On October 13th we begin The Play’s The Thing — a one year, roughly chronological exploration of the plays of William Shakespeare.
It’s Dostoevsky Time! PP Tackles ‘Crime and Punishment; Starting This Week
By Dennis Abrams The lights are coming down. The tree has been dragged out to the curb. The tinsel has been vacuumed out of the carpet. Another holiday season has come and gone, and with it, a new year is here. It’s time for resolution and reflection. In other words, it’s time to put away the genre fiction and read …
PP’s Year of Proust Ends, “Project D” for Dostoevsky Begins in 2011
By Dennis Abrams It’s almost over. In another week, our online reading project The Cork-Lined Room, will be closing its doors. All 3,000 pages of Proust’s masterpiece In Search of Lost Time will have been read, discussed, and analyzed within an inch of their lives. The experience has been unforgettable. Leading a discussion of the day’s reading, posting a …
Proust: The Perfect Beach Read
By Dennis Abrams Spring is here, summer will fast be upon us, and for most readers, it’s the time for fat juicy mindless paperback novels, perfect for idling away the time while at the beach or on vacation. This year though, why not try something different? There’s still time to join us on our year long journey through Marcel Proust’s …
With Which Author Would You Like to Dine?
By Edward Nawotka In today’s lead story Dennis Abrams writes about attending a dinner at Berkeley, California’s famed Chez Panisse restaurant inspired by the writings of Marcel Proust. The whole evening made him feel as if he’d spent a meal with the man himself. The question is simple: With which author would you like to spend a meal and why? …
My Evening With M. Proust
By Dennis Abrams BERKELEY: As the host and moderator of Publishing Perspectives’ year long Proust-reading experience, The Cork-Lined Room, I’ve often found myself wondering: Who exactly is it that is out there reading and apparently enjoying the 3000+ pages of Marcel Proust’s masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time? For whom am I spending evenings reading and posting? Is it Francophiles? …
Day One in The Cork-lined Room
By Dennis Abrams Today we begin our one-year journey through the entirety of Marcel Proust’s 20th-century masterpiece In Search of Lost Time, which will be taking place on our companion website, The Cork-lined Room. We anticipate that at a pace of 10 to 15 pages per day, excepting weekends, we should be finished in a year. The first posting about …
Bonus Material: Proust’s Paintings
By Dennis Abrams Marcel Proust, in a letter to Jean Cocteau, proclaimed that “My book is a painting.” And indeed, anyone who has read or has even attempted to read In Search of Lost Time has most likely found themselves overwhelmed, fascinated and even intrigued by Proust’s countless references to artists and their paintings. Characters and landscapes are described in …
Can Proust Really Change Your Life?
By Dennis Abrams You know you’ve been meaning to. You’re pretty sure that you’ve got a dusty copy of Swann’s Way sitting around somewhere. You’ve probably even read the book’s famous opening line, “For a long time I would go to bed early,” and thought to yourself, well, not now, maybe some other time. That time has finally come. Next …
Bonus Material: Salon Confidences Written by Marcel
By Edward Nawotka If Marcel Proust if famous for anything other than his novels, it’s the “questionnaire” that bears his name. The “Proust Questionnaire” was not, surprise, something Proust himself conceived of — it was, instead, a Parisian parlor game popular during the 1880s. “It is believed to have been popularized by the daughter of the 19th-century French president Felix Faure,” writes …