Articles tagged " Death"
Light
After the rain, the clouds shrank and the sky shone silver. The phone would ring any minute now. I was standing over the receiver when its shrill snarl echoed in the room. "How are you?" "Fine. And you?"…...
Level A
A-Gump had already been called A-Gump.1 At that time, the American movie Forrest Gump wasn't around yet. However, nobody knew about this. If A-Gump didn't mention it, nobody would know. Among all…...
Cadaver
I gaze at my corpse where it lies and I find myself beautiful. Beautiful as a wounded legend. Beautiful as only someone else can be. I gaze at my corpse and my corpse is a wire. I am its acrobat, its hostage.…...
from “Scenes from the Silent Movies”
Balancing the World on His Chin The posters advertising movies or dances were not the only ones that occasionally clamored for our attention from Olleros' walls and tree trunks. Sometimes, too, a traveling…...
Reading Rutka Laskier
From to time to time, a Dutch publisher will ask me to write a preface or an afterword to a book he plans to publish. I have written prefaces for authors as different as Machiavelli, Stendhal and Boris…...
The Trial of Jean-Marie Le Pen
By the time it starts the Blistier trial has already been known for months as "the trial of Jean-Marie Le Pen." Civil rights groups were the first to call it that, but by now the phrase, borne along on…...
The Pig
Asbjørn Hall was admitted to an Oslo hospital on December 4th, 2003, for an intestinal operation, a rather unpleasant business no one would look forward to. But Asbjørn Hall was seventy-eight…...
The Man Who Killed the Writer
First things first: I didn't write the book everyone thinks I wrote, the one that has been showering me with fame and riches since its publication, just over one year go. Although many people might…...
Inscription on a Tomb
And I felt your pure and sad soul As you'd feel the moon float in silence Behind drawn curtains. And I felt your poor and bashful soul, Like a beggar, hand stretched at the gate,…...
Parting, a scene
"Parting," first published in Hebrew in 1914, revolves around the biblical injunction (and the Jewish custom) that a man must marry and support his brother's widow. However, in later times, as bigamy…...
Under the Surface
"Are you sure you aren't coming swimming with me?" he asked me while he was entering the cold water on the lakeside gravel. "You know I'm not . . . I don't like swimming," I replied, just as…...
Love Begets Love
The day, along with Ismael, was dying. Under the blanket his still young body shuddered, the body of a man whose life had not been very productive. At his side, his wife Isaura, also still young, attended…...
Gulliver in Icelandic
On my first day, I was overcome with dread. It wasn't even four in the afternoon and the sun had set long ago. They turn on the streetlamps here by two, two-thirty, and in the brief spell of sunshine,…...
V. Samsara
I have always been intrigued by the fact that cows in India are sacred. Unmolested, they roam the streets of towns and villages. In some parts they have a bell round their neck and a jasmine topknot on…...
A Foot Patrol in Oruzgan, Afghanistan
Recently I flew from Afghanistan to the Netherlands along with some Dutch troops going on R&R for two weeks. A day later, I traveled to Paris to promote a book. The difference could not have been bigger.…...
Returning to Afghanistan
While publishers, agents and some authors were heading for Frankfurt for the annual book fair I decided to return to Afghanistan—or to be more precise Oruzgan, a small province in the south—where…...
The Other Life
I had to die to find out whether anybody loved me. When alive, I was never very popular, and it was a real problem for me that I fought very vigorously and quite without success. At home, if I didn't…...
A Practical Guide to Levitation
I do not like parties. The idle chat, the smoke, the fatuous talk of drunks, I find them all tiresome. Plastic plates annoy me even more. And plastic cutlery. And plastic cups. I'm served roasted rabbit…...
The Fat Indian Girl
I want to be like the flower that dies before getting old. That's what Modari, the fat Indian girl, used to say. She didn't die, nor did she grow old. She just got fatter and fatter. By the time…...
from “The History of the Bones”
Alberto Martins's History of the Bones opens with the narrator receiving a phone call from the provincial seaside cemetery where his father is buried. In a brief conversation, he learns that that block…...
Bad News on a Scrap of Newspaper
These days when my friends die only their names die. How can one yearn from the inhuman pit to grasp more than newsprint, shiny black wispy letters, arrows sunk into private memories? Only one who lives…...
(“Lengua”: María Zambrano)
The word's dawn is meaning's night I walk in springtime. The wild, strange, violent spring. Birdsong. The beginning of everything, verdure that seems to levitate. Death with a cig in its long holder…...
(“Parousía”)
Our time, why shouldn't I go backward into the moment with my trembling preferences, my restless desire, my thought's uttermost solitude? When I blink I usually see my mother, sitting on the sofa…...
George Tabori
On July 23 the theater director, playwright and writer George Tabori died. Unfortunately, Mr. Tabori is not widely known outside Germany and Austria. His relative obscurity doesn't do justice to the quality…...
The Golem in the Mirror
I dreamed of Prague at night. It looked the way each of us to whom the words "Old City" speak at least a little would imagine. I knew the Golem had returned, and I ran through the streets hoping to find…...
- Keywords
- europe
- poetry
- from 2000 to present
- death
- war
- spanish
- translation
- family
- writing
- love
- sex
- childhood
- marriage
- memory
- language
- asia
- chinese literature
- travel
- literature
- immigration
- americas
- nature
- middle east
- communism
- french
- mexico
- animals
- china
- polish
- poland
- russian literature
- families
- africa
- cities
- arabic
- polish literature
- loss
- mexican literature
- italian literature
- the end of things
- german literature
- israel
- murder
- spain
- poverty
- paris
- japan
- villages
- france
- dutch
- from 1950 to 2000
- relationships
- spanish literature
- aging
- irony
- netherlands
- work
- romanian literature
- exile
- islam
- italy
- money
- graphic literature
- friendship
- music
- french literature
- egypt
- argentina
- korean literature
- turkish literature
- chinese
- politics
- germany
- forum thread
- israeli literature
- meaning
- argentinian literature
- wisdom
- crime
- violence
- russia
- greek literature
- review
- catalan literature
- tranquillity
- lies
- japanese literature
- iraqi literature
- english
- god
Sections
Filters
