Even though the new Franzen doesn’t drop for another week, for many readers, today is the biggest book release day of the summer thanks to the publication of Mockingjay, the third installment of Suzanne Collins’ blockbuster Hunger Games trilogy. For those less inclined toward young adult fare, Kevin Guilfoile’s new novel The Thousand is now out, as is The Cross of Redemption, the “uncollected writings” of James Baldwin.
Tuesday New Release Day
RIP William Gay
I am very sad to report that William Gay, whom we featured in our “Post-40 Bloomers” series last fall, died on Friday, at the age of 68. From Clarksville Online: “At first, I would send a story to the New Yorker and when it came back, I’d send it to The Atlantic, or Harper’s or Esquire. I didn’t know about the college literary magazines but when I found out about them, I started getting published. After I finally got published in the Georgia Review, I got a call from the editor at The Atlantic. He asked why I wasn’t sending them something because they’d like to publish my work. I told him I’d been sending things for years. He said they never got to his desk. I had to wonder what kind of operation they were running.” Look for his final novel The Lost Country, hopefully coming soon.
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Fantastic Beasts and Where to Film Them
If eight Harry Potter movies weren’t enough, we can expect three new Warner Brothers films about J.K. Rowling’s spin-off Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. The trilogy will feature the magical zoologist Newt Scamander as he goes on adventures in New York 70 years prior to the Potter characters.
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Ways of Seeing
Overt at JSTOR Daily, Allana Mayer writes about visual literacy in the age of the Internet. As she explains it, “We have similar stories all throughout history: the moment when a perception—whether a literal way of seeing or a figurative mode of thinking—is assaulted and fundamentally shifts.” Pair with our own Bill Morris’s piece on the new Whitney Museum.
E-reading with Jonathan Franzen
It was with “a sort of resigned sigh” that Jonathan Franzen signed some reddit user’s kindle.
Tuesday New Release Day: Franzen, Binet, Baldwin, Müller
A new collection of non-fiction by Jonathan Franzen, Farther Away: Essays, is out today. Also out is Laurent Binet’s HHhH, from which we recently published some redacted scenes. Other new releases this week include Rosecrans Baldwin’s memoir Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down and Nobel laureate Herta Müller’s The Hunger Angel.
Nein, nein!
Bad news, guys: the longest word in the German language is officially no longer a word.
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Translating on a Tether
“There are so many ways to look at translation. One that has recently occurred to me is that of a tether: the translator is tethered to the meaning of the original the way an animal can be tethered to a stake. You can’t take off and roam the hills, but you can definitely move around and experience a comfortable degree of freedom.” Asymptote talks with Juliet Winters Carpenter about Japanese tanka poetry, Machi Tawara‘s Salad Anniversary, and the careful balance of translation.