Song of a Reformed Headhunter

I do not recognize my book in this review in the QLRS. * TLS January 8 2016 from Karen Thomson's Stephanie W. Jamison and Joel P. Brereton's The Rig Veda: The earliest religious poetry of India , and Roberto Calasso's Ardor , translated by Richard Dixon: As Rudolph Roth wrote over a century ago, "A translation must speak for itself. As a rule, it only requires a commentary where it is not directly convincing, and where the translator does not feel secure". *** from Norma Clarke's review of Stephen Bernard's The Literary Correspondences of the Tonsons : It was Tonson who began the pleasant practice of giving dinners to his authors when contracts were signed. He enjoyed the feasting and at the same time created a sense of obligation in his poets. Pope said he used flattery and food strategically: "Jacob creates poets, as kings sometimes do knights, not for their honour but for their money". Was he "genial Jacob" or avaric...

I've been putting together a mini spring course for my seniors, a course on the Chinese short story. I settled on the rather arbitrary number of three writers. Having read Li Yu (Ming-Qing) and Lu Xun (Republican era) at Sarah Lawrence, I know I would want to discuss their consummate and subversive artistry in class. I want a modern woman writer to complete the trio, and Chen Ruoxi fits the bill perfectly. I did not know her work until WL pointed me to her. The Execution of Mayor Yin and Other Stories from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is a collection of eight stories. They tell, in a powerful and subtle manner, how Mao's disastrous experiment affected--destroyed--the lives of ordinary people. Their dominant tone is not denunciatory or self-righteous, but empathetic and observant when narrated in the third person, and self-protectively detached or complicit when narrated in the first. Many of the narrators share Chen's background: a former overseas scholar who ...

His ailing father was China but the cure was not Confucius whom the son threw out, along with the physician. His father died and, in another country, when he turned into a street limned by electric lamps, his father stood up like a shadow on a wall. He led the shadow home and put to bed the dead who coughed into the porcelain throat of the red spittoon, coughed and called to arms his sons black-jacketed, their queues cut off, lovers of Huxley, Gogol, Shaw and Marx, called out in a darkening voice for light. on Lu Xun (1881-1936)