On NPR, Russian high school students now must read from The Gulag Archipelago. Genuine reflection or lip service? (Thx, Laurie)
Back from the Gulag
Women in Translation
“Between 2008 and 2014 there were 2,471 fiction translations published in the U.S. for the first time ever. Of those, 1,775 were written by men, compared to 657 by women, and 39 by men & women. In terms of percentages, female authors make up 26.6% of all the fiction translations published over the past seven years. I suspected going into this that there would be significantly more male authors published in translation than women, but I figured it would be more like a 60-40 split, not 71-27. That’s brutal.” Chad Post on the gender gap in literary translation.
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A Disturbance in the Force of the Joyce Estate
Our own Mark O’Connell likens James Joyce’s grandson to a “highbrow Darth Vader.”
Unlikely Correspondence
In a compelling personal piece for The Paris Review, Nick Antosca recounts his unlikely relationship with a “faceless confidant.”
The Billionaire is Dead…
At long last, a viable alternative to Mike Bloomberg and Bill Thompson has entered the NYC mayoral race. This candidate’s “zero tolerance anti-hipster policy” is certainly worth a look.
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An Eastern Bloc Monument
Cheers to Joshua Cohen for this early look at Péter Nádas’ mind-bending magnum opus, Parallel Stories. Our own review will appear sometime in 2014, when we finish reading. (But we can already say that all 1,100-page novels should begin, as this one does, with a dead body.)
The Scanner, Darkly
A used-book flipper, armed with a laser scanner and a PDA, delineates the unease he feels about the odd profession he has chosen.
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