David Orr investigates the day jobs of some modern poets, and notes “the university job is a relatively recent development in Anglo-American poetry.” Indeed, as this playful illustration from Incidental Comics makes clear, poets have engaged in a wide array of salaried jobs – from pediatricians to bank clerks to diplomats. Previously, we took a look at writers and their day jobs, too.
Poets and Their Day Jobs
New Vessel Press Brings International Literature to the US
New Vessel Press is a new publisher specializing in the translation of foreign literature into the English language. Translator Ross Uffberg and journalist Michael Z. Wise started it last year. Next month, they’ll publish their first book, The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra by Pedro Mairal, and they have plans for quite a few more as well.
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“Sequence of blackouts”
Recommended Reading: this new translation of an Albert Camus play at Page-Turner.
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“Everyone is simply wonderful”
You’ve heard about grade inflation, but universities are now dealing with academic job reference inflation, a slightly more adult kind of problem.
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Money Problems
Recommended Reading: Does commercial literature hurt literary fiction?
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A Complete Reading
Recommended Reading: From The New Yorker, it’s Tessa Hadley on fiction as anthropology: “When I’m writing a story, its world is thin, unsatisfactory, untrue, until I start to find my way to those details, those ‘small cultural signifiers.’ As these accumulate on the page, the life in the piece thickens, the details breed, and the story begins to stir.”
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