Honorary Powerful Support
Over at the New York Times, there’s a neat interactive feature showing a bunch of Western products and what their names are when transliterated into Chinese. This kind of thing is always a fun diversion . . . Here are my personal favorites: Citibank = Star-spangled banner bank This makes total sense, especially ...
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Thrown into Nature
Milen Ruskov’s second published novel (and first to be translated into English), Thrown Into Nature poses as the traipsing and unfinished manuscript of an eager young Guimaraes da Silva (“The ‘da Silva’ part is made-up, by the way, since an aristocratic title causes people pay more attention to what you say.”). Set ...
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2012 International Prize for Arabic Fiction Longlist
Seems like today is a day of award announcements . . . The International Prize for Arabic Fiction (aka, the Arab Booker) started five years ago as a way of bringing more international attention to great works of arabic literature. So far, they’ve given the award to five titles (two won last year), and all ...
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2011 Finlandia Prize
This year’s shortlist for the Finlandia Fiction Prize—awarded annually to the best novel written by a Finnish citizen—was announced yesterday, and is unique in that it’s the first list of finalists comprised entirely of women authors. Granted, this doesn’t happen very often, but I get the sense ...
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Study Publishing . . . in Calcutta
Jeff Waxman brought the Seagull School of Publishing to my attention yesterday, and now I’m wishing I was still 23 (I always wish I was still 23, and taller, with better eyesight and a lower body mass index), and could fly off to this . . . For three decades now, Seagull Books has been crafting books with an eye ...
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David Bellos on the new PRI's The World in Words
One of my favorite podcasts (aside from the Three Percent podcast, of course) is PRI’s The World in Words, which is hosted by Patrick Cox and covers a ton of really interesting topics related to language, translation, etc. It’s worth checking out every week, but especially this week, since the main focus is on ...
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Carrere's "Limonov" Wins the Prix Renaudot
This was actually announced a couple days ago, but I just received an email from French publisher P.O.L. celebrating the awarding of the Prix Renaudot to Emmanuel Carrère for his new novel Limonov. Limonov is not a fictional character. He exists. I know him. He was a lout in Ukraine; an idol of the Soviet underground ...
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