Kory Stamper, one of the lexicographers responsible for Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, describes the pleasures and poetry to be found in the Third Edition’s “color definitions.” Take vermillion for example, which is listed as “a variable color averaging a vivid reddish orange that is redder, darker, and slightly stronger than chrome orange, redder and darker than golden poppy, and redder and lighter than international orange.” (Related: how colors got their names; who names colors what.)
Colors: Definitions and Names
In Their Own Words
The translators behind books such as Don Quixote, My Struggle, and Swann’s Way talk about their translation process. Lydia Davis explains, “When I was translating novels, I would not read the text first, and that was very important to me because it let me retain the excitement of the unknown.”
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What’s Next? The KGB Bar Run By the Real KGB?
Over at Salon, Joel Whitney explains how The Paris Review worked with the CIA and “served, in part, as a covert international weapon of soft power.” While the possibility is certainly tantalizing, it’s necessary to read Whitney’s article alongside Carolyn Kellogg’s piece in the LA Times, which notes how “the threads of the article … become unsupportably tenuous” as it carries on.
These narrators are conspicuously powerless
Over at Prospect, Leo Benedictus takes a look into the subversive “hindered narrators” in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, Room, and Pigeon English.
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Hey, Hub Fans
Perhaps the best piece of baseball writing ever put to paper (duly praised here), John Updike’s “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu” about Ted Williams is being released in a slim, stylish volume from Library of America this week.
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An Interview with D.T. Max
D.T. Max, author of Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, the recently released biography on David Foster Wallace, discusses writing his much-anticipated look at the late author’s life. Further whet your appetite for DFW’s biography with our exclusive look at the book’s opening paragraphs.
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