Everything to do with letters
Cabaret artist Marjolijn van Kooten (43) has an anxiety disorder. With her book 'Schijtluis', she wants to break a taboo: if you suffer from an anxiety disorder, you should not be ashamed of it. Van Kooten writes extensively about her fears in 'Schijtluis'. It makes for a quirky and disconcerting book. Schijtluis is a diary. Openly and honestly, Van Kooten describes...
Het werd wel ‘de kunstroof van de eeuw’ genoemd: de diefstal van zeven beroemde schilderijen uit de Kunsthal, drie jaar geleden. De daders bleken vier Roemenen zonder enig benul van kunst. Schrijfster Mira Feticu, van origine Roemeense, schreef er een roman over. Zeven belangrijke schilderijen werden er gestolen uit de Kunsthal: een Van Gogh, een Picasso, twee zeldzame werken van…
Three years ago, the suspicion was already expressed in America; now it is also penetrating Europe. People are reading far more than bookshops and publishers think. And this is not even due to the illegal downloading of bestsellers that everyone is so worried about. Logical, because what people are reading so fanatically is not the book you find in a bookshop,...
'See, that's how it goes.' Esther Ending flips open a magazine containing an interview following her new novel An Island of Her Own, set on Ibiza, the island where she grew up. The article is not about her novel, but, unbeknownst to her, is part of a story about partying, drinking and drug use. [Tweet...
Alleen al vanwege het gebouw was literatuurfestival City2Cities een bezoek waard. Het Postkantoor op de Utrechtse Neude, in 1924 gebouwd als ode aan de vooruitgang in een stijl die het mooiste van de Amsterdamse School samenbracht, was immers al jaren dicht. Dus ook wie niet opgewonden raakt van Nick Cave en wie Michel Houellebecq een engerd vindt, had een reden…
Libraries are mostly negative in the news. Branches have to close, members walk away and there is an ongoing debate about their right to exist. But in Amersfoort, the library is on the rise. Over the past year, visitor numbers have risen sharply. An advance confession: I am a nostalgic library visitor. As a little boy, I used to borrow The Shipboys of Bontekoe, Eagle's Eye and...
The interesting thing about Financieel Dagblad columnist Annemarie van Gaal's stories is that you don't have to agree with her text at all but can still enjoy it. In her column in the newspaper of 13 April 2014, however, there is something else going on. Here, the conscience of financial and business Netherlands shows a very serious lack of...
Boekreview “A whole New Mind” door Daniel H. Pink Tussen alle negatieve berichten over de toekomst van de kunsten poppen zo nu en dan ook andere geluiden op. 1 van de meest indrukwekkende tegengeluiden is voor mij het boek “A whole new mind” van Daniel H. Pink. Volgens Daniel gaan kunstenaars en creatieven het de komende jaren helemaal maken. We zitten…
Boy Edgar was the most famous big band leader of his time, but at the same time a busy doctor and an alcoholic. A biography on this ADHD'ing all-rounder was published for the first time. An impressive, sometimes disconcerting book marred only occasionally by factual inaccuracies. By day he was, among other things, a renowned neurologist, a revolutionary abortionist and the first general practitioner in the Bijlmermeer. 's...
De kritische commotie die er is ontstaan rondom de verfilming van het boek Vijftig tinten grijs van E.L. James lijkt zich vooral te richten op de brave tamheid van het eindproduct. Iets dat in contrast staat met de vermeende gewaagdheid van het boek, waar een maagdelijke jonge vrouw zich seksueel laat inwijden door een rijke SM-yup. Filmcriticus Antony Lane somde…
The play 'Heart' is one for your bucket list. In other words, the play 'Heart', created by Matzer Theatre Productions as an adaptation of Lisette Lewin's book 'Heart of Barbed Wire', is a play you really must have seen. Why? I'll give you 4 reasons why. 1: The book is no longer on sale Lisette Lewin wrote a book in 1992 that...
A few months ago, the Council for Culture advised Minister Bussemaker to maintain the law on fixed book prices. And that while the functioning of the law has not been proven at all. For enterprising booksellers, this law is a block. This law earned erotic department store Christine le Duc a €15,000 fine. They came up with a playful...
More than 10,000 lines of verse comprise Englishman John Milton's poem Paradise Lost (1667). It cannot be easy to capture that in an hour-long dance performance and yet that is what choreographer Samir Calixto set out to do. Earlier, the young Brazilian cut his teeth on Schubert's Winterreise and Vivaldi's Four Seasons. On Friday, he opened with Paradise Lost the...
How do you get back home mentally after a war? David van Reybrouck in conversation with Stefan Hertmans and Ian Buruma Carrots, potatoes, maybe some celery and a dash of lard, this was the monotonous winter diet of the underclass in rural Flanders in the late nineteenth century. But, outlines professor and guest speaker Louise O. Fresco in her opening column, these days it is the...
Through the local theatre's website, I want to order tickets. I click on the performance of my choice. Select a date. Select the desired number of tickets. Click on "to pay". And there I can choose from at least 3 options to pay less for my tickets. Five euros discount with a CJP or as a person over 65. Four euros discount with...
He had had a TED training. It couldn't be otherwise. Bart Moeyaert, poet, writer and multiple award winner, sometimes literally wriggled into numerous corners to warm up the Dutch literary guild to his plans for 2016. That year, for the first time in a long time, the Netherlands will host the Frankfurter Buchmesse again, the Art Basel of the literary world....
'Do you not agree with me that many of you - like members of Roman Catholic curia - are already trying to make yourselves immortal and indispensable? That you are suffering from severe mental and spiritual petrification?' Kees 't Hart measured himself a papal role on Sunday 18 January, when delivering The State of Dutch Literature,...
Radbraken. This is how it works: you tie someone to a sturdy cartwheel, then break all his or her bones by beating them country-wide with clubs, after which you braid the mangled limbs around the spokes of the wheel. It is essential that the punished person undergoes all this alive and conscious. After the treatment, you bring the wheel with...
Zelden twee vrouwelijke kunstenaars aan een tafel gezien die meer van elkaar verschilden dan Dominique Goblet en Leela Corman. Twee vrouwelijke striptekenaars, aan weerszijden van Peter Breedveld die elk jaar als kenner van het comic genre wordt ingevlogen op Writers Unlimited. Corman, naast striptkenaar ook danseres, schrijft haar verhalen in een vrij herkenbare stijl. Indrukwekkende verhalen, historisch, zoals haar laatste…
Nii Ayikwei Parks wants to write a book describing bad places in Africa as ideal, so that people who use his books as travel guides will be mugged and robbed and thus will learn what fiction is. With this humorous statement, the British-born and British-based writer, who spent his childhood with his Ghanaian parents in Ghana, brings some air into the evening...
Home is where The hell is. The naming of Writers Unlimited's programme sections leaves little to the imagination. And listening to the opening of this particular section, writer Maaza Mengiste is not one to leave us with pleasant thoughts either. She has plunged literarily into the plight of refugees coming from Ethiopia to...
20 years of Writers Unlimited's existence, and the anniversary, now in The Hague, comes at a time when free writing worldwide is under heavier pressure than ever. Perhaps that is also why the audience is more numerous than previous editions. All nights are rigidly sold out, making for a rather sweltering atmosphere at the Theater aan het Spui. Apt opening of...
"Everyone who writes will sooner or later run into a wall, a limit of what cannot, should not and should not be written. And almost everyone will flinch at that moment and refrain from writing it. Because that wall is there to protect us from what we don't want." Karl Ove Knausgård, already compared by some to Marcel Proust,...
You have to do something with these new media. Although there are poets and writers who are disgusted by anything that seems to be more than scarce ink on white paper. For the group of innovators, the literary fund has set up a project together with the Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum and the stimuleringsfonds creatieve industrie. Writers and poets will receive a few thousand euros p.p. to work together...
Since the cuts, it has become a bitter necessity for many, cultural entrepreneurship. But what exactly that is, nobody knows at all. Even the government actually has no idea when talking about it. But, the government asks, so there must be an answer. In recent years, the Dutch art world has been flooded with self-proclaimed experience experts on cultural entrepreneurship....
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