The Guardian reports that translated literary fiction sold almost twice as much as English-language fiction in the UK last year.
Translation Matters
Curiosities: The Bowflex of Bookishness
The August issue of Open Letters is available. Nestled amidst the literary fare are early Oscar nominations from Sarah Hudson and a piece on the video game The Sims by Phillip A. Lobo.Electric Literature teamed up with animator Jonathan Ashley and musician Nick DeWitt to produce an animated trailer for Jim Shepard’s “Your Fate Hurtles Down at You,” a story which appeared in the literary magazine’s first issue.BOMB Magazine has a conversation between poker buddies Nam Le and Charles D’Ambrosio.Years ago, we wrote about La Porte, Indiana, a nifty book with a connection to Found Magazine chronicling a cache of found photographs from a small town. Now the book is being made into a documentary.Nicholson Baker has written the funniest piece yet about the Kindle. Ed initially takes umbrage (and gets comments from Baker and recants somewhat). YPTR weighs in as well.Spoiler Alert: neojapansme, a provider (along with our own Ben Dooley) of quite a bit of insight into Murakami’s new (and untranslated) novel 1Q84 has published a review of the book.Millions Fans: The Millions Facebook group now has over 400 members. We’ll be asking group members to help us with some upcoming special features, so join up (if you’re into that sort of thing.)Shatner… Palin… Twitter… bongos… need we say more?
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The Collector of Baskervilles
If there’s anyone more obsessive than Sherlock Holmes, it’s Glen Miranker. The former Apple executive owns the largest private collection of Sherlock Holmes works, totaling 4,500 items including books, manuscripts, illustrations, and other oddities. How he amassed such a collection isn’t a mystery — he’s been at it since the 1970s.
Growing Up
It’s a common trope in writing courses that young artists need a dose of childlike creativity. Self-help books for people with writer’s block are filled with callbacks to childhood interests. But is it possible, as Tasha Golden argues at the Ploughshares blog, that idealizing children isn’t the answer to our problems?
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27 letters
Here’s a letter that no longer finds itself at home in our alphabet, & yet we use it everyday.
Joyless
Poor Emily Schultz. Her debut novel is getting trashed on Amazon — not because it’s a bad novel, but because a number of reviewers have confused her with Stephen King. (It doesn’t help that her magazine also shares a name with King’s novel.)
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Heavy Feather Review’s Call for Submissions
As they begin preparation work on “Vacancies,” a special double-issue of their magazine, the folks at Heavy Feather Review have issued a call for writing that explores “the dimly lit corners of the unoccupied, unassuming, or idle.” For inspiration, look toward Philip Levine’s poem, “An Abandoned Factory, Detroit.”
The Lines Between Us
“Think of landscape. Think of how elements come to be attached to one another, how it’s impossible to separate the road from the field, the field from the tree, the tree from the water, the water from the sky. We cannot attribute natural features to the lines we design just as we cannot attribute natural causes to those dying as they try to cross them.” For Tin House, Portuguese writer Susana Moreira Marques meditates on the concept of borders and Wolf Böwig’s photography project, “Borders and Beyond.”