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Recent Posts
Author Archives: Ann Kjellberg
Celebrate! A new novel by Per Petterson
Not since Sebald has an author revitalized our sense of what’s possible in modern fiction as Per Pettersen has, in the humble opinion of Little Star. In prose so simple as to be almost invisible, he renders characters (usually just one) who are achingly human in their moral limitations and yet panoramically aware. I Curse […]
Dear Reader, We bring you A Thousand Peaceful Cities, by Jerzy Pilch
Little Star was thrilled to encounter A Thousand Peaceful Cities, a mind-bending romp by Polish journalist and novelist Jerzy Pilch, miraculously translated by David Frick and published this month by Open Letter. We here with pleasure offer a few choice morsels (with editorial emendations by ourselves). IN WHICH our hero’s father’s drinking companion, Mr. Traba, […]
Sitting Still II: The Skeptic Meditates—from Tim Parks
Seeking relief from chronic and debilitating pains that conventional medicine could not cure, critic Tim Parks finds himself, much to his own surprise, attending a meditation retreat that involves sitting in crossed-legged silence for twelve and more hours a day. Although the retreat takes place in Italy, where Parks lives, the course leader, John Coleman, […]
Sitting Still I: Paradoxical Relaxation — from Tim Parks
Exhausted by years of fruitless attempts to treat a battery of abdominal pains and urinary disorders with conventional medicine, Tim Parks tries a relaxation cure described in a book discovered on the net. He has the impression he is clutching at straws. Silence. More or less. How strange, I thought, after the fourth or fifth […]
Good-bye, David Markson
I am heartbroken to learn of the death of the great David Markson. Like many before me, I was drawn to Markson through a strange attraction exerted by a pile of austere paperbacks on the edge of a table at the Strand. I bought the mysterious book and, transported and enchanted, I contrived to meet […]
Rebecca West reflects on whether and why she is, or is not, a novelist
I know that had I been able to do what I liked, and that is just what I have not been able to do, I would have written nothing but novels. Fiction and poetry are the only way one can stop time and given account of an experience and nail it down so that it […]
First Time in English! A Thomas Bernhard Story
“Two Tutors” will appear in a newly translated collection of Bernhard’s early stories, Prose, from Seagull Press this May (see our elated facebook post of April 28). Two Tutors While the new tutor has until now remained silent during our lunchtime walk, which to me has already become a habit, today from the start he […]
Naming the Dead, Mother’s Day, 2 PM
On Mother’s Day, May 9, 2010, New York poets will gather at the Flushing Friends Meeting House, Flushing, NY, to read the names of the dead buried in the Hart Island Cemetery, America’s largest public potter’s field. The cemetery on Hart Island occupies 101 acres in the Long Island Sound on the eastern edge of […]
Soaring Into the Sky with Deborah Eisenberg
Deborah Eisenberg’s considerable powers of sympathy are swelled by the work of Hungarian novelist and bon vivant, Dezso Kosztolanyi, whose 1922 novel, Skylark, was recently reissued by New York Review Books. She reads a chapter from Skylark in this podcast, lingering on each mundane detail of the small turn-of-the-century burg in which it is set […]