Meeting Benches World art in all forms

He was an American author of many books (including sixteen novels, six non-fiction books, and five collctions of short stories). His works always explored the themes of fate and injustice. Before achieving success as a writer, he dropped out of college, working as a manual laborer. In the first 75 years since The Grapes of Wrath was published, it sold …

THE WAKE We saw the wake, but nothing of the boat, because it was happiness that had passed by. They gazed at each other, deep in their eyes a perception at last of the promised clearing, where great stags were running in all their freedom. No hunter entered that country without tears. It was the next day, after a night …

MAINTENANT JE REVIENS > Maintenant je reviens, a ce que j’ai toujours été, je reviens a pied, reviens en février, maintenant je reviens, a ce pour quoi je suis fait, je reviens chanter, est-ce bien un métier? Je reviens de tout, ce qui n’est pas moi, non ce n’étais pas moi, je reviens vers vous, et je n’en reviens pas, …

LIVE, FLESH Rise up corpse and walk nothing new under the yellow sun, the last of the last of the coins of gold, the light that flakes away, under the layers of time, the lock on the breaking heart. A thread of silk, a thread of lead, a thread of blood after these waves of silence. Signs of love’s black …

Albert Camus was born on November day in French colonial Algeria. Despite his family’s extreme poverty, he attended the University of Algiers, and after dropping out of the university, he entered the world of political journalism. While in wartime Paris, he developed his philosophy of the absurd. For him, existence seemed simply, absurd.                                The Stranger (published in 1942), it is …

SPORTS GOODS Brave as a postage stamp. He went his way, gently clapping his hands to count his footsteps. His heart as red as a wild boar, beat beat, like a butterfly, pink and green, from time to time he planted a little flag of silk, when he had marched enough. He sat down for a rest and fell asleep, …

After France’s defeat in 1940 (and its armistice with Germany), Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and his wife fled occupied France, and sojourned in North America, where he became one of the expatriate voices of the French Resistance. Its earlier memoir, recounted his aviation experiences in the desert of Sahara, the same experiences in this novella. In July 1944, Saint-Exupéry’s aircraft disappeared …

THE LITTLE PRINCE 1/3 – After France’s defeat in 1940 (and its armistice with Germany), Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and his wife fled occupied France, and sojourned in North America, where he became one of the expatriate voices of the French Resistance. Its earlier memoir, recounted his aviation experiences in the desert of Sahara, the same experiences in this novella. In …

PIETER QUAST 1/3 – He was a Dutch painter (born and died in Amsterdam). Pieter Jansz Quast gave his age as twenty-six when his marriage banns were published on June 29, 1632. For its wittier imagery, the stage performances in The Hague and the theatrical characters etched by Callot, yes, was they really important. Observing its works you can admire …

MIRROR, MIRROR EYE SEA It pains me when I look the mirror in Her eyes, I see a night robbed from its stars. A portrait dead inside, A Sol that lost its glee. Dreamt all dreams away. One thing remains too glow, the Razor came to play! The Silver beast carves a crevasse through the reddened sea. Gazed upon by …

This Herman Koch’s novel takes place in a well-known Amsterdam restaurant. It’s a summer’s evening in Amsterdam, and two brothers (and their wives), meet for dinner and some unsavoury truths emerge. Each couple has a fifteen-year-old son. The two boys are united by their single act, an act that has triggered a police investigation. Highly controversial tale of two families …

UTOPIAN I see the world getting smaller and smaller, untill it finally fades the taste of red wine still in my mouth, soothing me knowing in the back of my mind this place isn’t been made for you and me’. My arm hanging out the window, my fingers playing with the wind, fantasizing how it would be, to live this …

The Tea Lords, the story of ambitious Rudolf Kerkhoven, who becomes a tea planter in the Dutch East Indies. Bitten by the East Indies adventure, in the early 1870s he takes ship for Java, and plunges into the uncleared jungle foothills of the mountains (west Java), to follow his father as a tea planter. Over the seasons, Rudolf’s diligence gradually …