Philip Roth, who just authorized Blake Bailey to be his official biographer, has written an “Open Letter to Wikipedia” wherein the author states his grievance with the site’s entry for his novel The Human Stain. Related: can we just give this dude the Nobel already?
Philip Roth v. Wikipedia
Poet Laureate Sans Laurels
The recently (and controversially) appointed poet laureate of North Carolina has resigned from the post, but the upset generated by her short-lived laureateship can be interpreted as a sign of just how important poet laureates are. If you're unconvinced, or simply confused about what exactly poet laureates do, we have just the links for you.
Un Bon Dia
To begin to translate a book, you need to hone your knowledge of the language in which it’s written. To write a great essay about translating a book, you need a backstory, an interesting format and two or three foreign parables. At The Rumpus, Brian Oliu writes about translating his grandfather’s book from the Catalan.
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Friends Forever
Attention Babysitters Club fans: at 5:30 EST tonight, Scholastic will be holding a live Twitter party with author Ann M. Martin. Maybe it's finally time to find out if Claudia ever finished middle school, yes / yes?
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A House of Her Own
"I’m ten years away from the corner you laugh on with your pals." Carol Ann Duffy's poem "Before You Were Mine" has inspired a few great writers to share some photographs (and tender memories) of their mothers before they were born.
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Guys Lit Wire Book Fair
Guys Lit Wire is a group blog dedicated to “recommending books for teenage boys.” Twice a year, the group hosts a book fair in conjunction with Powell’s to help school libraries. For the past couple of years, the group has focused on Washington D.C.’s Ballou Senior High School, and this year their fair will run until October 14th. Please do check out the “wish list” and send a couple books in Ballou’s direction!
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The Best Books of the Year (2013)
Amazon released their annual Best Books of the Year: Top 100 in Print list today (as well as a free and helpful Reader’s Guide), and numerous Millions favorites made the cut. Both George Saunders’s Tenth of December and Philipp Meyer’s The Son cracked the top 10. We reviewed both here and here, respectively. Other notable books boasting extensive Millions coverage include Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings (review), George Packer’s The Unwinding (review), Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries (review), Dave Eggers’s The Circle (review), James Salter’s All That Is (review), Karen Russell’s Vampires in the Lemon Grove (interview), Stuart Nadler’s Wise Men (review), Colum McCann’s TransAtlantic (review), and Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary (review). Meanwhile, the top spot belongs to Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch.
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Orange to withdraw sponsorship of woman’s fiction prize
Kate Mosse announced that Orange will no longer be sponsoring the prestigious Orange Prize for Fiction, given annually to the best work of English-language fiction written by a woman.
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Father of Sci-Fi?
"John Milton—poet, free speech advocate, civil servant, classics scholar—was arguably a forefather to Asimov, Bradbury, Delaney, and the rest. Their outlandish other worlds owe a debt to his visionary mode of storytelling; their romance—characters who go on quests, encounter adversaries at portals, channel the forces of light and dark—is his, too." Over at Slate, Katy Waldman makes the argument for Milton as sci-fi author. Pair with our discussion of his epic Paradise Lost as part of this piece about difficult books.
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