What Is a Zola?
I’m not entirely sure what a Zola is—an ebook only store! a social network for readers! a discovery engine! something made in Manhattan!—but apparently it’s important enough to acquire (and thankfully dismantle) Bookish. From Publishers Weekly: Bookish, the struggling social network funded by ...
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The Snow Day Edition [Some January Translations]
Along with about, well, everyone else in the northeast, I’m snowed into my apartment today, so instead of answering the phones at Open Letter (HA! no one ever calls us), I’m at home, working on our forthcoming anthology of Spanish literature, A Thousand Forests in One Acorn, and, as a break of sorts, I thought ...
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The Faint-hearted Bolshevik
Let’s say you’re in a car accident. It’s not a bad one. You rear-end someone on a busy highway where traffic is crawling. And let’s say the person you hit happens to be a wealthy woman who leaps from her vehicle and berates you in language unfit for the ears of small children. What would you do? Javier, the supposed ...
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The Expedition to the Baobab Tree
In the beginning of The Expedition to the Baobab Tree by Afrikaans author Wilma Stockenström, the narrator, a former slave, walks on the path from the hollow trunk of the baobab tree in which she dwells to a water source that she shares with animals. As she collects her water using two “gifts” (a clay pot and an ostrich ...
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The Hare
“I should say at the outset that there is a lot of absurdity in the whole thing.” As the shaman MallĂ©n prepares to explain to Clarke the legend of the Legibrerian hare, I can’t help but read “the whole thing” as not simply the legend, but indeed the entire novel. At nearly 300 pages, The Hare is a great deal ...
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My Poems Won't Change the World
“The more bored you are, the more attached you get. I’m so bored, I no longer want to die.” So reads an entire poem by Patrizia Cavalli (translated by Gini Alhadeff) confirming for many critics of poetry what they’ve always believed: poets are gloomy, self-pitying bastards. *** The (incredibly exaggerated) ...
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Contest for Latvian and Estonian Translators
The Latvian and Estonian ministries of foreign affairs have announced a contest for the best Latvian-to-Estonian and Estonian-to-Latvian translations of 2013. Below is the information from the Latvian Ministry of Foreign Affairs: The Latvian and Estonian ministries of foreign affairs announce their annual contest for the ...
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