You can stream n+1‘s podcast with Sam Lipsyte. It “chronicle[s] Lipsyte’s journey from his role as ‘Lead Screamer’ for the punk-rock band Dungbeetle to the publication of his third novel, The Ask.”
n+1 Podcast with Sam Lipsyte
Translations of Loneliness
“In Rilke’s essay on Auguste Rodin, written in the same year, he describes the sculptor’s visits to the Jardin des Plantes early in the morning to sketch the sleepy animals. And later on, in Rodin’s studio on the Rue de l’Université, he observes a tiny plaster cast of an antique tiger that Rodin treasured: ‘There is a cast of a panther, of Greek workmanship, hardly as big as a hand…. If you look from the front under its body into the space formed by the four powerful soft paws, you seem to be looking into the depths of an Indian stone temple; so huge and all-inclusive does this work become.’” Henri Cole on the poet and a place that inspired his work.
Battle Royale
Publishers Weekly did some sleuthing and it turns out that it only takes 300 print copies sold per day to land the Amazon bestseller list – time to get cracking, everyone.
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A Zone of Inviolable Privacy
Patti Smith’s M Train was released this Tuesday. Geoffrey O’Brien reviews her memoir at The New York Review of Books: “Perhaps M Train represents the attempt by someone whose career is as public as can be imagined to stake out a zone of inviolable privacy, albeit through the public act of writing a book meant for publication.” Need more music? Check out our Torch Ballads and Jukebox Music column.
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Parlez-vous Francais?
“One of the most rewarding parts of reading Jane Eyre as a thirteen-year-old Midwesterner is taking a wild shot in the dark at the meaning of all of the untranslated French passages.” Mallory Ortberg at The Toast takes a shot at translating some of Jane Eyre’s trickier passages. Bonus: here are a bunch of reasons why Mr. Rochester is a creep.
Interview with Günter Grass
French Fiction
Recommended recommendations: Nancy Kline surveys recently translated French novels for the New York Times Book Review. Pair with our own Bill Morris‘s piece in the Daily Beast on the 2014 Nobel Prize Winner Patrick Modiano and “Why American’s Don’t Read Foreign Fiction.”
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