We have spoilers for the August 2017 Boxwalla Book Box!
FYI Boxwalla has updated the format & pricing for the book box!
August Book Spoiler # 1 + new price : 29.95 bimonthly
Starting with August, the book box will have a new format : one great writer from the past paired with a great living writer who we think is a potential Nobel Laureate. New Price : $29.95. Old subscribers will automatically be billed at the new price.
The Theme of the August Book Box is ‘Language & Identity’ with writers from the United States of America & Armenia.
And we have a spoiler!
The second book showcased this August is by one of America’s greatest living writers : Cynthia Ozick’s Puttermesser Papers. This book was described in the New York Times as being “Fanciful, poignant…so intelligent, so finely expressed that, like its main character, it remains endearing, edifying, a spark of light in the gloom”
Here’s an excerpt from Puttermesser Papers:
“In bed she studied Hebrew grammar. The permutations of the triple-lettered root elated her: how was it possible that a whole language, hence a whole literature, a civilization even, should rest on the pure presence of three letters of the alphabet?…It seemed to her not so much a language for expression as a code for the world’s design, indissoluble, predetermined, translucent. The idea of the grammar of Hebrew turned Puttermesser’s brain into a palace, a sort of Vatican; inside its corridors she walked from one resplendent triptych to another.”
Each August Book Box will contain Western Armenian writer Zareh Vorpouni’s novel ‘The Candidate‘ which was translated just last year, forty years after it was first published in 1967.
The modern Armenian language has two forms: Western Armenian and Eastern Armenian. During the 1915 Armenian genocide, most Western Armenians were driven out the country and they settled all over the world. And now Western Armenian is only spoken by the Armenian diaspora. In 2009, UNESCO identified Western Armenian as an endangered language. Since language and culture are so inextricably linked and culture in turn shapes identity, the preservation of language is an important part of preserving identities. We are excited to showcase a book translated from this disappearing language.
An excerpt from this Western Armenian Novel, The Candidate :
“Now and then people would rush past, the sidewalk rumbling like an empty barrel under their feet. At that moment, the street – like a watchdog opening and closing its eyes – would wake up with a start, only to lazily fall back asleep. Most of the people on the street were busboys, waiters, or cleaners who worked in banks or government buildings. In their haste none of them had time to care about Minas’s mindless laughter.”
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