“’When I finish reading one of her stories, I always feel understood and somehow forgiven for being human,’ Mr. George said. ‘It may simply come down to wisdom. Like the greats, Edith has it.'” Steve Almond gives an overview of Edith Pearlman‘s writing and publication history for The New York Times Book Review in the wake of the release of her latest collection, Honeydew, which Josh Cook recently reviewed for The Millions.
“Forgiven for Being Human”
Colson Whitehead Heads to London
Remember when Colson Whitehead wrote about his experiences at the World Series of Poker? Well, the Zone One author is back at it again, but this time with dispatches from London’s Olympic Village. I wonder if he'll share any gossip about Vince Vaughn and the US Women's Soccer team...
Fighting the Taxman
Neighbor and sometime Millions humorist Jacob Lambert has published a piece in Philly Weekly on our street's travails with the Board of Revision of Taxes (BRT). I was there and it was a stirring mix of city politics and journalism in action.
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Bad Habits
There are many things you could call William S. Burroughs, who was born a hundred years ago this month, but Will Self prefers to call him “the original junkie,” a title which reflects the author’s hedonistic background and the strangeness of books like Naked Lunch. Self takes a close look at Burroughs’s novel-cum-memoir, Junky, in The Guardian.
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Authenticity and New Orleans
Writing for n+1’s City by City series, Moira Donegan remarks on the “self-defeating contradictions” of working at a nonprofit in New Orleans. It’s a town, she writes, where most arrive to either “perform charity or to party,” and where, she feels, “many of the people who … come to help the city [are] also hurting it.” In certain ways, the piece can be read as being in conversation with Duncan Murrell’s 2012 essay for Oxford American about authenticity, preservation, posterity, and the Big Easy.
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Traduttori traditori (“translators traitors”)
“As energy loss is an unavoidable fact of mechanics — no mechanism can be 100% efficient, and the best a designer can do is manage the loss as productively as possible — so translation loss is similarly unavoidable,” explains Mark Davie, who recently translated Galileo’s Selected Writings. But what if the “energy loss” isn’t a failure of the work’s translator so much as a failure of the organization commissioning (or failing to commission) the translation? What if, as is the case for much Arabic literature, “the process [of selecting works for translation] is based on a political consideration” that deprives Western readers of the best Arabic literary work?
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New Zadie Smith
Recommended reading: new fiction from Zadie Smith in the New Yorker, "Escape from New York."
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Curiosities: Astronaut Food
Jonathan Evison talks with independent publicist Lauren Cerand about promoting books.Kindle shenanigans: "This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers."Marking the 40th anniversary of the Moon landing, Kottke puts together a huge post of photos, videos, and links in commemoration.Our recent item rounded up all the "big" books coming out in the latter half of the year. PW alerts readers to "10 promising fiction debuts" coming this fall.Jacket Copy concludes its Pomo Month with an annotated list of "61 essential postmodern reads."New uses for card catalogs. (via)The second issue of online literary journal The Critical Flame has arrived.Mark Sarvas offers a four-part interview with Joseph O'Neill. "I think I start with one idea. In Netherland, it was cricket in New York. Then there is an accumulation of sentences, and often just single words. Words that interest me. And I sort of build it up like a poem."Amazon names the "Best Books of the Year... So Far."
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