The International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award has announced its winner: Gerbrand Bakker’s The Twin. The book was previously on the Best Translated Book Award shortlist. See Also: The IMPAC longlist and shortlist.
The Twin Wins the IMPAC
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The New York Times has a piece about niche dating websites that includes Alikewise, a matchmaking site for bibliophiles. Users can search for people based on age, sex, location, and, for instance, whether or not they like Bukowski.
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What’s Lost
We tend to take it for granted that the world needs more translated works. The dictates of common wisdom state that reading translated works help us understand the reality of foreign cultures. But what if translation, which erases at least some nuance from works of literature, instead “sifts out the foreign or the unsettling in the name of easy consumption”? In The Irish Times, Michael Cronin reviews a recent book by NYU professor Emily Apter.
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Lambda Literary Award Names 2019 Finalists
Whittled down from a pool of 1,000 submissions, the finalists for the 2019 Lambda Literary Awards—which highlight and celebrate LBGTQ literature—include Akwaeke Emezi, Joseph Cassara, Hieu Minh Nguyen, Patrick Nathan, and Jordy Rosenberg.
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Are The Bad Sex Awards… Bad?
With news of this year’s winner fresh off the press, it’s easy to see how the Literary Review’s “Bad Sex Awards” are an annual delight to many readers (as well as an annual horror to several authors). But are they also counter-productive? As one former “winner” of the award asks, is the Bad Sex Award “anything more than a sort of moral outrage dressed up as a quest for high standards in writing?”
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Little Big League
What does the Man Booker prize mean for independent presses? On Salt, Saraband, and Oneworld, the three indie publishers with books on the Man Booker longlist this year.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Messud; Wang; Tallent; Rothmann; Handler
Out this week: The Burning Girl by Claire Messud; The Hidden Light of Northern Fires by Daren Wang; My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent; To Die in Spring by Ralf Rothmann; and All the Dirty Parts by Daniel Handler. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.