The New York Times reports on the launch of Neal Stephenson’s new serialized digital novel, The Mongoliad, complete with video, music, and user-profiles. (via AuthorScoop)
Neal Stephenson’s New Digital Novel
Lost and Found in Translation
“The Google Translate results feel less and less lucky as the sentence progresses, and with each new roll of the search engine dice.” Over the six years that Esther Allen was translating Argentine novelist Antonio Di Benedetto‘s classic, Zama, she would occasionally run lines through Google translate as an experiment in the ersatz. Pair with translator Alison Anderson on “Ferrante Fever” and what a great translation adds to the original work.
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Gary Shteyngart, Viral Video Star
It seems like Gary Shteyngart may be embarking on a new career as a viral video star (remember his wacky book trailer for the hardcover of Super Sad True Love Story?). Here he is with Paul Giamatti in a “buddy comedy” touting the paperback.
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Summer Reading at The Brooklyn Rail
Want to know what artists Paul Chan and Richard Serra, poet Eileen Myles, and translator Charlotte Mandell are reading this summer? Check out The Brooklyn Rail’s Summer Reading List.
Australian Best
Lit-mag Meanjin Quarterly is taking a cue from The Millions and kicking off a new series, The Best Australian Fiction of the 21st Century (so far).
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Not Just the Mind’s Eye
A new Tumblr, The Composites, takes descriptions of characters from novels and feeds them through police composite sketch software to produce images of their “faces.” Creepy and cool. (via kottke)
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Searching for Geeshie and Elvie
“This is what set Geeshie and Elvie apart even from the rest of an innermost group of phantom geniuses of the ’20s and ’30s. Their myth was they didn’t have anything you could so much as hang a myth on.” John Jeremiah Sullivan investigates more mysterious musicians in The New York Times Magazine. Bonus: You can listen to their music as you read. For more of Sullivan’s music journalism, read his piece on the origins of ska.
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It Was A Dark and Stormy Night
What have you found in your grandparents’ attics lately? Bet it wasn’t a signed copy of Frankenstein.
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