Recommended Reading: In which a great translator takes on a nearly impossible project: “Schmidt violates the rules of orthography and punctuation throughout the book, and its sprawling conversations cover James Joyce, trees, magic, the moon, and Xerxes, among many other things. After getting Zettel’s Traum out of his system, Schmidt would go on to write his best works. ‘I had to write it,’ he said. ‘And such a book had to be written sometime.'”
Translating the Untranslatable
According to What’s Trending
It might sound weird, but Jon Methven McSweeney's really wishes you would tell him how he did with your egg whites and avocado wrap.
See Spot Run
Is there any animal more noble than your beloved childhood pet? In this moving essay from 3:AM Magazine, Adrian Nathan West explains a couple of lessons that he learned about love and devotion from his Labrador named Jake.
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Tales of a Onetime Construction Worker
Last week, Emily Gould recommended Nell Zink in her Year of Reading piece, extolling Zink's novel The Wallcreepers as a “funny, profane, [and] deeply weird book.” At The Paris Review Daily, Matthew Jakubowski interviews the author, who talks about living in Germany, reading too much Kafka and writing for Jonathan Franzen.
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How Many Palins Does It Take To Break Even?
Will HarperCollins sell 400,000 copies of Going Rogue? (My guess: you betcha.)
Burroughs’ Selected Letters
Recommended Reading: The selected letters of William S. Burroughs at The Paris Review Daily. Read his correspondences with family and writers Allen Ginsberg and Norman Mailer. Pair with Jonathan Clarke’s article on why an author’s biography will never be more important than their writing.
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Book Nerd Gift Alert
I did not know this existed: Trivial Pursuit Book Lover's Edition. I suspect that Millions readers would be quite skilled. Sample question: "What Hardy novel features a doomed title heroine who names her daughter Sorrow?" Bookslut took the game for a spin a few years back.
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