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I don’t know much about this Quantified Writer Project, but seeing that it combines two of my favorite things—Arnon Grunberg’s work and neuroscience—I feel like I really should.
Here’s the basic description from Arnon’s website:
Dutch author Arnon Grunberg and his publishing house, Nijgh & Van Ditmar, initiated the formation of a top class research team that will investigate the physiological processes governing the production and perception of art in a unique collaboration between scientists, an artist and the public.
The team plans to take detailed measurements of the brain activity and the physical signals recorded from the author as he writes his new novel. This will take place in New York, where Grunberg lives, starting November 19th and lasting two weeks. The next phase, in the fall of 2014, will be to study members of public (n=~50) reading the new novel in a controlled situation. On top of this, and using a limited set of parameters, the team will study brain activation in several thousand readers.
There is also a LiveStream box on this page, so maybe we’ll all have the chance to watch as Arnon writes? Regardless, this sounds really cool, and I’m very curious about the results. It seems like something could fit right into Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine, but, you know, actually factually accurate. (Yeah, I went there.)
Reviewed by Jason Newport
To be, or not to be?
Hamlet’s enduring question is one that Szilárd Borbély, acclaimed Hungarian poet, verse-playwright, librettist, essayist, literary critic, short-story writer, and, finally, novelist, answered sadly in the negative, through his suicide in 2014, at the. . .
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A Greater Music is the first in a line of steady and much-anticipated releases by Bae Suah from key indie presses (this one published by Open Letter). Building off of the interest of 2016 Best Translated Book Award longlist nominee. . .
Reviewed by Tim Lebeau
The dislocation of individuals from the countries of their birth has long been a common theme in contemporary literature. These two short novels recently translated into English appear firmly rooted in this tradition of ex-pat literature, but their authors eschew. . .
Reviewed by Jason Newport
In Melancholy, Hungarian author, critic, and art theorist László Földényi presents a panorama of more than two thousand years of Western historical and cultural perspectives on the human condition known as melancholia. In nine chapters, Földényi contrasts the hero worship. . .
Reviewed by Jeanne Bonner
Pascal Quignard’s __The Hatred of Music_ is the densest, most arcane, most complex book I’ve read in ages. It’s also a book that covers a topic so basic, so universal—almost primordial—that just about any reader will be perversely thrilled by. . .
Reviewed by Damian Kelleher
In Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Flaubert attempted to highlight the ordinary, tired, and often crass nature of common expressions by italicising them within the text. When Charles, Emma Bovary’s mediocre husband, expresses himself in a manner akin to that of. . .
Reviewed by Russell Guilbault
Eliot Weinberger takes big strides across literary history in his genuinely breathtaking short work, 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, tracking translations of a short ancient Chinese poem from the publication of Ezra Pound’s Cathay in 1915 to Gary. . .
Reviewed by Vincent Francone
Prose translators will likely disagree, but I believe translating poetry requires a significant level of talent, a commitment to the text, and near mania, all of which suggests that the undertaking is the greatest possible challenge. The task is to. . .
Reviewed by Vincent Francone
The biggest issues with books like The Subsidiary often have to do with their underpinnings—when we learn that Georges Perec wrote La Disparition without once using the letter E, we are impressed. Imagine such a task! It takes a high. . .
Reviewed by Kristel Thornell
Following The Infatuations, Javier Marías’s latest novel seems, like those that have preceded it, an experiment to test fiction’s capacity to mesmerize with sombre-sexy atmospheres and ruminative elongated sentences stretched across windowless walls of paragraphs. Thus Bad Begins offers his. . .
- 5 October 17: 40th ALTA conference | Minneapolis, MN
