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“Anything might happen”: Kultura in Maisons-Laffitte and the politics of exile
Kultura’s former digs. “Absolutely secret, absolutely necessary,” said Andrzej Bernhardt at the steering wheel, driving me from one side of Maisons-Laffitte to the other. “It was very dangerous....
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Józef Czapski: A Life in Translation – and a Cahiers Series giveaway
Update on 3/26: Still some editions of this treasure available for free for a retweet (or Facebook “share”) during the giveaway: Go to Facebook and Twitter pages here and here, beginning today. I...
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Take a look around Nobel poet Czesław Miłosz’s home in Kraków: it almost...
He wrote his poems here, next to the bust of his wife Carol Thigpen My visit to beloved Kraków last month was very short – so brief and tightly packed I didn’t have a chance to return to the apartment...
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Czesław Miłosz: the moment his world turned upside down
Author, author! My review of Andrzej Franaszek’s Miłosz: A biography (Harvard University Press) is in the current issue of the Times Literary Supplement. I also discuss the publication of the Nobel...
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Adam Zagajewski and “the battle to imbue life with maximal meaning”
A distinctive, insistent, civilized stance. Adam Zagajewski is an absolutely foundational figure for many of us – not only because of his own poems and essays, but for his quietly insistent, civilized...
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Join me for a talk with Eric Karpeles on his new Czapski biography: Thursday...
Czapski by Czapski I’d love to see all of you at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Nov. 29 at the legendary City Lights Booksellers, on 261 Columbus Avenue in San Francisco. And here’s why. The subject of evening...
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Best New Year’s resolution for 2019 – from the third monkey on Noah’s Ark
The best resolution of the incoming 2019 may be the one that appeared on my Facebook newsfeed, by author and former bank robber Joe Loya, who served Lompoc Federal Penitentiary, with two years in...
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“I can recall no whining.” Polish war hero, artist, writer Józef Czapski is...
No sooner was it up than it was behind a paywall, but my The Wall Street Journal review is nevertheless in print and online here. “Shouldering the Century’s Burden,” discusses a spray of books on a...
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Józef Czapski. Haven’t heard of him? Here’s a chance to learn about one of...
Keith Botsford’s very short “Józef Czapski: A Life in Translation,” in the Cahiers Series http://bookhaven.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Eric-Kareples-on-Jozef-Czapski.mp3 It’s been quite...
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Why do inmates of Soviet prison camps love Proust?
Over at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Patrick Kurp, who blogs at the matchless Anecdotal Evidence, has some thoughts about the curious attraction of Soviet prisoners to Marcel Proust… this time it’s...
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