In a video introduced by Paul Yoon, James Salter (who was recently interviewed by our own Sonya Chung) speaks about his time in France and his experience writing A Sport and a Pastime.
“You could say that the book [A Sport and a Pastime] is a long poem to provincial France.”
Just Another Mason
In general, we think of translators as people whose job, briefly summarized, is to create elegant texts out of works in foreign languages. But J.R.R. Tolkien, in his translation of Beowulf, set out to do something different. The Lord of the Rings author published a translation that he kept intentionally clunky. Why? In his telling, he did it to better imitate Old English.
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Literature With a Bang
What can you find at a gun show: firearms, NRA-lovers, and chapbooks? Patrick Wensink discovers the literary subculture of gun enthusiasts. Best chapbook titles: “Homebrew TNT,” “Beat the Box: The Insider’s Guide to Beating the Lie Detector” and “Emergency War Surgery.”
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Dificil
Growing up, Judy Bolton-Fasman watched her mother study Don Quixote, propping the book up on their kitchen counter while studying for her Master’s in Spanish literature. Her mother was a native speaker, but Cervantes was still a tough writer to figure out, especially if you were reading his work while trying to cook dinner in the background. The author looks back on her mother’s education in a Saturday Essay for The Rumpus.
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Challenging the Able-Bodied Gaze
“I hate the idea that you must write every day because I really can’t do that. Sometimes the aching bones in my body will not allow it.” Electric Literature interviews three writers—Keah Brown, Esmé Weijun Wang, and Jillian Weise—about disability, publishing, and accessibility. From our archives: Wang’s 2016 Year in Reading entry.
Paul Harding’s Book Notes Playlist
Enon author Paul Harding made a playlist to accompany his latest book, which was recently reviewed on our site by Joseph M. Schuster.
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This Is Just To Say
“’This Is Just To Say’ is magical because of this personal, endless quality to it,” writes Jezebel’s Kate Dries in her exploration of the poem’s prevalence among Twitter comedians. Meanwhile Andrew Epstein remarks in a supplementary blog post, “I guess this is just to say that the Jezebel piece reminded me that Kenneth Koch was remixing and spoofing [William Carlos] Williams almost 50 years before anyone ever dreamt of Twitter.”
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