If you’re anything like me, you’re likely to be intrigued by a series with the title Novelists in Restaurants Eating Food. If you’re a lot like me, to the point where it may be a cause for concern, you’ll be doubly intrigued by the prospect of Charles Yu paying a visit to Buffalo Wild Wings. Sample quote: “I’m not sure what I was expecting, but the restaurant simultaneously managed to exceed, disappoint, and exactly meet these expectations.”
“Sometimes America reaches maximum volume”
The Best of the VQR
If you read my Year In Reading, and if you’re a really impulsive person, you probably already subscribed to The Virginia Quarterly Review. However if you needed more than just my testimonial in order to open up your wallet, perhaps their official list of “The Best Writing in VQR in 2012” will sway you.
●
●
Coming Soon: The Future
Lapham’s Quarterly‘s Food issue was a big hit, but their upcoming Future issue looks promising as well.
Too Crazy to Believe
“Any day’s news supplies plots so fantastic that most make-believe story lines pale in comparison.” Author John Altman in the LA Times about the difficulty of writing fiction during Trump’s presidency. “My current novel-in-progress concerns North Korea,” writes Altman, “and each day’s headlines endanger its premise. But too much second-guessing hobbles a writer. One can only take a deep breath, remind oneself that war with North Korea would jeopardize much more than a humble spy thriller, and forge ahead, hoping for the best.”
●
●
●
●
New Dyer Book
Word of a new book from Millions fave Geoff Dyer has just emerged. (Edit: new in the U.S.; it’s been published previously in the U.K.) The Missing of the Somme, due in August, is a “meditation on World War I.”
●
●
Women in Translation
“Between 2008 and 2014 there were 2,471 fiction translations published in the U.S. for the first time ever. Of those, 1,775 were written by men, compared to 657 by women, and 39 by men & women. In terms of percentages, female authors make up 26.6% of all the fiction translations published over the past seven years. I suspected going into this that there would be significantly more male authors published in translation than women, but I figured it would be more like a 60-40 split, not 71-27. That’s brutal.” Chad Post on the gender gap in literary translation.
●
●