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We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories From Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch NY: Picador, 1999 ; 356pp This year marks the twentieth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide. In the hundred days that followed the downing of President Juvénal Habyarimana’s […]
Read MoreThe first English translation of one of Roberto Bolaño’s novels was published in 2003, the same year he died, at the age of fifty, of liver failure. Susan Sontag was his anglophone herald, referring to him, in her notes on By Night in Chile, as “the most influential and admired novelist of his generation in the […]
Read MoreInstead of seizing upon the liberation that had been handed to us, we twisted it somehow into a charge: because we could do anything, we felt as if we had to do everything. And by following unwittingly along this path, we have condemned ourselves, if not to failure, then at least to the constantly nagging sense that […]
Read MoreBorgesian understatement, Nixonian analysis, Putinian philosophy, and a rediscovered Kodak disc camera. The ink, the wine, and the laughs were all flowing at Tuesday’s Seriously Entertaining show as another smashing line-up of writing talent mused aloud on the creative process and the terror that one day the ink might just dry up altogether. Amanda Vaill […]
Read MoreWhat happens when The Ink Runs Dry? Fortunately, the House of SpeakEasy has a talking cure. We’re delighted to welcome Jonathan Alter, David Gilbert, Christopher Mason, Jay Parini and Amanda Vaill to City Winery for another Seriously Entertaining literary cabaret, taking in tortured geniuses, presidential candidates, messiahs and more. Read on, dear friends, to meet […]
Read MoreSpain’s war had become an experimental exercise — which will prevail, fascism or socialism? Whose weapons are stronger, Germany’s or Russia’s? — that the rest of the world was watching with interest. This is “a bleak and terrifying epiphany” for Arturo Barea, an aspiring writer working in Madrid as a press censor for the Republicans […]
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