“All of a sudden, things that should be banal, like a person’s face—the fact that a person has a face—becomes extremely disorienting. In these moments, I think it’s important to keep those strange commas.” In an illuminating interview for Asymptote, Year in Reading alumna Katrina Dodson talks about the thrills and challenges in translating The Complete Stories of Clarice Lispector. Pair with Magdalena Edwards’s Millions review of the collection.
The Via Crucis of the Book
Jonathan Lethem’s Brooklyn
Jonathan Lethem gives The Guardian a tour of his Brooklyn neighborhood.
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More on Rizzoli’s
Rizzoli’s is closing, but if the owners have their way, there’ll be a Rizzoli’s II opening its doors in the near future. In the meantime, you can read this Times piece about the bookstore, which puts its closing into context.
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Perpetua
When, in 1921, a young French writer working as a translator for James Joyce asked the writer to reveal his schema for Ulysses, Joyce balked, saying that “If I gave it all up immediately, I’d lose my immortality.” What he meant, at least in part, is that he wanted his opus to be relevant in perpetuity. At Full-Stop, Dustin Illingworth reads Ulysses on Twitter and asks: can the book survive the transition from the page to social media? Pair with: Josh Cook on The House of Ulysses by Julian Rios.
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Food Book Fair
Hey! Fans of Kickstarter (or possibly KickStumbler?) wouldn’t you like to help finance “the world’s first ever Food Book Fair that will bring together food publications from around the world alongside dynamic event programming.”
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Internet Erasure
“There is a wide range of art in the world, but there is an urgent need for art that pushes us and makes us uncomfortable because it forces us to think, to question, to give into it, to resist.” Year in Reading alum Roxane Gay writes on Internet censorship and Dennis Cooper’s now deleted blog.
Dear Alice
Last week in the LRB, Christian Lorentzen used a review of Dear Life to slam the critical consensus surrounding Alice Munro. At Salon, Kyle Minor defends the author, who he thinks “demonstrates that the short story can operate out of a formal dexterity no less expansive in its possibility than the novel’s.”
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