March 27

Read about Ai Qing's poetry as a prisoner in China here

Read Ai Qing's obituary

Read an excerpt of Snow Falls on China's Land

Snow falls on China’s land;
Cold blockades China

Wind,

Like a grief-stricken old woman
Closely following behind,
Stretching out her icy claws,
Tugs at the travelers’clothes.
With words as old as the land,
Her nagging never ends.

Coming from the forests
In horse-drawn carts,
You, there, farmers of China,
Wearing fur hats,
Braving the blizzard —
Where are you going?

* * *

A different translation excerpt of Snow Falls on China's Land

Read excerpt from an interview with Ugrešic

The ‘five Croatian witches’ is a label which was given to me and four other Croatian journalists, writers, activists, and professors, by Croatian spin doctors. They wanted to identify us as a dangerous political group, as a dangerous female group (if five women have been accepted as dangerous, then all women are potentially dangerous). The fact that we are all educated women also contributed to their fear; all educated women are potential traitors. All in all, Croatian spin doctors used an age-old pattern: witches are evil, only women are witches and only women worship the Devil. Who is the Devil? The Devil is a foreigner;­ a Serb, Yugoslav, commie, anybody from the East, and so on.

Read an excerpt from the novel From the Ministry of Pain

Goran could not make his peace with what had happened. He was a fine mathematician and much loved by his students, and even though his was a “neutral” field he’d been removed from his post from one day to the next. Much as people assured him that it was all perfectly “normal”-in times of war your average human specimen always acts like that, the same thing had happened to many people, it happened to Croatians in Serbia, to Serbs in Croatia, it happened to Muslims, Croats and Serbs in Bosnia, it happened to Jews, Albanians and Roma, it happened to everybody everywhere in that unfortunate former country of ours-they failed to make a dent in his combined bitterness and self-pity.

Read more here

Read more about Michael Aris here

Read a review of Hidden Treasures and Secret Lives

Read the New York Times and The Independent obituaries for Michael Aris

Read the Authors Calendar biography of Budd Schulberg

Read Schulberg's bio on IMDB.com

Read Schulberg's obituaries here and here

Schulberg was the eldest son of Jewish parents who had risen from East Side poverty to a life of comfort and elegance on New York’s West Side. His father, Benjamin, known as “BP”, wrote screenplays for Adolph Zukor’s Famous Players film company before moving to Hollywood in 1920, where he became the cigar-chomping, poker-playing, hard-drinking head of production at Paramount studios. The sound of his father throwing up at dawn after an evening “script conference” with his latest female star was a familiar one to Budd.

His mother Adeline, or “Ad”, was a tough-minded literary agent. A cultured woman, she believed in Freud and progressive education, and despised the trash emitted by her husband’s studio. She had little time for parenting, and none for maternal affection, but was proud of her son’s intellectual and artistic interests.

Schulberg grew up a crown prince in the heyday of the Hollywood studios. With the run of the studio lot, he was spoiled by everyone who sought BP’s favour, and grandly drove around town in his father’s Duesenberg. When BP temporarily left his wife for the actor Sylvia Sidney, Budd screamed at his father: “You son of a bitch! You’re coming home with me. Right now!”