Author Archives: Ann Kjellberg

Susan Sontag at Scandinavia House, Friday

Scandinavia House this week will host a series of events springing from the still-bright energies left to us by Susan Sontag.  First, on Friday from 3:30 to 4:30 there will be a seminar on the challenges of literary translation, with Sontag Translation Prize winner Benjamin Mier-Cruz, Sontag’s son and literary executor David Rieff, Susan Bernofsky, […]

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“The Grand Lady of My Soul,” by Goli Taraghi

In front of me, in the middle of the desert, in that silent wasteland, there is a secluded garden sheltered by white walls. A half-open door summons me. I peek in. There is no sign of a human being. There are two rows of tall poplars flanking the surrounding walls and four aged cypress trees […]

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Words Without Borders, an appreciation

Words Without Borders is a grandly ambitious project bringing international writing to American audiences. They publish an online monthly journal homing in on a language or culture or theme somewhere in the world, as well as expansive anthologies and curricula

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Looking for More? Other new writing from the Muslim world

In addition to Tablet & Pen, featured in Little Star this week, there are suddenly lots of opportunities to sample writing old and new from the Muslim world in English, such as Beirut 39: New Writing From The Arab World, edited by Samuel Shimon for the Hay Festival in Wales, with an introduction by a […]

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“An Interview with Atropos,” by Wislawa Szymborska

This fall’s bonanza of Polish literature continues with new translations of the Vermeer of modern poetry, Wislawa Szymborska. Szymborska was born in 1923 in Prowent, Poland. Five collections of her poems have been published in English. She received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996. This poem is translated by Clare Cavanagh and the great […]

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“Break the Glass,” by Jean Valentine

Little Star welcomes the appearance of Break the Glass, an enigmatic and limpid new book from Jean Valentine. Some of our favorite poems from Break the Glass are available on line: “In Prison” and “Hawkins Stable” in The New Yorker “The Whitewashed Walls” at Copper Canyon Press “Time is Matter Here” on Poetry Daily One […]

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Gjertrud Schnackenberg returns!

After a hiatus of nearly ten years, during which she published no poems that this reader could find, we receive this searing, soaring new book.  As always Schnackenberg’s poems are meticulously constructed and ornately referential: they inhabit their metaphors like a mote suspended in air.  But in Heavenly Questions Schnackenberg’s poems achieve a new degree […]

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Editorial: A Cultural Center That Can Hold

According to Mapquest, the offices of Little Star are 1.93 miles from 51 Park Place.  I don’t know if that puts us within the range of sanctity felt to govern the thoughts and deeds of those who live in lower Manhattan.  Acrid smoke did float over our building on September 11, 2001, and streams of […]

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Kathryn Davis, “Body-without-Soul”

Two snapshots from “”Body-without-Soul,” by Kathryn Davis Eager for more? Read the whole story, coming next month in My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales, edited by Kate Bernheimer of Fairy Tale Review. t was a suburban street, one block long, the houses made of brick and built […]

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“The Blood of Thought”: Zbigniew Herbert on Hamlet, first time in English

The mad Ophelia and the mock-mad Hamlet expressed the poet’s many-sided rebellion against the world’s ordinariness. For there is a kind of normality that is unacceptable, a base, comfortable normality that submits to reality, forgets easily. It is universal because some inner law of economics doesn’t allow us to experience reality to the full, to […]

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