Page 27 - Max Brod News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Philip Roth: The Biography, by Blake Bailey. W. W. Norton. 912 pages. $40. I ’ve never understood what others make out of non-fiction. Me, I used to make fiction out of it, but that was a while ago and I’m talking about regular people. I’m talking about you people, who apparently even now keep buying and library-borrowing, perhaps even reading, masses of these vast, fact-teeming books whose genre swears to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God. What exactly do you want from them? I can’t imagine you read history for the same reason I did, to cherry-pick peri...

Locking down with Kafka How the great writer, in his airless, claustrophobic fictions,  provides a guide to living in the pandemic age. In “A Report to an Academy”, a short story published by Franz Kafka in 1919, an ape named Red Peter gives a lecture to a scientific conference, recalling how he was hunted in the jungle and then awoke one day in a cage, unable to return to the old way of life he had loved.  “For the first time in my life I could see no way out,” the ape says of his captivity. “Hopelessly sobbing, painfully hunting for fleas, apathetically licking a coconut, bea...

Roberto Bolaño Recenters His Mythic World Credit...David Plunkert By Garth Risk Hallberg Translated by Natasha Wimmer Emily Dickinson asked her sister, Vinnie, to burn her papers after she died. For Kafka, it was his friend Max Brod. Philip Larkin assigned the job to a professional, the distinguished editor and poet Anthony Thwaite. But no formal code of ethics covers the work of literary executors, whose general inclination — when in doubt, publish — often leaves us the richer. True, it may not enlarge our sense of Larkin’s poems to read him banging on about his “non-a...

Don't show me this message again✕ A detail of one of the photographs taken by the unnamed civil servant (Christian Berst Gallery) H e was an unsung genius toiling in obscurity, dedicated to his art and his beloved mother, upon whose death he took his own life.   Or was he a dirty old man who for years sneaked around Paris cafes, shops, and streets, secretly photographing women’s legs? Whatever the truth, his oeuvre is now on display in a Paris art gallery and is making a tidy sum for the gallery owner. Please enter your email addressPlease enter a valid email addressPlease enter a valid...