Not much in this morning's post, but what came was wonderful: Alberto Manguel's short memoir (just 74 pages) With Borges (from Telegram Books, new imprint of Saqi Books); the Ingeborg Bachmann reader Last Living Words and Steve Katz's Antonello's Lion (Green Integer); and, thrillingly, two new CDs from the sublime Cold Blue Music - Daniel Lentz's On the Leopard Altar and Chas Smith's Descent.
In 1964, in Buenos Aires, Jorge Louis Borges, by this time blind, approached sixteen-year-old Alberto Manguel, then serving in a book shop, and asked if he would be interested in a part-time job reading aloud to the old writer. With Borges is "part memoir, part biography and all celebration of the living quality of literature."
Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) was, as many of you will know, as well as a poet, dramatist, and novelist, and leading voice in post-war German literature, the lover of Paul Celan.
Cold Blue Music is the leading exponent of West Coast minimalism and post-minimalism. "The label defines a certain ‘Southern California sound,’ uncluttered, evocative and unusual, with a wistful emotional edge."
Readers Comments
In my post this morning, a letter informing me of a council tax rise.