Ricky Lee Grove

Philip Roth’s  Writers from the Other Europe  was a Penguin paperback series he launched and served as general editor for, beginning in the mid-1970s and running until 1989. Its goal was to bring major Eastern European fiction to American readers, especially writers who were well known in their own countries but little known in the U.S. His interest in the series grew out of visits to Prague in 1972 and 1973. He was deeply moved by the plight of writers living under totalitarian regimes—authors who were often banned, imprisoned, or forced into menial labor while their work circulated only in samizdat (underground) form. Roth envisioned a series that would move beyond political curiosity and highlight these authors as literary masters rather than mere political dissidents. The series focused on the "Eastern Bloc," primarily featuring writers from Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, and Yugoslavia. The books were known for their distinctive paperback covers, which often featured e...

  I came to  Wystan Hugh Auden  by way of Tolkien. I devoured the notes and bibliography section of Tolkien’s biography written by Humphrey Carpenter. Auden is mentioned as being an early supporter of Tolkien’s trilogy and wrote influential reviews of the first two books in the trilogy. So I searched for Auden in the bookstore where I was working and found his first collection of essays, reviews, and aphorisms,  The Dyer’s Hand  (1967) .  Many of the essays were revelations to me, ( Making, Knowing and Judging ) others I simply didn’t understand because I was too young. Auden’s essays led me to his poetry which I found challenging as well (I was 17 at the time), but I was also impressed. They captured my imagination in a way no other poet did and they inspired me to explore the words he used and research the subjects he wrote about. His writing enriched my life. Thus began a life-long interest in Auden. I’ve been reading his work for most of my life. I stil...

  April 2026 Reading Challenge: Haiku-like story of a Geisha love story set in the snow country of northern Japan Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata was first published by Iwanami Shoten Publishing in 1948 and in substantially revised form in 1948. The first English translation was published by Knopf in 1956 and translated by Edward Seidensticker. It is a lyrical, haunting exploration of wasted love and the transient nature of beauty. The novel follows Shimamura, a wealthy, detached dilettante from Tokyo who specializes in the study of Western ballet (which he has never actually seen). He travels to a remote hot-spring town in the mountains of Niigata to visit Komako, a rural geisha. Over the course of three visits spanning several years, their relationship unfolds against a backdrop of heavy snow and isolation. While Komako falls deeply and desperately in love with him, Shimamura is emotionally “numb,” viewing her passion with the same detached aestheticism he applies to art. The n...

 I love watching old cartoons. There's just such a sense of fun in them. They are all forgotten now, except for those studying animation. It's a shame, because these short cartoons were well-crafted, funny, and very creative. So when I came across a collection of cartoons from 1929 at archive.org, I was so delighted. My favorite cartoon of the 16 featured in the archive is "When the Cats Away".  When the Cat’s Away is a 1929 Walt Disney Mickey Mouse short that stands out because Mickey and Minnie are shown as actual mice rather than the familiar cartoon-sized characters. It was released on May 3, 1929, and is generally treated as the sixth Mickey Mouse cartoon. The film was directed by Walt Disney and animated by Ub Iwerks and Ben Sharpsteen. It was a loose remake of Disney’s earlier 1925 silent short Alice Rattled by Rats, which helps explain why its character setup feels a little unusual compared with later Mickey cartoons

  The cover art for the iconic Dover Publications editions of  Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu  often utilizes 19th-century archival illustrations rather than contemporary commissions. The covers were designed by the company’s legendary editor and scholar,  E.F. Bleiler . He often selected the specific archival woodcuts and period artwork used for these covers to ensure they captured the "shudder-filled" atmosphere of Le Fanu’s prose. The specific illustration on the cover of Guy Deverell is a wood engraving, but there is no credit for the artist (often the case with many publishers printing public domain novels). It is appropriately creepy because of the objects (old church, dead tree, crow), but the colorization is excellent. I’m sure the original image was black and white. If Bleiler designed the cover, he chose swaths of blue, great and amber which come together to suggest the “sensational” quality of the story. Another excellent cover in the Dover Sheridan Le Fanu repri...