We’ll be revealing the top 5 vote getters in our “Best Fiction of the Millenium (So Far)” poll on Thursday and Friday. We’d love to hear your predictions here.
What’s Your Top 5?
One Translation To Rule Them All
“Despite a glut of English translations (well over a hundred, by my count),” writes Dante scholar Robert Pogue Harrison, “New versions of the entire [Divine Comedy] poem or individual canticles continue to appear in rapid succession—six in the last decade alone.” Over at the New York Review of Books, he investigates three of the latest: Dan Brown’s Inferno, Mary Jo Bang’s Inferno, and Clive James’s Divine Comedy.
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Making It Big
Over at Catapult, Mensah Demary shares the story of how he got to be a professional editor. As he puts it, “I was asked recently what it takes to succeed as a writer and editor. Actually, I was being asked a more specific question: how do you become a successful writer and editor? I don’t have the answers; I only have my life.” Pair with Kate Angus’s Millions essay on making a living as a poet.
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Book Bailouts
Ukraine is investing approximately $61 million in order to “bolster [the nation’s] reading, publishing and bookselling beginning in 2014 and lasting through 2018.” One concern held by Ukranian literati is the rapidly expanding influx of Russian writing, which some claim have been “push[ing] books from Ukrainian publishers and authors off the shelves.” Meanwhile, Russia recently announced a $100 million stimulus package for its own book industry.
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Adventures in Journalism
Bono and Bob Geldof guest edited Monday’s issue of the Globe and Mail newspaper in Toronto.
Early Buzz
In his look ahead to interesting books coming out in 2011, Scott Esposito includes the book I co-edited, The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books, which features pieces by Jonathan Lethem, Rivka Galchen, Benjamin Kunkel, and several other great writers and is due out in March.
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New from Neil Gaiman
Exciting news, Neil Gaiman fans! The author will release The View from the Cheap Seats, a collection of his non-fiction work, this May. For more Gaiman, check out our own Tess Malone’s review of The Ocean at the End of the Lane.
Dragged In
Most institutions that become an essential part of a local culture build up a collection of curios over the years. They collect as much evidence as they can of their proximity to major events. At the New York Public Library, for example, you can find a letter opener whose handle is made from the paw of Charles Dickens’s dead cat. (h/t The Paris Review Daily)