Twilight roundup …

… Courtesy of Dave Lull:



… Crossing literary borders:  Small presses growing translated fiction's readership.


… The top 10 crime novels in translation | Books | theguardian.com.


… Movies and books again: THE ALLURE OF THE MAP.

Writers love maps: collecting them, creating them, and describing them. Literary cartography includes not only the literal maps that authors commission or make themselves but also the geographies they describe. The visual display of quantitative information in the digital age has made charts and maps more popular than ever, though every graphic, like every story, has a point of view.

… Up to her neck in self: What lies beneath Samuel Beckett's half-buried woman in Happy Days?

… Those were the days: Cynthia Ozick on W. H. Auden at the 92nd Street Y.

… behold, on this selfsame platform, T. S. Eliot—a sacerdotal figure, the era’s reigning literary pope, fake-Brit sonorities reverberating like a cathedral organ, grim and tragic, and as funereal as a marble tomb. And then W. H. Auden, capaciously contrapuntal, though they lived in consonance, Eliot born in 1888, Auden in 1907, Eliot an American who chose England, Auden an Englishman turned American. They died eight years apart and knew the same world, the same political dooms, and the same return to the metaphysics of Christianity. On that broad stage, Auden seemed at the time a lesser god: only Eliot could fill, as he once did, a football stadium. The public Eliot was a venerated monument that loomed unforgivingly, while Auden, even in public, had an air of plainness. Auden’s reading was spoken; it had almost a kind of casualness, a flatness, a matter-of-factness. He read poetry as if he were reading prose.

Ozick offers the commonplace disparagement of the '50s. But she is 13 years older than I. Guess it would have looked different if she had been a teenager.

… A look at Ravelstein by Saul Bellow.

John Updike said that an author’s successful late works are often characterized by a “translucent thinness.” Relatively speaking, Ravelstein would be a decent example of that thesis. In it, we’re no longer dished up the thick, rich liver pâté of Bellow’s heartiest writing, but rather something smoother, a little less heart-clogging.