Got a crush on Draco Malfoy? J.K. Rowling is concerned. In a piece on her website, she writes: “I have often had cause to remark on how unnerved I have been by the number of girls who fell for this particular fictional character.” Pair with: our own Elizabeth Minkel on Rowling and other authors with second thoughts.
Bad Boys
Confessions of a Modern Opium Smoker
"Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling, and Charles Dickens wrote about opium smoking in their novels. But if you read the way they describe opium smoking, without a doubt these people never saw the real thing. It’s laughable…What we see in movies, even to this day, with the obligatory London opium-smoking scene is complete fiction." Interview with a modern-day opium addict.
Visiting Main Street
What happens if your town's reputation was made by an author who hated it? Sinclair Lewis grew up in Sauk Centre, Minnesota and scathingly satirized it in Main Street (our Modern Library Revue of it), but it's the town's only claim to fame nearly a century later. At The Morning News, Matt Ray Robison visits.
Lesley Nneka Arimah: Artist of the Year
The Minneapolis Star Tribune has named author Lesley Nneka Arimah its 2017 Artist of the Year. They note, "Arimah is at the forefront of a growing number of young authors, primarily immigrants and writers of color — in the Twin Cities, as well as across the country — who are writing some of the most original and interesting fiction and poetry being published today." Arimah is the author of the short story collection What it Means When a Man Falls From the Sky, a 2017 Year in Reading favorite. She was also honored as one of the National Book Foundation's "5 under 35" and named as a finalist for the John Leonard Prize. Congratulations!
The End of the Hemingway Embargo
2,000 recently digitized copies of Ernest Hemingway’s papers will be transferred from Cuba to Boston’s John F. Kennedy Library – this will be the first time copies of the papers will be available to U.S. researchers. As of right now, I don’t believe there are any plans to return the urinal Hemingway took from a Key West bar to its proper location in Sloppy Joe’s.
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This Land Press
This Land Press, which launched in 2010 as a project to “bring literary journalism to Middle America,” will suspend publication of its magazine this spring, and there are no immediate plans for future publication.
What Doesn’t Translate
We've linked to infographics about the life cycle of translated books, but that doesn't cover the difficulties inherent in translation itself. The New Yorker's latest Out Loud podcast tackles this subject as Adam Gopnik talks with Ann Goldstein and Sasha Weiss about priorities in translation and how we identify with the languages we use.