“And keep your eyes wide The chance won’t come again” – Bob Dylan Sometimes one has the chance to be an eyewitness to history at a remarkable moment. Ten years ago, visitors were told what we now know to be true: that along with the end of the Castro regime would come […]
Month: October 2015
GUEST BLOG—Five Reasons to Read Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend by Nancy Carr
Dickens’s last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend, is one of his most complex and ambitious works. It includes everything you’d expect from Dickens—a huge cast of characters, a convoluted plot, extremes of emotion, and a vivid depiction of life in Victorian London. (Did you know, for instance, that private “dustmen” […]
GUEST BLOG—Nella Cotrupi on Trieste and Tristezza
I flip pages of my memory like the pages of the many books we’ve read together. What do I come up with? The flotsam and jetsam of a world modern and yet defined by the ever-present layers of its past, its names, its words from many tongues, its wisdom, and […]
GUEST BLOG—Three Questions for Real Life, brought to you by … Fairy Tales!
Beauty and the Beast. Bluebeard. Red Riding Hood. Cinderella. No sooner do we hear the names of well-known fairy tales than our thoughts turn to illustrated storybooks and the Disney movies of our childhood. To our common way of thinking, saying that something is a fairy tale is also to […]
CLASSICAL TRIVIA! Lost (or Found) in Translation
Every few years, there is a new, and generally assumed to be improved, translation of a major literary classic. Robert Fagles (The Iliad, The Odyssey, and The Aeneid), Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov), Robert and Jean Hollander (Dante’s Divine Comedy) are just a few […]