Recommended Reading: The Orphan Master’s Son author Adam Johnson penned a long profile of Kim Jong-Il’s “personal chef, court jester, and sidekick,” and it’s every bit as wild as you’re probably imagining.
“Fujimoto would never see him apologize again.”
The Marvelous Words
Over at Catapult, Niina Pollari writes about translating Finnish literature in English. As she puts it, “If a thing you read gives you that sensation, it’s your responsibility to share the piece with someone.”
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Lydia Davis Whistles
False Positive
At The New Yorker, Sarah Miller humorously learns why only positive book reviews might be a bad thing. “If St. Petersburg is the Little Engine That Could of city names, then the main character, Raskolnikov, is the Little Engine That Could of elderly pawnbroker murderers,” she writes in her review of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment.
The Book Was Better
The Book Was Better is a podcast that “debates, discusses, and rips into the (often) hastily written and terrible book-of-the-film” adaptations for movies like Wild, Wild West, Hackers, The Net, and (try not to be upset by this one…) Jumanji. (Those episodes can be found here, here, here, and here, respectively.)
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