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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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TT: An all-American bookshelf

December 8, 2007 by Terry Teachout

Kalima, a United Arab Emirates-based non-profit venture, has just announced plans to translate a very wide-ranging list of foreign books into Arabic and distribute them throughout the Middle East. The inspiration for this idealistic enterprise was a UN report about human development in the Arab world which pointed out that more books are translated into Spanish every year than were translated into Arabic in the whole of the last millennium–an extraordinary and disturbing statistic.
Learning about Kalima inspired me to draw up my own list, a compact boxful of books that I’d send to an Arab (or any other foreigner) who wanted to know what America and its people were like. The list, not surprisingly, became the subject of this week’s “Sightings” column.
Which books did I pick? Here’s a hint: Willa Cather made the cut. To find out more, pick up a copy of Saturday’s Wall Street Journal and turn to my “Sightings” column in the Weekend Journal section.
UPDATE: To read the whole thing, go here.

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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