Category: words

Why? Because novels are about interiority. “One of the great fights of the 21st century will be the fight for privacy and self-ownership, which is also, to my mind, the struggle for literature as distinct from the dark babble of social media. Writers thrive on privacy, not on Twitter, and so do readers when the lights are low.”

For one piece, the necessary reporting might include 20 books. Adam Gopnik writes with the morning coffee from 9 and reads after dinner until 11, usually for four hours each. “I’ve discovered that reading is actually one of those skills that increases exponentially the more of it you do, and it doesn’t stop improving the older you get, which is an encouraging fact,” he told me. For work, he now reads the average book, preferably with Mozart or Haydn playing, in one and a half, maybe two hours.

The idea of forming some kind of “literary translators’ agency”—which would perform a similar role to an author’s agency—is one that translators have been mulling over for years. After all, such agencies exist for most other creative professions, such as illustrators, actors, musicians, and designers. But it’s a rather tough nut to crack for literary translators, mainly because there simply isn’t enough money in literary translation to make such a venture financially sustainable.

From public “type-ins” at bars to street poets selling personalized, typewritten poems on the spot, typewriters have emerged as popular items with aficionados hunting for them in thrift stores, online auction sites and antique shops. Some buy antique Underwoods to add to a growing collection. Others search for a midcentury Royal Quiet De Luxe — like a model author Ernest Hemingway used — to work on that simmering novel.

“Postmodernism has lost its value in part because it has oversaturated the market. And with the end of postmodernism’s playfulness and affectation, we are better placed to construct a literature that engages earnestly with real-world problems. This new literature can, in good faith, examine complex and ever-shifting crises – of racial inequality, capitalism and climate change – to which it is easy to close one’s eyes.”

“David Grossman’s ‘ambitious high-wire act of a novel’, A Horse Walks Into a Bar, set around a standup comic’s rambling and confessional routine in an Israeli comedy club, has won the Man Booker International prize for the year’s best fiction in translation.” … Grossman, a bestselling writer of fiction, nonfiction and children’s books who has been translated into 36 languages, will share the £50,000 prize with his English translator, Jessica Cohen.”

As if it weren’t bad enough that the terrorist group torched rare old books and manuscripts in the municipal library while they occupied the city, as ISIS was being driven out of Mosul by Iraqi government forces, it burned down the university’s library building and its entire collection, one of the most important in the Middle East. Robin Wright visits the wreckage.

Okay, there have surely been worse bestsellers in the 48 years since, but probably none that were deliberately bad. Producer Sam Kim has assembled the first-hand story of the newspaper writers who pulled of one of the great “literary” (if that’s the word) hoaxes of the 20th century. (audio)

Not a tiger mother (as his book makes clear, Vance’s mother did not qualify), but the Tiger Mother, Amy Chua, who was his law professor at Yale. The two authors talk to Caroline Kitchener about their mentoring relationship and how Chua helped bring Vance’s bestseller into being.

A Pulitzer-winning author of poetry and nonfiction who directs the creative writing program at Princeton (and the erstwhile NPR NewsPoet), Smith says, “I think the responsibility really is to just help raise the awareness of poetry and its value in our culture. To me that means talking to people – getting off the usual path of literary festivals and university reading series and talking to people who might not even yet be readers of poetry.”