Today, the BBC reports, a specialist will examine four vaults in Zurich believed to contain the last works of Franz Kafka — part of an ongoing legal battle to determine who owns the texts, and if they should be published. It’s a story that has taken many twists and turns, and unlike many Read More
The word "dazzle" appears often and in many forms in Adam Thirlwell’s boldly self-indulgent The Delighted States (FSG, $30), which turns the history of the novel, from Cervantes to Nabokov, into an enchanted, borderless, timeless playground for the amusement of Mr. Thirlwell and any reader who succumbs to his charms (which I did, mostly). Much Read More
A JOURNEY ROUND MY SKULL
By Frigyes Karinthy
New York Review Books, 288 pages, $17.95
Frigyes Karinthy, in his day a well-known Hungarian humorist and writer, was in his favorite cafe in Budapest when he heard the roaring of a train that no one else heard. On subsequent evenings his hallucination Read More
I ought to be writing about Thomas Pynchon. His gargantuan new novel. But I’ve lost confidence in Mr. Pynchon, who hasn’t written a good book since Gravity’s Rainbow, 33 years ago, and so I found I couldn’t force myself to read the whole of Against the Day: I couldn’t kid myself into believing that the Read More
I’m not sure I can tell you the difference between a “personal history” and a memoir, but Jonathan Franzen’s contribution to the genre is so expertly shaped and composed, so genuinely, organically thought-provoking, that I wish I could yank it off the shelf where it will inevitably sit with the autobiographical writing of other hip Read More
I’m not sure I can tell you the difference between a “personal history” and a memoir, but Jonathan Franzen’s contribution to the genre is so expertly shaped and composed, so genuinely, organically thought-provoking, that I wish I could yank it off the shelf where it will inevitably sit with the autobiographical writing of other hip Read More
There are times when objects in a realist painting seem to abandon their identity and become something else-something more mysterious and independent, more like symbols or memories than easily recognized physical items occupying real space in the real world. In the recent still-life paintings of Richard Baker at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, a great Read More
There was a time when it could rightly have been said of the Czech writer Franz Kafka (1883-1924) what W.H. Auden wrote in his elegy, “In Memory of Sigmund Freud”: “if often he was wrong and, at times, absurd, / to us he is no more a person / now but a whole climate of Read More
Throughout much of northern Europe, the winters are long and
the days are short. Sunlight is scarce in a world of lamplight and shadow.
Mother Nature provides few comforts, and human nature is often driven to
extremes. The consumption of alcohol is likely to be high, and the food is
certain to be heavy. The Read More
The Beast in the Nursery: On Curiosity and Other Appetites , by Adam Phillips. Pantheon Books, 192 pages, $21.
If Freud had written a book called The Beast in the Nursery , the beast would no doubt have been sex. Adam Phillips’ beast in the nursery is language or, to put it more broadly, Read More
