Recommended Reading: George Szirtes’s “Afterword: The Death of the Translator,” which is available on The White Review’s website.
“They lined up the translators and shot them.”
Reading with the Jetsons
Ever dreamt of using a sophisticated library where robots fetch your books for you? Well, you bespectacled futurist, guess what. (h/t The Paris Review)
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Meeting Mr. Jacobson
"A funny thing happened when Howard Jacobson won the Man Booker Prize last Tuesday... a smattering of people who were not even related to Mr. Jacobson stood and cheered." A profile of the new Booker winner and an exploration of his winning book, The Finkler Question, in the New York Times.
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On Marathon Readings
Writing for the Wall Street Journal, David Shapiro remarks on the current popularity of the marathon reading, or “a format of communal public performance that has more in common with the filibuster than the conventional literary reading.” Previously, Jeff Price wrote a piece on our site concerning the particular camaraderie that arises among participants and audience members during marathon readings. (As a bonus: I share a David Foster Wallace anecdote in the comments for that piece.)
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A Jump in Stature
Mark Twain first rose to fame as the author of an essay about a frog-jumping contest in California. Originally titled “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,” the essay went viral in America’s biggest newspapers, eventually inspiring the New York Tribune to write of Twain that “no reputation was ever so rapidly won.” Yet the humor which made the essay so popular is often lost on modern audiences, in no small part because, as Ben Turnoff writes in Lapham’s Quarterly, frontier humor isn’t funny if there's no Wild West.
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Writing in the Motor City
Is Detroit the new Brooklyn? Two Brooklyn writers relocated to the Motor City and are trying to turn the city into a writers' haven with the project "Write A House." The non-profit will award free, renovated houses in Detroit to writers of modest means.
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RIP Robert Stone
RIP Robert Stone, who passed away at his home in Key West on Saturday. The author, who won the National Book Award in 1975 for his novel Dog Soldiers, was 77. You can get a sense of his work by reading Tatjana Soli’s review of his story collection Fun with Problems.
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