One remains in silent amazement: How does he find these stories? How does he know everything?

Die Zeit

Eliot Weinberger continues his ever-astonishing exploration of the essay form, opening up its possibilities, and reinvigorating it with a passion and intellect unmatched in contemporary letters.

Oranges & Peanuts For Sale

Literature by Eliot Weinberger

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. Presented at the PEN World Voices Festival as a “post-national” writer, Eliot Weinberger is “a sparkling essayist” (Confrontation), and his writings “a boundary-crossing, shape-shifting cabinet of curiosities” (The Bloomsbury Review).

Paperback(published Jun, 01 2009)

ISBN
9780811218344
Price US
16.95
Price CN
19
Trim Size
5x8
Page Count
272
Portrait of Eliot Weinberger

Eliot Weinberger

American essayist and translator

One remains in silent amazement: How does he find these stories? How does he know everything?

Die Zeit

Weinberger, an omnivorous reader, has a detective’s extraordinary memory for the apposite and unusual fact

Nathaniel Tarn, Jacket Magazine

One of the delights of reading his essays is that they reveal the interconnections between the two; the Wittgensteinian idea that the limits of one’s language are the limits of one’s world becomes, in his hands, a tool for revealing the blind spots common to our culture.

Scott Saul, The Nation

In this brave new literature, a chaos of images, characters and stories swirls like electrons around a nucleus. They bond with images and fall apart again, down through the ages.

Los Angeles Times