Did you dig “After Ellen,” Justin Taylor’s short story in The New Yorker? How about his interview for the Page-Turner blog? Yea? Well here’s even more: Joshua Cohen talks with The Gospel of Anarchy author for Jewish Book Council.
Justin Taylor Threepeat
Borges’s Best-Of
Jorge Louis Borges’s suggestions for the thirty-three books to begin his famed Library of Babel includes works by Oscar Wilde, Franz Kafka, and even Borges himself–and, maddeningly, no women. Nothing against Borges, but you may want to spend some time with our own slightly more diverse Year in Reading series for a bit more variety.
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How Fact-Checking Works
Ever wondered how the fact-checking process works? Well wonder no longer. The Columbia Journalism Review posted an excerpt from their recently published Art of Making Magazines collection, and it explains The New Yorker’s workflow as well as the perils of “Shoot-the-Fact-Checker Syndrome.”
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Revolutionary Word
Lewis Lapham, namesake and founder of Lapham's Quarterly, has compiled a "revolutionary reading list."
In Search of Proust
Translating is notoriously difficult work, and translating Proust even more so. The Boston Review has published a very thoughtful piece about the history of In Search of Lost Time in English, the trouble with annotations, and the general "tension in translation between the spirit and the letter." We highly recommend you take the time to read it, even if you don't have time for Proust just yet.
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EU Literature Prizewinners Announced
Winners of the EU Prize for Literature were announced at the Frankfurt Book Fair.
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The Inspiration for Uncle Tom’s Cabin
A professor at Clemson University believes he’s identified the fugitive slave who was harbored for one night in the home of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Moreover, the professor believes that the man was “an inspiration for the novel [Uncle Tom’s Cabin]. I think his pain touched [Stowe] and helped her to act.”
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Disgrace
Do you think J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace should be made into a movie starring John Malkovich? Someone does--see the trailer here.
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“Var inte ond”
The most striking thing about Google’s effort to block Sweden from coining a word for “ungoogleable” (“ogooglebar”) is that the proposed Swedish word somehow sounds more English than its actual translation.
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