A fabulous book!! No one could ask for a better read, late at night, with the blankets tucked around one, and a hot buttered rum at one's side!!

Chekhov was a man!!

This is one of the best books I have ever read on any subject. It is NOT just a collection of Chekhov's letters, but a complete outline of his life and thought -- just as the title promises!

Simon Karlinsky is, of course, a treasure to the world of literature. His knowledge of Russian history and literature is profound -- and you will find this book utterly fascinating if only because of its scathing analysis of 19th-century Russian critics, the most myopic of men -- and the unwitting forerunners of the even more myopic partisans of "Socialist Realism." It was against these titanic mental pygmies that Chekhov had to make his artistic way -- and the pygmies misunderstood and and libelled him every step of the way.

Chekhov was a highly original literary genius whom the world is still discovering. Enjoy this book, and enjoy your invitation to the even greater pleasure of reading Chekhov himself. The Modern Library has published three volumes of his stories, and they are wonderful. The plays are also superb.

Highest recommendation!

There are many biographies of Chekhov, including the new one by Rayfield, but this edition of the letters is the best source of the writer's life and thought. Long out of print, it was wise of Northwestern University Press to re-issue this book. The other editions of the letters, by Hellman and another by Yarmolinsky, cannot compare.
This volume is valuable for its superb, lengthy introduction, which is a capsule biography. In addition, each of the fifteen sections are introduced by an engaging biographical headnote.
The letters themselves are the record of an extraordinary person, a man who instructed other writers to succeed in their work by feeling "compassion down to their fingertips."
This book shows the emotions and thoughts of the writer who lived that simple but wise piece of advice.
Among the more amusing letters is the one to his wastrel brother, in March 1886, in which he wittily enumerates the qualities of well-bred people. Among them: "They don't guzzle vodka on any old occasion, nor do they go around sniffing cupboards....They shun all ostentation: empty barrels make the most noise."
This volume is full of such humorous but sage advice, and reveals the man behind the extraordinary short stories and plays better than any biography.
You will remember some of the letters in this book throughout your lifetime.

_The Encyclopedia of the Dead_ is one of the best short story collections of this or any century, I'm not shy to say, and it is my personal favorite of Kis' books (_A Tomb for Boris Davidovich [forthcoming from Dalkey Archive] coming in a close second). Kis' writes in a wonderful type of lyrical documentary style, mixing fact and fiction (though it is difficult to tell sometimes whether the fact is not fiction and vice-versa), reminiscent of some of the contemporary younger western writers (namely, William T. Vollmann, who himself is a big fan). In short, buy this book! (If you don't have a penny to your name and you can't buy one...you should not steal it, thought you would have it and be able to read and devour it like you need to.)

It took almost six months from the day I ordered this book, until it came out of print and I received it in my mail. It took me less than a week to read it...This is a book of stories about people who find their death in different ways. Kis mixes myths and legends of the Bible to: middle eastern legends, female intuition, patriotism, death anticipation due to long and difficult illness. Each story is setup in its own time, century, country and is viewed from different perspective. And all these situations and places combined, make up this wonderful book. My favorite story was "The Encyclopedia of the Dead". It sounds so personal, that anyone who knows a little bit about Danilo Kis' life, can see a lot of Kis himself - in this story. Mr. Heim did wonderful job translating this work. However, I was a bit disappointed that Mr. Haim did not make an effort to write an introduction for this book. Writer's notes at the end of the book were extrimely helpful in understanding stories more deeply and understanding what he wanted to accomplish with this work of art. Many of Danilo Kis' reders like to remember him as writer who had Borges for an idol. Please, let us not forget that Kis had admirerers himself - no one less than Joseph Brodsky, amongst others.

Smart, to the point and funny. Book of life in the sense. My favorite story - "Steffi Speck in The Jaws of Life". Ms. Ugresic's power of the observation is amazing. She has a way of presenting sad and ironic experiences of every day middle class life in hillariosly funny terms. Her "patchwork" (of stories) book is so true, no wonder she can move any reader. I am looking forward to reading her "Fording the Stream of Concioussness" book. Hopefully, there will be more books coming from this talented writer

What a pity Ms Ugresic is not known in this country - or if she is, as a Yugoslav/Croat, with all the heavy baggage that implies nowadays. These stories are absolutely delightful -- I can't remember the last time I laughed out loud when reading. Nothing escapes her wit and derision -- love affairs, relationships, writers, serious literature -- and we come out of one of her stories (in particular Hot Dog in a Warm Bun, Lend Me Your Character or Kreutzer Sonata -- not to mention the title novella)-- tonified and with our faith in life restored, as after a sauna or a refreshing cold shower. Ms Hawkeworth's translations are excellent too, it's hard to believe this wasn't written in English. Let's hope Ms Ugresic has kept her sense of humour, and that a major publisher will make her prose known to more of us..

The introductory chapter of this intriguing and ground-breaking book sets forth the scope of the book with a clarity uncommon in reflective books of this genre. The author's opening comments state: "'Electric Language: A Philosophical Study of Word Processing' is an introductory study of the philosophical significance of the phenomenon of word processing." He then goes on to carefully explain that the book will constrain itself to this narrow topic. True to his word, he does not distract himself by discussing the details of any particular word processing program. Rather, his discussion and point of view deals with word processing as a general phenomenon.

To be sure, Electric Language is a scholarly book, written principally for an academic audience. Yet the flashes of insight that sparkle on many pages of this book make it worth the effort of plowing through the passages on Plato, Aristotle, Heraclitus, and Heidegger. Of course, the ancients had little interesting of lasting value to say, and Heidegger's ideas can never be pinned down to an exact time and place, but it's good that someone at least gives these poor souls a respectful nod of the head.

Articulating Thoughts Many of Us Might Have Passed Through Our Minds Already

It's uncanny how the author of this book puts into words ideas that many of us have been thinking about already. Heim serves as a "perceptive fish, " taking time to examine closely the water we've all been swimming through unknowingly: "When we speak of word processing, we are speaking of a true phenomenon of our time, in the sense of something appearing with a certain historical uniqueness. But while such eventful things are phenomenal or striking in their appearance, the essential nature of such a phenomenon may not thrust itself upon us as easily as the recognition of it as an unprecedented appearance."

If we don't take the time to think about these things today, tomorrow we'll be so attuned to the benefits of word processing that we won't even be able to remember the world before them. We have a narrow window of opportunity to think these thoughts. While the future rushes at us with increasing speed, the past, too, is receding from us at an equivalent speed.

One of the concepts Heim examines is the idea that word processors facilitate the "external representation of thought." Those of us who can type quickly can "dump" our ideas onto a computer screen, and then play with the ideas on screen, rather than in our minds. Word processing beckons the tentative, preformed idea to emerge from the recesses of the mind. Embryonic notions, barely formed at all, feel bold enough to take up residence on your computer screen. Word processing, from a psychodynamic viewpoint, is an interesting study in " emboldening" technology.

Likewise, the emergence of typography in the 15th century went one step further as an "emboldening" technology: "One of Ong's most striking studies concerns the connection between the ascendancy of typography and the inauguration of modern logic." p. 63

Heim's remarks about Plato remind me of an anecdote I heard as an undergraduate student of philosophy. Apparently many of the ancient Greeks genuinely believed that reading diminished a person's mental capacity. Some early Greek educators went so far as to ban reading in schools.

Why were these great sages so mistaken in their view? Well, in the oral tradition of the early Greeks the capacity to listen and remember was far more important than the capacity to read. Recall, the greatest minds of ancient times took great pride in being able to recite The Odyssey from memory. From their frame of mind, reading diminished one's capacity to memorize, and "to memorize is to learn."

The fallacy of this reasoning is that reading promotes understanding, and understanding is a higher form of knowledge than rote memorization. True, when the printed word was introduced into the Greek classroom, the students in those classrooms had little incentive to engage in rote memorization. But their diminished capacity to perform rote memorization was far overshadowed by their increased capacity to understand.

What is language?

To think about the nature of word processing is to think about the nature of language. Heim chomps into some interesting ideas when he looks at the linguistic angle of word processing: "The chaos of details and of possibilities becomes manifest through language as language reduces chaos by ordering things in predictable relationships. Language, then, has power -- not solely in the control over things wielded by the users of language, but also and especially in the structural power language exerts over its users." p. 77-78.

Taking Michael Heim's train of thought a few steps further, if language is a tool, then all literate human beings belong to a user group: the "Human Language Users Group." It follows then that the your own local computer user group is a special interest group within that larger user group. No matter that the larger user group has no formal newsletter or membership roster. Anyone who reads or writes is given automatic membership privileges in that group.

Heim develops the concept that word processors give us the power to physically rearrange our thoughts on a computer screen: "The encoding of letters in the ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) computer code not only permitted the transmission of natural-language at electronic speed; encoding natural language on computers makes possible a new approach to language as directly manipulable in new ways." p. 82.

So just as high-speed computers can use computer programs to perform great feats of number crunching (read: numerical manipulations), so too can human minds use word processors to perform unique new feats of "combinatorial concept collaging." (My words.)

The Psychic Framework of Word Processing

One of the most tantalizing chapters in Electric Language is chapter four, "The Psychic Framework of Word Processing." Here the author plunges into the heart of the mind. In discussing the nature of human thought, Heim quotes from a passage in Hubert Dreyfus's 1979 book, What Computers Can't Do: The Limits of Artificial Intelligence. "There is no doubt some temptation to suppose that since the brain is a physical thing and can be metaphorically described as 'processing information,' there must be an information processing level, a sort of flow chart of its operations, in which its information-processing activity can be described."

This sort of thinking leads one to reflect on the hierarchies of the brain operating system. Is there an equivalent of DOS in the mind -- an upper level information manager which can be called upon to per form information storage and retrieval tasks? And naturally this question leads to the question of the megabyte size of human memory's long term storage capacity and how much less expensive it is to add metaphorical SIMM's to your mind than it is to add physical SIMM's to your desktop computer system.

How Word Processing is Transforming Our Mental Habits

Just as human beings have habits of the body, so do they too have habits of the mind. Word processors help develop a creative habit -- a habit of regularly engaging in creative expression for fun and profit. Heim goes back to Aristotle to understand the nature of human habit: "Habit in the Aristotelian sense, is a proclivity for acting along the lines of certain potentials already developed through training and repeated practice."

The real beauty of Heim' s analysis is that he combines and synthesizes Aristotelian thinking with ideas expressed by some of the early pioneers in word processing development.

The book Mediterranean: A Cultural Landscape represents global, objective and unburdened approach to topics of our civilizaton's cradle. Namely the author managed to write about so complex and multiculturaly entwined subjects on a certain way that is acceptable to and appreciated by all mediterranean nations and religions and by all who are interested in overall hystorical and cultural development of this part of the world . The Matvejevic story about Mediterranean is far from being scientificaly cold and dull, as he is intertwining in it a lot of his own observations, which are witty, sparkling and deep at the same time. In the same sense his approach isn't sticking to cronological or geographical order, but wise comparing of different eras, cultures, civilizations, nations and religions of this "sea, surrounded by land". It is the book that unites. The medieval form of breviary, that the writer is using, is giving the treated topics some special nobleness that is emphasized by poetical language which is fluctuating like the Mediterranean sea.

The first half or so of this book is what makes it worthwhile. There we find Heidegger's best sustained discussion of Leibniz. To be sure, there are other discussions of Leibniz scattered throughout Heidegger's work (most notably in "The Principle of Reason") but here we find him attempting to elucidate Leibniz's metaphysics, not discuss aspects of Leibniz's work in connection with a broader theme. Heidegger's style of reading makes for excellent introductions to the thinkers he discusses. It's ironic that a writer who has a reputation for obtuseness and impenetrability can produce vividly clear discussions of other thinkers. It should be noted that Heidegger's "Die Frage nach dem Ding" (the English translation, long and sadly out of print, went by the name "What is a Thing?") is one of the best introductory books on Kant in any language. But Heidegger's approach: cut straight to the "question of Being" and show how the rest of a philosopher's work fits in with his basic metaphysical position, makes for a clear and striking interpretation, even if Leibniz scholars might find it a little over-aggressive in some details.

The poetic description of sadness at the heart of this short novel is very moving.

Within the pages of this book, Tisma has brought to life a small part of the world which, at the time, was sadly caught between the clash of two ideologies that were slowly descending, like dark clouds, upon Europe - communism and fascism. The consequent racial suspicions, which leave no one untouched, are real: Hungarians, Jews, Serbians, all are caught in the ideological swirl which, as we know, had devastating consequences for the people of the region: pogroms, the invasion by Arrow Cross Hungarians, the murder of communists (Blam's sister)...

The novel also delves into the unconscious of violent retribution, something which, as we have learned in recent years, only leads to the perpetuation of violence. Mr. Tisma must have had the wars that raged throughout the 90s in mind (i.e., Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina) while he was writing his novel. (The precariousness of the region, of which we are all aware, is in part the result of a failure to put the past behind, to let go, to forgive.) The dream-like scenes, where long-dead friends of Blam's pay their executioners in kind, are harrowing.

A short novel about a region of the world whose history we unfortunately know too little about, and but one tiny chapter in the book of horrors that were visited upon the European Jewish community.

The Book of Blam is a wonderful book and an important book. It recounts the events during the Holocaust period in what is now Serbia. After reading this and Tisma's Kapo, he has a style of writing that is unlike most writers that I have read from Eastern Europe; concise, flowing storylines and easy to read. His story has been told many times before but there is something to Tisma's writing that makes Genocide appear as normal to these killers as washing their hands or going for a walk. His is a voice of reason in Novi Sad, a city with little tolerance then and now. After the events in the Balkans during the recent past, sad to say, not much has changed.

This is the literary equivalent and then some of the photographic essay "A Vanished World" and Anne Frank's diary in 1950, had she survived. And an all too useful exploration of how survivors of the abyss might look at the world. I can't say I'm looking forward to reading Tisma's other work, but read it I must.

This book really helps for children and even for adults too! This book is fun and interesting and not the type of "yellow pages and small writing" type of book. Sometimes when ur teacher teach u sumthing outside the school syllabus, u might not fully understand. BUT, this book makes u understand the whole situaation of waat ur teacher's saying. E.g ur teacher might say sumthi like prime numbers, but in this book the number devil ( a character ) calls it prima donnas!Its really fun! This book is actually teaching u math, but in a story way!

Is there a devil on your back thats been hounding you to learn those numbers? Well, there is an easier way to learn and understand numbers. With Haans Enzensberger's childrens book The number Devil, its not only fun, but makes it all look easy. Sometimes it is, other times it can be overwhelming. The number devil is a story that takes place in dreamland where a child, who hates math and numbers finds out how numbers are essential to the world we live in. He also finds out that numbers are easy to understand, so long as we take the time to understaand them. Each chapter attempts to study a number. Starting with 0 and 1, then moving to others from 2 on up. Every number is a pattern and creates more patterns. Its a matter of seeing the patter that clears up the muddle of large numbers. I found this book easy to read and fun and educational. Highly reccomended!

I have little to add to the other reviewers' comments. The devil himself is not that exciting, he's no Dr. Matrix, and the dream sequences are just backdrops to the main themes. Renaming various things like factorials "vroom!" and Fibonacci "Bonacci" seems a bit silly and doesn't add a lot. But who cares? In each chapter a fascinating bit of mathematics is presented in an approachable and fun way: Pascal's triangle, combinatorial sets, infinite sets of numbers, and so on. Also, the main character acts in a realistic way: he gets annoyed, he's sometimes lazy, etc. More important, he generally asks the questions readers want to know, and in a believable way.

This is a good book to give a 6th grader with (or better yet, without) an interest in math. I'd also recommend Martin Gardner's two "Aha!" books ("Insight" and "Gotcha"), which present great puzzles and paradoxes in a single page each.

This book was my first encounter with Kundera, and it lead me to devour other books of his. I think what I appreciate most about Kundera is the consciousness of his wittiness, and how this consciousness is both beautifully insighful and at the same time threaded with the cutting edge of irony. Life is a struggle and the gods play dice in Kundera's world, but it is that struggle that makes those the humanity of the characters profound.

Compared to his other books, I think what I appreciated most about his book is how it all came together at the end. As different characters add their voices and perspectives to the narrative, you begin to grasp a sense of the whole. You know how some books just leave you in an afterglow when you finish? That's how I felt with the Joke.

From the moment I picked up the book, all I could think about was Kafka - The Castle, Joseph K in The Trial.... Kundera could not seem to escape his Masters - Kafka, etc. The novel is as intricate as any of his works and somehow sets the stage for future pieces. By far the most political of his novels, it is not a political novel. It is a story of human existence. Kundera picks apart a particular theme, on one level Kundera can be said to be exploring a sense of the absurd. The four part novel is cleverly written in the first-person narrative. The novel centers around Ludvik and Helena and the colorful storied surrounding them and their cohorts. Kundera sets up his heros as antiheros through a series of humanizing qualities - usually self-centered. Accused of portraying his characters from a male fantasy perspective, people lose sight of the intricate stories that he weaves - part advocacy, part parody. Centered around the narrative of the joke - Ludvik, who being a dedicated communist, finds himself the victim of a joke he outlined in an open postcard to a young lady he was trying to impress. Locked in this Kafkaesque drama, his life is one tragedy after another. He becomes a skeptic. He blames history. We are thrust into a tailspin of the "absurd situation" we find ourself in. Surface as this analysis has been, kindly look to the deeply insightful comment that Kundera makes on the human condition through the use of his characters. I am certain we will all find a little of ourselves in every character.

Miguel Llora

My reading "The Joke" opened my eyes to an entirely different style of prose than I have ever experienced before. Kundera has more respect for his characters than any American novelist I have ever read. Rather than creating characters to tell the world about himself, I felt that Kundera revealed these characters' lives to tell us all something about the world. The best book I read in 1996 due to its complexity of story yet ease of reading, its engaging characters, and its honest depiction of people who learn to live thier lives despite the expectations of their society. The feelings experienced by these people - alienation, betrayal, revenge, and, in the end, a kind of defiant acceptance - are experiences most of us in late 20th century America can relate to

"The Book Of Laughter and Forgetting" was Kundera's phenomenal literary debut, earning considerable praise from Western literary critics when it was first published. It is a fascinating look at memory, sexuality and personal relationships as told through a series of seven distinct vignettes, each with a separate cast of characters (though two are directly interwoven.). His splendid, terse, yet lyrical, prose seemingly weaves these different sections into a coherent work of fiction. Part memoir, part political tract, and as well as fiction, Kundera looks at the human condition as seen through predominantly Czech eyes during the bleak aftermath of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, yet his themes remain universal and of interest to all.

One of the things that is interesting about Kundera's works is how he often ties different stories and different narrators in together, and combines stories that flow in and out in different directions (like Unbearable Lightness, perhaps his most famous, which combines two couples). This book has many stories which flow together with varied narration, and in a few of them, the narrator rises out of the page to tell his own stories. Kundera is undoubtedly a post-modernist, but there is something fascinatingly easy to read about all of his stories. It's clear from reading this how he loves and obsesses about his characters. This book is a fantastic read that really makes you think a lot about the relations between men and women, and also about life in a (former) Soviet controlled country. I think in America we feel very removed from what went on in Eastern Europe, but much of Kundera's writing based on the horrors he experienced bring you in touch with that world.

Like Rushdie's Satanic Verses, this book is largely about angels and devils, or good and evil. The setting is (mostly) Prague around 1970, and the basic political themes -- Czech and Russian Communists and their adversaries -- are used as a foundation for the more ethereal, philosophical themes, such as the nature of humor, the nature of history, and the differences between the genders.

Kundera's frequent personal anecdotes told in the midst of the novel can be quite disconcerting -- and there's a parody of this book floating around the web that makes light of Kundera's self-indulgent practice of using his books as personal therapy sessions. But the anecdotes are still interesting, and since Prague around 1970 is such a big part of Kundera's own mental and cultural ethos, well, why not?

Anyone who is familiar with the dark, fatalistic jokes whispered in Communist Eastern Europe in the Olden Days will enjoy the steady stream of such humor in this novel. Kundera is a masterful joketeller. There is also a lot of bawdy sexual humor, fairly standard, but that is not nearly as interesting as the joke about the man vomiting in Prague's central square (I don't want to spoil the joke here, so you'll just have to read it in the book).

Kundera's attitudes toward women are for the most part repugnant -- but that's Kundera for ya. The contemporary American reader will wince when Kundera describes the beauty of rape, etc. This is just fair warning that some of the attitudes in this book may make you angry, as they made me angry; but we can't change Kundera. At least, unlike the other Kundera I've read, this novel is only partly -- not entirely -- about sex and seduction.

Overall, this is a combination of a brilliant reflection on history and philosophy, a warm-hearted story about dissidents in Prague, and some amusing autobiographical notes on Kundera. I found it more satisfying than Unbearable Lightness of Being, and can compare it (but only distantly) to the novels of Gunter Grass, which also discuss major political-historical events and the burden of a historical conscience, but focusing on the characters' personal lives, not hitting the reader over the head with grand historico-political lessons.