The Reading Room/3:
writing of the moment
 

Issue Three

The Mediterranean: its many voices, mysteries and eternal paradoxes are evoked in a section of Amos Oz’s new new novel, The Same Sea (to be published by Harcourt, Inc.) and in Jon Papernick’s tale of Jews and Arabs living in Israel today. The Spanish writer, Fanny Rubio gives a freshly intense interpretation of Mary Magdalene—was she in reality Jesus’ wife? Nadia Benabid translates for the first time Angel Vásquez’s masterpiece The Vida Perra of Juanita Narboni (to be published by Great Marsh Press). Written in the Tangier Spanish dialect Jaktia, akin to Ladino (a combination of Spanish, Hebrew and Arabic), Juanita Narboni is to 1950s Tangier what Molly Bloom is to Dublin. Juan Goytisolo fires a blast at the corruption of the Spanish literary world that has been heard all through Europe.

Saul Bellow reflects on writing and the life of a writer in his conversation with Barbara Probst Solomon. Norman Birnbaum wryly recalls his time as a New York Yank in postwar Oxford, and Lionel Abel, in his last essay, writes on Ezra Pound, and Poetry with a capital “P” versus poetry with a small “p”.

The Times we live in are brilliantly evoked in the narrative writing of Michael Carroll, Alan Cheuse, Stanley Crouch, Stephen Dixon, Elizabeth Gaffney, Judith Rossner and Miriam Rugel. New American Voices include Judith Kellem and Ingrid Lundy.

Charles-Louis Philippe’s modernist novel Bubu of Montparnasse, about the world of teen-aged pimps and prostitutes in Belle Epoque Paris, is amazingly contemporary in its concerns and language.

Poet’s Corner: The poetry of Sally Dawidoff, Lisa Katz, Don Maggin and Elizabeth Morse.

Art Portfolio: Art by the Spanish artist Gonzalo Torné and drawings by Bill Anthony, inspired by Balthus, Dylan Thomas and John Gruen.