The Best Books in Translation

Friend of The Millions Edan Lepucki has a short story in the most recent LA Times West Magazine, “Salt Lick“. Congrats!I’ve heard of publishers throwing in a free bookmark to help sell copies of a new book, but gold?Oriani Fallaci, the fiery (and athiest) Italian journalist who recently passed away, bequethed her library to a Pontifical university.Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam takes the Sony Reader for a spin and isn’t impressed.Did you know that among this year’s finalists is the first graphic novel ever to be in the running for a National Book Award? Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese has been given that honor. “I can’t say it’s a dream come true, because it never even would have occurred to me to dream it. It wasn’t in my reality,” Yang says.John Hodgman is at it again with one of the more antic Washington Post chats I’ve ever encountered. (via Books are my only friends)

If Moby Lives is right, the literary beef that erupted when Oprah selected Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections for her book club and he rejected the (in his mind, dubious) honor is about to get a curious denouement. Speculation is that Freedom is poised to become another Oprah selection. And your author suspects that Franzen will be more welcoming this time around. (Oprah sticker haters should probably buy their copies of Freedom now, just to be safe.) Update: The AP confirms and so it begins again.

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.”