Category Archives: News

Kantan, a story in English from a Noh drama, by Paul Griffiths

Kantan was a little place to pass through, perhaps to spend the night, at the inn a pleasant woman ran by herself. She had just the one guest room, with an alcove where the visitor could lie down, head resting on a pillow left by someone calling himself a magician. Whoever sleeps on this pillow, […]

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One poem by Derek Walcott: Glyn Maxwell

Most poets, when they leaf back through their work to select the Best of Themselves, tend to want grown-ups around: poems from not so long ago, poems that show what the poet came to, what he or she did when he or she grew up, poems they can talk to. The awkward youngsters in the […]

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Jesse Ball, “Silence Once Begun”

The Mother of the Accused I said to him, I said: When you were four, your father and I had a thought that we should perhaps travel to different waterfalls, that it might be a good thing to see all the waterfalls we could. So, we began to go to waterfalls whenever we had a […]

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One of the most relentlessly and funnily experimental writers of our time

Here is the much-missed David Markson, author of Wittgenstein’s Mistress and other great, unclassifiable works, on Kenneth Bernard, in Little Star Weekly this week: One of the most relentlessly and funnily experimental writers of our time. Kenneth Bernard is one of the most gloriously antic fiction writers we possess. Think of Salvador Dali or Giorgio […]

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“The Mission,” by Joy Williams

A Mr. Hill was doing my paperwork. “What will you take away from this experience?” he asked me. I looked at him, a little wildly, I guess. “What do you think you will learn from the incarceration experience?” he said. “I don’t know,” I said. Mr. Hill wore a pink shirt and looked tired. His […]

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What Vergil gave Dante (1931), newly translated Erich Auerbach

Originally Dante belonged to an Italian literary movement that he called the dolce stil nuovo. It was a movement that, with a swiftness of growth unparalleled in literary history, conjured perfection out of a void. The flowering of medieval verse during the first quarter of the second millennium in France, Germany, and Spain had passed […]

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For Epiphany, Patricia Storace

Like Homer, Ovid, and Dante, Patricia Storace, in her new novel The Book of Heaven, has produced a great harmonizing of myths into a single cosmic tale. Unlike these forbears, her ear is attuned to the myths outside our hearing—the ones neglected by the bards, inscribed in constellations beyond our horizon. For Epiphany today, our […]

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Flight into Egypt (2), by Joseph Brodsky, translated by Seamus Heaney

In the cave—it sheltered them, at least, safer than four square-set right angles— in the cave the threesome felt secure in the reek of straw and old clobber. Straw for bedding. Outside the door, blizzard, sandstorm, howling air, Mule rubbed ox; they stirred and groaned like sand and snowflake scourged in wind. Mary prays; the […]

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Janet Malcolm’s collages

Little Star continues its serendipitous series of collages by important writers (see Mark Strand, here), with a sample from a new exhibition by Janet Malcolm, showing at Lori Bookstein Fine Art from January 9 to February 8, 2014. Malcolm’s “Abyss” appears as the cover image of Little Star Weekly this week. Her new project, her […]

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“Quitting Time,” by Caleb Crain

In the empty room, he slowly wiped clean the blackboard. Before he remembered that Edgar might have notes in his satchel, it was too late to look at them: a girl was hesitating in the doorway. “Come in,” said Bernard. “Where’s Mr. Price?” “He’s not feeling well.” “He’s sick,” she said, interpreting. She scooted herself […]

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