Мастер и Маргарита

Oct 302011
 

Of course, all the fun starts at mark 0:46 with Behemot’s arrival.

Rinat Timerkaev’s Master and Margarita is due by the end of next year. From what I think I see in this short trailer, I would say that he masterfully employs some kind of Hayao Miyazaki’s sensitivity to Mikhail Bulgakov’s world of justice and eternal salvation.

Even if you don’t speak Russian, it’s worth checking his previous short I Love You. The moment it starts to rain is pure poetry. And those red trams and paneláks behind them brought intense memories of Prague in early nineties. This boy has a touch. I am sure we’ll hear more of him in the future.

If you’re lucky enough to speak Russian, you can find more on his blog.

(via Master and Margarita)

It’s here!

Oct 282011
 

Murakami’s newest novel, 1Q84 arrived today. As mentioned before, we offer it for very cool price of 19.90 euros.

Translating Murakami

Oct 272011
 

Usually I work five days a week and finish a rough draft of four pages per day. Twenty pages a week, 80 pages a month—that’s always my goal. With writers whose prose is trickier, I might do only three pages a day, but Murakami is pretty straightforward and logical. It took about ten months to come up with a rough draft of Book 3 of 1Q84, and then I spent two months revising it.

Whilst we wait for our copies of 1Q84 to arrive, here is a short interview with one of translators. It takes about a year for only one out of three volumes, and that is for a rough draft. (hvala, Vuk)

Michal Ajvaz

Oct 272011
 

Checking on some of our new arrivals, Michal Ajvaz alternative take on Prague caught my eye.

The frontier of our world is not far away; it doesn’t run along the horizon or in the depths. It glimmers faintly close by, in the twilight of our nearest surroundings; out of the corner of our eye we can always glimpse another world, without realizing it. We are walking all the time along a shore and along the edge of a virgin forest.

Divided brain

Oct 242011
 

Thanks to Maria Popova and her Brain Pickings.

The metaphor of the “left-brain”/”right-brain” divide has permeated pop culture as one of the defining dichotomies of how we think about and describe ourselves. But this metaphor is rooted in a number of neuropsychological realities of how our brains operate — the right hemisphere (the “master”), with its flexibility and capacity for empathy and abstraction but lack of certainty, and the detail-oriented left (the “emissary”), with its preference for mechanisms over living things, its inability to see past the literal, and its propensity for self-interest.

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