It’s déjà vu all over again in comic book land: The New York Times reports that by September DC Comics will have restarted all 52 of it DC Universe comic book lines, each with a new No. 1 issue.
Comic Book Restart
The Trouble With Memoirs
“If you didn’t feel you were discovering something as you wrote your memoir, don’t publish it. Instead hit the delete key, and then go congratulate yourself for having lived a perfectly good, undistinguished life. There’s no shame in that.” Neil Genzlinger at the New York Times lays some ground rules for those compelled to write memoirs.
Animals Everywhere!
It is a truth universally acknowledged (and recently addressed in Barclay Bram Shoekmaker‘s Millions review of Mo Yan‘s Frog) that literary translation is an imperfect art, and this list of mistranslated “literary moments” only offers more evidence for the claim. But for every serious blunder there’s also a truly ridiculous one (or more). For example, the French translated the title of Animal Farm as Animals Everywhere!, which sounds a lot like a charming children’s book and not at all like Orwell.
Fish N a Barrel
The Vault chooses the “20 Worst Hip-Hop Album Covers”. Sorry, South Coast Shorty.
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Real Grit
At the LARB, Anne Trubek quotes Lionel Trilling in a review of The Son and American Rust, the two books published thus far by New Yorker 20 Under 40 alum Phillipp Meyer. “In the American metaphysic,” Trilling wrote in his essay “Reality in America,” “reality is always material reality, hard, resistant, unformed, impenetrable, and unpleasant.” Those of you who read our pieces on both books may be able to guess why the quote is relevant.
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Economics of the E-Book
The Wall Street Journal reports how literary authors are feeling the pinch in the age of e-books: “The upshot: From an e-book sale, an author makes a little more than half what he or she makes from a hardcover sale.”
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Google Labs’ Ngram Viewer
In a TED Talk, Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel show us how Google Labs’ Ngram Viewer works. You can learn “surprising things” from 500 billion words, a string of characters which put together “would stretch from here to the Moon and back ten times over.”
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How many times can one tell origin stories? DC and Marvel do some type of rebooting every few years, at least on some titles. How many times has Superman been rebooted? They never accomplish anything beyond bumping up sales for a few months, till readers figure out how bogus the reboots are. But, of course, sales are the only reason to do this.