LibraryThing's Secret Santa
There’s not a lot of time to sign up (registration closes on December 15), but LibraryThing is hosting its second annual Secret Santa campaign: The idea is simple. Pay $25. You play Santa to a random LibraryThing member, and find them up $20 worth of books, based on their library or a short description. Someone ...
>
New CONTEXT
The new issue of CONTEXT Magazine is now available online. (And I assume in print. For some reason, we don’t get copies in Rochester, but this is usually available at bookstores like St. Mark’s.) Almost all of the readings, interviews, etc., are about recent Dalkey titles, such as the interesting excerpt from ...
>
NEA Literature Grants
I’m going to write more about this next week, but this morning, the National Endowment for the Arts announced the recipients of the 2009 Access to Artistic Excellence grants. A lot of fantastic organizations received funding this year, such as Archipelago, the Center for the Art of Translation, Graywolf, Copper Canyon, ...
>
Best Translated Book 2008 Longlist: The Enormity of the Tragedy by Quim Monzo
For the next several weeks we’ll be highlighting a book-a-day from the 25-title Best Translated Book of 2008 fiction longlist, leading up to the announcement of the 10 finalists. Click here for all previous write-ups. The Enormity of the Tragedy by Quim Monzo, translated from the Catalan by Peter Bush. (Catalonia, ...
>
The Future of Reading is Fine, Move Along, Nothing to See Here
The Guardian—which has self-admittedly entered the season of the “crap survey”—has an article today about a recent study on what reading material most attracts the other sex. A survey commissioned by the National Year of Reading has found the top 10 reads to impress a woman. Top of the list is ...
>
Urban Elitist on the Future of Publishing
The future of publishing is a hobby-horse of mine, and I’m always excited to find someone else — like David Nygren at Urban Elitist — writing long, intelligent articles about this topic. A lot of his ideas will be familiar to frequent readers of this blog, but the way he describes the situation is ...
>
Canadian Literature of 2008
Omnivoracious has a nice write-up about the 5 Best Books Out of Canada This Year. Sure, these aren’t necessarily translations, but they are international . . . and if there’s any English-speaking country whose literature receives less attention in the U.S. than books in translation, it’s Canada. (I’m ...
>