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. Parasitology mira grant6/30/2023 In his memoir Nerd Do Well, Simon Pegg finds that fast zombies “forgo the winning subtleties of the genre in favour of less cerebral scares” (234). Among true horror aficionados, there’s contention over which is superior to the other. At the very least, my specific horror of zombies has led me to ponder the implications of the two major subspecies: the truly undead, shuffling zombie and the quick, infected zombie. So, despite being a horror weenie, I’m a bit more acquainted with the stuff than a similarly spookable Jane who wisely avoids the stuff altogether. This year’s entry was the X-Files episode “Home.” After reading this review of it on Tor.com, I found myself reading every summary of it I could find and even chanced a glimpse at some screencaps until I was starting getting reluctant to turn off the lights. But, despite (or perhaps because of) my aversion, I find myself, once a year, embarking on an oblique horror binge by reading the Wikipedia entries for horror films and spooking myself silly. (It’s something about the tone, not the gore.) I mean, I’m really glad I watched Cabin in the Woods, because it’s a very useful text for me critically, but I also stayed up until 2 AM in the morning, serene in the knowledge that Pumpkinhead would inevitably jump out of the shadows and set my bed on fire. It is no secret that zombies terrify me and I’m the kind of weenie who can barely stomach horror films. In New Orleans, there was a large population of free blacks, and slaves there had “greater relative freedom” than elsewhere. Sublette also lucidly discusses New Orleans’ important role in the domestic slave trade, arguing persuasively that the culture of slavery in New Orleans was different from that in Virginia or South Carolina. He considers, for example, how musical influences from different parts of Africa-Kongo drumming and Senegambian banjo playing-combined to forge a distinctive musical culture. Central to his account are the African slaves, who began arriving in New Orleans in 1719, and their contributions to the city’s musical life. ) charts the development of New Orleans, from European colonization through the Haitian revolution (which was crucial to French and American negotiations over Louisiana) to the Louisiana Purchase. In this thoughtful, well-researched history, Sublette ( Cuba and Its Music Johanna louise spyri6/30/2023 Gravesite at Sihlfeld cemetery in Zurich Plagiarism claim An icon in Switzerland, Spyri's portrait was placed on a postage stamp in 1951 and on a 20 CHF commemorative coin in 2009. She was interred in the family plot at the Sihlfeld-A Cemetery in Zürich. Alone, she devoted herself to charitable causes and wrote over fifty more stories before her death in 1901. Spyri's husband and her only child, both named Bernhard, both died in 1884. Heidi tells the story of an orphan girl who lives with her grandfather in the Swiss Alps, and is famous for its vivid portrayal of the landscape. Her first story, "A Leaf on Vrony's Grave", which deals with a woman's life of domestic violence, was published in 1873 the following years further stories for both adults and children appeared, among them the novel Heidi, which she wrote in four weeks only. Whilst living in the city of Zürich she began to write about life in the country. In 1852, Johanna Heusser married a lawyer named Bernhard Spyri. Born in Hirzel, a rural area in the canton of Zürich, as a child she spent several summers near Chur in Graubünden, the setting she later would use in her novels. Johanna Louise Spyri ( German: née Heusser 12 June 1827 – 7 July 1901) was a Swiss author of novels, notably children's stories. Ray bradbury short story smart house6/30/2023 Some of the technological paradigms are outdated. Also, all three of the Allendale, Californias are near where I live, so I really hope this stays fiction.ĭespite my love for it, I must admit that some aspects of this story ring false for modern readers. is “only” at war with Afghanistan, drugs, and reason, and yet most of us would still be surprised if by that date our cities had been reduced to green, glowing piles of rubble with fully-automated houses in the exurbs. I suspect people will be paying more attention to it in the near future, since the story’s events happen over the 4th and 5th of August in 2026-only seven years in the future as I sit writing this article. We are still figuring out our relationship to automation, still grappling with the horrors of war, and suffering the cruelty of wealth inequality, so, it’s still relevant. But really it’s a memento mori and a prescient warning about automation, war, and wealth and raises questions about how these things might be linked. At a surface level, it’s a story about the last days of an abandoned, high-tech house. (At the very least, it will help you understand the rest of this article.) It was first published 69 years ago in Collier’s magazine, but don’t pass it by as a historical curiosity. If you haven’t read the short story, ‘ There Will Come Soft Rains,’ do so now. |