Before the Novel: Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron
Almost every even moderately serious lover of literature knows Giovanni Boccaccio’s erotic classic The Decameron, which he wrote around 1350.…
Kategoria: 1B LITERATURE
Geisha of Gion (2002)
Mineko Iwasaki (b. 1949) was regarded in the 1970s as the most beautiful woman in Japan, and that is not…
Where Are the Dogs in Memoirs?
There is a dog in the picture. Not just any dog, but Panu, a Karelian Bear Dog, who was a…
Kafka and the Girl
The following story is told about the Czech writer Franz Kafka. Around 1922, Kafka was walking in a Berlin park…
The Bookshelf Is the Reader’s Portrait
Over the past week I have taken more than fifty plastic bags of books to the recycling center. Each time…
Finland’s Forgotten Olympic Gold in Literature
When Finland’s Olympic medals are listed, one gold medal in literature is often forgotten. Finland won it at the Berlin…
The Idea of the Library in the Twenty-First Century
Let the library be a temple of culture. But it is also a shop where the result of the writer’s…
A Book Is a Message
A book is always a message from writer to reader, from one human being to another. It is rather like…
Literary Ecosystems
Just as a thought experiment: what might a literary ecosystem look like without publishers and bookstores, or with their role…
What Makes a Good Book?
Somewhere there may very well be—and I would bet there is—a book that only its author likes. But for that…