Richard Nash on Borders, Bookselling
Nice piece by Cursor founder, Red Lemonade publisher, former Soft Skull director Richard Nash on CNN’s website about the fall of Borders and the role of booksellers: There are many reasons why the tiny, scrappy independent publisher I ran from 2001 to 2009, Soft Skull Press, became a publisher with a Pulitzer ...
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Interview with Marina Harss [Read This Next]
As part of this week’s Read This Next feature on Alberto Moravia’s Two Friends, we just posted an interview with translator Marina Harss conducted by U of R translation grad student (and fellow soccer fan) Acacia O’Connor. Here’s an excerpt: Acacia O’Connor: Two Friends is a unique text — ...
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Numbers that Make You Go Ouch
So, Borders is basically dead-and-nearly-gone, what with their liquidation starting tomorrow and almost 11,000 employees losing their jobs in the next few weeks. This was a long time in coming, and is a surprise to no one. That said, it’s a tricky thing to formulate an adequate response to. On the one hand, over the ...
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2012 NEA Translation Fellowships
Continuing in our day of prize announcements, this morning the NEA released info on this year’s Translation Fellowships. The NEA awarded $200,000 in grant money to 16 translators—many of whom I know personally—for a wide range of projects. This is always one of the most exciting announcements of the ...
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2011 PEN Translation Fund Winners
Still catching up post-vacation, so this is somewhat old news, but still worth mentioning . . . Last week, PEN announced the recipients of this year’s Translation Fund awards. Winning translators receive $3,000 to support their work, and hopefully via the attention generated by the award, will find a publisher for their ...
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Catching the Prize in Klagenfurt: Leif Randt and the Ernst Willner
After a three day marathon of reading a seven-person panel of judges for the Festival of German-Language Literature announced Leif Randt as the winner of the Ernst Willner Prize for his novel Schimmernder Dunst uber CobyCounty (The Haze Over Coby County), translated by Stefan Tobler. The Festival, formerly known as the ...
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The Last Brother
Indian-born Nathacha Appanah’s The Last Brother is clearly meant to be touching. The story, told in flashback, revolves around Raj, a nine year old boy who lives with his mother and abusive father on a remote island in the Indian Ocean, and David, an orphaned Jewish refugee who has been indefinitely detained on the island ...
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