“I’ve spent my whole professional life swirling the eddies of the margins… What I want right now is to see my book in an airport. Then in a couple of years everyone will figure out that I’m too esoteric, and I’ll be back…” The New York Times posts a curious interview with the unconventional Jaimy Gordon, winner of this year’s National Book Award.
An Interview with Jaimy Gordon
Biblieauphilia
The Book Bench comes up with a list of perfumes inspired by novels, from Essence of Mrs. Dalloway to Middlesex Scented Oil.
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Your Tacit Approval
“I hate to break it to you, folks, but RTs are implied endorsements. Forwarding an article by e-mail without explaining why you are passing it on implies that you agree with it (and that you are someone who likes to waste my time). RTing something without comment means the same thing.” Uh oh.
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Characters on Fire with Sandra Cisneros
Sandra Cisneros discusses her forthcoming poetry collection, Woman Without Shame, and why she writes about characters and stories with an urgent quality.
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War and ???
Nowadays, we take it as a given that Tolstoy’s fame was guaranteed by his talent, but many of his contemporaries thought he’d never get a readership outside his native Russia. Why? His writing, as Rosamund Bartlett puts it in a comparison with Turgenev, was “unpolished, more uncompromising and altogether more Russian” than his peers’. If you generally prefer Dostoevsky, you’ll appreciate our survey of scholars on which author was greater. (h/t Arts and Letters Daily)
Translation by the Numbers
Three Percent crunches the numbers on all the translated fiction and poetry published in the U.S. in 2009. The overall numbers were down in 2009 from 2008. The top language to be translated? Spanish, followed by French, German, Arabic, and Italian. (Thanks, Laurie)
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