We care quite a bit about book covers here at The Millions, hence our recent rounds of cover-judging. To honor the hundredth anniversary of Tolstoy’s death, Flavorwire has compiled a selection of Anna Karenina‘s many covers, and opportunities for judgement abound.
Covering Anna Karenina
Recommended Reading: Qiu Miaojin
Remember when I wrote about Bonnie Huie’s translation of Qiu Miaojin’s Notes of a Crocodile? Well here’s some more about Huie’s work. Over at the PEN blog, you can check out the translator’s introduction to Miaojin as well as an additional excerpt from the translation-in-progress.
More on Lydia Davis
Fiction Friction
“There’s more to life than writing and publishing fiction. There is another way entirely, amazed as I am to discover it at this late date,” Philip Roth said in an interview with Cynthia Haven for Stanford’s The Book Haven. Besides his retirement from writing, Roth also discussed why he doesn’t consider himself an American-Jewish writer and his book The Ghost Writer. For more Roth, read our essay on lessons you can learn from his work.
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Charter Schools
Diane Ravitch takes on the documentary Waiting for Superman in the “Myth of Charter Schools” for The New York Review of Books.
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For Your Weekend
Slate offers up a treatise on “the greatness of gin.” (via my friend Derek, who wrote: “for your book blog; there is too little booze on it”)
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“Odessa stands for freedom as well as sleaze.”
“Embracing the transients and flâneurs, this is, in effect, a museum of Russian literature. And, being Russian, it becomes a museum of censorship and repression as well as art: of genius and bravery, blood and lies.” Snowdrops author A.D. Miller visits Ukraine’s Odessa State Literary Museum.
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