I spoke to Poggioli about you, at Harvard. He would like to have you there for six months or a year, and this is an opportunity you should not refuse. Even though Harvard is not America, but a kind of Olympus containing the intellectual cream from all over the world, you would have the chance to see a bit of America traveling around. And one should not let slip any chances of “talking” to the Americans, of doing something to bridge this abyss which divides us, and it really is an abyss: this is a different world, as far from Europe and our problems as the Moon.
To prepare us for the release of Italo Calvino’s letters, the editors at Page-Turner are running excerpts from the book. In their latest installment — following their first two — Calvino describes New York City, which “swallowed [him] up like a carnivorous plant.”

“Dash cams, as reported in Animal, have become ubiquitous in today’s Russia, where road hazards range from ‘insane gridlock’ to ‘large, lawless areas’ habited by ‘police with a penchant for extortion and deeply frustrated drivers who want to smash your face,’ and where courts rarely award damages without video evidence. A large percentage of Russian car crashes are thus captured on video and aggregated on a devoted LiveJournal page that gets more than four million views per month. The car-crash video corpus is a gold mine of piquant Russian slang, from the derogatory potsient—a hybrid of ‘[hospital] patient’ and ‘putz,’ used to denote crash victims—to the honorific zhelezobetonnoe ochkko—anus of concrete—for drivers who navigate deadly situations without losing their cool.”

- A Meteor in the Russian Sky by Elif Batuman

Writing might initially happen in a vacuum, but books emerge and live somewhere very different. To ignore all this is at best wishful thinking and at worse self-sabotage…Eugenides’s decision to ignore this vast reality is less troubling than another feature of his advice: that it comes from the Pulitzer Prize winner himself. After all, Eugenides can write inside his make-believe casket and enjoy the spectacle of his well-attended funeral, too.
Todd Hasak-Lowy, “Jeffrey Eugenides’s Killer Advice.”
In ancient times, there was a famous chef named Pao Ding, who was an expert at carving up cows. In modern times, there was a man who was an expert at sizing them up—my father. In Pao Ding’s eyes, cows were nothing but bones and edible flesh. That’s what they were in my father’s eyes, too. Pao Ding’s vision was as sharp as a knife; my father’s was as sharp as a knife and as accurate as a scale. What I mean to say is: if you were to lead a live cow up to my father, he’d take two turns around it, three at most, occasionally sticking his hand up under the animal’s foreleg—just for show—and confidently report its gross weight and the quantity of meat on its bones, always to within a kilo of what might register on the digital scale used in England’s largest cattle slaughterhouse.
Recommended Reading: “Bull” by Mo Yan, the latest winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Our own culture, under the spell of Grimm and Perrault, has favored fairy tales starring girls rather than boys, princesses rather than princes. But Schönwerth’s stories show us that once upon a time, Cinderfellas evidently suffered right alongside Cinderellas, and handsome young men fell into slumbers nearly as deep as Briar Rose’s hundred-year nap. Just as girls became domestic drudges and suffered under the curse of evil mothers and stepmothers, boys, too, served out terms as gardeners and servants, sometimes banished into the woods by hostile fathers. Like Snow White, they had to plead with a hunter for their lives. And they are as good as they are beautiful—Schönwerth uses the German term “schön,” or beautiful, for both male and female protagonists.
Remember those 500 fairy tales that were discovered a few weeks ago? Apparently they were a bit more “modern” than the standard Grimm’s fare.