Мастер и Маргарита

 art, film  Comments Off
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!

 books  Comments Off
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

 books  Comments Off
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)

 Posted by at 7:50 pm  Tagged with:

Michal Ajvaz

 books  Comments Off
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

 neuroscience, RSA Animations  Comments Off
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.

Small interview

 life in the bookshop  Comments Off
Oct 212011
 

Here is a small interview with me for one of our UK based partners. They portrait many other interesting independent bookshops in their section “bookseller focus”.

“I am Saint George and with a little help of my customers the dragon will return to its cave. Or not.”

 Posted by at 2:08 pm

Time is a rubbery thing; an interview with David Eagleman

 science and society  Comments Off
Oct 192011
 

Boing Boing has an interview with David Eagleman, neuroscientist and writer. We have both his Incognito and Sum.

We all go through life assuming that time is an external river that flows past us. But experiments in my laboratory over the past decade have shown that this is not precisely the case. Time is an active construction of the brain. We can set up simple experiments to make you believe that a flashed image lasted longer or shorter than it actually did, or that a burst of light happened before you pressed a button (even though you actually caused it with the button), or that a sound is beeping at a faster or slower rate than it actually is, and so on. Time is a rubbery thing.

Haruki Murakami for the Guardian

 books  Comments Off
Oct 162011
 

To make the wait for your copy of 1Q84 a bit easier, here’s an article-interview with Murakami for the Guardian by Emma Brockes. Quite interesting!

Haruki Murakami

All around him his friends rebelled, too. Some killed themselves, something Murakami often writes about. “They are gone,” he says. “It was a very chaotic time, and I’m still missing them. So sometimes I feel very strange to become 63 years old. I feel myself as a kind of survivor. Every time I think about them, I have some feeling that I have to live, I have to live very strong. Because I don’t want to spend years of my life… it should be the very purpose, life. Because I survived, I have obligations to give fully. So, every time I write my fiction, from time to time I think of the deceased. Friends.”

Consistency is all. “I like to read books. I like to listen to music. I collect records. And cats. I don’t have any cats right now. But if I’m taking a walk and I see a cat, I’m happy.”

Word as Image

 art, books  Comments Off
Oct 122011
 

Word as Image

To promote his new book, formerly Google’s now Facebook’s creative director Ji Lee created this visually delightful video, in which the relationship between the signifier and the signified becomes a bit less arbitrary.

Via the Casual Optimist.

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