Cynthia Haven

Writer and Editor at Freelance

@NEHgov Public Scholar; Author: Czesław Miłosz: A California Life; Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard. @nytimesbooks @theTLS @thenation @vqr @WSJBooks

Articles

Joseph Brodsky’s 85th birthday today! Celebrate with a few books - he would!

1 month ago | bookhaven.stanford.edu | Cynthia Haven

Today is Nobel poet Joseph Brodsky’s 85th birthday. What better way to celebrate than by celebrating the books that have celebrated him. One is by my humble self, the book by Ellendea Proffer, who with her husband, the late Carl Proffer, brought the future Nobel poet to AmericaOh, there’s another good way to celebrate, perhaps the best: return to his books, essay, and lectures. Meanwhile, three of the books. See more here. Many thanks to Vladimir Maksakov for compiling a list.
Huckleberry Finn, Jim, and the “lie of silent assertion”

1 month ago | bookhaven.stanford.edu | Cynthia Haven

Stanford English Professor Shelley Fisher Fishkin has written lots about Mark Twain, and the Book Haven has written about it here and here and here, among other places. She’s just published a new book – and we mean new, only a few weeks out with Yale University Press: Jim: The Life and Afterlives of Huckleberry Finn’s Comrade. Her birthday was celebrated today with a party with her husband Prof. Prof. James Fishkin, a Stanford politics and communications scholar.
Cynthia’s Substack

2 months ago | cynthialhaven.substack.com | Cynthia Haven

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Belief in Nothing

Mar 24, 2025 | wisdomofcrowds.live | Leo Strauss |Cynthia Haven

Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements, and national debates that piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: the nihilism(s) of our time. Join us! CrowdSource features the best comments from The Crowd — our cherished readers and subscribers who, with their comments and emails, help make Wisdom of Crowds what it is.
Cynthia’s Substack

Mar 20, 2025 | cynthialhaven.substack.com | Cynthia Haven

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"A moralizing scientific fable written in the spirit of Diderot"

Mar 20, 2025 | cynthialhaven.substack.com | Cynthia Haven

Stanford will be featuring an “Another Look” discussion of Dino Buzzati’s 1960 The Singularity on Thursday, April 17, in Levinthal Hall at the Stanford Humanities Center at 424 Santa Teresa Street on the Stanford campus.Register for the event, whether on zoom or in person, here. In preparation for the event,Another Look director, Stanford Prof. Robert Pogue Harrison, interviewed Edwin Frank, director of New York Review Books and the founder of the NYRB series.
"I relearned that good philosophy makes us uncomfortable."

Mar 15, 2025 | cynthialhaven.substack.com | Cynthia Haven

Józef Tischner was also a prominent figure in Solidarity. Not many in the West know the name of Polish intellectual, philosopher and priest Józef Tischner, author of the just-published The Philosophy of Drama. My friend, Artur Rosman, an associate research professor at the University of Notre Dame and the editor-in-chief of the mega-traffic Church Life Journal, has just translated and published the thick volume with the University of Notre Dame Press.
The woman who bested C.S. Lewis in an Oxford debate

Mar 7, 2025 | cynthialhaven.substack.com | Cynthia Haven

March 18 will be the 105th birthday of the Irish moral philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe of Oxford, a staunch Catholic who famously debated C.S. Lewis and managed to get him to rethink his ideas on miracles. She also famously defended the view that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were intrinsically evil as they were attacks on noncombatants. “For men to choose to kill the innocent as a means to their ends is always murder, and murder is one of the worst of human actions ...
Poet in the New World by Czesław Miłosz

Feb 26, 2025 | the-tls.co.uk | Cynthia Haven

Welcome to the TLSWinner of the 2024 Niche Market Newspaper of the Year Award and proudly niche since 1902.
W.H. Auden: "You have got to have a marvelous sense of line endings."

Feb 15, 2025 | cynthialhaven.substack.com | Cynthia Haven

You once said that you thought Dante, Langland, and Pope were the three major influences and most important poetic figures for you. Would you please comment on that? They vary at different times. Pope has always been, but at the moment I would say that my two chief models are Horace and the classical Goethe of the middle period - "Metamorphosis of Plants" and that sort of thing. I have always loved Horace, but when I was young, I knew I couldn't use him yet. Now I can.