Platero and I by Juan Ramón Jiménez7/1/2023 The edition I picked up in the London Library is an English translation by William and Mary Roberts of American origin, it was published in Britain in 1914, the year Jiménez won the Nobel Prize. Platero and I, or Platero y yo, subtitled ‘An Andalusian Elegy’, is an early work which achieved much popularity, even legendary status, in the Spanish-speaking world. Having fled Spain at the time of the civil war, he spent much of his later life in the United States, where he taught at the University of Maryland and became known as the author of a line used by Ray Bradbury for the epigraph to his science-fiction classic Fahrenheit 451: ‘If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.’ Jiménez (1881–1958) was a Spanish poet who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1956. You’re going to love me.’ For me, Platero and I proved to be such a book. I spend a lot of time, more than I should, wandering through the stacks of the London Library, that strange and vast labyrinth of books, that pungent shadowy temple in which time appears to have set like resin and it was there, not long ago, when I wasn’t looking for it – because I didn’t know it was there – that I came across Platero and I by Juan Ramón Jiménez. Something special can happen then: something even miraculous. Like Poe’s purloined letter, they hide in plain view, standing on their shelves unregarded for days, weeks, months or years, innocent in their brittle dignity, until a hand, perhaps an idle one, pulls them down.
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Behind Closed Doors by B.A. Paris7/1/2023 I haven't loved a book this much since Alex North's The Whisper Man, which was only a few books ago. As much as I loved North's fabulous debut novel, I think I loved Behind Closed Doors even more. Low-ish for me anyway. Having only three or four books at home makes me kind of nervous I need at least five to feel like my reading well won't run dry. This book should definitely not be in the back-up category, but of course I had no idea how great it was going to be. Hooked from the very first page, I couldn't put it down. The crazy thing is, I saw Behind Closed Doors in passing when I needed a back-up book because my stack at home was getting low. Code name villanelle7/1/2023 Which in turn explains the entry in his bibliography which stands out as most un- Villanelle like: his co-authorship of The Faber Pocket Guide to Ballet…Ĭodename: Villanelle was optioned for the screen relatively quickly after the first novella, in spring 2014. These were mostly what Jennings calls “politely received but unprofitable novels,” adding “Our income was, to say the least, patchy.” That probably explains why he was dance critic at The Observer newspaper for 14 years. It wasn’t Jennings’s first published work: far from it, with Atlantic appearing back in 1995. It was followed by Villanelle: Hollowpoint in August, then Villanelle: Shanghai and Odessa in February and June of the following year. Codename: Villanelle was originally self-published by Jennings as four separate novellas, the first (with the same name) appearing in February 2014. With the second series of Killing Eve starting this month, and one of our most eagerly anticipated TV shows of the year, it seems a good point to take a look back at Luke Jennings’s original source material, and its translation to the small screen. Credit: Entertainment Weekly “You are an evolutionary necessity.” The three mothers anna tubbs7/1/2023 Although Tubbs highlights how these women instilled the lessons their sons ultimately shared with the world, she also illustrates that their lives did not begin when they gave birth.īy law, Alberta King had to give up her career as a public school teacher when she got married but she continued to teach through the church and her role as a mother. The mothers’ lives span from the 1890s to the late 1990s, through two world wars, the Great Depression, the Great Migration, the Harlem Renaissance, the women’s suffrage movement, the Civil Rights Movement and the deaths - in two cases, assassinations - of their sons. Tubbs, a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of Cambridge, encompasses the lives of Alberta King, Louise Little and Berdis Baldwin. Anna Malaika Tubbs’ biography, “The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation” honors the women who reared some of the most famous men in history, but were subsequently all but erased from their legacies. This story was published in partnership with The 19th, a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom reporting on gender, politics and policy.īefore the world came to know three revolutionary men, they were sons whose mothers’ deep, honest love prepared each for lives of activism. |