With the holidays and then gearing up for the National Book Awards 2007, I've been away from my blog for a while, but we haven't been idle. The other day we submitted a grant to the National Endowment for the Humanities to support 400 programs in libraries across the country on the literature of American immigration, from the 17th to the 21st century. Our Brooklyn Academy of Music series got off to a great start with Francine Prose and tonight Pete Hamill will be with us.

    As for my own reading, one thing that has impressed me lately has been fiction by Russian immigrants. Of course, everyone knows about Gary Shteyngart (Absurdistan), but have you read Olga Grushin's The Dream Life of Sukhanov? Or Lara Vapnyar's Memoirs of a Muse? It's hard to believe that English is a second language for either of these young writers. And two weeks ago the new Alejandro Springall movie based on Ilan Stavans' story "Morirse esta en ebreo" premiered at the New York Jewish Film Festival (the story appears in Stavans' The Disappearance.)



Recommended reading: Hermann Broch's work should be better known in the United States. Try his Death of Virgil. It's brilliant.