Search results for ""New York Review of Books""

Three of the legendary Russian dissident writer''s greatest poems, two autobiographical and one based on a Russian folktale, now in a new, invigorating English translation.The three poems in this collection, Backstreets, Poem of the Mountain and Poem of the End, were all written in the few short years spanning the period immediately preceding Tsvetaeva''s move from the Soviet Union to Prague in 1922. Poem of the Mountain and Poem of the End are generally considered some of her finest poems and have been translated widely; Backstreets, initially dismissed by Russian readers as nigh unintelligible, is almost unknown in English. Andrew Davis''s translation is a first, and it reveals the poem in all in its emotional intensity and poetic pyrotechnics as among Tsvetaeva''s greatest achievements.Poem of the Mountain and Poem of the End both concern the end of an affair. Backsteets, by contrast, is a retelling of the Russian folk-tale of Dobrynya and Marinka.

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An illuminating selection of writings on a wide variety of topics—everything from technique, music theory, and daily routine to spirituality and systemic racism—from the personal journals of Sonny Rollins, master of the tenor saxophone and “jazz’s greatest living improviser” (The New York Times).Sonny Rollins is one of the towering masters of American music, a virtuoso of the saxophone and an unequaled improviser whose live performances are legendary and who reshaped modern jazz time and time again over the course of a career lasting more than sixty years. Throughout the greater part of it, Rollins also maintained a notebook in which he sketched in words and images as he pondered art and life and his own search for meaning. The Notebooks of Sonny Rollins provides an unequaled glimpse into the mind and workshop of a musical titan, along with a wealth of insight and inspiration to readers.In the fall of 1959, Rollins famo

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The Russian master''s most infamous novel, a dystopian fever dream about cloning, alternative histories, and world domination.Vladimir Sorokin’s Blue Lard is the most iconic and iconoclastic Russian novel of the last forty years. Thanks in part to its depiction of Stalin and Khrushchev having sex, which inspired a Putinist youth group to throw shredded copies of the author’s books into an enormous toilet erected in front of Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater, Blue Lard is the novel that tore Sorokin out of the Moscow Conceptualist underground and into the headlines.The book begins in a futuristic laboratory where genetic scientists speak in a Joycean dialect of Russian mixed with Chinese—peppered with ample neologisms—and work to clone famous Russian writers, who are then made to produce texts in the style of their forebears. The goal of this “script-process” is not the texts themselves, but the blue lard that collect

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A new, haunting, unexpectedly relevant rendering of an ancient Indian short story collection by a contemporary author and Buddhist practitioner.The twenty-five tales included in The Oceans of Cruelty constitute one of the oldest collections of stories in the world, a book that offers both a set of uncanny, unsettling, and unforgettable narratives and a profound meditation on what weird thing it is that drives us to tell and to listen to stories. “Tales of the Vetala” is one of the names under which these stories have made their way from ancient India to the world at large, a Vetala being a corpse-spirit, and the frame story to the collection as a whole tells of a young king who bears the burden of a double spell. He has fallen under the power of a sorcerer, whose demand is that he fetch to him a Vetala to be his servant, and he has fallen under the power of the Vetala itself. Like a bat, the Vetala roosts upside down in the branches of a tree, and nigh

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