Oranges & Peanuts for Sale

Oranges & Peanuts for Sale

<p>Presented at the PEN World Voices Festival as a “post-national” writer, Eliot Weinberger is “a sparkling essayist” (<em>Confrontation</em>), and his writings “a boundary-crossing, shape-shifting cabinet of curiosities” (<em>The Bloomsbury Review</em>).</p><br />Many of the twenty-eight essays in <em>Oranges & Peanuts for Sale</em> 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 <em>The New York Review of Books</em>, <em>The London Review of Books</em>, and <em>October</em>.<br /><br /><br /><br />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 <em>New York</em>. Another section is a continuation of Weinberger’s celebrated political articles collected in <em>What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles</em> (a finalist for the National Books Critics Circle Award), including a sequel to “What I Heard About Iraq,” which the <em>Guardian</em> called the only antiwar “classic” of the Iraq War. A new installment of his magnificent linked “serial essay,” <em>An Elemental Thing</em>, takes us on a journey down the Yangtze River during the Sung Dynasty.<br /><br /><br /><br />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.