“One hears, in the news, that one new fad after another is sweeping the academy. World literature, digital humanities, book history, cognitive science. Perhaps everyone will just watch TV (there are twenty-seven panels on The Wire, and at least a paper, I recall, on Rizzoli and Isles, a TNT show)…The elephant in the room, or the one that has left the room a while ago (but whose stinking presence everyone still inhales deeply or holds their nose after), is Theory.” N + 1 reviews MLA 2013.
Tenure Track
Vegans and Vegetarians, Take Note
On The Rumpus this week, an interview with a vegan activist, Dr. Neal Barnard, whose appearance at 58 is “an excellent advertisement” for his diet.
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Little Prince, Lots of Translation
This month, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s iconic children’s book Le Petit Prince will be translated into Hassanya, a rural Arabic dialect spoken in portions of Mauritania, Morocco, Algeria, Senegal, and Mali. This marks the 300th translation of the book.
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Uncommon Language
Writing about a foreign country is always a dodgy proposition, but it seems to be especially thorny when English people and Americans take on their transatlantic brethren. Looking over two contributions to the genre by English writers — Terry Eagleton’s Across the Pond and A.A. Gill’s To America With Love — Carlin Romano concludes that neither manages to “teach us something new about ourselves.”
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New Sebald Excerpt
Over at Page-Turner, you can check out an excerpt from W.G. Sebald’s A Place In the Country, which we previewed briefly in our Great 2014 Book Preview last month.
Book Pirates
The American author is dead, long live the American author! At the New York Times, a eulogy.
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