“The label ‘Immigrant Fiction’ derives from the same problematic Pantheon in which ‘Women’s Literature,’ ‘Black Literature,’ and more, exist. Unlike the genre of, say, science fiction, which describes the content and style of the writing, categories like ‘immigrant’ or ‘Black’ fiction seem to be concerned more with the author’s identity and/or perceived audience.” On literary categories and immigrant fiction, over at Guernica.
The Boundaries of Literature
RIP Márquez
Gabriel García Márquez has died at the age of 87. The Colombian writer was a prominent novelist, screenwriter, and journalist. He was most famous for One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera, and The Autumn of the Patriarch and won a Nobel Prize in 1982 for his work.
Ancient Welsh Book To Be Made Available Online
A 13th century Welsh book originally written by monks on pages of animal skin has finally been made available online thanks to the country’s National Library. The ancient Book of Aneirin contains the Gododdin, one of the oldest poems ever written in the language.
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Amazon: criticism you can count on
A study of the top 100 non-fiction titles between 2004 and 2007, and the major media and Amazon reviews for each title, yields some fascinating results: “experts and consumers agreed in aggregate about the quality of a book.”
Literary Cartographies
“Everyone was compared to García Márquez or Fuentes once upon a time. Now it’s Bolaño or Vila-Matas (best case scenario). I am not sure what the reason for this is. There are many possible explanations. One may be that Latin America is still conceived by many as a kind of remote, torrid zone, an isolated and disconnected region of the world. So the only possible references associated with younger writers are the better-known older ones, always writing within the same language.” Over at The White Review, Stephen Sparks interviews Valeria Luiselli about Latin American criticism and borrowing from the past. Also check out Lily Meyer’s Millions review of Luiselli’s new novel, The Story of My Teeth.
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Eaten Whales
Apropos of nothing in particular, here’s a fantastic cake inspired by Moby-Dick. Apropos of whales in general, however, is this beautiful video on the disintegration of a whale carcass inspired by “Radiolab.”
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On the Cover
Janet Hansen, designer for Alfred A. Knopf, explains her process in creating the cover for Steven Millhauser’s Voices in the Night. Look back on our comparisons of U.S. and U.K. book covers.
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