Oranges & Peanuts for Sale

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New Directions Publishing, 2009 - Literary Collections - 254 pages
Many of the twenty-eight essays in Oranges & Peanuts for Sale have appeared in translation in seventeen countries; some have never been published in English before. They include introductions for books of avant-garde poets; collaborations with visual artists, and articles for publications such as The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, and October.

One section focuses on writers and literary works: strange tales from classical and modern China; the Psalms in translation: a skeptical look at E. B. White's New York. Another section is a continuation of Weinberger's celebrated political articles collected in What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles (a finalist for the National Books Critics Circle Award), including a sequel to "What I Heard About Iraq," which the Guardian called the only antiwar "classic" of the Iraq War. A new installment of his magnificent linked "serial essay," An Elemental Thing, takes us on a journey down the Yangtze River during the Sung Dynasty.

The reader will also find the unlikely convergences between Samuel Beckett and Octavio Paz, photography and anthropology, and, of course, oranges and peanuts, as well as an encomium for Obama, a manifesto on translation, a brief appearance by Shiva, and reflections on the color blue, death, exoticism, Susan Sontag, and the arts and war.
 

Contents

Oppen Then
3
Where Was New York? 96
16
Vicente Huidobros Altazor
35
NiedeckerReznikoff
45
Kenneth Cox
59
Susan Howes My Emily Dickinson
70
James Laughlin
77
Susan Sontag
89
Alter and the Psalms
104
The Tang
115
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About the author (2009)

Eliot Weinberger was born on February 6, 1949. He is a writer, editor and translator. His work has been published in 30 languages. He first gained recognition from his translations of Nobel Prize winner and poet Octavio Paz. These translations include Collected Poems 1957-1987 and In Light of India. He has also translated other writers such as Vicente Huidobro's Altazor. He received the National Board Critic's Circle Award for his edition of Borge's Selected Non-Fictions. Today Eliot Weinberger is mostly known for his essays and political articles focusing on U.S. politics and foreign policy. His literary writings include An Elemental Thing, which was selected by The Village Voice as one of the "20 Best Books of the Year for 2009. He is also the co-author of a study of Chinese poetry translations, 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei. In 2000 he was the only American literary writer to be awarded the order of the Aztec Eagle by the government of Mexico.