Archive for April, 2007

Green thoughts at PEN World Voices

Video highlights from PEN’s “Writers on the Environment” event (with Collins, Franzen, Isegawa, Iyer, Mak, Marilynne Robinson, Roxana Robinson, Rushdie, Shteyngart, Teller, & Whitehead) are up.

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Kumar on post-colonial writing in a globalized world

Amitava Kumar sends word that he’ll be reading from Bombay-London-New York for his “Post-Colonial Writing in a Globalized World” talk with Ilija Trojanow at the Goethe-Institut tonight. The section he has in mind, which I read while preparing for the Branding & Freedom in the Market Economy event last month, considers representations of Ghandi. I’m posting it in context here . . .

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Canonical

Kelly Jane Torrance wonders why Wharton, Cather, and Powell — all great American novelists — are given a place in the canon only as a nod to diversity.

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Argentina’s naturalist writer

Was William Henry Hudson Argentina’s Thoreau? “We are still marching bravely on,” he wrote, “conquering Nature, but how weary and sad we are getting.”

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Persephone Books: rescuing forgotten novels by women

The publishing arm of Persephone Books, a bookshop on Lamb’s Conduit Street in London, revives novels, mostly by women, that have fallen out of print and dropped out of public consciousness. The books are bound in gray covers, with endpaper fabric in patterns dating to the year of first publication. For Peter Fawkes, this project highlights the trouble copyright extension . . .

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