The Hall of Uselessness

The Hall of Uselessness PDF Author: Simon Leys
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590176200
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 577

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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.

The Hall of Uselessness

The Hall of Uselessness PDF Author: Simon Leys
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590176200
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 577

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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

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

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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).

Chinese Shadows

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

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Book Description


Little Labors

Little Labors PDF Author: Rivka Galchen
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811222977
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 101

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Book Description
In paperback at last: Rivka Galchen’s beloved baby bible—slyly hilarious, surprising, and absolutely essential reading for anyone who has ever had, held, or been a baby In this enchanting miscellany, Galchen notes that literature has more dogs than babies (and also more abortions), that the tally of children for many great women writers—Jane Bowles, Elizabeth Bishop, Virginia Woolf, Janet Frame, Willa Cather, Patricia Highsmith, Iris Murdoch, Djuna Barnes, Mavis Gallant—is zero, that orange is the new baby pink, that The Tale of Genji has no plot but plenty of drama about paternity, that babies exude an intoxicating black magic, and that a baby is a goldmine.

Uselessness

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

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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.

Journalism of the Highest Realm

Journalism of the Highest Realm PDF Author: Edward Price Bell
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807132852
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
Once considered the "best American newspaperman London has ever had," Edward Price Bell (1869--1943) helped invent the ideal of a professional foreign news service at the late and great Chicago Daily News, which in its heyday had the second-largest daily newspaper circulation in the United States. At the turn of the twentieth century, professional overseas reporting was still an experiment. The Chicago Daily News's visionary owner and publisher Victor Lawson was not certain how to organize the service or even what kind of news it should cover. Bell, who had distinguished himself as a young reporter in Chicago, became the anchor for the service when Lawson sent him to London in 1900. The course he set established the standard for the New York Times and other prestigious American newspapers. Unfortunately, few journalists or scholars are familiar with Bell's contributions, in part because his autobiography remained archived at the Newberry Library in Chicago. In Journalism of the Highest Realm, Jaci Cole and John Maxwell Hamilton have edited and annotated Bell's story, focusing on his lively account of the early days of the Chicago Daily News's foreign service as well as the dramatic stories his correspondents covered. James F. Hoge, Jr., the last editor-in-chief of the Chicago Daily News and present editor of Foreign Affairs, sets the stage for Bell's memoir with an informative foreword on the evolution of foreign news gathering over the last century. A bright-eyed midwestern teenager who learned journalism on the job at a small newspaper in Terre Haute, Indiana, Bell quickly established himself as an enterprising reporter. Moving on to Chicago, he became the Daily News's go-to man. He was assigned big stories and landed interviews with leading politicians, a knack that became a trademark of his overseas reporting. Over more than two decades in London, Bell entrenched himself in politics and culture, sending back thoughtful background and analysis of current events. In his memoir, Bell recounts his exclusive wartime interviews with Sir Edward Grey, the British foreign secretary, and Lord Richard Haldane, the minister of war; a later sit-down with the charismatic Il Duce, Benito Mussolini; and his rather tense exchanges with former vice president Charles Dawes, American ambassador to Britain. The respect Bell commanded among British elites and his years of experience as a London insider thrust him into a diplomatic role. Bell became an unofficial envoy to the British government and also a conduit for British views to the United States and its leaders. After Bell returned to Chicago in the early 1920s, the Daily News dispatched him on special missions to Europe and Asia to interview leaders about world peace. His accounts were published in two books and earned him a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize in the 1930s. Despite this acclaim -- indeed, to some extent because of it -- Bell fell out of favor when new owners acquired the newspaper in 1931, and he retired to the Mississippi Gulf Coast.With Journalism of the Highest Realm Cole and Hamilton put this great newspaperman into a broader context. As they show in their thoughtful introduction, Bell and the Daily News continually grappled with problems that still bedevil overseas correspondence. Foreign news, they show, has always been an enterprise that is at once valuable and vulnerable.

An Anatomy of Chinese

An Anatomy of Chinese PDF Author: Perry Link
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674067681
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
Rhythms, conceptual metaphors, and political language convey meanings of which Chinese speakers themselves may not be aware. Link’s Anatomy of Chinese contributes to the debate over whether language shapes thought or vice versa, and its comparison of English with Chinese lends support to theories that locate the origins of language in the brain.

China's Response to the West

China's Response to the West PDF Author: Ssu-yü Teng
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674120259
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Contains primary source material.

On the Abolition of All Political Parties

On the Abolition of All Political Parties PDF Author: Simone Weil
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590177908
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 97

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Book Description
An NYRB Classics Original Simone Weil—philosopher, activist, mystic—is one of the most uncompromising of modern spiritual masters. In “On the Abolition of All Political Parties” she challenges the foundation of the modern liberal political order, making an argument that has particular resonance today, when the apathy and anger of the people and the self-serving partisanship of the political class present a threat to democracies all over the world. Dissecting the dynamic of power and propaganda caused by party spirit, the increasing disregard for truth in favor of opinion, and the consequent corruption of education, journalism, and art, Weil forcefully makes the case that a true politics can only begin where party spirit ends. This volume also includes an admiring portrait of Weil by the great poet Czeslaw Milosz and an essay about Weil’s friendship with Albert Camus by the translator Simon Leys.

Other People's Thoughts

Other People's Thoughts PDF Author: Simon Leys
Publisher: Black Inc.
ISBN: 1921866632
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 162

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Book Description
ʻA book is a mirror; if an ape looks into it, an apostle is hardly likely to look out.’ –G. C. Lichtenberg ‘The desire to go into politics is usually indicative of some sort of personality disorder, and it is precisely those who want power most that should be kept furthest from it.’ –Arthur Koestler ‘Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.’ –Thoreau In this wonderfully entertaining collection of quotations, Simon Leys gathers insights and bons mots from a motley group of great artists, wits and thinkers. Topics range from ambition and adventure to youth, sex, time, toads, wine, faith and friendship. Wise, witty and delightfully unpredictable, Other People’s Thoughts is for anyone who has ever rifled through a friend’s bookshelves or snuck a peak over a reading stranger’s shoulder. In this wide-ranging miscellany, we are given free rein to explore the nooks and crannies of one man’s mental library. By turns profound, whimsical and subversive, the result is a book-lover’s delight.