This week in the Great Books List

The Narrow Road to the Deep North , Basho. 1702

Basho, was the pseudonym of Matsuo Munefusa, a Japanese poet, who is considered the master of the Japanese poetic form, haiku, was the most famous poet of the Edo period in Japan. Basho is also celebrated for his works in the collaborative haikai no renga form. His poetry is internationally renowned, and within Japan many of his poems revered. Oku no Hosomichi or The Narrow Road to the Deep North was inspired by a journey taken by Bashō in the late spring of 1689. Read more here.

Book of the week

Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen

In this week's Salon, Laura Miller looks at an exquisite new novel about delusions and the weather. She writes, "Last December," explains the narrator of "Atmospheric Disturbances," Rivka Galchen's droll, exquisite first novel, "a woman entered my apartment who looked exactly like my wife." The speaker is Leo Liebenstein, a New York psychiatrist, and the wife is Rema, an Argentine considerably younger than her husband. Confronted with this ingenious impostor (she's so good he briefly contemplates the possibility that one of her feet might really be his wife's), Leo is initially nonplused. Soon, however, he formulates a plan: find the real Rema. His search spans continents, entails a possible career change and enlists the help of a patient who says he can manipulate the weather. Read the review here.

Articles of note

Revisiting the spellbinding Saki

Christopher Hitchens waxes on the spellbinding qualities of H.H. Munro, AKA Saki. In this month's The Atlantic, Hitchens writes "At the age of 15, Noël Coward was staying in an English country house and found a copy of Beasts and Super-Beasts on a table: “I took it up to my bedroom, opened it casually and was unable to go to sleep until I had finished it.” I had a similar experience at about the same age, and I agree with Coward that H. H. Munro—or “Saki,” the author of the book in question—is among those few writers, inspirational when read at an early age, who definitely retain their magic when revisited decades later. I have the impression that Saki is not very much appreciated in the United States. Good." Read more here.