blogis librorum. A blog about books. Rare books.

Are you thinking about traveling to Argentina in the near future? Or perhaps you’re considering a trip to Buenos Aires through literature? Argentina is a socially, culturally, and geographically varied country, with a world-famous wine region, the literary capital city of Buenos Aires, and part of the archipelago known as Tierra del Fuego. In addition to its scenic splendor, the city of Buenos Aires is well-known for the world-famous writers it produced in the twentieth century. From novelists and short-story writers associated with the journal Sur, such as Adolfo Bioy Casares, Jorge Luis Borges, and Silvina Ocampo to expatriate novelists and poets like Julio Cortázar, Argentina produced some of the most significant writers of the last one-hundred years. Here are a couple titles we highly recommend.

     

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As the year winds down, the writers and staff at Books Tell You Why would like to take a moment to thank all of our loyal readers. Engaging with you over the course of 2016 has been a delight. It is your smart commentary, unique insights, and thoughtful criticism that make this blog a remarkable platform for rare book collectors and book-lovers of all kinds.

Let’s take a look back at some of our highlights this year. Here are the ten most-read posts on blogis liborum, written and published in 2016.      

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Since 1967, the International Writing Program (IWP) at the University of Iowa has brought together writers from more than 140 different countries to be in residence for a semester at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. During the fall residency each year, the University of Iowa hosts events for the writers in residence, who read work from their recent novels, short stories, poetry collections, drama, and books of creative non-fiction. To be eligible for residency in the IWP, writers must have at least one book published, and they must have sufficient English-language skills. In 1977, Bessie Head traveled from Botswana to the United States as one of the IWP’s fiction writers in residence.

     

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Winter, let us say, has its detractors. Beyond a certain latitude, the Winter Solstice is a symbol of minimal sunlight, bracing cold, and brutal snowstorms. This does not mean that the season has nothing to recommend it. The colder months offer the opportunity to stay in, drink hot cocoa, and watch something seasonal or festive, say, It's a Wonderful Life (1946). And really, snow’s not so bad if you’re watching it fall from the comfort of your own home. Here are four strategies for reading around the winter solstice.

     

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Jane Austen completed six novels in her lifetime. Not only were her books popular immediately after publication, but each of her novels is now considered a classic. Readers today love Austen's work for its engaging characters and love stories, but her books do more than entertain. In fact, they cast a fascinating light on the social and class structure of the 18th century and the unique position of Georgian society women. Despite the years that separate the society represented in her novels from today, Austen remains a beloved author whose characters' struggles and victories still resonate long after the culture in which her stories were set has evolved. Here are some things you may not know about Jane Austen.

     

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Many readers of twentieth-century literature are familiar with the works of Native American novelist N. Scott Momaday. A writer of Kiowa and Cherokee ancestry, Momaday was born in Lawton, Oklahoma at the Kiowa-Comanche Indian Hospital to Natachee Scott and Alfred Morris Momaday. In 1963, N. Scott Momaday received a Ph.D. in literature from Stanford University, and shortly thereafter, his novel House Made of Dawn (1968) won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Many critics cite House Made of Dawn as the beginning of what scholars and critics have described as the “Native American Renaissance,” referring to the (re)emergence of native American voices and narratives in fiction. In 1969, Momaday published The Way to Rainy Mountain, a text that introduced readers to Kiowa folklore and, in many respects, familiarized readers with his father’s illustrations. Since the late 1960s, Momaday has written numerous works of poetry, memoir, fiction, and scholarship.

Yet what many readers who are well-acquainted with Momaday’s literary output don’t know is that his parents, Natachee Scott Momaday and Al Momaday, were also prominent writers and artists.

     

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Pablo Neruda wasn’t born with the name by which so many readers across the globe have come to know his work. Rather, he was born Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto in the small Chilean town of Parral, Chile. This December marks the 45th anniversary of Neruda winning the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 1971, Neruda traveled back to Stockholm—he had visited on previous occasions and had met the founder of Sweden’s first poetry journal, FIB:S lyrikklub, Stig Carlson—to accept the Nobel Prize. Yet his winning this award wasn’t entirely a surprise. To be sure, scholars and fans of his work had been making efforts for years to encourage the Nobel Committee to recognize the poet’s achievements. On this anniversary of Neruda winning the Nobel Prize, we’d like to think a bit more about why Neruda was selected for the award, as well as some of the reasons that the Nobel Committee didn’t honor him earlier in his lifetime.

     

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If you’re interested in twentieth-century literature in any way at all, you’ve probably encountered some of the fiction of Vladimir Nabokov. The Russian immigrant novelist was born in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1899, and he immigrated with his family to Britain after the Russian Revolution. He moved to the United States in 1939, just two years before the U.S. would enter World War II, and he remained here with his wife, Véra, until 1959. Most American readers are familiar with the novelist’s perhaps most famous—or infamous, depending upon the speaker—work, Lolita. Yet we’d like to introduce you to a recently published book of Nabokov’s letters to his wife, simply entitled Letters to Véra (2015). The edited collection contains correspondence from the writer over the course of decades, along with photographs and small drawings that accompanied Nabokov’s letters to Véra.      

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“If you have a garden and a library,” said the Roman philosopher Cicero, “you have everything you need.” These are wise conditions under which to live a life: With books to connect you to humanity, and plants to connect you to nature. And as reading is a lifetime joy—one at which we get better with age—gardening is the same. To cultivate a garden for food or for beauty is a skill one can employ into the farthest reaches of old age. And, it is our luck that we may turn to our library, and peer through the pages of a gardening book, to bolster this passion.

     

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If you’re planning a trip to Moscow, Russia and are interested in visiting authors’ homes, you’re in great luck. We only had a handful of days to spend exploring the many literary haunts and homes of some of Russia’s greatest writers, so we packed in as much as we could. While visitors to Russia often think of St. Petersburg as the place to go to visit the homes of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Vladimir Nabokov, we can’t recommend a trip to Moscow enough. In addition to the magnificence of Red Square and St. Basil’s Cathedral, where else in the world can you pack in visits to the former addresses of six of the world’s greatest writers?

     

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