Did Patrick Modiano deserve the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature? Wrong question, our own Bill Morris writes in The Daily Beast. The right question is: Why is foreign fiction in translation still such a tough sell for American publishers?
Tough Sell
The Vulture Circles
New York magazine’s Vulture Reading Room series, featuring Sam Anderson and others, dares to take on Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol. The verdict? Brown’s stylistic overreach is still good comic fodder for discerning readers.
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Inside Coetzee’s Head
J. M. Coetzee has published The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy with psychologist Arabella Kurtz, which details the five-year correspondence between the two. The letters offer “a rare opportunity to understand the mind of a writer who almost never speaks at length in his own voice.” For more of the Nobel laureate, read our review of The Childhood of Jesus.
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The Humanities Ph.D.: Less Than Useless
Despair, debt, frustration, a decade in school rewarded with guaranteed joblessness. If this cocktail of woe sounds good to you, consider getting a Ph.D. in English, History, or any other humanities discipline. At the New York Times, yet another of the recent spate of articles explaining how utterly dismal the prospects of recent humanities Ph.D.s are.
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More dispatches from what will undoubtedly go down in history as the Great Pulitizer Prize For Fiction Brouhaha of 2012:
The Tournament of Books team over at The Morning News have posted an in depth commentary on this year’s withheld Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The Wall Street Journal asks a handful of book critics to name the books they thought should’ve won. And over at Moby Lives, Nick Davies has rounded up the statements made by the jury in response to the brouhaha. Lev Grossman, on the other hand, outlines why he’s totally okay with the board’s decision. And of course, we’ve got links and excerpts for all the finalists over here.
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The Birth of the Novel
Recommended Reading: On Herman Melville and his reputation for “being sexually dangerous, and even depraved.”
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Beautifying Books
As e-books gain market share, publishers are gussying up book designs. Free Press vice president and publisher Martha K. Levin says, “the message [is] that even if you’re buying 90 percent of your books on your e-reader, this is the one that you want to have on your bookshelf.” The article highlights 1Q84 as an example of a successfully well-designed physical object, but if you haven’t seen a copy, check out Chip Kidd’s discussion of his work on the book.
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That’s one reason why I choose primarily to review books in translation, preferably from the French, and preferably ones I’ve read in the original . And I’ll be reviewing the first three novels by Modiano for The Millions in the autumn.