In a recent post, Times Flow Stemmed has quoted W. H. Auden's reading of Franz Kafka: 'I am inclined to believe that one should only read Kafka when one is in a eupeptic state of physical and mental health and, in consequence, tempted to dismiss any scrupulous heart-searching as a morbid fuss. When one is in low spirits, one should probably keep away from him, for, unless introspection is accompanied, as it always was in Kafka, by an equal passion for the good life, it all too easily degenerates into a spineless narcissistic fascination with one’s own sin and weakness.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Franz Kafka

Fabulous Faber & Faber

A cultural and historical overview

Abe Books celebrates the role Faber & Faber have served in the publishing industry: 'Faber and Faber is still an independent publisher today and its legacy is genuine – as much of its early work remains in print and no publisher has come close to matching its commitment to poetry. It has published 12 Nobel Laureates and six Booker Prize-winners so you could say its trophy cabinet is full to bursting. Paul Auster, Kazuo Ishiguro, Peter Carey and Orhan Pamuk are just four of its current cosmopolitan crop of well regarded writers.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Faber & Faber: Writers' Gallery

Why book reviews are still important

Tom Lutz on the cultural role that book reviews continue to serve

Editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books Tom Lutz argues for the continued relevance of literary criticism: 'It’s not like we live in a culture that is too well informed. For all the talk of information overload, we are all of us a little behind on our reading. Book reviews, even short ones, provide a service. Longer ones, not because they are longer, but because they can, as Gumport says, address ideas more seriously: they end up becoming a more substantial service.' [Read More]

Free Penguin Classics iPod App

Penguin Classics launch Complete Annotated Listing for your iPod

Screenshots of the Penguin Classics: Complete Annotated Listing iPod application

As part of its 65th anniversary celebrations, Penguin has released their popular Penguin Classics: A Complete Annotated Listing in a downloadable digital form. You can now access it free as an iPod application available from iTunes (link via Galley Cat) [Download the app]

About the App

For sixty-five years Penguin Classics has been the leading publisher of literature in the English-speaking world, providing readers with a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Now, in an effort to further enhance the discovery of great literary content, comes the Penguin Classics Complete Annotated Listing iPhone App.

This exciting Web-based app connects you to the classics like never before, putting the complete, annotated descriptions of all Penguin Classics currently in print right in your pocket!

Features

• The Complete Annotated List of the Penguin Classics library, searchable by title or author.
• “Discover the Classics” section which lets you populate books based upon Subject, Genre, Time Period, and Region. Feeling lucky? Give your iPhone a shake and see what the App finds for you.
• Quizzes that will test your knowledge of over 60 Penguin Classics.
• Facebook integration so you can share you quiz scores, as well as Penguin Classics you’ve read and Penguin Classics you want to read, with your Facebook friends.
• An Essential Classics section, a must for any Classics aficionado!
• The app will be continually updated with news, additional quizzes and lists, events info, and the latest Penguin Classics titles.

Video demonstration

Download

• Click here to download the Penguin Classics: A Complete Annotated Listing iPod app

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Jack Kerouac's On the Road as iPad app
• T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land as iPad app

On Daphne du Maurier's The Doll: Short Stories

du Maurier's posthumous collection reviewed in The Observer

Daphne du Maurier. Photograph: Edward Gooch/Hulton

Natasha Tripney reviews Daphne du Maurier's The Doll: Short Stories in The Observer: 'While they often do feel like the work of a young writer, they are occasionally quite startling in their insight and their ability to unsettle.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Daphne du Maurier: The Doll: Short Stories
• Nicolas Roeg on Don't Look Now