New today are Peter Carey’s The Chemistry of Tears and China Mieville’s Railsea. And Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 is now out in a snazzy three-volume boxed-set paperback edition.
Tuesday New Release Day: Carey, Mieville, Murakami
“Jawline of an aircraft carrier”
“It’s like a crackpot combination of Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge!, Ingmar Bergman’s The Magic Flute and Lars von Trier’s Dogville. Does this crazy idea work? Maybe 70 percent of the time, but when it does it’s both daring and brilliant.” At Salon, Andrew O’Hehir is surprised by Anna Karenina.
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Caution: Little Fires May Grow
“But the truth is that even very small actions can ripple outwards and have huge and far-reaching effects. In other words, the fires you start can be little, but don’t think they don’t matter, or that they won’t spread.” The Los Angeles Review of Books interviewed Celeste Ng about writing about women, transracial adoption, and her novel, Little Fires Everywhere (featured in multiple Year in Reading entries).
John Cage, Silence
Don’t listen to John Cage‘s 4’33” while you read Marjorie Perloff‘s article on the 50th anniversary of Silence. It could be a distraction.
Discussing The Worm
“Magic I think for me is kind of personal. Like, as soon as magic is in play, then I am given permission to imagine a different world, one in which magic things might happen—one where maybe I get some magic to wield if I’m lucky. Where cool stuff might happen at any given moment, cool stuff you wouldn’t even guess at. And for as long as the story holds, I’m kind of living in that world.” John Darnielle talks with Colin Winette about E.R. Eddison‘s The Worm Ouroboros, reading high fantasy and writing Wolf in White Van.
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Women in Translation
“Between 2008 and 2014 there were 2,471 fiction translations published in the U.S. for the first time ever. Of those, 1,775 were written by men, compared to 657 by women, and 39 by men & women. In terms of percentages, female authors make up 26.6% of all the fiction translations published over the past seven years. I suspected going into this that there would be significantly more male authors published in translation than women, but I figured it would be more like a 60-40 split, not 71-27. That’s brutal.” Chad Post on the gender gap in literary translation.
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