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).
Many of the twenty-eight essays inOranges & 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.
About the author
Eliot Weinberger’s books of literary essays include Karmic Traces, An Elemental Thing, The Ghosts of Birds, and Angels & Saints. His political writings are collected in What I Heard About Iraq and What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles. The author of a study of Chinese poetry translation, 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, he is a translator of the poetry of Bei Dao and the editor of The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry. He was formerly the general editor of the series Calligrams: Writings from and on China and the literary editor of the Murty Classical Library of India. Among his many translations of Latin American poetry and prose are The Poems of Octavio Paz, Paz’s In Light of India, Vicente Huidobro’s Altazor, Xavier Villaurrutia’s Nostalgia for Death, and Jorge Luis Borges’ Seven Nights and Selected Non-Fictions. He has been publishing with New Directions since 1975.
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