The Washington Post reports that Spanish writer and Cervantes Prize winner Juan Goytisolo has died at age 86. Bruna Dantas Lobato wrote about Goytisolo’s 1970 novel of dispossession Count Julian for us, noting that “[j]ust like the nature of exile itself, the narrative offers no relief, no place of rest: just fragment after fragment of dry landscapes, lonely characters, and rooms in disarray.”
Juan Goytisolo: 1931-2017
Students and Reading
If we can’t teach students to read, should we try teaching more modern books?
An Imagined Country
“The immigrant who arrives too late in life to adapt to his new country, but too early to survive on nostalgia for the old country, has to create a third, imagined country to live in.” Peter Pomerantsev writes for the London Review of Books about Brighton Beach, Russian immigrants and a “self-made America.” Pair with Matthew Wolfson‘s review of Yelena Akhtiorskaya‘s novel of Brighton Beach and Odessa, Panic in a Suitcase.
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Sonya’s Favorite Novel of the Millenium (So Far)
At The Second Pass, check out my review of Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living, an unsung gem of a novel by Australian writer Carrie Tiffany.
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Pevear and Volokhonsky on Leskov
Granta talks to some translators of Russian literature about what they’re working on, and we learn that Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, the first couple of Russian translation are working on a 600-page collection of stories by Nikolai Leskov, an underappreciated contemporary of Dostoevsky. Previously: The Millions interviews P&V.
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Previewing Batuman
The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, the forthcoming debut effort by sometime Millions contributor Elif Batuman, gets an intriguing write-up in Publishers Weekly.
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Listen Up!
Don DeLillo spoke in Chicago last week, after receiving the Carl Sandburg Literary Award. Adam Daniels, our intrepid #LitBeat correspondent, reports.
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There’s Franco in My McCarthy
Sometime Ph.D candidate, sometime actor, and ubiquitous lit blog all-star James Franco (henceforth known as “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named”) has begun filming an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God in West Virginia, and I’m reminded of that line from W. B. Yeats’ “The Second Coming” — “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”