“My process for writing is the same, regardless of form: I abandon my children, I become a horrible husband, and a half-assed teacher. That’s what it all has in common.” Adam Johnson interviewed for Tin House in conjunction with the release of his new collection of short stories, Fortune Smiles.
The Half-Seen Thing
Annals of Translation
Recommended Reading: The largest publishers of translated works in the United States published less in 2015 than they normally do—503 works of fiction down from 597 from the previous year.
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Weekend Prizewinners
Next by James Hynes has been named the winner of The Believer Book Award, and it was announced Friday that Thomas Teal’s translation from the Swedish of Tove Jansson’s The True Deceiver took home the Best Translated Book Award. The book was competing with a shortlist of ten novels in translation.
Capturing Appalachia
“Of all the work produced from this region no one observer gets the place or the people completely right,” Rob Amberg writes about his 40 years spent photographing Appalachia. His photo essay “Up the Creek” is part of The Oxford American’s “Portraying Appalachia” Symposium.
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Catlin Seaview Survey
One of my favorite Google Easter Eggs was the (now removed) instruction to “swim across the Atlantic Ocean” in order to get from New York to London. Today, however, that joke seems prophetic. Google, in conjunction with The University of Queensland and the Catlin Group, has created the Catlin Seaview Survey or, in other words, “an underwater variant of the Google Street View service.”
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“He’s like a Shakespeare.”
How do you “challenge Muslim stereotypes” in film? Add more white actors. The director of a biopic about 13th-century Sufi poet Jalaluddin al-Rumi hopes to have Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert Downey Jr. star in the film.
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It Was Nothing, Really
W.H. Auden lived a secret life, not as a man with a second family or an illicit habit but as, weirdly enough, a genuinely kind human being. He paid for a friend’s costly operation and camped outside the apartment of a woman who suffered from night terrors until she felt safe enough to sleep on her own again. So why did the poet want to hide his good deeds? He claimed he didn’t want to be admired for basic decency.
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