I attended yesterday the talk at Barcelona’s Festival 42 by US horror author Grady Hendrix, a man who looks disconcertingly like actor Brady Cooper’s brother or cousin. Hendrix has made a name for himself as an author who combines the gruesome, the shocking, and the humorous in his novels, though I must confess that I […]
A week ago, the research group I currently belong to, Beyond Postmemory, held the seminar “Nature Remembers: War, Trauma and Environmental Postmemory,” in which we discussed how not only human beings but also nature can suffer, so to speak, from PTSD and show signs of trauma long after a conflict. Postmemory, a concept coined by […]
Today I’m shamelessly piggybacking, this time using The Atlantic’s wonderful selection of 65 outstanding US picture books for infant and toddler ‘readers’ to fill in this blog entry. The piece is not signed, but you can find for each book a comment by the person who chose it (authors, librarians and other experts). The […]
Happy new academic year! May it brings plenty of positive energy for teachers and students, and the thorough defeat of patriarchal darkness in all fronts and nations (yes, I’m thinking of those awful guys). I’ll begin my sixteenth year as a blogger (how time passes!!), with a reminder that the all the yearly volumes can […]
You might think that Victorian novels are so long because of their serialization in weekly or monthly instalments, sold either as part of periodical publications or independently. However, this business practice, introduced by Charles Dickens’s publisher, Chapman, with the serialization of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (19 instalments between March 1836 and November […]
In this summer of very long books, I have re-read with great pleasure Benito Pérez Galdós’s masterpiece Fortunata y Jacinta: dos historias de casadas (1887), a novel certainly far superior to Tolstoi’s Anna Karenina, but still not hailed as the universal classic it should be. Blame for this a certain prejudice against Spanish literature and […]
I must confess my total and utter failure to enjoy Leo Tolstoy’s classic novel Anna Karenina (serialized 1875-1877 and printed in a single volume in 1878). I started with the customary patience I use when reading very long texts (1096 pages in my edition, the excellent 2000 translation by husband-and-wife team Richard Pevear and Larissa […]
I was supposed to take part in a seminar next week, which I’ll have to miss, with a talk about how to use AI correctly. In this talk I was going to describe, once more, how the late Iain M. Banks presents AI in his Culture novels (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_series). The Culture is a post-scarcity, […]
The book I’m currently working on, a study of secondary characters, has a corpus composed of 19th century novels in diverse European languages. I started with nine authors, but I have decided to abandon Swedish writer Selma Lagerlöf because I found it impossible to sustain my interest in her novel Gösta Berling’s Saga (1891), which […]
Continuing with my reading of bibliography on the minor characters, this week I’ve perused David Galef’s The Supporting Cast: A Study of Flat and Minor Characters (1993), a volume less well regarded than Alex Woloch’s The One and the Many but still quite remarkable. Whereas Woloch focuses on the 19th century novel (Austen, Dickens, Balzac), […]