Author Archives: Ann Kjellberg

Kiki Dimoula is a brazen plagiarist

Kiki Dimoula, one of Greece’s preeminent poets, is just now being comprehensively translated into English for the first time thanks to the exemplary Margellos World Republic of Letters series at Yale University Press, an endowed series made possible by Cecile and Theodore Margellos to bring important works of world literature into English. They have already provided […]

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Gros-Jean ignores a warning, from “Moon-Child,” a play by Derek Walcott

Rare footage! Derek Walcott himself as the Narrator in a production of  “Moon Child (Ti Jean in Concert),” at the American Academy in Rome on April 4, 2011. Also wonderful: The silky Wendell Manwarren as the Planter and music by Ronald “Boo” Hinkson. NARRATOR Deep in the forest, thick, where precious creatures are: the dove, […]

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Little Star Salon #2: Padgett Powell!

Little Star is very happy to invite our contributors, subscribers, and special friends to a reprise Little Star Salon, at the same gemütlich uptown location, this time with novelist Padgett Powell! Date September 22, time 5 PM. Mr. Powell is the author of the surprise hit, The Interrogative Mood, a novel-like experience composed entirely of […]

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“The Attic,” by Danilo Kis

Dalkey Archive in the next few weeks brings us a bumper crop of new translations of the great Danilo Kiš (pronounced quiche), including his first novel, Mansarda, translated here as The Attic, written in Belgrade in 1962 and finding its twenty-seven-year-old author in an unfamiliarly buoyant mood.  Brodsky wrote of the later, darker Kiš that […]

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New translation of the Bhagavad Gita!

A new translation of the Bhagavad Gita from Norton by Gavin Flood and Charles Martin sent me into Namaste on 14th Street for a comparison. Flood and Martin’s introduction is welcoming and informative; I took note especially of their description of the poem’s form, which echoes the larger epic, the Mahabharata, in which it sits.  […]

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Walser’s Trakl

In February we considered the poetry of Georg Trakl on the occasion of several new translations of his work. Now another door opens on this literary moment with Christopher Middleton’s Thirty Poems of Robert Walser, including this tribute to Trakl (first published in Michael Schmidt’s indispensable PN Review). Walser, whose growing recognition in English owes […]

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A miracle from Anakana Schofield

—Mam. It had been years, and by the time the day came, she was ripe for it. Off the bus from college this Friday evening, home he was to her, stood in her kitchen, looking helpful—helpful was the way Jimmy looked. —Mam. I’ve something to tell ya. A silence brewed that she swiftly interrupted. It […]

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In the Dasgupta Institute, Tim Parks

Beth: People are fidgeting. Kristin has arrived to my left, Marcia to my right. Even without seeing, I feel who is there. I know them, I know the space. I know the vibrations they send, the way the air changes when they sit. Someone starts to breathe very deeply, rhythmically, behind us, some new student […]

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John Cheever would have been 100 today

John Cheever would have been 100 years old today, raising the disquieting prospect that the world he described may be transforming into history. Thinking about the real and the created: In his forthcoming How Literature Saved My Life, David Shields writes Driving around, I heard a Cheever story on the radio and found it so […]

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Up Today: Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading

We love this idea!  Starting today the innovative folks over at Electric Literature bring you Recommended Reading, a weekly dose of meaty writing chosen for you by notable authors and editors. This week: “Watching Mysteries With My Mother,” a story by Ben Marcus; next week, a new translation of Clarice Lispecter, chosen by New Directions. […]

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