· 2016
"An ode to the imagination."—NRC Handelsblad A joy to read, La Superba, winner of the most prestigious Dutch literary prize, is a Rabelaisian, stylistic tour-de-force. Migration, legal and illegal, is at the center of this novel about a writer who becomes trapped in his walk on the wild side in mysterious and exotic Genoa, the labyrinthine port city nicknamed "La Superba." Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer (b. 1968), poet, dramatist, novelist, renowned in the Netherlands as a master of language, is the only two-time winner of the Tzum Prize for "the most beautiful sentence written in Dutch" (including one in La Superba!).
· 2009
Rupert has been accused of a terrible crime and his imagined defense begins the night he met the love of his life, Mira. By turns shockingl honest, incredibly funny and clearly unhinged, Rupert's defense includes rants about the properly formed insult and men in sweaters. It also visits the memory sites of Rupert and Mira's short lived affair. With each story Rupert attaches to these places his defense becomes a little more outlandish, while he comes convinced that his innocence is beyond doubt. A brilliant monologue that fully exposes the inner workings of the mind.
· 1999
This book is about passages where Pindar uses the future tense with reference to himself or to his song. It addresses the question as to exactly what the function is of the future tense in those passages. This is a vexed problem, which has played a major role in Pindaric criticism for the last decades and which has recently gained relevance for the interpretation of other authors as well. This book offers a detailed examination of all the relevant passages in Pindar, as well as a generous amount of examples from other authors. It takes a firm stand against the communis opinio that first person futures in Pindar merely express a present intention: the so-called "encomiastic" or "performative" future. It demonstrates that the reference to a future moment is relevant in every single instance of a future verb in Pindar and concludes that there is no such thing as an "encomiastic" future. Inhalt: Futures with a text internal reference - Futures referring to a later moment in the ode - "Fictional" futures - Generic futures - Futures with a specific text external reference - The case of Olympian XI - First person futures in Theocritus' second Idyll & magical texts. (Franz Steiner 1999)
· 2022
Longlisted for the 2023 DUBLIN Literary Award "[Grand Hotel Europa] calls to mind Nabokov, Tom Wolfe, Baudrillard, Umberto Eco, Wes Anderson . . . [a novel of] incorrigible high spirits." —Rand Richards Cooper, The New York Times Book Review A sweeping, atmospheric novel about European identity, centered on a hotel that encapsulates the continent's manifold contradictions. The love of my life lives in my past. Despite the alliteration it’s a terrible line to have to write. I don’t want to come to the conclusion, just as the hotel I’m staying in and the continent it is named after, that the best times are behind me and that I’ve little more to expect of the future than living off my past. A writer takes up residence in the stately but decaying Grand Hotel Europa in order to contemplate where things went wrong with Clio—an art historian and the love of his life. His recollections take him back to when they first met in Genoa, his wanton visits to her in Venice, and their dulcet trips to Malta, Palmaria, Portovenere, and the Cinque Terre in their thrilling search for the last painting made by Caravaggio. Meanwhile, he becomes fascinated by the mysteries of the Grand Hotel Europa and the memorably eccentric characters who inhabit it, all of whom seem to hail from a halcyon era. All the while, globalization is laying claim to even this place, where a sense of lost glory hangs sulkily in the air. Grand Hotel Europa is Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer’s masterly novel of the old continent, where there's so much history that there hardly seems space left for a future. Cinematic, lyrical, and brimming with humor, this is a novel about the European condition, which like the staff and residents of the Grand Hotel Europa may have already seen its best days.
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· 2018
Een schrijver doet per brief aan een vriend verslag van zijn uitbundige leven in de Italiaanse stad Genua.
This book deals with political propoganda in classical antiquity, exploring the contexts, strategies, and parameters of a fascinating phenomenon that has often been approached with anachronistic models (such as the centrally organized 'propaganda machines' of the 20th-century totalitarian regimes) or completely ignored. It offers case studies on the archaic period, classical Athens, the Hellenistic kingdoms, the Augustan age and the late Roman empire, and emphasizes concepts such as interaction, integration, and horizontal orientation.
· 1999
A study of three "epinicia" of Pindar, which have in common that they celebrate victories of Aeginetan athletes. The primary objective of this book is to provide an interpretation of each of the three odes as meaningful, coherent works of the literary art.
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· 2019
The work of artist Erik Odijk (1959) consists of drawings, photographs and works of art in public space. Odijk is best known for his large drawings, often made on location or in his studio, in which fragments from nature always form the most important visual elements. Drawings that let you wander with your gaze and amaze you about the effects he achieves with mainly black and white drawing material, for example charcoal.00The book 'The Academy of the Sublime' shows a selection of Erik Odijk's work from 2005 to the present. The book consists of three separate 'magazines' and illustrates the three different disciplines in the artist's oeuvre by means of 150 illustrations. The separate magazines are combined in a single large format folder. The large format allows the viewer/reader to disappear into Odijk's work, as it were, because the details of the work are clearly visible in this way. 00With text contributions by artist Erik Odijk, landscape architect Paul Roncken, novelist and poet Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer, artist and writer Anne Bruggenkamp and writer and journalist Hans Maarten van den Brink.
De vriendschap tussen Erik Jan Harmens en Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer is gebaseerd op hun compromisloosheid; hun liefde voor taal; het gevoel voor vuige humor; de totale inzet. Een klein jaar lang stuurden ze elkaar met sardonisch genoegen strofes, gaven voorzetten om elkaar vlak voor het inkoppen pootje te lichten. In Duetten klinken twee stemmen van geheel verschillende klankkleur die in onwaarschijnlijke samenzang een dringend lied zingen dat de wereld naar de ratsmodee gaat.
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