John Updike, Author, Dies at 76

The New York Times (28 Jan 2009):

NEW YORK (AP) — John Updike, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, prolific man of letters and erudite chronicler of sex, divorce and other adventures in the postwar prime of the American empire, died Tuesday at age 76. Updike, best known for his four ‘’Rabbit’’ novels, died of lung cancer at a hospice near his home

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January Magazine: Best Books of 2008 (Fiction)

Nicht einfach eine Liste, sondern Empfehlungen, die auch begründet werden:
January Magazine: Best Books of 2008: Fiction
In der Spalte rechts sind die “best books” aus den anderen Kategorien verlinkt.

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Harold Pinter, playwright and polemicist

Harold Pinter, who was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 2005, died on 24th Dec. 2008.
I’ve read a couple of Harold Pinter obituaries in the meantime, but the one in the Economist seems to me to convey a good idea of what the writer was like: Harold Pinter, playwright and polemicist.
Because he could be […]

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Stopping by town walls on a snowy morning1

Diese malerische Strecke ist Teil meines täglichen Schulwegs. Vergangene Woche habe ich kurz mein Fahrrad angehalten und dieses Foto gemacht. Die wunderbar verschneite Szenerie gibt mir – auch wenn man relativ schnell vorbeisaust – zusätzlich positive Stimmung für den Tag.
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¹Der Titel ist eine Anspielung auf eines der berühmtesten Gedichte von Robert Frost: “Stopping by Woods […]

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Poetry Archive (!)

A wholehearted recommendation for various reasons: Poetry Archive.
This wonderful website contains recordings of around one hundred contemporary poets reading their poetry. There usually are a handful of poems for each poet, so there must be ca. 500 poems at the Poetry Archive. You get a streamed recording and can also read along while listening. The […]

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John Updike on Obama

In a conversation with NYT Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus, John Updike uses an intriguing neologism to describe Obama’s social skills. Updike thinks that the president-elect displays a certain “reaching-outness” (approx. 3:50 in the following video). – How would you spell it, with or without the hyphen? Or put another hyphen in front of “ness”?
The […]

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Great expectations in modern times

Just two things (and one thing more) on the impressive success of Barack Obama:

An Economist article on the importance of being e…lected: Great expectations of Barack Obama.
A video on how Obama used the Internet to gather votes: Barack Obama and the Internet (see below).

Embedded video from CNN Video
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One thing more: Wie wär’s mit einem kleinen […]

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BardBox

The “News on the Rialto” blog, dedicated to all things Shakespearean, has drawn my attention to the BardBox.
BardBox is “an attempt to bring together some of the best and most interesting of original Shakespeare-related videos on YouTube”.
Among other things, there is a page where you can look for videos connected with a particular play, and […]

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Margaret Atwood: „A matter of life and debt“

Nachdem man eine Reihe von Journalisten und Finanzfachleuten zum Thema Wirtschaftskrise gehört hat, tut es gut, mal eine Äußerung aus der Feder einer Schriftstellerin zu lesen. Margaret Atwood schreibt in ihrem Op-Ed-Beitrag “A Matter of Life and Debt” (NYTimes.com) unter anderem (NB: smart allusion in the headline):
In “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” for example, human beings are […]

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Corduroy Mansions – online novel by Alexander McCall Smith

Only just discovered: The Telegraph offers a podcast of one chapter a day of Alexander McCall Smith’s first online novel:
“Corduroy Mansions” by Alexander McCall Smith.
I listened to Chapter 14: The Names of Dogs, read by Andrew Sachs, and I quite enjoyed it. He has a pleasant voice which transports the little ironies in McCall Smith’s text very nicely. It’s impossible to say of course whether the whole novel would convince me more than “Portuguese Irregular Verbs”, which I read a couple of weeks ago (and wrote about in the Tulgey Wood), but one has to give the author credit for this way of publication.
Certainly a kind of “easy listening” treat for advanced students.

This entry with proper links: TulgeyWood