Assault on the Minibar
I mentioned this in passing a couple weeks back, but The Paris Review website recently posted Dubrakva Ugresic’s “Assault on the Minibar,” which is one of the many fantastic pieces in her new collection, Karaoke Culture. A number of sites have been linking to this essay, and I particularly like the ...
>
Balls of Gold
Over at Salon, Kevin Canfield has a nice piece about the challenges of translation and the way translators are underappreciated: Gavin Bowd, the English translator for Michel Houellebecq, was working on the controversial French novelistās āThe Map and the Territoryā ā Knopf will publish the first American edition ...
>
And Then There Was BAM!
The Melville House blog has a really interesting post about the future of Barnes & Noble that links off to this piece by Rick Aristotle Munarriz. Barnes & Noble is coming off another dreadful quarter. Back out the Nook and its digital downloads and you’ll find that sales actually fell by 11% at its ...
>
N+1 Podcast
I totally missed the launch of this, but apparently N+1 now has a podcast, the new episode of which is now online. Carla Blumenkranz, n+1 editor and contributor, discusses her piece āCaptain Midnight.ā This unusual portrait follows a young Gordon Lish in the early ā60s as he searches for new talent and struggles ...
>
Three Messages and a Warning: Contemporary Mexican Stories of the Fantastic
If nothing else, Three Messages and a Warning proves that anthology editors hold far more power than the individual authors. The problem is not so much that Three Messages fails to offer any excellent Mexican āstories of the fantastic,ā but that those tales are few and poorly placed within the book as a whole. For ...
>
Karaoke Culture
After taking a few weeks to mull over Dubravka Ugresicās Karaoke Culture, I took a rainy afternoon and watched a movie with Chinese food. The movie was High Fidelity and Iāve seen it many times, but never have I thought about the final lines so much before. With uncharacteristic selflessness, Rob Gordon explains how to ...
>
New NEA Director of Literature is Ira Silverberg
This is just fantastic news all around. I really like Ira, and I think he’ll be great for the NEA. Well done. Washington, DCāThe National Endowment for the Arts welcomes Ira Silverberg as its new director of literature on December 5, 2011. Silverberg brings 26 years of experience in book publishing and literary ...
>