Haruki Murakami on Translations

Haruki-san talks to Mainichi about translating American literary giants
Also Powerpuff Girls are now ten years old!

Ay! Marisa delos Santos, the biggest selling Pinay author in the States right now, Talks to the Wrong Inquirer

Marisa (pronounced "Mareesa") de los Santos, with her second novel, Belong to Me (William Morrow, $24.95), about a young Center City couple who move to the Philadelphia suburbs, is now a bona fide New York Times best-selling author. And that's the hardcover list, thank you. Now read the rest of the Philadelphia Inquirer article by the great Carlin Romero.
Her next novel will delve on the Philippines daw. Promise.

Four Books for Aspiring Writers

These are Mental Floss's suggestions.

A Study of "Table of Contents"

A must for book designers.

Libro Libre

You want books. Good books. Kuwan
And if you start asking, how can there be a man like him. There is: Yiyun Li's A Man Like Him

Booksale Collectors

I went to Booksale yesterday and was astonished to see a shelf full of old books with a clear plastic they use for magazines. On the plastic is a round sticker with something like "Certified Collection." These are the old hardbounds which they sell for P5 to P10 but now they are selling them for P75 to P750. So the thrill of finding a dirt cheap book has been cut out. I peeped at some of them and found out that some of them are not even First Editions, so what gives? As long as they look ancient?

25 Books for Sci Fi

io9 presents 25 books that sci fi fans and writers should read:

On the Origin of Species (1859), by Charles Darwin.
Male and Female (1949), by Margaret Mead.
Animal Liberation (1975), by Peter Singer.
Godel, Escher, Bach (1979), by Douglas Hofstadter.
Cosmos (1985), by Carl Sagan.
The Selfish Gene (1990), by Richard Dawkins.
The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance (1995), by Laurie Garrett.
Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by its Most Brilliant Teacher (1995), by Richard P. Feynman.
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1999), by Jared Diamond.
The Elegant Universe (2000), by Brian Greene.
The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography (2000), by Simon Singh.
The Well: A Story of Love, Death, and Real Life in the Seminal Online Community (2001), by Katie Hafner.
The Myth of Monogamy: Fidelity and Infidelity in Animals and People (2002), by David Barash and Judith Lipton.
A User's Guide to the Brain (2002), by John Ratey.
How the Universe Got Its Spots (2002), by Janna Levin.
Why Things Break (2003), by Mark Eberhart.
Evolution's Rainbow: Why Darwin Was Wrong About Sexual Selection (2004), by Joan Roughgarden.
How to Survive a Robot Uprising (2005), by Daniel H. Wilson.
Illegal Beings: Human Clones and the Law (2005), by Kerry MacIntosh.
The Science of Orgasm (2006), by Barry Komisauruk, Carlos Beyer-Flores, and Beverly Whipple.

The Cult Classics

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969)
The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell (1957-60)
A Rebours by JK Huysmans (1884)
Baby and Child Care by Dr Benjamin Spock (1946)
The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf (1991)
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1963)
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)
The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger (1951)
The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield (1993)
The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart (1971)
Chariots of the Gods: Was God An Astronaut? by Erich Von Däniken (1968)
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (1980)
Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1782)
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg (1824)
Dianetics: the Modern Science of Mental Health by L Ron Hubbard (1950)
The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley (1954)
Dune by Frank Herbert (1965)
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (1979)
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe (1968)
Fear of Flying by Erica Jong (1973)
The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer (1970)
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (1943)
Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R Hofstadter (1979)
Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (1973)
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln (1982)
I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith (1948)
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino (1979)
Iron John: a Book About Men by Robert Bly (1990)
Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach and Russell Munson (1970)
The Magus by John Fowles (1966)
Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges (1962)
The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa (1958)
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (1967)
No Logo by Naomi Klein (2000)
On The Road by Jack Kerouac (1957)
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson (1971)
The Outsider by Colin Wilson (1956)
The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran (1923)
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell (1914)
The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám tr by Edward FitzGerald (1859)
The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron (1937)
Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse (1922)
The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1774)
Story of O by Pauline Réage (1954)
The Stranger by Albert Camus (1942)
The Teachings of Don Juan: a Yaqui Way of Knowledge by Carlos Castaneda (1968)
Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain (1933)
Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1883-85)
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an Inquiry into Values by Robert M Pirsig (1974)

Guidebook by Googling

A nice story about how Lonely Planet updates its guides.

Barthelme in Bontoc

Reading companions in Bontoc were a Poets&Writers magazine and "Not-Knowing", book on the nonfiction works of Donald Barthelme. Left D.B. in a hotel and thought I lost it forever. But, Lo and behold!, had it returned to me against all odds. It's a sign.

"Play is one of the great possibilities of art; it is also ... the
Eros-principle whose repression means total calamity. The humorless
practitioners of le noveau roman produce such calamities regularly, as do our
native worshippers of the sovereign Fact. It is the result of a lack of
seriousness."--From an essay, "After Joyce"

Free eBooks from Planet X

Only the classics

1. 1984 by George Orwell
2. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
3. Aesop's Fables by Aesop
4. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Caroll
5. Andersen's Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen
6. Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery
7. Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne
8. Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche
9. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
10. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
11. Dracula by Bram Stoker
12. Erewhon by Samuel Butler
13. For the Term of His Natural Life by Marcus Clarke
14. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
15. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
16. Grimms Fairy Tales by the brothers Grimm
17. Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
18. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
19. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
20. Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson
21. Lady Chatterly’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
22. Middlemarch by George Eliot
23. Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
24. Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
25. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
26. Paradise Lost by John Milton
27. Pride and Prejudice
28. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
29. Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen
30. Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence
31. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
32. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
33. The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky
34. The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
35. The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky
36. The Iliad by Homer
37. The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells
38. The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling
39. The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper
40. The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood by Howard Pyle
41. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
42. The Prince by Nicolo Machiavelli
43. The Trial by Franz Kafka
44. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
45. Ulysses

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Junot Diaz Spells "Masculinity" with a K

Junot won last week the Pulitzer for "Oscar Wao." In this interview with In These Times, Diaz talks about masculinity, Trujillo and transnational writers.

Chabon

Now I now have a book to ask new friend Jun Balde for. Michael Chabon's new novel! Cover pa lang, complicated na! Jun gave me "Jazz Poems" which blew the hell out of me and then sent kanina an original dirty, dirty text na I suspect was made by him Nice way to start the day.

Dia el Libro

Instituto Cervantes celebrates Día del Libro or International Book Day, an event that aims to promote the love for reading and the written word, with a grand book sale at the Instituto Cervantes. And I need to add, mostly European titles!!! Regularly celebrated on the 23rd of April, World Book Day was inspired by a tradition from Barcelona, Spain that celebrates St. George's Day, where men and women exchange a rose for the gift of a book. Coming after last year's successful run, where guests had their pick of books and the chance to witness and participate in activities such as wine and cheese-tasting, dance classes, concerts, and free Spanish classes, the 3rd Día del Libro promises to be even grander and bigger.Opening its doors to bibliophiles, culture lovers, and the curious on April 19 from 10 am to midnight, Instituto Cervantes revives the grand Barcelonan tradition with the Día del Libro book fair.

Jhumpa on Writing

"Writing is so humbling, there’s no confidence involved. It helps to have some experience, a greater degree of familiarity with the process of writing. I think each time you start a story or novel or whatever, you are absolutely at the bottom of the ladder all over again. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done before." Jhumpa Lahiri

Why Some of My Lady Friends are Having a Hard Time Searching

Some years ago, I was awakened early one morning by a phone call from a friend.
She had just broken up with a boyfriend she still loved and was desperate to
justify her decision. “Can you believe it!” she shouted into the phone. “He
hadn’t even heard of Pushkin!”

Read the rest of this essay about literary noncompatibility and why it is indeed a matter of love or muerte

My Last Brian Blog For Today

Hey, don't hate the Gucci Gang. I'm sure some of you anonymous commenters are now queueing for the 6/49 lotto tickets hoping to win the P200 million jackpot so you can finally join them. Hey, and before you do, read the Bible. This is the GG Bible:

100 Best Last Lines

this way this way this way this way this way this way this
way out this
way out
O

–Ronald Sukenick, Out (1973)


This is the difference between this and that. –Gertrude Stein, A Novel of Thank You (1958)

Now everybody— –Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)

And the last word from the ringleader of Gucci Gang:

And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless Us, Every One! –Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1843)

Tiny sabi nyo e di Tiny. More here

Fischer's Last Words: “Nothing eases suffering like human touch”

" Bókin, or The Book, is essentially a 1950s version of New York’s Strand Bookstore. Besides the books stacked head-high, under card tables, and on plywood shelves, the first thing you notice about Bókin is its smell, decayed and airless. Walking inside the 35-year-old establishment is like entering a Parisian flea market without the noise: overwhelming, a paralysis of the senses. But it was here, between narrow aisles lined with thousands of fraying biographies and history books, sitting in an ordinary chair whose varnish had worn thin, where Bobby Fischer could be alone in his thoughts. It was here where he could contemplate his place in history by poring through books on outlaws and rebels from Russia, Britain, Libya, and the Soviet Union with whom he could relate. And it was here, beneath the quiet hum of the fluorescent lights above, where Bobby Fischer could, for at least a few hours a day, seem to live a normal life."
An endearing account of Fischer's last days in Iceland reading books at the back of The Book.

Wanted: Author of "Requiem" Poem

This is a poem submitted to Roland T for the "Mondo Marcos." We don't know the poet and if you do, please tell us immediately or else we have no choice but to drop this poem:

Requiem

Memory is a mosaic of tongues licking dirt, of lies embroidered to protect the King of Martial Law.

He was born. He is risen. He will kill again. And his kingdom will have no end.

Memory is a 1972 machine gun fired on Sunday morning. Four bodies on the edge of a dirt road. An act of suspended drowning.

This is a cup of his blood, the new and everlasting covenant.

Memory is a woman who howls wolf past curfew. Late night dinner parties and spilled champagne.

She drinks it so that their sins may be forgiven.

Memory is a spinning bottle, a top with no base, a mad pack of white dogs eating brown tails, brown dogs eating spotted tails.

She breaks the bread, gives it to their disciples, and says, Eat this in memory of us.

Memory is an archipelago of closed-view coffins, eaten calmly like sugared fingers of bread.