"Do you remember that blizzard last summer? The strange moths that melted in our hands? Those were the ashes of the National Library. Your Serbs must have feared that we would take all those books, in so many languages, into our hands and hurl them against your tanks. Fat gray flakes of novels, poems, and plays floated down on our heads while corpses floated in the river."
--Scott Simon, Pretty Birds
A bang, not a whimper
Two months into L.'s retirement, and I'm finished with the stockpiling of books. No more book purchases! Or at least, no purcha...
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(See also Musee des Beaux Arts ) As far as mental anguish goes, the old painters were no fools. They understood how the mind, the freakiest ...
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When I finished Kevin Brockmeier's A Brief History of the Dead last spring I immediately did a search to see if the Coca-Cola Corp. had...
Are you enjoying this book? It has been on my list for a long time. I even checked it out of the library at one time and then never read it before the due date--the story of my life!
ReplyDeleteI had to read it in small increments since what happens isn't at all pleasant, but I'm glad I read it and now have a better idea of what it was like in Sarajevo during the war. I'm going to make sure that my daughter gets a copy of it for Christmas if she doesn't manage to snag a copy at the university in the fall.
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