What happened to the Avant Garde? is the subject of a debate to be led by Gabriel Josipovici, A.S. Byatt, and others, on Monday, December 3rd, at the British Library; part of the event called Breaking the Rules: The Printed Face of the European Avant Garde 1900-1937, consisting of talks, films, discussions, comedy, music and more: celebrating the spirit of the European Avant Garde 1900-1937 details here.

A new story by Gabriel Josipovici, "He Contemplates a Photo in a Newspaper," appears in the new journal The International Literary Quarterly.

Staying news: Ismo Santala has written a substantial review of Gabriel Josipovici's first novel (1968), The Inventory, for the UK literary site Ready Steady Book.

"The Dark Waters" is a story by Gabriel Josipovici now appearing in the Eclectic England section of the Mad Hatter's Review.

 

Gabriel Josipovici was a participant in Kisufim - Jerusalem Conference of Jewish Writers: “To Be A Jewish Writer” which took place 28 Nisan--1 Iyar 5767 (April 16-19, 2007), the first international conference of its kind of Jewish writers and poets throughout the world. It was organized by Dimui : A Journal of Jewish Arts, Literature and Culture, Beit Morasha of Jerusalem, and marked the 40th anniversary of the Nobel Prize in Literature awarded to S.Y. Agnon

On the occasion of Goldberg: Variations appearing in the US, Michael Signorelli interviewed Gabriel Josipovici for his blog Cruelest Month.

What ever happened to Modernism? Gabriel Josipovici's John Coffin Lecture in Literature on this subject, at the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies of the University of London's School of Advanced Study, on March 14th, was very well attended. A blog account isat Ellis Sharp's The Sharp Side.

Jewish Book Week features
Gabriel Josipovici in Conversation with Bryan Cheyette
http://jewishbookweek.com/2007/040307a.php
on Sunday, March 4, 2007.

A substantial interview with Gabriel Josipovici by Mark Thwaite is on his literary web site, Ready Steady Book.

Only Joking, not yet available in English, has been published in German as Nur ein Scherz. Information from the publisher is here, a review in Der Spiegel in German is here, in English here.

Two new Gabriel Josipovici titles in 2006:

The Singer on the Shore, a collection of essays and reviews, March 2006, from Carcanet Press,

Reviewed in The Guardian

and

Everything Passes, a novel, also from Carcanet Press, September 2006 (now at Amazon UK).

A major essay, "By a cool well: where to find the princesses and their frogs" in the 8th July 2005 issue of the Times Literary Supplement, reviewing Selected Tales: Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, edited and translated by Joyce Crick, Oxford University Press. Opening paragraphs:

Why do we need another edition of Grimm's Fairy Tales? Are there not already several complete editions in English and any number of picture-book selections for children, with new ones appearing every Christmas? Instead of answering this question directly let us take another example of a "world's classic", the Bible. Though there are countless editions of the Bible around, and a large number of commentaries, OUP's World's Classics edition, published in 1997, filled a yawning gap. Edited by Robert Carroll, an Old Testament scholar with a real feeling for literature, and Stephen Prickett, a literary critic and scholar with a strong interest in the Bible and its afterlife in literature, this contained a long and extremely interesting introduction and copious footnotes. It did not try to summarize the many biblical commentaries, which tend to be theological and historical, but rather to raise questions about the Bible as a book and a great literary document, which of course it is, as well as being a cultural and religious one. In a similar way, Joyce Crick, a fine scholar of German literature who has always been adept at addressing a larger audience than simply her fellow Germanisten, has set out here to rescue Grimm's Tales both from children and from folklorists and to help us see it as a major literary work. Like Carroll and Prickett, she has done a magnificent job, and both she and OUP are to be congratulated.

For too long these haunting tales have been pulled out of context and subjected to mythological and psychological exegesis. Crick has done us an enormous service by returning them to their context in the Germanic lands of early modern Europe (Brueghel has always seemed to me a better key to their interpretation than Freud, Marx, or Mircea Eliade). Though she does not include some of my favourite stories (the wonderfully surreal "Herr Korbes" and "Lauschen und Flohchen", for example), and though she can do nothing about conveying the huge linguistic range of the collection, this is nevertheless a volume to treasure.

Full text available to TLS subscribers at
http://www.the-tls.co.uk/archive/story.aspx?story_id=2111602

An introduction by Gabriel Josipovici to Aharon Appelfeld's Badenheim 1939 in the new Penguin Modern Classics edition.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0141188200/

Gabriel Josipovici gave a reading at Shakespeare & Company in Paris
on Saturday, May 28th, at 7 pm.

A recent appearance was at Ajex Hall, Palmeira Avenue, Hove on November 7 for the 2004 Bill Epstein Memorial Lecture, How to Read the Bible, on understanding the nature of an ancient text and of our own modern readerly decisions, and bringing the Bible to life as a multi-faceted and open work.

Gabriel Josipovici recently completed a semester as visiting professor at the American University in Paris, where he gave a talk in February 2004...