David Foster Wallace died a little more than a year ago. It’s a good time to revisit Garth’s excellent piece written shortly after Wallace’s death. More recently, No Pun Intended published a long reflection on Wallace.
DFW a Year Later
One Child Fiction
In 2013, Mo Yan became China’s first resident Nobel Laureate in Literature, which prompted a huge swell of interest in his books in the West. In the Times, Janet Maslin reviews Frog, his latest novel to get an English translation. Sample quote: “Mo Yan, whose real name is Guan Moye, says everything he needs to about the Cultural Revolution with a scene in which Tadpole and other schoolboys eat coal and claim to find it delicious.” You could also read Alan Levinovitz on modern Chinese literature.
A Bombing Hits Home
Recommended Reading: On the recent terrorist attacks in Ankara, and longing for home.
Economics of the E-Book
The Wall Street Journal reports how literary authors are feeling the pinch in the age of e-books: “The upshot: From an e-book sale, an author makes a little more than half what he or she makes from a hardcover sale.”
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To Be Outnumbered
“At first I had three [children], because I think we need to be outnumbered. It’s good for them. That was my plan when I had three children.” Sit down with Karl Ove Knausgaard as he drives his daughter home. Jonathan Callahan reflects on how Knausgaard’s writing consumes him.
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The Grenadier
Recommended Reading: Leo Robson’s review of a new book of essays by Craig Raine.
Are You There God
As part of his ongoing campaign to atone for his sin of helping Trump, ghostwriter Tony Schwartz is consulting for the Clinton campaign. And dear god if ever we’ve wished a writer well, it’s now.
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Hard to Define
“Every single book or painting or piece of music exists and we take from it what we need and love and shape it into another narrative that goes out into the world or stays within us, so it’s this great thing of one narrative piling onto the next. It’s hard to define.” Miriam Toews talks with The Rumpus about her novel All My Puny Sorrows and the distinctions, or lack thereof, between autobiography and fiction.
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The Art of Translation
In general, fact-checking isn’t the most glamorous part of a journalist’s career, which is why Michael Erard was surprised to find that a recent fact-checking session for an Al Jazeera article turned out to be among the most interesting conversations of his life. Why? His sources were linguists, and their job was to explain to him the workings of brand-new sign languages.
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