Member: svoboda

It's beautiful...and a bit eerie. I am looking forward to reading it!!!!!!!!I cannot help but think of a film called LIttle Otik, a surrealist film by a Czech couple (2000) I pulled this on the internet:

Karel Horák (Jan Hartl) and Božena Horáková (Veronika Žilková) are a childless couple and for medical reasons are doomed to remain so. While on vacation with their neighbors at a house in the country, Karel decides to buy the house at the suggestion of his neighbor. When he is fixing up the house, he digs up a tree stump that looks vaguely like a baby. He spends the rest of the evening cleaning it up and then presents it to his wife. She names the stump Otík and starts to treat it like a real baby. She then works out a plan to fake her pregnancy and becoming more and more impatient she speeds up the process and 'gives birth' one month early.
Otík comes alive and has an insatiable appetite. Alžbětka (Kristina Adamcová), the neighbor's daughter, who has been suspicious all along, when she reads the fairy tale about Otesánek, the truth sets in for her. Meanwhile little Otík has been just eating and growing. At one point he eats some of Božena's hair, and another day she returns home to find that Otík has eaten their cat. Karel and his wife are at odds with Karel pushing for killing the thing and Božena defending it as their child. The baby later consumes a postal worker (Gustav Vondráček) and then a social worker (Jitka Smutná).

posted by lstover at 6:33 pm (EST) on Nov 3, 2009

The wind was against them now, and Piglet's ears streamed behind him like banners as he fought his way along, and it seemed hours before he got them into the shelter of the Hundred Acre Wood and they stood up straight again, to listen, a little nervously to the roaring of the gail among the tree tops.
"Supposing a tree fell down, Pooh, when we were underneath it?"
"Supposing it didn't" said Pooh after careful thought!

A.A Milne Winnie the Pooh

posted by theoldman at 8:52 am (EST) on Aug 27, 2009

Hi Terese:

I'm glad you saw the squib in the Japan Times. I meant to send you a message about it, but . . . one thing and another.

Best,

David

posted by dcozy at 1:52 am (EST) on Dec 21, 2008

Terese,

Sorry I haven't replied until now. I hadn't been on LT for quite some time and just now updated my account. I loved Trailer Girl--your work as a poet shines through. And, your book about your uncle sounds fascinating. I order all the fiction for our public library--and because I read/write poetry--order the poetry for our collection. I am definitley asking my colleague who orders the nonfiction to get Black Glasses Like Clark Kent. Thanks for the note!

posted by bibliofile55 at 8:50 am (EST) on Aug 21, 2008

PS: If you don't mind giving me a postal address I'll send you a hard copy.

posted by dcozy at 7:59 am (EST) on May 26, 2008

Hi Terese:

My review of Black Glasses Like Clark Kent appeared Sunday, May 25 in The Japan Times (Tokyo). You can read it on-line here:

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/f...

Thank you very much for the review copy, and for having written such a good book.

Best,

David

posted by dcozy at 7:58 am (EST) on May 26, 2008

Thanks!

Best,

posted by dcozy at 6:09 pm (EST) on Mar 1, 2008

Ms. Svoboda,

Your book, Trailer Girl: And Other Stories is an excellent collection of short fiction. Your characters are poignant, gritty and tremendously human. It's wonderful to find you here.

Lisa Haynes

posted by anoisblue at 11:39 pm (EST) on Sep 28, 2007

I won the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize for the memoir. It's called Black Glasses Like Clark Kent and will appear in February. I'd be glad to send you a galley. Maybe email you a copy! He was an MP in postwar Japan who guarded an American stockade in which a gallows was built--and used on American soldiers, by Americans. It's the untold story of violence between Americans and Japanese during that Occupation.

These are my blurbs so far:

Delving into the past, in this wonderful, singularly wry memoir, turns up enough guilt to go around for everyone. And yet, such is the honesty, humor and literary skill of Terese Svoboda that she manages to turn this sad story into a triumph of compassion and insight.
- Phillip Lopate, author of "The Art of the Personal Essay"

"Few books over the past decade have surprised and moved me as much as Terese Svoboda’s Black Glasses Like Clark Kent. A family romance in the guise of a biography and memoir, this is also a mystery in the spirit of writers as various as Dashiell Hammett and Sigmund Freud, Patricia Highsmith and D. W. Winnicott. Black Glasses is, as Svoboda intimates, a 'triptych,' a three-story house that spans World War II Japan and contemporary America, creating imaginative space for the intricate lives of her uncle and cousin as well as her own. Resourceful, elegantly phrased, angry, stubborn, fierce, beautiful, and ultimately devastating— I’m honored and pleased to award the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize to Terese Svoboda's Black Glasses Like Clark Kent." Robert Polito, author of "Crime Novels."

"When Teresa Svoboda agrees to write the war story of her uncle, who served
in the American military police in Japan in the aftermath of World War II,
she enters a nightmarish world of secrets and irretrievable truths.
Lucid, self-knowing and artful, her memoir about getting the story will
resonate for readers of every generation."
Alice Kaplan, author of "The Interpreter"

posted by svoboda at 9:11 am (EST) on Sep 10, 2007

Thanks for your note. Who's publishing the memoir? And who was your uncle? Was he well-known? What was he doing in Japan? (I review books about Japan for a couple of nationally distributed newspapers here, and am always looking for interesting things to write about.)

Best,

posted by dcozy at 9:41 pm (EST) on Jul 16, 2007