The novel wouldn’t strain the reader’s suspension of disbelief quite as much if the narrator were just a few years older—a short Publishers Weekly review even made the mistake of calling it a “portrait of teenage rebellion”…
Some of the translations are more academic, aiming mainly to reproduce the content of the poems without bothering too much about the form. Others strive to turn the poems into equivalent works in English, with varying degrees of success. Part of the attraction of a collection like this lies, hopefully, in the unity of its approach, and that is largely due to the collection being one translator’s version of Claus…
Dreams have the following architecture: metallic substance, pursuant laws of mineralness. Vague plunder of booty, plastic robe of pearls. Sesame pirates of our wonderfully dull childhood where a perverted man usurps your surname and wanders the lawn, sprinkling reindeer tears…
I said to them, ‘We need to understand that we’re the last generation of writers that can think of themselves as Victorian gentlepeople, living above the marketplace…’
For those uninterested in the history of materials, it may seem strange that some colors cannot exist divorced from their material wellspring. Mummy Brown, for example, is a brown obtained from the ground up fragments of Egyptian mummies…
The ghost of one of the murdered, misburied underage models begins to haunt Benson. She has bells for eyes, tiny brass ones dangling from the top of each socket…
Simply put, fashion is the largest, best-funded and best-scripted NGO in existence—and one that’s not above using politicians as instruments for social command and control…
For instance, through the response which is made to the child’s instinctive babblings the child comes to know what those babblings mean; they are transformed into articulate language and thus the child is introduced into the consolidated wealth of ideas and emotions…
…the boy knew from experience that if he stepped inside the room a certain alteration of the air would unnerve him—he’d begin to feel that strange sad clutching sensation, that was also a sensation like that of sand slipping away beneath your feet…
Sometimes I smile before I mean it. Better, sometimes I’ve smiled before I mean it. Meant it. You know what I mean?—Sometimes I smile before I smile, or know I’m smiling, and I mean it, although I didn’t mean to—never mind–
