Earlier this month, Yale University Press published Mechanisms of Loss by Michel Faïs, translated from the Greek by David Connolly, a duet of provocative novellas that examine contemporary Greek identity and postmodernity. To mark the occasion, editorial intern Matthew Blake sat down with Michel to discuss the novellas and explore questions
Terry Eagleton— All art has a political dimension, but tragedy actually began life as a political institution. Indeed, for Hannah Arendt it is the political art par excellence. Only in theatre, she writes, ‘is the political sphere of human life transposed into art’. In fact, ancient Greek tragedy is not
Yale University Press: What is your earliest memory of connecting deeply with a literary character? How old were you, who was it, and what do you remember feeling at the time? Alberto Manguel: Because I learned to read when I was about four, my earliest remembered stories are those of
Bernard Avishai— Irving Howe famously said that the cruelest thing one could do with Portnoy’s Complaint was “read it twice.” But why reread it when the first time was unforgettable? Back when the book was published, exactly 50 years ago, I knew people who sat around in coffee shops, student unions,
Clive James— Both The Sopranos and Band of Brothers were HBO cable productions, and their collective impact might tend to persuade us that network television was left nowhere. But it’s a law of the arts that a stylistic innovation gets instantly everywhere, like heat or cold; and in fact, even while HBO
In Why Trilling Matters, from Yale University Press’s Why X Matters Series, Adam Kirsch makes a compelling argument for why mid-century American literary critic Lionel Trilling might matter thirty-six years after his death. Yet the importance of a literary critic rests on the more fundamental question of the importance of
The May 22 cover of the New York Times Book Review featured a photograph of Harold Bloom; the title of Editor Sam Tanenhaus’s essay: “An Uncommon Reader”, accompanied online by an interview at Bloom’s home in New York. As Tanenhaus writes of the new book, The Anatomy of Influence: Literature
Ivan Lett I decided to take this column on the road and pay a visit to the very office where so many of the books I gush about begin their lives. Around London, like New York, a prideful smile spreads across my face when I see advertisements for upcoming shows
In the wake of a heated commentary by Carlin Romano in The Chronicle Review, the academy has revived a familiar and unsettling debate over the merits of philosopher Martin Heidegger's work in light of the thinker's well-known connections to Nazism. The publication of Emmanuel Faye's book, Heidegger: The Introduction of
Richard M. Cook’s Alfred Kazin: A Biography, about one of the most important literary critics of the 20th century, has in turn become the subject of articles by literary critics from The New York Sun, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, and The New York Times Book Review. In his