Vagrant tales
Before Greece embraced modernity and its marvels, it was a nation of stark realities and pernickety sprites. Lore and legend held as much validity as did hard facts in the popular imagination, but also in the synthesis of what was no less than a national soul. Sprites, trolls, crones, harridans and ogres, with innumerable names,...
Unfinished business
There is a singular sense of feverish neutrality in Thanassis Valtinos’ writing. A cinematic poise, a travelling eye, a dramatist’s instinctive flair for tension, voice, climax, the lull that contains more menace than any thundering explosion; a perpetual game of darkness and light, an omniscient narrator who never divulges all he knows. Valtinos was born...
The Pandora paradox
Throughout our convoluted histories, stories have had a way of reappearing under different forms and guises; we can never be certain of when a story was told for the first time, only that it will be not the last. Before the first chronicle of travel there must have been an Odyssey of which we now...
Literature in your lifetime… and beyond
The printed ‘book’ – a physical thing made up of paper, type, ink and board – has been around now for over 500 years. It has served literature wonderfully: packaging it in cheap (sometimes beautiful) forms that have helped to sustain mass literacy. Few inventions have lasted longer, or done more good. The book may,...
Thinking and feeling
In 1978 Jonathan Cott, a contributing editor of Rolling Stone magazine, interviewed Susan Sontag first in Paris and later in New York. Only a third of their twelve hours of discussion made it to print. Now Yale University Press has published a complete transcript of their conversation, accompanied by Cott’s preface and recollections. Sontag’s musings...
