Wednesday, June 17, 2015

What is K. David Jackson reading?

Featured at Writers Read: K. David Jackson, author of Machado de Assis: A Literary Life.

His entry begins:
I'm reading Among the Sinner: a novel by Karen von Kunes, published in 2013. Karen is Czech, escaped in her teens, and writes from a deep human experience. After invoking the meaning of "zazemí" (what one needs in life, background, education, position) the novel follows...[read on]
About Machado de Assis: A Literary Life, from the publisher:
Novelist, poet, playwright, and short story writer Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839–1908) is widely regarded as Brazil’s greatest writer, although his work is still too little read outside his native country. In this first comprehensive English-language examination of Machado since Helen Caldwell’s seminal 1970 study, K. David Jackson reveals Machado de Assis as an important world author, one of the inventors of literary modernism whose writings profoundly influenced some of the most celebrated authors of the twentieth century, including José Saramago, Carlos Fuentes, and Donald Barthelme. Jackson introduces a hitherto unknown Machado de Assis to readers, illuminating the remarkable life, work, and legacy of the genius whom Susan Sontag called “the greatest writer ever produced in Latin America” and whom Allen Ginsberg hailed as “another Kafka.” Philip Roth has said of him that “like Beckett, he is ironic about suffering.” And Harold Bloom has remarked of Machado that “he’s funny as hell.”
Learn more about Machado de Assis at the Yale University Press website.

Writers Read: K. David Jackson.

--Marshal Zeringue