The Guardian reports that translated literary fiction sold almost twice as much as English-language fiction in the UK last year.
Translation Matters
You May Finally Touch the Art
Greek artist Petros Vrellis has created a touch-sensitive, interactive version of Van Gogh’s Starry Night.
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Excerpt from Good on Paper
Rachel Cantor’s pub day for Good on Paper (included in our first-half preview) was this Tuesday. Check out an excerpt from the novel at Lit Hub.
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Žižek’s Take on Baltimore
Philosopher and flower hater Slavoj Žižek comes late to the “let’s discuss The Wire‘s greater cultural significance” party, but he does bring some excellent points with him. For the record, he doesn’t believe it’s the greatest TV series of all time. And the entire thing is worth hearing if only for an in-depth analysis of this [NSFW] scene.
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Obsessing Over Women
Parul Sehgal cures your “bland biography”-induced malaise by prescribing “three delightfully deranging books” in which writers “riff on the women who’ve consumed them.”
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A Nervous Tic Motion Of The Head To The Left
“She loved that I had to kiss her goodbye 16 times or 24 times if it was Wednesday.” In poet Neil Hilborn’s slam poem “OCD,” he discusses what it’s like for a person with obsessive compulsive disorder to fall in love and incorporates his tics in the performance.
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John Berger, In Memoriam
The British critic, essayist, and novelist John Berger died yesterday at his home in France, reports The New York Times. Probably best known for his book of art-criticism-as-philosophy Ways of Seeing, which was turned into a popular BBC series and sold more than a million copies, Berger also won the Booker prize for G. in 1972 and was nominated again in 2008 for an epistolary novel, From A to X. The Guardian has rounded up some of his quotes, including the apt-feeling “[h]ope is not a form of guarantee; it’s a form of energy, and very frequently that energy is strongest in circumstances that are very dark.”
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Light as a Feather
“We can work harder to mourn, get better at it, connect it better to how we live, how we care for people, how we educate people. It’s politics, for me.” ZYZZYVA interviews Max Porter about his Grief Is the Thing with Feathers. Pair with Lidia Yuknavitch’s Millions essay on grief and art.