#1: THE MOST IMPORTANT THING I WILL NOT BE TELLING YOU. “Classic” is a terrible epithet to slap on a book: it ends up on somebody’s Lifetime Reading Program or one of those other canons people are always firing off. My own notes are going to be entirely random and subjective, but if you are looking for a guide to the best, a checklist of the biggies, I recommend Classics Revisited, by Kenneth Rexroth. Rexroth was a California poet—he organized the famous Six Gallery reading that launched the Beat movement—as well as a translator, essayist and reader of world-ranging voracity. This book gives essays on sixty classics ranging from Gilgamesh to Chekov, with suggestions for the best translations of foreign-language works. Unlike most such efforts, it is lively, beautifully written and genuinely exciting. There is a second volume, More Classics Revisited, and both are in print from New Directions.
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See All#219. CHECKING THE BOOKS. Princeton University Press over the last few years has been publishing an interesting series, “The Lives of the Great Religious Books,” short popular “biographies” of how t
#218. GIVING THE PEOPLE WHAT THEY WANT. Movie stars rarely seem to have more fun onscreen than when they’re making fun of other movie stars, and few recent films had more fun with this topic than th
#217. FERNANDO PESSOA, EDMUND WILSON, YEHUDA AMICHAI. The Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa is an easy darling to everyone who writes about literature, because he’s got such a great and vivid story.
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