go upright among those who are on their knees / among those with their backs turned and those toppled in the dust / and let your helpless Anger be like the sea / whenever you hear the voice of the insulted and beaten… Two poems by ZBIGNIEW HERBERT (1924-1998) / TRANSLATED BY John and Bogdana… Read More The Adventures of Mr Cogito
Few writers have possessed the short-story format as thoroughly as the Canadian author and Nobel laureate Alice Munro, who has died aged 92. Sarah A Smith Although her early years as a writer were clouded by the feeling, partly the result of pressure from her publishers, that she should concentrate on producing a novel, she never… Read More Alice Munro obituary
BOOKS IMAGE & SOUND: Editor’s Picks: **************************************************
First posted August 29, 2013 Robespierre Edited by Colin Haydon and William DoyleReviewed by Hilary Mantell In the two years following the taking of the Bastille, he pursued an impeccably liberal and far-sighted agenda. He spoke for manhood suffrage and against a property qualification for voters; against slavery; in support of civil rights for Jews; against capital punishment; and… Read More Hilary Mantell: Springtime for Robespierre
I feel about Christians the way everybody feels about Christians. I love what Gandhi said, that he loved Christ, but it was Christians he had a problem with, and that’s totally how I feel about it. Katherine Rowland Your book launched last month and the next day you celebrated your 70th birthday. Does that number carry… Read More Anne Lamott on love, sobriety and reaching 70: ‘All I’ve learned, I’ve learned because the abyss swallowed me’
Rabindranath Tagore (Written in Bengali on December 31, 1899) THE LAST SUN of the century sets amidst the blood-red clouds of the West and the whirlwind of hatred. The naked passion of self-love of Nations, in its drunken delirium of greed, is dancing to the clash of steel and the howling verses of vengeance. The… Read More Sunset of the Century
Book Launch: Tuesday May 7; 5.30 pm; Jawahar Bhawan; Rajendra Prasad Road Gandhi’s Assassin. By Dhirendra K Jha ‘The Poets of Rapallo’ Review: Ezra Pound’s Fascist Paradise Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia is a warning against resurgent fascism Christopher Bollas: The fascist state of mind (1992) Walter Benjamin: Capitalism as Religion (1921) Against homogenisation: Advancing diversity through Democratic Confederalism Ten Theses… Read More गांधी का हत्यारा गोड़से: नाथूराम की ज़िंदगी और उसके सपनों का भारत
By Kyle Chayka “The power to change one’s life comes from a paragraph, a lone remark,” James Salter wrote in his 1975 novel, “Light Years.” An encounter with a single “slender” line of writing, as he put it, can send a reader spinning off on a new trajectory; her life becomes divided into a before and… Read More The Internet’s New Favorite Philosopher
What concerns me is a more glaring omission: how would a Tibetan, a Dai, a Uighur, or Mongol respond to the assertion that the Chinese discourse on race was never characterized by a “gruesome efficiency”? Or is Tibet to be reduced to an instance in which perceptions of sociocultural difference outweigh those of race? Reviewed… Read More Frank Dikötter: The Discourse of Race in Modern China
The great tragedy in the new feminist theory in America is the loss of a sense of public commitment…. Butler’s self-involved feminism is extremely American, and it is not surprising that it has caught on here, where successful middle-class people prefer to focus on cultivating the self rather than thinking in a way that helps… Read More The Professor of Parody (1999)
After the truth-shower 