In the new Quarterly Conversation, among other pieces, Jordan Soyka endeavors to answer the question, “How do we decide who owns the right to write about Hurricane Katrina?”
New Quarterly Conversation
How to Beat Bias Againist the News? Libraries
Lisa Eve Cheby argues that one of the best ways to beat ‘fake news’ claims (which is really media illiteracy) is to fund more libraries. Read the rest of her argument in Entropy. I’m certainly convinced.
Interview With a Bookseller
“We have a customer who eats Bibles. She’s very nice, but she will walk up to a section, rip out a page, and eat it. She much prefers Catholic versions—she won’t touch King James Bibles.” This interview with the owner of Brattle Book Shop in Boston illustrates the peculiar idiosyncrasies of daily bookstore life. For all you romantics out there, here is a love letter to the brick-and-mortar bookstore.
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Endless Depths
Every so often, a piece comes along that rends the fragile mind, employing a devil’s portion of mundane details to lay bare the inescapable futility of all human endeavor. This is the only rational way to describe this piece at The Awl, which takes the form of a conversation between Karl Ove Knausgaard and True Detective’s Nic Pizzolatto.
Hitchens on Literary Feuds
With Naipaul and Theroux making nice, the Times asks Christopher Hitchens what makes for a good literary feud these days: “A really first-rate bust-up must transcend the limits of ‘an entertaining side show’ and involve playing for high moral and intellectual stakes”
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Sic transit gloria mundi
Two sides of a related coin: on authors whose fame died before they did, and on authors who died before they finished their work.
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Confessions of a Theorist
“This is the odd space these Theory Generation novels inhabit, making them peculiar novels of ideas. Their writers have read enough Theory at a young enough age to be in continued thrall to its power; they do justice to the disorienting shock those texts once had, and perhaps still have. Yet they are old enough to ironize (tenderly or bitterly) that power.” Are you a member of the theory generation?
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Literary Translators are Winners
The American Literary Translators Association has announced this year’s recipients of the National Translation Award. Prose honors went to William M. Hutchins’s translation from the Arabic of Ibrahim al-Koni’s The New Waw: Saharan Oasis, and the poetry winner was Pierre Joris’s translation from the German of Paul Celan’s Collected Later Poetry.