“We break down thirty-nine literary journals and well-respected periodicals, tallying genre, book reviewers, books reviewed, and journalistic bylines to offer an accurate assessment of the publishing world.” This year’s VIDA Count is out.
Viva La Vida
Abandon All Carts
If you’ve read the Inferno, you’ve journeyed with Dante and Virgil to the ninth circle of Hell. At McSweeney’s, you can go grocery shopping with them. “Abandon all carts, ye who enter here.”
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Talking with Daniel Woodrell
Winter’s Bone author Daniel Woodrell has a new book out, and to mark the occasion, he talks with Dwyer Murphy of Guernica about his upcoming book tour, Southern poverty and the rejections Winter’s Bone received. Sample quote: “When my family started doing better and my parents encouraged my brothers and me to succeed beyond them, we started asking why our parents were telling us to strive so hard to live in these neighborhoods full of people they clearly resented—and feared too, I think.”
Talking to Ourselves
“Like walkie-talkies that require a button be pressed to speak and released to hear, does reading require that either the voice of the author or the voice of the reader’s consciousness be silenced at any given moment? Such an analogy suggests that reading is an act of hospitality toward another’s mind, in which we silence our voice in courtesy to the voice of another’s consciousness, a voice that alternates with our own in conversation.” John Biguenet on silent reading.
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Translators at Work
Clarice Lispector’s translator and Year in Reading alumna Katrina Dodson interviews Elena Ferrante’s English-language translator Ann Goldstein about private identities and the final Neapolitan novel.
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Who Wouldn’t Want to Retire Here?
A retired Japanese couple has teamed up with an architecture firm to design “a house with a bookshop and a café where neighbors and visitors can stop by.” The result is a decidedly more spacious and well-lit version of Brazenhead Books – another domicile/bookshop.
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TED is Dead
It’s fashionable to hate on TED all of a sudden. In the span of a month, we’ve got this piece by Nathan Jurgenson in The New Inquiry, this one by Benjamin Wallace in New York Magazine, and this one by Megan Garber in The Atlantic.
“Because with Helen DeWitt, everything is physical.”
Lightning Rods author (and occasional Millions commenter) Helen DeWitt has a story entitled “Recovery” featured in Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading series. Don’t miss the “single sentence animation” video for it, either.
Which is Which
“Two writers guard an archive. One writes Fiction; the other writes Fact. To get past them, you have to figure out which is which.” Recommended reading: The New Yoker‘s Jill Lepore attempts to trace the “long-lost story of the longest book ever written,” Joe Gould‘s The Oral History of Our Time.
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