“May God give me the courage to finish it:” The London Review of Books profiles one woman’s attempt to translate Finnegans Wake into Mandarin Chinese.
A Chinese Finnegan
Down, Set, Read
Indianapolis Colts quarterback Andrew Luck is the NFL’s unofficial librarian. According to his teammates, Luck is a voracious reader who regularly recommends books in the locker room. The genre is unimportant; Luck reads everything from books on concrete architecture to Love Life by Rob Lowe. Where is the Football Book Club when you need them?
Leonard Cohen in Love
Leonard Cohen's love letters to Marianne Ihlen, which also described the writing and publication of Cohen's novels, recently sold for a whopping $876,000.
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Iowa’s Free Online Poetry Workshop
A new MOOC from the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program is scheduled to begin on June 28. “How Writers Write Poetry” is free and open to the public, and it will feature craft talks from poets such as Robert Hass and Kwame Dawes. A fiction-writing course is also scheduled for September. (Related: Read how several Iowa MFA students describe a typical day in the program.)
Blind Date with Dostoevsky
At the Paris Review Daily, Elif Batuman walks us through part one of her 12-hour blind date with Dostoevsky. (via Book Bench)
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“I can’t rely upon sex and violence to sell my books”
Meet Libi Astaire, the “Jewish Jane Austen” and a major figure in the burgeoning Haredi literary scene.
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Brief Hideous Movie
Gawker posted the first trailer for the forthcoming film version of David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews With Hideous Men.
73 Ways to Become a Better Writer
For aspiring writers who prefer their advice in bulk, Mary Jaksch at the Huffington Post gives 73 suggestions for becoming a better writer.