Worldcrunch
TOKYO — It’s a bit further away from the bigger stores in Tokyo’s Ginza district. Between the sake bars, along the tall towers that watch day and night over the Sumida River, a quiet art gallery hosts large, abstract paintings. And across the street from a shop for urban bikes with monochromatic frames is a […]
BOGOTA — Spanglish: Is it a dialect? Ghetto talk? Whatever else it may be, Spanglish is now the brazen, no-nonsense fruit of two languages and cultures coexisting in the United States. It may sound a little crazy at times. For example, walking in a Latino area of New York one day, I saw a notice […]
Stories for humans, like water for fish…
There are plenty of good reasons Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa shouldn’t be flaunting his affair with a Madrid socialite. But if it’s really love, none of that really matters.
Families of certain social standing in Egypt often educate their children in English. Publishing houses too are getting in on the Anglo influence, publishing literary works and texts written directly in English.
The best-selling novelist is adored by ordinary Chileans (and millions of readers worldwide) but has been shunned by the cultural elite of her native country. She is not the first successful person to get such treatment.
The Nobel laureate, who died this week, helped Germany find its voice after the horrors of World War II. But his life ultimately embodied his nation’s struggles to come to terms with its past.
French writer François-René de Chateaubriand“s journey to North America had generations yearning for the romantic scenery he described: “Now and then, in the distance, you could hear the solemn rumble of the Niagara cataract, which, in the quiet of the night, echoed in the desert wilderness and died out through the lonely forests.” Unfortunately, visitors […]
The anonymous author has penned a new book, but lives in fear of reprisal for her writings that celebrate female sexual pleasure and castigate “Arab arrogance” and subjugation of women.
To the surprise of many, the family of legendary novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez sold his personal papers to the University of Texas. It’s nothing political – but all about posterity, and money of course.
Mario Vargas Llosa sits down with Clarin in the Nobel laureate’s home to explore why the hopes at Communism’s fall have been replaced by deep religious hatred and a secular cynicism.
PARIS — With all due respect to the Cassandras of national decline and lovers of French bashing — the cherished pastime of denigrating all things French at every turn — Patrick Modiano’s Nobel Prize for Literature win is excellent news. Lovers of French literature will be the first to rejoice, but the prize is also […]
OXFORD — The walls in this Oxford, Mississippi, bookstore are covered with pictures of authors. One by one, Richard Howorth comments on them, as if this place were an open book narrating a multitude of unfinished stories. With his wife, this keen-eyed slender man with a dry humor has owned and managed Square Books, housed […]
Weeks before Marquez’s death at 87, the Bogota daily wrote how the legendary novelist was followed right until the end by the ghosts of his strongest character: his mother.
Egyptian writer Haytham El Wardany’s latest work offers a novel approach to dealing with the capital’s overwhelming excess of aural stimulation.
STOCKHOLM — Some say Japanese-born Yoko Tawada who has adopted Germany as her home is a writer with a split cultural personality. After 30 years, she still struggles to reconcile the differences. “Like two personalities, they don’t want to be one,” she says. “They didn’t want to tell one story. I couldn’t put them together. It’s impossible.” In Sweden to launch her 23rd book, The Naked Eye, the award-winning author says the story has links to her own experience traveling by train from Japan to Germany. “I came to Europe by the Trans-Siberian Railway,” she says. “It is a slow […]
BBC, THE GUARDIAN (UK) Worldcrunch NEW YORK– Dan Brown, the bestselling author of the Da Vinci Code, is set to release a new novel on May 14. According to The Guardian, Dan Brown’s dapper, tweed-suited symbologist Robert Langdon, the man who cracked The Da Vinci Code and found The Lost Symbol, is about to embark […]
-Essay- After Mo Yan won this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature, many Chinese people predicted that this would contribute greatly to the expansion of Chinese culture in the world. I sincerely hope so. However, in peaceful times the transmission and penetration of a culture are extremely slow. The Italian Jesuit priest, Matteo Ricci (1552-1610), was […]
NOBELPRIZE.ORG (Sweden) Worldcrunch STOCKHOLM – The 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to 57-year-old Chinese writer Mo Yan. 2012 #NobelPrize in #Literature was awarded to Mo Yan “who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary.” — Nobelprize_org (@Nobelprize_org) October 11, 2012 The official site of the Nobel Prize describes Mo […]