2008 Best Collection of Short Stories

The guest in the most recent episode of The New Letters on the Air was Jaimee Wriston Colbert. She read a couple of stories from her new book Dream Lives of Butterflies: Stories. Her collection of short stories won the 2008 Golden Award for Short Fiction (proper title?).

Life's a Beach

Life's a Beach is an easy and quite mindless read. It tells the story of two sisters, one of them, married and with three kids on the verge of her fifty-year birthday and the other one having trouble finding a relationship that lasts. The latter lives in an apartment above the garage in her parents house, a FROG - Finished Room Over the Garage. There are a lot of frogs and toads in this book. Even the jokes are froggy. It seems that Claire Cook had the idea of having the frog as an uniting symbol for her narrative. In the end of the book, Ginger, the protagonist, gets a one-foot tall Jazzy J Frog singing "What a Wonderful World" from her father as well as a miniature frog palace from her boyfriend, Noah. Ginger and Noah get together in the end to give Cook's novel the image of a happy-ending beach read.

Jane Austen's Lover

Hmmm - look at this.

Covent Garden

Clive Boursnell published a new book with his pictures from the market in Covent Garden taken in the last 35 years. The market will close June 21, 2008.
The Guardian's few photos.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier Clay

should be my next leisure read.

Christina Stead

This is a translation into Italian of Christina Stead's 1973 book The Little Hotel: A Novel, Il Piccolo Hotel. Una delle ultime "sophisticated comedies."
Un libro gradevole intelligente per una buona lettura.

Pride and Prejudice

Jane Austen

I am being tortured......

I am done with it though. Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy finally got married. I saw the BBC series and the 2005 movie as well.

I also read a very interesting article "Translated Passion in Pride and Prejudice" by Roberta Grandi from the Catholic University in Milan. There are several excellent points that Grandi makes which I'd like to remember. She is interested in the stylistic techniques and tropes in the novel and in the 2005 movie. Grandi looks at synecdoches and metonymies that are translated from the text to the film. She focuses on the eyes, the hands, and the technique of focalization as a metonymical device.