Junot Díaz is at home discussing his native Hispaniola as he muses on the function of apocalypse – New Orleans, Haiti, and Japan – in our global media landscape.
Ruin-Reading
I’ll Take “Enjambments” for a Thousand, Alex
A writer at this blog watched a night of literary Jeopardy. (Here’s a hint: what is The Outlet?)
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How to Finish a Fairy Tale
“I just didn’t see the textual evidence for it. If Mark Twain wanted to make somebody black, he would make them black. He was not shy about dealing with matters of race.” For The New Yorker, Mythili G. Rao on the complicated backstory to the upcoming publication of The Purloining of Prince Oleomargarine, a “new” children’s book by Mark Twain. See also: our consideration of Twain’s self-deprecating travelogue The Innocents Abroad.
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Authenticity and New Orleans
Writing for n+1’s City by City series, Moira Donegan remarks on the “self-defeating contradictions” of working at a nonprofit in New Orleans. It’s a town, she writes, where most arrive to either “perform charity or to party,” and where, she feels, “many of the people who … come to help the city [are] also hurting it.” In certain ways, the piece can be read as being in conversation with Duncan Murrell’s 2012 essay for Oxford American about authenticity, preservation, posterity, and the Big Easy.
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Pixar Concept Art Released
Pixar got the 2013 film buzz started early by sending out four images of concept art to ComingSoon.net prior to New Year’s Day. The artwork provides teaser images of films in the pipeline through 2016.
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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