Viewing entries tagged
paul kerschen
David Auerbach: You clearly took joy in writing your version of Keats. Is The Warm South fan fiction of a sort?
Paul Kerschen: No doubt! There must also be a touch of Frankenstein in my resurrecting him for my own purposes. I gained and lost a great deal over the course of writing, but whatever the endpoint, it did at least start from a felt intimacy with Keats’s own words, and perhaps in that respect it isn’t too much worse a distortion than other kinds of reading.
A feature by Paul Kerschen
Can Xue’s Five Spice Street is among other things an author’s reflection on her newfound public position. The book was originally published as Breakthrough Performance (突围表演), a purposely self-conscious title for a debut novel. At the same time, 突围 suggests breaking free, an escape from entrapment or other immediate danger, and this raises the possibility that the escape itself constitutes the performance, that a kind of Houdini act is being staged . . .
A feature by Paul Kerschen
László Krasznahorkai's 2014 Best Translated Book Award for Seiobo There Below—presented in Ottilie Mulzet's expert translation—serves to cement the Hungarian's status as one of the most original writers. And yet, only a portion of Krasznahorkai's extensive catalog is currently available to Anglophone readers. Here, Paul Kerschen delivers a masterful reading of the award-winning Seiobo There Below and offers a glimpse of what awaits us in coming years, including Destruction and Sorrow beneath the Heavens (forthcoming from Seagull Books in Ottilie Mulzet's rendering), The Prisoner of Urga, and Krasznahorkai's debut short-story collection, Relations of Grace. This essay, originally published in Music & Literature No. 2, is accompanied here by a series of photographs documenting the author's encounter, organized by Osaka University and held at the temple of Hōzan-ji, with the original manuscripts of the fourteenth-century Japanese actor and Noh playwright Ze'ami, whose spirit infuses Seiobo There Below, and whose influence is felt throughout much of Krasznahorkai's as-yet-untranslated oeuvre . . .
