Four Winds Press
PROJECT DETAILS
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Category: Essays
Release Date: April 2015
Print Length: 248 pages
Trim Size: 5.5" x 8.5"
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FORMATS
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Paperback, $15.95
ISBN: 978-1-94023-06-7
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Ebook, $15.95
ISBN: 978-1-94023-07-4
ABOUT THE BOOK
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A brilliant collection of essays that offer an eloquent justification for comparing apples and oranges.
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What does it mean when people say “You can’t compare apples and oranges”? Are comparisons across genres inherently invalid, or can they be illuminating? In 22 wide-ranging essays, Dutch author Maarten Asscher maintains that comparisons can be the highest form of argument.
Asscher makes his case with examples drawn from classical to contemporary history, art, and literature: Hamlet in Ithaca and Telemachus in Elsinore, the Mediterranean and the North Sea, writing from a prison cell and writing from a room at home, the “suicide” of Primo Levi and Japanese Kamikaze pilots . . . With graceful erudition and idiosyncratic wit, Asscher demonstrates how the comparative method can provide insight not only into two subjects simultaneously, but also into fundamental issues they may have in common.​
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Maarten Asscher
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Maarten Asscher studied law and Assyriology at Leiden University in the Netherlands. He started his career in literary publishing in 1980 and became the Dutch publisher of writers such as Carlos Fuentes, Primo Levi, Amos Oz, James Salter and Wisława Szymborska. In 2004, after six years as a cultural policy advisor at the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, he went on to become director and co-owner of the Athenaeum Bookshop in Amsterdam. In 2018 he decided to devote his energy fulltime to writing and to translating poetry.
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From 1992 onwards he published novels, short stories and novellas, and several books of essays. In 2015 he obtained a PhD in comparative literature with a dissertation on imprisonment as a literary experience. Most of his books have also appeared in German translation. He has translated poetry by Paul Valéry, Albrecht Haushofer, and Fernando Pessoa and produced a Dutch translation of Oscar Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol.
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Maarten Asscher is married and lives in Amsterdam. He has three adult daughters.
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ALSO BY MAARTEN ASSCHER: Oscar Wilde's Crucifx: A Biographical Experiment
