Jonathan Franzen and Chad Harbach aren’t the only two authors adapting their works for television. Lev Grossman is working on an hour-long Fox series based on his novel The Magicians.
The Primetime Magicians
Careless Cervantes
Ilan Stavans’s introduction to the quadricentennial edition of Don Quixote is available on the Literary Hub website. As he explains it, the narrative is both baffling and perfect: “What I like most about Don Quixote is its imperfection. I wasn’t wrong in my teens about the sloppiness of the writing; it is just that my attitude was too pedantic. It is, unquestionably, a defective narrative. Cervantes is often criticized as a numb and careless stylist.”
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Translating After the Iron Curtain
The art of book translation becomes even more challenging when you translate a book that hasn’t been updated since the Cold War. At Asymptote, Jacek Dehnel discusses how much changed from Ariadna Demkowska’s 1962 translation of The Great Gatsby to his current work. “Demkowska was working under very different circumstances: behind the Iron Curtain and without access to Google. It was, therefore, more difficult for her to track down various details, such as those concerning well-known financiers or popular culture starlets of the 1920s.”
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Greenwell’s Debut
“What Belongs to You is a haunting, gorgeous, and fierce debut, capturing desire in every sentence—holding the space of what we long for and what can never truly be ours.” The Rumpus reviews Garth Greenwell’s debut novel. To compare and contrast, pair with our review of the novel.
Let’s Get 1,000 Feet on War And Peace
Jason Novak, brilliant penman behind last month’s brilliant Panorama of Middlemarch, has followed up that effort with an equally impressive Panorama of “Bartleby, the Scrivener.”
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For Auld Lang Syne
“A perfect example of what the short story can do when the form is at its best: containing as much of an emotional blow as that of a 800-page novel, regardless of its brevity.” The Guardian awards its 4th Estate BAME short story prize to “Auld Lang Syne” by Lisa Smith. The prize was launched in 2015 in response to a report “which found that black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) writers struggled both to get published and against stereotypes imposed by the UK’s overwhelmingly white publishing industry.”
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Five Favorite Story Collections
Curtis Sittenfeld shares her favorite short story writers, from Alice Munro to new voice Jennine Capo Crucet.
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Irv Loathed NPR
Recommended Reading: A piece of new fiction by Joanthan Safran Foer! Go check out “Maybe It Was the Distance” over at The New Yorker. Here’s a review of Foer’s Tree of Codes by Kevin Nguyen for The Millions which calls the format of the book, “a wonderful experiment in what a book can be, and also home to a mediocre novel.”
1,000 on Twitter
Cheers to @Selorian for becoming the 1,000th follower of @The_Millions on Twitter.
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Your post is somewhat misleading. The “silver screen” refers to motion pictures, not television: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_screen
Whoops. I was thinking that movies were the highest, so they were the “golden screen.” TV would be the next tier. I’ll fix the post accordingly. Thanks.