It's been since about 500 B.C. that Babylonian and Assyrian were widely spoken. Those languages, closely related to Arabic and Hebrew, were assimilated into Akkadian, the primary speech of what is now Iran, Syria, and Turkey. Later, Aramaic, the language of Jesus, eventually became the preferred way of speaking in those regions. It wasn't until…
Read More "Asking Utnapishtim for Directions to the Bathroom"
For fans of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings series (both the books and the films), a long wait is over. The Hobbit, prequel to the trilogy (The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and The Return of the King) has finally been given the go-ahead by the Tolkien family, who had delayed the…
For book geeks, October is a month of thrills. First, on October 7, the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa. The Swiss Academy praised the author “for his cartography of the structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt and defeat.” On October 12, the…
One of the reasons for the endurance of the works of William Shakespeare is their ability to be adapted in many different ways. Romeo and Juliet has been set in during the Civil War and in Chicago's ganglands of the 1920s. The Comedy of Errors got the 1970s disco treatment. Richard III was once produced…
Read More "The Tempest With a Twist and the Nobel in Literature"
After teaching The Great Gatsby for many, many years, I couldn’t help but get bored with the same old interpretation of the geography: East Egg represents the old rich, West Egg represents the new rich, The Valley of the Ashes represents industrialization. Blah, blah, blah. That’s why I was excited to find a totally different (although…
Congrats to Mario Vargas Llosa, who was awarded this year's Nobel Prize in Literature. It was announced this morning at a ceremony in Sweden. Considered one of Latin America's greatest authors, the 74-year-old Llosa has penned numerous novels, plays, and essays. His most famous works are Conversation in the Cathedral and The Green House, both of…
"A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you…
Read More "Twentieth Anniversary of Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried”"
This week it was announced that the infamous Algonquin Hotel has been purchased by the Marriott hotel chain. In June of 1919, a group of writers, critics, journalists, and actors—among them, Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Edna Ferber, Alexander Woollcott, and Harpo Marx—began meeting for lunch at the Algonquin Hotel. The hotel was a short distance from the offices…
