LIbras and their Qualities

I've heard these qualities ascribed to Libras before...but is it really true that some (?), many(?),  most Libras are charismatic, gentle, kind, easy-going, stylish, romantic, intuitive AND good-looking all in one?  More power to us if it's true, fellow Libras. It didn't say anything about our flaws...Do we have any? Oh well...maybe vanity,  perhaps...

Mo Yan Wins Nobel Prize for Literature

"Life-Altering" Novels and Novellas

The Castle by Franz Kafka (Czech Republic)

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (United States)

The Melancholy of Resistance by Laszlo Krasznahorkai (Hungary)

My Life by Anton Chekhov (Russia)

The Devil by Leo Tolstoy (Russia)

The Middle of the Journey by Lionel Trilling (United States)

The Red and the Black by Stendhal (France)

The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins (England)

Billy Budd by Herman Melville (United States)

Swann in Love (Part 2 of Swann's Way) by Marcel Proust

Chance (featuring Marlow, the irrepressible narrator) by Joseph Conrad (England)

Black Boy by Richard Wright (United States)

Recommended Short Stories - World Lit

"Day of the Butterfly" by Alice Munro (Canada)

"The Doll's House" by Katherine Mansfield (New Zealand/England)

"The Third Bank of the River" by Joao Guimaraes Rosa (Brazil)

"No Dogs Bark" by Juan Rulfo (Mexico)

"The Secret Lion" by Alberto Alvaro Rios (United States)

"The Balek Scales" by Heinrich Boll (Germany)

"In the Ravine" by Anton Chekhov (Russia)

"Ward #6" by Anton Chekhov (Russia)

"Four Meetings" by Henry James (United States)

"Investigations of a Dog" by Franz Kafka  (Czech Republic)

"The Book of Sand" by Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina)

"Gryphon" by Charles Baxter (United States)

"Poor Fish" by Alberto Moravia (Italy)

"The Black Sheep" by Italo Calvino (Italy)

"The Last Judgment" by Karel Capek (Czech Republic)

"Rhinoceros" by Eugene Ionesco (Romania/France)

"An Encounter" by James Joyce (Ireland)

"No Witchcraft for Sale" by Doris Lessing (Rhodesia/England)

"The Prisoner Who Wore Glasses" by Bessie Head (South Africa)

"Once Upon a Time" by Nadine Gordimer (South Africa)

"Another Evening at the Club" by Alifa Rifaat (Egypt)

"The Happy Man" by Naguib Mahfouz (Egypt)

"The Swimming Contest" by  Benjamin Tammuz (Israel)

"Wanted: A Town without a Crazy"by Muzzaffer Izgu (Egypt)

"Saboteur" by Ha Jin (China)

"Tokyo" by Fumiko Hayashi (Japan)

"Swaddling Clothes"* by Yukio Mishima (Japan)

Note: Most of these wonderful stories can be found in an anthology entitled Reading the World: Contemporary Literature from Around the Globe.   If you happen to be a teacher searching for new materials or are just someone who loves short stories (glad to know you're out there!), I would highly recommend this volume

Richard Wright & Harper Lee

Considering how many 9th graders across the country get their first taste of "protest literature" of sorts by sampling Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird wherein they glimpse into the old world of the deep south through the eyes of a precocious young white girl named Scout Finch, as a high school English instructor who has taught TKAM for many years now, I keep wondering about what other work of American fiction to pair with this work so that readers might be shown a similar set of circumstances, but through the eyes of an equally perceptive youthful narrator who doesn't happen to be white. The most obvious nominee, for my money at least, would be Richard Wright and his great memoir, Black Boy, the time-frame of which actually precedes Lee's novel by several years and, in my humble opinion, offers a wider swath of territory, nuance and prescient insight...

War and War by Laszlo Krasznahorkai

László Krasznahorkai was born in Gyula, in southeast Hungary, in 1954. He is probably best known through the oeuvre of the director Béla Tarr, who has collaborated with him on several movies. Mentions “Werckmeister Harmonies.” In “War and War,” György Korin, an archivist and local historian, travels to New York, finds lodgings with a Hungarian interpreter, and begins to write the text of the transcendently important manuscript. Slowly the reader confirms what he has suspected from the start, that “the manuscript” is a mental fiction, a madman’s transcendent vision. Krasznahorkai’s most recent work in English is not a novel but a collaboration between the writer and the German artist Max Neumann. “Animalinside” (translated by Ottilie Mulzet, and published jointly by New Directions, Sylph Editions of London, and the Center for Writers and Translators at the American University of Paris; $20) is a series of fourteen exquisite and enigmatic paintings, with paragraph-length texts by Krasznahorkai. Resembling, in form, Beckett’s “Texts for Nothing,” Krasznahorkai’s words often seem to be a commentary on late Beckett. Krasznahorkai is clearly fascinated by apocalypse, by broken revelation, indecipherable messages. His demanding novel “The Melancholy of Resistance” is a comedy of apocalypse, a book about a God that not only failed but didn’t even turn up for the exam. The pleasure of the book flows from its extraordinary, stretched, self-recoiling sentences, which are marvels of a loosely punctuated stream of consciousness. - from "The Very Strange Fictions of Laszlo Krasznahorkai" by James Wood (article abstract)

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/07/04/110704crat_atlarge_wood#ixzz28zt7Ff68

Hello, October