Recent Entries:

Ingo Schulze was born in Dresden in 1962. Now living in Berlin, he is often described as the writer most representative of the united Germany. Two years ago he visited Dresden, located in what used to be the GDR. “It was a very sobering experience,” he said in a recent interview. “The whole Disneyfication of the city.

David Mamet’s 1997 Paris Review interview includes this exchange:

“Interviewer:
Is there a moment in one of your plays that you really didn’t know was there?
Mamet:

“Postmodernism has an allergy to depth,” sneezed Terry Eagleton in an otherwise thoughtful article in The Guardian a few years ago. Profundity for Eagleton requires language working at a “deep moral or metaphysical level,” but the “centreless, hedonistic, self-inventing, ceaselessly adaptive” creature who emerges from postmodernism cannot or refuses to go deep.

The narrator of 03, now in his mid-40’s, begins by recalling the moment he spotted a “slightly retarded” girl (“it was harder to guess her age”) waiting at a bus stop in the dispiriting town of Montpérilleux. He was 18.

Murray Bail’s beguiling fourth novel, The Pages, begins with Erica Hazelhurst, a 46-year old professor of philosophy, and Sophie Perloff, a 43-year old psychiatrist, driving from Sydney to a remote sheep farm in New South Wales.

Reflecting on Gerard Manley Hopkins, Elizabeth Bishop advised herself as follows: “Portray not a thought, but a mind thinking … The ardor of [an idea’s] conception in the mind is a necessary part of its truth, and unless it can be conveyed to another mind in something of the form of its occurrence, either it has changed into some other idea or it has ceased to be an idea, to have any existen