Penguin Classics Research Articles

Echo, and: Letter, and: Sea Daffodils

Echo, and: Letter, and: Sea Daffodils A. E. Stallings (bio) Echo What tales we tell what tales What ails? About the girls gone quiet Yet The story-telling ones once Who entertained the heart art Till suddenly they ceased. eased What makes the tongue inert? hurt. What turns the voice to swords Words, Cutting the throat? What takes aches, The name from the alibi I Of the body? We were stern: turn Stories, we said, are lies, ice, We told her, don’t repeat them. eat them. [End Page 360] Letter Daughter, yours is a different alphabet,For every word I know, you know another.You are only half mine, and halfA language hard to learn. In AmericaWhen I point out geese winging overhead,A wedge aimed like an arrow out of winter,I say, look, they are flying in a V —The metaphor so old it’s lost its spellAlthough it’s new to you. And yet you readThe white page of the sky your own way.“Maybe,” you say, “a V that’s upside down,“Or a Lambda,” adding, for me, “A Greek L.” [End Page 361] Sea Daffodils Pancratium maritimum for A. M. How the tattooed day-trippers nearly trampled them like flotsam, not blossoms,How it was illegal to pick them on Santorini, yet matrons gathered bouquets of them to their black-clad bosoms. How beside the seaside parking lot, in a moon-bleached waste,They seem both dissolute and chaste. How they danced in bridal white on the beach, as awaiting the sacrificeThat will unbridle the snorting winds, if it suffice. How briefer than youth they are, more fragile than plighted troth,And only pollinated by the hawk moth, The dithering moth that only flies when the winds are nearly becalmed.How in winter they turn inward, self-embalmed In their papery layers of onion-stingy bulbs, jar-like, Canopic.How older than any epic. How they meadow the edges of islands when they make landShuttling their ropey roots through the weft of unraveling sand. [End Page 362] How (you’ve said I’ve said), English daffodils misspellArchaic and infernal asphodel How once their tattered banners of surrender have been furled,They hunker from the world To bristle again like the wan shades of warriors sprung out of battle,How their seedpods, makeshift sistrums, rattle With seeds like black dice, like flinders of volcanic glass,But light as Styrofoam or pumice To float out and deploySwart as the hollow hulls that sailed for Troy, Among the trackless sea-roads, bobbing in the wavesLike jettisoned life jackets, then planted in shallow graves Above which the wind vowels, circumflexed, Erasmian.How this perfume, neither tuberose nor jasmine Has shipwrecked here in their alabaster chalicesSuch longueurs from the faded frescoes of Minoan palaces. [End Page 363] A. E. Stallings A. E. Stallings is an American poet who has lived in Greece since 1999. She has recently published a new verse translation of Hesiod’s Works and Days (Penguin Classics), and a new collection of poetry, Like (with FSG). Copyright © 2019 The University of the South

Extinction, Laserpicium

Extinction, Laserpicium A. E. Stallings (bio) Quam magnus numerus Libyssae harenae lasarpiciferis iacet Cyrenis —Catullus 7 Consider silphium, extinguished flower,Kin to the wild carrot, Queen Anne’s lace,Fennel and dill, and rooted now no placeOn earth, that once was worth an empress’ dower,A Caesar’s ransom. Silphium was powerStored in Rome’s coffers, stamped upon the faceOf silver tetradrachms, a thing to baseThe wealth of nations on. Now past its hour,Stamped out, its numbers harvested to zero,What properties, what cures were in an ounceAre lost to us—mere footnote to the pleasureOut of a poem—“kisses without measure.”The last stalk ever found, Pliny recounts,Presented as a rarity to Nero. [End Page 73] A. E. Stallings a. e. stallings is an American poet who lives in Greece. Recent books include the poetry collection Like, from Farrar Straus Giroux; a verse translation of Hesiod’s Works and Days, from Penguin Classics; and a translation of the Homeric mock-epic, The Battle Between the Frogs and the Mice, from Paul Dry Books. A selected poems is forthcoming from FSG. Copyright © 2019 University of North Carolina Wilmington

Matthias WittekindtDie Tankstelle von Courcelles

rithms are able to predict and manipulate our online behavior. McNamee’s “concerns had been building throughout 2016 and reached a peak with the news that the Russians were attempting to interfere in the presidential election.” He reached out to Zuckerberg and Sandberg with a two-page memo detailing his concerns and listing instances where Facebook was causing harm. The answer was swift and polite but treated McNamee’s letter as a PR problem rather than seriously addressing his concerns. Instead of further trying to appeal to Zuckerberg and Sandberg, McNamee teamed up with like-minded individuals like Tristan Harris of the Center for Humane Technology and Renée DiResta of New Knowledge to prompt public and political action, which contributed to Zuckerberg testifying at two congressional hearings in April 2018. What McNamee is calling for is a regulatory -body “equivalent of the Food and Drug Administration (fda) for technology ” that ensures technology is once again deployed to serve humans, not vice versa. The concrete regulations he envisages reach from requiring third- party audits of algorithms , to making “a filter bubble-free view of Facebook News Feed and Google search results” mandatory, to granting users ownership and absolute control over their data including the ability to migrate data to other companies, which would significantly facilitate the entry of start-ups. Zucked is not a scientific study but the account of one person who came to worry about the impact of a company whose founder he once advised. This comes both with its advantages and shortcomings . Many arguments— on addictive behavior and mental health impacts, for example—the reader will likely be willing to follow. After all, don’t most of us feel like we are wasting too much time scrolling through the social-media platform of our choice? Yet intuition and personal experience do not necessarily extrapolate to the wider population. McNamee somewhat concedes this point and lists a wealth of material to complement his own. One book that is not included in this list is The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, by Shoshana Zuboff, which was published only a week before Zucked. At nearly seven hundred pages in length, Zuboff’s book adds important depth to the argument that both are making, and, since its publication, McNamee himself has thrown considerable praise its way. Zuckerberg himself may not see the same need for regulation as many of his critics do, but today even he senses that there is something wrong with the power his company wields: “Lawmakers often tell me we have too much power over speech, and frankly I agree.” Felix Haas Zurich, Switzerland Matthias Wittekindt Die Tankstelle von Courcelles Hamburg. Edition Nautilus. 2018. 256 pages. Die Tankstelle von Courcelles (The petrol station of courcelles) is the latest offering from German novelist Matthias Wittekindt. As a prequel to the series set in Fleurville, it sees Ohayon as a young gendarme investigating a fatal shooting. Although it was awarded second place in the prestigious Deutscher Krimi Preis in 2019, you could be forgiven for initially believing it is a coming-of-age novel. Ohayon’s minimal presence underlines that this novel is not a police procedural of the regional krimi genre, which is highNota Bene Dina Nayeri The Ungrateful Refugee Catapult In her first work of nonfiction, Dina Nayeri completely recalibrates the immigration conversation, raising provocative questions and providing human stories that illustrate the realities of life as a refugee. She calls particular attention to the harmful manner in which Western governments privilege certain dangers over others, challenging her readers to rethink their preconceived notions of the refugee crisis. The urgency of the issue is augmented by Nayeri’s unfailing tenderness in telling stories that are both deeply personal and globally resonant. The Penguin Book of Migration Literature Ed. Dohra Ahmad Penguin Classics This compact but dense collection delivers precisely what it promises, a thoughtfully curated selection of literature penned by writers in migration from one country to another. With pieces drawn from various time periods (the selection by Phillis Wheatley being an especially powerful inclusion), the text is divided up broadly into writing about departures, arrivals, generational assimilation, and, in one case, a return to the place of origin...

When I Met Kathy Acker

When I Met Kathy Acker

Beyond Gatsby: How Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Writers of the 1920s Shaped American Culture

Beyond Gatsby: How Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Writers of the 1920s Shaped American Culture

The Scarlet Letter and Other Writings, by Leland S. Person

<i>The Scarlet Letter and Other Writings</i>, by Leland S. Person

Harm's Way

Harm's Way A. E. Stallings (bio) It sounds like a country road.It sounds like the swerveInto the oncoming laneOf a blind curve,One teenager goading anotherAbout their nerve; It sounds like a wet stretchWhere a bridge tossesIts back over a riverAnd a valley of mosses,The humble guardrail studdedWith makeshift crosses, Like the shrug of black iceAs the cold gets colderRunning next to the ditchOff the soft shoulderWhere the odometer stopsAnd no one gets older, Or the path in a fairy taleThrough an ancient woodWhere the crumbs you dropped are gobbledAnd you're lost for good.And I would keep you out of itIf I only could. [End Page 383] A. E. Stallings A. E. STALLINGS is an American poet who has lived in Greece since 1999. Her new verse translation of Hesiod's Works and Days is recently out with Penguin Classics, and a new volume of verse (Like) is forthcoming in the autumn with Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2018 Michael Brown

Penguin Classics and the Canonization of Chinese Literature in English Translation

This article examines the process by which translated Chinese literature becomes ‘canonical’ in the anglophone literary system. Adopting a notion of the ‘classic’ that takes into account both essentialist and historical stances, it conducts a study of Penguin Classics originally written in Chinese under the aspects of choice of texts, translations, publishing, and literary-critical reception. It addresses the questions: What is the current canon of Chinese literature in English translation? What are the forces that certify some Chinese works as deserving canonical status in anglophone culture? And what consequences might the politics of recognition have for the understanding of world literature at large? It argues that translated texts are valorized by multiple mediators within institutional frameworks, and the status they are accorded reflects the structures of the global literary economy.

The Tender Friendship and the Charm of Perfect Accord: Nabokov and His Father by Gavriel Shapiro Nabokov, Vladimir Olga Voronina and Brian Boyd (review)

REVIEWS 737 Shapiro, Gavriel. The Tender Friendship and the Charm of Perfect Accord: Nabokov and His Father. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI, 2014. xvii + 306 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Appendices. Bibliography. Index. $55.00. Nabokov, Vladimir. Letters to Véra. Edited and translated by Olga Voronina and Brian Boyd. Penguin Classics. Penguin Books, London and New York, 2014. lxi + 798 pp. Illustrations. Chronology. Appendices. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £30.00: $40.00. 2014 saw the publication of two long-anticipated volumes, each focusing on the most intimate and significant relationships in Nabokov’s life. The first, Gavriel Shapiro’s study of V. D. Nabokov’s influence on his son, casts invaluable light on the predominant figure of Nabokov’s formative years, and the second, a collection of newly-published letters from Nabokov to his wife, Véra, offers a rare first-hand account of his day-to-day existence over the course of more than half a century. Perhaps the most enduring image of Nabokov and his father is that of them on a boat attempting to play a makeshift game of chess to the rattle of Bolshevik machine-gun fire as they sailed out of Sebastopol harbour in 1919. Yet, as Shapiro points out, ‘the fundamental and multifaceted role of V. D. Nabokov in the life and works of his illustrious son’ has until now been ‘largely overlooked’ (p. 5). The purpose of his study, therefore, is to draw the focus onto someone who, apart from being a major source of inspiration for his eldest son, was in his own right fascinating and dynamic, a kind of late imperial Russian Renaissance Man. Shapiro’s book is structured around a defined set of topics and sub-topics — jurisprudence; politics; literature; painting, theatre and music; lepidoptera, chess and sports — which enable him to explore the many correspondences, affinities and allusions that emerge either from Nabokov’s writing, or through a careful comparison of character, behaviour and public persona communicated via his essays, commentaries and interviews. To Nabokov scholars, much of this material will be eminently familiar: descriptions of V. D. Nabokov in his various guises — as a jurist, politician and nobleman, avid chess player, boxing enthusiast, eclectic book collector and sponsor of the arts — are scattered throughout Nabokov’s autobiography, Speak, Memory, and further elaborated not least in Brian Boyd’s magisterial biographical work. What is distinct about thisstudy,apartfromthewealthofnewinformationonV.D.Nabokovitprovides (which includes translations of two key essays in the volume’s Appendices), is the way Shapiro teases out the range of references Nabokov made to his father consistently across his work. One such example is Prison Pastimes, V. D.’s account of his three-month incarceration in 1908, which informs Nabokov’s 1938 novel, Invitation to a Beheading, evident in Cincinnatus’s experiences of SEER, 95, 4, OCTOBER 2017 738 solitary confinement, surveillance and the humiliation of infantilization, as well as the novel’s identifiable variant of the Kresty prison library. Through Shapiro’s careful attention — drawing on V. D. Nabokov’s prolific published work as a criminologist, political commentator and critic of the arts, as well as unpublished diaries and notes — what was a partial yet intriguing figure finally steps out of the shadows to assume fully three dimensions. For example, whilst his exploits as a political campaigner and defender of civil rights are well documented, the controversy of his attendance and reporting of the Beilis Trial during 1913 is revealing of the risks he took to declare his abhorrence of antisemitism, something that his son not only shared but which also made him a target for attack by the Russian right wing in émigré Berlin. It was a theme that recurs throughout Nabokov’s fiction, from The Defense (1929) to the postHolocaust story, ‘A Conversation Piece’ (1945), culminating in his portrayal of Pnin’s lost love, Mira Belochkin, who perishes in a Nazi concentration camp. As well as many congruences of opinion and taste between father and son, there were also divergences. For example, whilst both expressed a negative attitude towards Oscar Wilde, it is apparent from Nabokov’s statements on art and artistry that Wilde’s ‘aesthetic precepts’ had a ‘certain impact’ on him, and he...

A Study of “Fidelity” in Middlemarch Book Covers

Book Covers play a major role in the identification and reception of literary works. However, not so many studies have been attributed to them. Genette and other critics’ concern about the significance of book covers lead the present study to investigate the factor of “fidelity” in Middlemarch book covers . To this end, six available covers from the Penguin Classics will be taken into consideration. The results would investigate how this publisher has been successful in demonstrating true images of the novel. It is concluded that while some covers do not give a true picture of the incidents of the novel, some like Midlands’ 1994 and 2003 versions have been relatively sincere in presenting the novel. It is hoped that the results will help the critics to pay more careful attention to book covers and their influence on the reception of literary works.

The Penguin Arthur Miller: Collected PlaysPresence: Collected StoriesCollected Essays

For those readers who can never get enough of the works of Arthur Miller, Penguin has released three collections of Miller's plays, essays, and stories in its Penguin Classics Deluxe Editions to commemorate the centennial of Miller's birth: The Penguin Arthur Miller: Collected Plays, Collected Essays, and Presence: Collected Stories.Collected Plays includes eighteen of Miller's most famous and popular works as well as some of his less often performed pieces. The “Note on the Text” indicates that the versions in this edition are those “preferred by Arthur Miller and should be considered authoritative texts.” In her foreword titled “Letter to a Young Playwright,” Lynn Nottage explains why she was drawn to Miller's works, offers some salient comments about All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, and A View from the Bridge, and remarks how all of Miller's plays deal with “imperfect men and embattled dreamers.” She discusses in brief the influence of the House Un-American Activities Committee on Miller's ideas and canon and declares that “no other playwright of his era devoted as much time and care to dramatizing the anxieties, aspirations, and sacrifices made by men in pursuit of the elusive American dream.”Collected Essays is organized into three sections labeled “On the Theater,” “On His Works,” and “On Society and Politics.” Susan Abbotson, in a lucid introduction, explains and summarizes the focus of each section, paying particular attention to connect the facets of Miller's varying ideologies to the works and the political and social events that inform the substance of the essays. Abbotson is comprehensive and unbiased in her appraisal of the essays, noting that Miller himself “is also fully aware of his own potential biases.” Abbotson captures the essential purpose of Miller's essays when she writes, “Forthright and willing to tackle even the most sensitive issues with a calm deliberation, he writes to make sense of the world for himself as much as for his reader.” The “On the Theater” section is further subdivided into essays that discuss “Concerning Tragedy,” “General Commentary,” and “Concerning Language.” The “On His Works” part includes essays on The Golden Years and The Man Who Had All the Luck, Focus, All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, An Enemy of the People, The Crucible, A View from the Bridge, After the Fall, Incident at Vichy, The Price, The Archbishop's Ceiling, The American Clock, and Mr. Peter's Connections. Finally, the “On Society and Politics” segment includes essays that consider the topics of Juvenile Delinquency, The McCarthy Era, Conditions in America, the Holocaust, Politics Abroad, and Satire.Presence: Collected Stories offers three groups of stories with varying themes and characters that, ultimately, address familiar Miller ideas. The collection titled “I Don't Need You Anymore” includes nine stories; “Homely Girl, A Life” includes one story of the same title, and “Presence” contains six stories, as did the Penguin Viking edition of 2004. Whether Miller is depicting the romantic and seemingly aimless assignations of Janice Sessions from “Homely Girl, A Life,” the seaside walkers watching as the fish die in “Please Don't Kill Anything,” the Jew Harold May performing his tap dance for Hitler in “The Performance,” or a man confronting a family of beavers in “Beavers,” what consistently emerges in Miller's stories, as is evident in his drama, is a collection of individuals who are seeking comprehension and connection with the natural world, the social world, or the political world. Miller is always illustrating some “other” with which his protagonist is either wrestling or embracing, and the characters in his stories are no different from his dramatic figures. His briefest story in his “Presence” collection is the story of the same title in which an unnamed protagonist wanders a beach, sees a man and woman making love, later meets that woman, and then eventually wonders whether her presence was reality or vision. The character suspended between the real world and the imagined one often appears in Miller's plays. Although Miller admits in his foreword to the collection that “some of these stories could never be plays, but some perhaps could have been,” he explains in the final lines of his foreword that his stories offer “the rending of a particular vision at its proper distance, the discovery of the tone appropriate to one's feeling for a thing, a person, an event.”Though Miller scholars and readers may have encountered the works discussed in this review in previous editions, they will find that each Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition presents the works in a new logical and well-constructed sequence that makes each edition easy to approach, whether the reader is using the edition for research or enjoyment.

Film Writing Adapted for Game Narrative: Myth or Error?

Film Writing Adapted for Game Narrative: Myth or Error?

What to Read Now: When Civilization Fails

Notebook With two world wars, revolutions, famines , colonial violence, and state-sponsored genocides, the twentieth century was the most murderous in history, claiming the lives of some two hundred million people—catastrophe on a global scale, in which collapsing power structures left people exposed to unmitigated violence. Each of the three books below explores a different way a civilization can fail, reminding us how thin is the thread by which humanity hangs over the abyss, and how it is only by confronting our own nature that we can try to prevent the past from happening again. Anna Bikont The Crime and the Silence: Confronting the Massacre of Jews in Wartime Jedwabne Trans. Alissa Valles Farrar, Straus & Giroux “There’s something in man,” says one of the Holocaust survivors in Anna Bikont’s book, “that makes him like killing.” Part memoir, part investigative journalism, The Crime and the Silence is an informed and gut-wrenching reconstruction of July 10, 1941, when the Jewish residents of a small Polish town were burned alive by their Polish neighbors, a crime they subsequently blamed on the Germans. Having only recently discovered she was Jewish, Polish writer and scholar Anna Bikont makes it her personal quest to get to the definitive answer as to what exactly happened in Jedwabne, an issue that has polarized Polish society. The findings of her harrowing journey through eyewitness accounts and other surviving evidence dispel a few myths that are at the heart of Polish and European identities (her readings have been picketed by Polish nationalists) and show the endpoint to which decades of stoking fear and hatred against “the other” can take a society. Varlam Shalamov Kolyma Tales Trans. John Glad Penguin Classics Varlam Shalamov’s firsthand account of life in Stalin’s Gulag, a system of forced labor camps in northeastern Siberia, reads like a nightmare version of Jack London’s Klondike stories, where the harshness of nature is no match for the cruelty of men. In the frigid world of Kolyma, one chops off his fingers to get out of a gold shaft; a darned woolen sweater is reason to kill; and grown men cry at the sight of bread. Some are dying for days, like the Poet from “Sherry-Brandy.” Some fall flat on the ice and expire while still clinging to their mining hacks. The hopes of the living extend no further than a few hours. No crime can shock a Kolyma inmate; like bodies, souls freeze over, too. Those who retain their humanity change nothing. Unpublished during Shalamov’s life, Kolyma Tales is a monument to the millions of men and women who perished in Stalin’s camps. Saul Below considered it a book “that captures the essence of being.” Jose Eduardo Agualusa A General Theory of Oblivion Trans. Daniel Hahn Archipelago Following Angola’s path from colonialism to independence, with violent detours into war, communism, and capitalism, the Portuguese-Angolan writer Jose Eduardo Agualusa paints disaster through the eyes of an exiled Portuguese woman, Ludo, who barricades herself inside her apartment in Luanda and subsists, for twenty-eight years, on pigeons and vegetables, burning her favorite books to stay warm and writing her observations on the walls. In Oblivion, events are measured against the currency of Ludo’s universe, with revolutions and civil war appearing less important than the death of her pet, which equals the elimination of half the known world. Animals share equal space with humans on the pages of Agualusa’s book for a simple reason: “Humanity hasn’t worked out well.” Narrated in a voice reminiscent of Latin American and European classics, filled with rich imagery and existential insights, the novel borders on a dream, whose strange beauty lingers for a while after turning the last page. Russian American writer Anastasia Edel has written a novel, Past Perfect, a collection of literary essays, a short-story collection, and a nonfiction book, Russia: Putin’s Playground. She holds an MFA from Pacific University and lives in the Bay Area with her family. what to read now When Civilization Fails by Anastasia Edel 6 WLT JANUARY–FEBRUARY 2017 ...

What to Read Now: When Civilization Fails

Notebook With two world wars, revolutions, famines , colonial violence, and state-sponsored genocides, the twentieth century was the most murderous in history, claiming the lives of some two hundred million people—catastrophe on a global scale, in which collapsing power structures left people exposed to unmitigated violence. Each of the three books below explores a different way a civilization can fail, reminding us how thin is the thread by which humanity hangs over the abyss, and how it is only by confronting our own nature that we can try to prevent the past from happening again. Anna Bikont The Crime and the Silence: Confronting the Massacre of Jews in Wartime Jedwabne Trans. Alissa Valles Farrar, Straus & Giroux “There’s something in man,” says one of the Holocaust survivors in Anna Bikont’s book, “that makes him like killing.” Part memoir, part investigative journalism, The Crime and the Silence is an informed and gut-wrenching reconstruction of July 10, 1941, when the Jewish residents of a small Polish town were burned alive by their Polish neighbors, a crime they subsequently blamed on the Germans. Having only recently discovered she was Jewish, Polish writer and scholar Anna Bikont makes it her personal quest to get to the definitive answer as to what exactly happened in Jedwabne, an issue that has polarized Polish society. The findings of her harrowing journey through eyewitness accounts and other surviving evidence dispel a few myths that are at the heart of Polish and European identities (her readings have been picketed by Polish nationalists) and show the endpoint to which decades of stoking fear and hatred against “the other” can take a society. Varlam Shalamov Kolyma Tales Trans. John Glad Penguin Classics Varlam Shalamov’s firsthand account of life in Stalin’s Gulag, a system of forced labor camps in northeastern Siberia, reads like a nightmare version of Jack London’s Klondike stories, where the harshness of nature is no match for the cruelty of men. In the frigid world of Kolyma, one chops off his fingers to get out of a gold shaft; a darned woolen sweater is reason to kill; and grown men cry at the sight of bread. Some are dying for days, like the Poet from “Sherry-Brandy.” Some fall flat on the ice and expire while still clinging to their mining hacks. The hopes of the living extend no further than a few hours. No crime can shock a Kolyma inmate; like bodies, souls freeze over, too. Those who retain their humanity change nothing. Unpublished during Shalamov’s life, Kolyma Tales is a monument to the millions of men and women who perished in Stalin’s camps. Saul Below considered it a book “that captures the essence of being.” Jose Eduardo Agualusa A General Theory of Oblivion Trans. Daniel Hahn Archipelago Following Angola’s path from colonialism to independence, with violent detours into war, communism, and capitalism, the Portuguese-Angolan writer Jose Eduardo Agualusa paints disaster through the eyes of an exiled Portuguese woman, Ludo, who barricades herself inside her apartment in Luanda and subsists, for twenty-eight years, on pigeons and vegetables, burning her favorite books to stay warm and writing her observations on the walls. In Oblivion, events are measured against the currency of Ludo’s universe, with revolutions and civil war appearing less important than the death of her pet, which equals the elimination of half the known world. Animals share equal space with humans on the pages of Agualusa’s book for a simple reason: “Humanity hasn’t worked out well.” Narrated in a voice reminiscent of Latin American and European classics, filled with rich imagery and existential insights, the novel borders on a dream, whose strange beauty lingers for a while after turning the last page. Russian American writer Anastasia Edel has written a novel, Past Perfect, a collection of literary essays, a short-story collection, and a nonfiction book, Russia: Putin’s Playground. She holds an MFA from Pacific University and lives in the Bay Area with her family. what to read now When Civilization Fails by Anastasia Edel 6 WLT JANUARY–FEBRUARY 2017 ...

A tradição textual do Convívio de Dante Alighieri

Having been announced for the beginning of 2018 the publication of my translation of Convivio as part of the Penguin Classics Companhia das Letras collection, I present in this article the history of the transmission of the text of Dante, from manuscript codices to the most recent Italian editions that served as basis for the translation and for its critical apparatus. Because this is Dante’s text that most provokes discussion about its (re)establishment, the translation derives from the critical edition of Franca Brambilla Ageno (1995), emphasizing the importance of observing the philological discussion in the field of the studies about Dante made in Brazil.

BJGP Library: Howards End.

IN PRAISE OF PERSONAL RELATIONS Howards End, EM Forster Penguin Classics, 2000, PB, 336pp, £8.99, 978-0141182131 It would be easy for us — over-stretched target-driven bio-technicians that we seem to be becoming — to dismiss EM Forster and his novels as irrelevant anachronisms. The man himself was a rather prissy mummy’s boy, a closet homosexual, wracked with self-doubt; a timid acolyte on the fringes of the Bloomsbury set. Yet he was, and remains, one of the most perceptive and meticulous cartographers of the inner life, and his 1910 novel Howards End is, dare we but heed it, a powerful warning not to throw out the baby of humanity with the bathwater of science. The novel chronicles the entanglements of the passionately Bohemian Schlegel sisters — brisk Margaret and giddy Helen — with the prosaic Wilcoxes, a tribe of hard-nosed capitalists, …

Staging the Silk Road Journey Abroad: The Case of Dunhuang Performative Arts

Staging the Silk Road Journey Abroad: The Case of Dunhuang Performative Arts

BJGP Library: Heart of Darkness: A Journey into the Human Condition.

Heart Of Darkness Joseph Conrad (First edition, 1899.) Penguin Classics deluxe edition, 2012, PB, 144pp, £7.99, 978-0143106586 What happens if one has all restraints removed? Do we at last flourish, to become our true selves? Do we become happy? Or would our flaws turn us away from both happiness and flourishing? Such a question is usually meaningless. We are social creatures embedded in relationship networks that jointly determine our behaviour and our path. But some unusual individuals, often leaders, manage to achieve an unusual level of autonomy, totally dominating the led. Unrestrained. This usually ends in tears. Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness is often remembered as the inspiration for Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 film Apocalypse Now , the action transposed to the Vietnam War and containing one of Marlon Brando’s last great roles. Heart of Darkness itself is easily …

BJGP Library: The Grapes of Wrath: Californian Displacement.

The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck (First edition, 1939.) Penguin Classics new edition, 2007, PB, 528pp, £7.99, 978-0141185064 Juxtaposed with Noel Streatfeild and Jacqueline Wilson, our childhood bookshelves held a fair amount of rogue adult literature. Aged seven and cluelessly scanning the spines for entertainment, I selected Animal Farm . All allegory was lost on me, of course, but I was dumbstruck by the idea of a book without a happy ending, turning the last page repeatedly, sure I must have missed the final chapter. I first read The Grapes of Wrath at a similarly ill-advised stage of development, during the phase of childhood in which displacement and destruction are terrifying concepts. I was still …

Books Received

Books Received Mark I. West Beyond the Bedtime Story: Promoting Reading Development During the Middle School Years. By Nicholas D. Young and Christine N. Michael. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2015. Intended for parents and teachers of middle school students, this book provides practical suggestions on how to foster a love of reading in early adolescents. The authors draw on research in the fields of literacy education and adolescent psychology. Neil Gaiman in the 21st Century: Essays on the Novels, Children’s Stories, Online Writings, Comics and Other Works. Edited by Tara Prescott. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015. Although Neil Gaiman’s writings for children are not this volume’s exclusive focus, several of its contributors do discuss them. Examples include Jennifer McStotts’s essay on Gaiman’s Newbery winner The Graveyard Book and Renata Lucena Dalmaso’s on his picture books The Wolves in the Walls and Blueberry Girl. The Turnip Princess and Other Newly Discovered Fairy Tales. By Franz Xaver von Schönwerth. Edited by Erika Eichenseer. Translated and with an introduction by Maria Tatar. Illustrated by Engelbert Süss. New York: Penguin Classics, 2015. Like the Brothers Grimm, Franz Xaver von Schönwerth wrote down German folktales during the mid-nineteenth century. Most of these tales, however, went unpublished, and in 2009 they were discovered stored away in a municipal building in the Bavarian Alps. This new collection brings seventy-four of these tales into print. What Middletown Read: Print Culture in an American Small City. By Frank Felsenstein and James J. Connolly. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015. The authors of this study analyzed the circulation records of the public library in Muncie, Indiana, from the early years of the twentieth century, and the result is a snapshot of mid-American reading habits and tastes. [End Page 93] Of particular interest to children’s literature specialists is the section on children’s borrowing patterns, which includes a chart listing the most frequently borrowed children’s books. The top three books on this list are Louisa May Alcott’s Under the Lilacs, Horatio Alger’s The Young Adventurer, and Martha Finley’s Elsie Dinsmore. [End Page 94] Copyright © 2016 Children’s Literature Association