“To the best of my recollection, I was in my late thirties when I started telling people I was going to translate The Great Gatsby when I turned sixty. … Metaphorically speaking, I had placed Gatsby securely on my kamidana, the high shelf that serves as a household shrine to the Shinto gods, and then lived my life glancing up at it from time to time.”
Category: publishing
Coming Out Of The Closet As A Gatsby Hater
Kathryn Schulz: “I find Gatsby aesthetically overrated, psychologically vacant, and morally complacent; I think we kid ourselves about the lessons it contains. None of this would matter much to me if Gatsby were not also sacrosanct. Books being borderline irrelevant in America, one is generally free to dislike them – but not this book.”
Blame Game – Art Of The Literary Feud
“If you get a bad review and you’re from Newfoundland, it’s because of geography; if you get a bad review and you’re a woman, it’s because of gender. Here’s a recent example of how this works.”
Remember The Whole Earth Catalog?
“Though it wasn’t exactly a book, it was a how-to manual, a compendium, an enyclopedia, a literary review, an opinionated life guide, and a collection of readers’ recommendations and reviews of everything from computational physics to goat husbandry. … [It] came to be the magnum opus of the entire counterculture.”
How Crowdsourced Personalization Could Save Publishing
“Personalization is as much a buzzword nowadays as disruption, big data, or the cloud. It might also be part of the solution to pull the publishing industry out of the downward revenue spiral it’s been stuck in for years.”
Mother Demands Michigan School District Censor ‘Pornographic’ Anne Frank Diary
“According to one Michigan mother, the unedited version of the landmark account of a young girl’s life during the Holocaust is inappropriate for 7th-graders because of a scene in which Frank discusses her female anatomy.”
More And More US Cities (Even Fresno!) Appoint Poets Laureate
“For many poets, and those in the poetry business, the popularity of poets laureate – those who labor over words to sing a community’s virtues or plumb its psyche in an age defined by Twitter messages – is a pleasant surprise. Why now, though, remains something of a mystery.”
Translators Of Dan Brown’s Inferno Confined In Underground Bunker
simultaneously that they hired 11 translators from France, Spain, Germany, Brazil and Italy to translate it intensively between February and April 2012. The translators are said to have worked seven days a week until at least 8pm, in a windowless, high-security basement.”
UK Academics Protesting Education Cuts Are Themselves Dinged For Bad Grammar
“The 100 educators have inadvertently made an argument for precisely the sort of formal education the letter is opposing.”
How Much Have This Year’s Pulitzer Prizes Helped Book Sales?
“Two weeks after the 2013 Pulitzers were announced, all five winning books have, in fact, seen an increase in sales. The numbers, however, are woefully underwhelming.”