Out this week: All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung; Things to Make and Break by May-Lan Tan; Gone So Long by Andre Dubus III; Impossible Owls by Brian Phillips; Scribe by Alyson Hagy; A Dream Called Home by Reyna Grande; What If This Were Enough? by Heather Havrilesky; and Good and Mad by Rebecca Traister.
Tuesday New Release Day: Chung; Tan; Dubus III; Phillips; Hagy; Grande; Havrilesky; Traister
The Conch Republic Seeks Literary Job Applicants
A true genius is someone who’s talented and accomplished enough to work in the publishing/literary crucible of New York City, but who’s also smart enough to know that working in New York City is nothing compared to working in Key West, Florida. That’s right: the Key West Literary Seminar is hiring.
Smoking Knausgaard
“[E]ach video is a portrait of the artist as a beginner—and a look at the creative process, in all its joy, abjection, delusion, and euphoria.” The Paris Review has a new video series called “My First Time,” in which big-name authors talk about getting their start. Helen DeWitt, Jeffrey Eugenides, Sheila Heti, a chain-smoking Karl Ove Knausgaard – what more could anyone want? More origin stories, that’s what! Six writers – Colum McCann, Alexander Chee, Jami Attenberg, Emily St. John Mandel, Justin Taylor, and Anthony Marra – look back on their first books for us.
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Como?
Here at The Millions, we tend to focus on translation as a literary form, which often leads to debates over how much a translator can change the meaning of a text. However, the majority of translation in the world is far more functional, as it is in the case of basic European bureaucracy. In The Nation, Benjamin Paloff takes a broader look at movements from one language to another. Pair with: Barclay Bram Shoemaker on translating Mo Yan’s Frog.
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The Science of Language and Creativity
At the Philadelphia Inquirer, neurologists look at cases where serious brain injury has actually brought about higher levels of creativity in artists, particularly where linguistic ability is harmed. “Language is the bully of the brain,” [one neurologist] says. “It takes up its own space and if something else gets crowded out, too bad.” (via Book Bench)
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Coming Out of the Woodwork
“Suddenly, it seems like gay characters are everywhere in Y.A. literature. Or, if not everywhere, certainly in far more places and in a greater variety than ever before.”
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A Narrative Made Up of Many Narratives
Elizabeth Karp-Evans interviews How to Read a Novelist author John Freeman about editing, American narratives, and his goals for Freeman’s.
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