The Hall of Uselessness

Author: Simon Leys
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590176383
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 577

Book Description
An NYRB Classics Original Simon Leys is a Renaissance man for the era of globalization. A distinguished scholar of classical Chinese art and literature and one of the first Westerners to recognize the appalling toll of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Leys also writes with unfailing intelligence, seriousness, and bite about European art, literature, history, and politics and is an unflinching observer of the way we live now. The Hall of Uselessness is the most extensive collection of Leys’s essays to be published to date. In it, he addresses subjects ranging from the Chinese attitude to the past to the mysteries of Belgium and Belgitude; offers portraits of André Gide and Zhou Enlai; takes on Roland Barthes and Christopher Hitchens; broods on the Cambodian genocide; reflects on the spell of the sea; and writes with keen appreciation about writers as different as Victor Hugo, Evelyn Waugh, and Georges Simenon. Throughout, The Hall of Uselessness is marked with the deep knowledge, skeptical intelligence, and passionate conviction that have made Simon Leys one of the most powerful essayists of our time.

Simon Leys

Author: Philippe Paquet
Publisher: La Trobe University Press
ISBN: 1925435563
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 541

Book Description
An award-winning biography of one of the greats. Simon Leys is the pen-name of Pierre Ryckmans, who was born in Belgium and settled in Australia in 1970. He taught Chinese literature at the Australian National University and was Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Sydney from 1987 to 1993. He died in 2014. Writing in three languages – French, Chinese and English – he played an important political role in revealing the true nature of the Cultural Revolution. His writing on China and on varied literary and cultural topics appeared regularly in the New York Review of Books, Le Monde, Le Figaro Littéraire, Quadrant and the Monthly, and his books include The Hall of Uselessness, The Death of Napoleon, Other People’s Thoughts and The Wreck of the Batavia & Prosper. In 1996 he delivered the ABC’s Boyer Lectures. His many awards include the Prix Renaudot, the Prix Mondial Cino Del Duca, the Prix Guizot and the Christina Stead Prize for fiction. This substantial biography – recently published by Gallimard in France to wide acclaim and winning an award from the Académie Francaise – draws on extensive correspondence with Ryckmans, as well as his unpublished writings. It has been translated by an internationally renowned French translator Julie Rose (based in Sydney).

The Death of Napoleon

Author: Simon Leys
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312421779
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 148

Book Description
History tells us that Napoleon Bonaparte died in exile on the desolate island of St. Helena in 1821. Or did he? This film supposes a more fanciful tale. A secret network of loyalists hatch an ingenious plot: the Emporer (Ian Holm in a double role) will return to Paris, while a double takes his place in exile. Trading identities with a dissolute sailor (Holm), Napoleon is spirited back to France to reclaim his throne. Yet, early on in the scheme, the plan goes awry. The double refuses to give up playing Napoleon thereby stranding the former Emperor in Paris.

Chinese Shadows

Author: Simon Leys
Publisher: Penguin Group
ISBN: 9780140047875
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Book Description

Shifting Interludes: Selected Essays

Author:
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9781604736687
Category : American essays
Languages : en
Pages : 230

Book Description
A collection of eloquent, sometimes hard-hitting essays by one of the South's most beloved writers covers forty years in Morris's career as a journalist and columnist. (Literature)

Sherman Alexie

Author: Jeff Berglund
Publisher: University of Utah Press
ISBN: 1607819740
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 344

Book Description
A collection of critical essays on the writing and films of American Indian author Sherman Alexie.

Writing Was Everything

Author: Alfred Kazin
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674962389
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 161

Book Description
Blending autobiography, history, and criticism, this book is a reaffirmation of literature in an age of deconstruction and critical dogma and stands as testimony to Kazin’s belief that “literature is not theory but, at best, the value we can give to our experience, which in our century has been and remains beyond the imagination of mankind.”

Uselessness

Author: Eduardo Lalo
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022620779X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 192

Book Description
Eduardo Lalo is a writer, essayist, and artist from San Juan, Puerto Rico. His many books include the award-winning novel Simone, which we published in translation. Suzanne Jill Levine is a leading translator of Latin American literature who runs the translation doctoral program at UCSB. A tale of social, spiritual, and intellectual yearning, Uselessness follows the life of its narrator, a young Puerto Rican writer studying in Paris, the city of his dreams. There he finds an appreciation of the arts that he has always longed for, yet he remains alienated from it because of his uncertain identity. Meanwhile, he grapples with two long, tumultuous love affairs. He conveys these events in a dark yet witty tone, as if aware of the futility of his youthful follies. After some time he chooses to end perhaps his greatest love affair, that with the city of Paris itself, and return to San Juan. Upon his return, he finds himself just as estranged and alienated at home as he felt abroad. In his writing and academic careers he gains little notoriety, but he tries to help a student whose struggles in many ways reflect his own early days. As he observes this young man's mistakes, the narrator confronts a path he very nearly traveled down himself and, in doing so, accepts his small place in the narrative of countless generations.

Literature and the Taste of Knowledge

Author: Michael Wood
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781139446129
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Book Description
What does literature know? Does it offer us knowledge of its own or does it only interrupt and question other forms of knowledge? This 2005 book seeks to answer and to prolong these questions through the close examination of individual works and the exploration of a broad array of examples. Chapters on Henry James, Kafka, and the form of the villanelle are interspersed with wider-ranging inquiries into forms of irony, indirection and the uses of fiction, with examples ranging from Auden to Proust and Rilke, and from Calvino to Jean Rhys and Yeats. Literature is a form of pretence. But every pretence could tilt us into the real, and many of them do. There is no safe place for the reader: no literalist's haven where fact is always fact; and no paradise of metaphor, where our poems, plays and novels have no truck at all with the harsh and shifting world.

Masscult and Midcult

Author: Dwight Macdonald
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590174682
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Book Description
A New York Review Books Original An uncompromising contrarian, a passionate polemicist, a man of quick wit and wide learning, an anarchist, a pacifist, and a virtuoso of the slashing phrase, Dwight Macdonald was an indefatigable and indomitable critic of America’s susceptibility to well-meaning cultural fakery: all those estimable, eminent, prizewinning works of art that are said to be good and good for you and are not. He dubbed this phenomenon “Midcult” and he attacked it not only on aesthetic but on political grounds. Midcult rendered people complacent and compliant, secure in their common stupidity but neither happy nor free. This new selection of Macdonald’s finest essays, assembled by John Summers, the editor of The Baffler, reintroduces a remarkable American critic and writer. In the era of smart, sexy, and everything indie, Macdonald remains as pertinent and challenging as ever.