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Best of web:
George Saunders Has Written the Best Book You’ll Read This Year
By JOEL LOVELL
Junot Díaz described the Saunders’s effect to me this way: “There’s no one who has a better eye for the absurd and dehumanizing parameters of our current culture of capital. But then the other side is how the cool rigor of his fiction is counterbalanced by this enormous compassion. Just how capacious his moral vision is sometimes gets lost, because few people cut as hard or deep as Saunders does.”
To read more, click:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/06/magazine/george-saunders-just-wrote-the-best-book-youll-read-this-year.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Tea with the Pushkins in Brussels
By Michael Johnson
Pushkin’s language may be difficult for non-Russians, but so what? “Even Shakespeare is difficult.” she noted. Pushkin, she explained, is “fantastically simple, not metaphorically rich”. His charm is his simplicity. Translators sometimes fail to appreciate this straightforward quality. A certain flatness hampers Pushkin in various languages, including French. Maria, the diminutive wife of the Brussels great-grandson, raised herself on tiptoes to reach for a couple of books on her shelves during my visit there and showed me translations into French by Alexander Dumas and Prosper Mérimée. “Look at this,” she said, shaking her head. “The French is clear but there is none of the richness, none of the finesse. These versions lack soul.”
To read more, click:
http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/tea-with-the-pushkins-in-brussels/

Lastupdate on : Wed, 9 Jan 2013 21:30:00 Makkah time
Lastupdate on : Wed, 9 Jan 2013 18:30:00 GMT
Lastupdate on : Thu, 10 Jan 2013 00:00:00 IST