Laura Miller at Salon reports on the ongoing problems with Google Books’ plan to “digitally scan every book in the world.”
The Trouble with Google Books
Dispatch from Kolkata
Over at Electric Literature, Megha Majumdar writes about the changing architecture in Kolkata, the quest for authenticity, and nostalgia. Pair with Olena Jennings’s Millions essay on nostalgia for a life never lived.
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This is the way the film ends
Blasphemy Alert: They’re giving the film version of August: Osage County a “less downbeat” ending. Curse you, Harvey Weinstein! Is nothing sacred? Can a woman not lament the disintegration of her life, family, and mental stability while the final lines to T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” are read by her housekeeper? Has America gone soft?
Wood and Krasznahorkai in Conversation
The latest installment of Housing Works Bookstore Café’s biweekly podcast features a conversation between James Wood and László Krasznahorkai. (We interviewed him for our site last year, too.) The Hungarian author’s next book, Seiobo There Below, was highlighted in our Great Second-Half 2013 Book Preview.
Beach Boys Reunite
“Wouldn’t it be nice if we were older? / Then we wouldn’t have to wait so long,” crooned Brian Wilson in The Beach Boys’ 1966 hit “Wouldn’t It Be Nice.” The song went on to become the title of Wilson’s autobiography. Now, over half a century later, the crew is finally older, and fans hoping for a reunion won’t have to “wait so long” because the band’s officially announced an upcoming 50th anniversary tour.
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The State of Literature in Translation Today
Chad Post ran the numbers to calculate “the state of literature in translation today,” and in so doing he found that AmazonCrossing has been publishing more works of fiction and poetry in translation than any other press except Dalkey Archive. Additionally, the “overall number of works of fiction in translation being published in the U.S. is growing pretty nicely.” To get a full account of what’s coming out this year, check out his 2013 Translation Database.
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“Style is the writer”
Metaphorical Departure
We all spend way too much time in airports this time of year, but Brad Leithauser searched for a metaphor about his journeys through BWI. As he writes for The New Yorker, “There was a piquant pleasure on the night when I first put these two experiences—morning churchgoing, evening airport-going—side by side. I’d been idly and only semi-consciously asking myself what these nocturnal intervals at B.W.I. reminded me of, and now, suddenly, I’d located my metaphor.”
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