Agents and Editors
I agree with Michael Orthofer, the interaction between super-agent Andrew Wylie and super-awesome Playboy editor Amy Grace Loyd over the first-serial rights to Nabokov’s The Original of Laura is a bit gross. From the New York Observer: It was an inspired method, the flowers serving as a reference to Nabokov’s ...
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The Sacred Book of the Werewolf
“What a crazy idea that was—to change the name of the KGB. One of the greatest brand names ever was simply destroyed!” Pelevin has a great knack for relaying the oddities of the Russian condition in terms that almost anyone can understand. Product placement in Generation “P” revealed to the rest of the world that, ...
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Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector
One of the fall books that I’m really looking forward to is Benjamin Moser’s biography of Clarice Lispector entitled Why This World, which, according to the back jacket, is “based on previously unknown manuscripts, numerous interviews, and years of research on three continents.” Moser replaced the ...
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Paper-Over-Board Follow-Up
So a couple weeks ago I caused a little bit of a stir by announcing via an article in Publishing Perspectives that we were abandoning the paper-over-board format in favor of all paperbacks. We got a lot of responses about this, ranging from people who were disappointed and love paper-over-board, to booksellers explaining that ...
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Dubravka on the BBC
Dubravka Ugresic’s Baba Yaga Laid an Egg was recently published in the UK as a part of The Myths series—“a long-term global publishing project where some of the world’s most respected authors re-tell myths in a manner of their own choosing.” She appeared on BBC Radio 4 recently to discuss the ...
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And Now Back to Your Regularly Scheduled Blogging . . .
Well, hopefully. It might take another day to get back in the swing of things, but I am back and will be writing a couple reviews this week, featuring July’s store of the month, etc., etc. (And finally replying to e-mails, in case you’re waiting for a response . . .) In the meantime, here’s a link to a ...
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A Translation Roundtable
The Observer Translation Project, which we’ve mentioned here before, posted a really cool translation roundtable/interview that they conducted recently: World-famous novelist Norman Manea, two premier experts in the realm of literature in translation—Susan Harris of Words Without Borders and Chad Post of Three ...
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