The Book of Emotions
At its inauguration in 1960, Brasília was baptized “The Capital of Hope.” It is a city that was carved out from scratch in the cerrado, a woodland savannah in the middle of Brazil, in just 41 months of construction. It is also a city completely planned out, a city born without any residents. When Clarice Lispector, one ...
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It's Fine By Me
On an early morning in Oslo in 1970, Arvid Jansen shimmies up his high school flagpole and replaces his nation’s flag with that of the Viet Cong. Confronted by the headmaster in front of his classmates, Arvid takes the opportunity to expound on the evils of the U.S. occupation of Vietnam and Norway’s complicit foreign ...
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More about Mo Yan's "POW!"
One of the things that may have gotten buried in all the articles about Mo Yan receiving this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature is the fact that Seagull Books is bringing out his next work in English translation—POW!, which sounds pretty wild, and has been compared to the works of Witold Gombrowicz and Javok ...
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Rosalind Harvey on Translation
The new issue of FSG’s Work in Progress weekly newsletter (which is maybe the best publisher newsletter out there), has an interview with Rosalind Harvey, co-translator with Anne McLean of Oblivion by Hector Abad and Dublinesque by Enrique Vila-Matas, and solo translator of Juan Pablo Villalobos’s Down the Rabbit ...
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Lawrence Ferlinghetti Declines 50,000 Euro Prize from Hungarian PEN Club
Just received this email from New Directions, and rather than summarize and all that, I’m just going to let it stand alone. (Ironic that this comes out on the day of the Nobel Prize announcement . . . ). So here’s a letter from ND publisher Barbara Epler: October 11, 2012 Late last week, we learned that famed ...
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Mo Yan Wins the 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature
In case you’re just getting up and haven’t heard the news, Mo Yan was awarded this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature. The Nobel Prize in Literature 2012 was awarded to Mo Yan “who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary”. Admittedly, I’ve never ...
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Nobel Prize in Literature Will Be Announced Tomorrow
And if Murakami Haruki wins, I’m calling in sick. Those odds are plain out stupid. I sort of find the betting on literary prizes angle to be intriguing, but it’s so clear that the betting public is basically no more knowledgable than a herd of sheep, and just as likely to follow and loud dog. And why is Bob ...
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