If you went to Dublin at one point and paid a visit to The Book of Kells — and if you didn’t, what gives? — you’ll appreciate this take on the artifact in The Irish Times.
That Old Thing?
Translation Matters
The Guardian reports that translated literary fiction sold almost twice as much as English-language fiction in the UK last year.
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For Franzen Haters
Do you hate Jonathan Franzen (and/or contemporary literature generally)? Then you’ll love B.R. Myers‘ take on him at The Atlantic.
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Comfort Food
With regards to that Rushdie quote: a defense of bad books.
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Royals
Make of this what you will, but when Lorde first read Year in Reading alum Wells Tower’s Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, it struck her as “the best collection [she’d] ever read.” Her interview with Tavi Gevinson in Rookie reveals that she also loves Raymond Carver and Claire Vaye Watkins.
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Amazon’s Programming
Look out, network television. Amazon’s hiring creative executives to shepherd “crowd-sourced scripts” through development.
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China’s Censorship Army
Not only does China employ some two million censors to monitor microblogs and the internet, but the nation also has a formidable staff – both official and unofficial – to monitor literature and print publications. Indeed, reports Andrew Jacobs for The New York Times, “It is the editors at Chinese publishing houses themselves who often turn out to have the heaviest hands. ‘Self-censorship has become the most effective weapon,’ said the editor in chief of a prominent publishing house in Beijing … ‘If you let something slip through that catches the attention of a higher-up, it can be a career killer.’”
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The Peripatetic
Over the past fifteen years, Mohsin Hamid has moved from New York, to London, and to Lahore, Pakistan, with stints in Italy and Greece. His new book, which came out yesterday, is a series of essays about his odyssey across the world, chronicling his observations and experiences that led him to move. At Bookforum, a review by Jake Lamar.