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I haven’t posted a thing here in what feels like ages. It’s only been a month and a half, in fact, but what a month and a half it’s been! In February, Jenny and I learned that we were both finalists for the inaugural Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize from the National Book Critics Circle, which made us the first married couple to be shortlisted for any NBCC award — and this fact drew some attention from the Literary Hub and the Los Angeles Times. Last Thursday, I was stunned to learn that my translation of Andrey Kurkov’s Grey Bees won. I mean it: stunned. The news reached me over Twitter in Los Angeles, in the office of my old colleague Peter Winsky, who’s now teaching at the Slavic department at USC. I was about to give a reading from My Hollywood and Other Poems and couldn’t…

Last week’s post looked at the uncanny, and how it resides within ourselves. Today, I will move on to exploring ways in which we can confront these aspects of our inner world, often termed our ‘monsters,’ or our ‘demons.’

• The Struggle To Face Our Inner Demons

Ghost – Mario Sironi. Wikimedia Commons.

“No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human breast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed.”

Freud. From Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, 1905

Facing our dark side, or our shadow side as Jung termed it, is far from easy. Jung’s shadow is akin to Freud’s ‘unheimlich,’ which describes parts of the personality of which we may be unaware. If we remain in denial about the existence of our own shadow, we will tend to project that darkness onto…

The esteemed Irish writer William Trevor is frequently cited as a master of the short story, and rightly so. His stories are spellbinding – humane, compassionate and beautifully written. He has a way of getting into the hearts and minds of his characters with insight and precision, laying bare their deepest preoccupations for the reader to see. These skills are very much in evidence in Nights at the Alexandra, a slim collection comprising the titular novella and two short stories, The Ballroom of Romance and The Hill Bachelors. I simply adored these achingly melancholy pieces, exquisitely expressed in Trevor’s deceptively simple, understated prose. As in Clare Keegan’s novellas Foster and Small Things Like These, there’s a luminosity or purity to Trevor’s stories, an emotional truthfulness that’s hard to capture in a review.

The collection opens with the titular novella in which fifty-eight-year-old Harry looks back on the days…

Last week saw the publication of Dana Gioia’s Meet Me at the Lighthouse, a perfect collection of poems. Dana has been a mentor and a friend to me, but had he and I never met, the pages of this book would have lodged themselves just as firmly in my heart. In fact, we came to know each other through one of its masterpieces, “The Ballad of Jesus Ortiz.” It reached me through a mutual friend, the late Scott Timberg, and I leapt at the chance to publish it in the Los Angeles Review of Books. The ballad tells the true story of Dana’s great-grandfather, a Mexican immigrant to the US who was killed in an argument over a bar tab. It is a poem of the West, and others in Dana’s book — including the titular “Meet Me at the Lighthouse” — bring the…

Curiosity (Mission San Juan Caistrano) – (Joseph Kleitsch)

“Curiosity about life in all of its aspects, I think, is still the secret of great creative people.”

Leo Burnett

Curiosity is being eager to find out about new things, to know and learn about various aspects of the world.

It means that we will investigate with some enthusiasm whatever interests us.

Being curious requires an openness of mind, and a willingness to pursue new knowledge and experiences.

Einstein regarded curiosity as a basic aspect of his success :

“I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.”

Einstein

Well, that was Einstein…. but how might such curiosity helpus?

Research into the benefits of curiosity has revealed that it is a crucial factor in academic learning.

“Curiosity is the beginning of all wisdom.”

Françoise Sagan

It is also well documented that curiosity can make us feel happier, enhance relationships