For The New Yorker, Jill Lepore brings a critical eye to the memoirs of 2020’s Democratic presidential candidates, comparing the lyricism and romance of Pete Buttigieg’s Shortest Way Home to the force and anger of Elizabeth Warren’s This Fight Is Our Fight to the less inspired liberal-cum-Republican coming-of-age narrative in Ronald Reagan’s Where’s the Rest of Me? “Most of the books,” Lepore notes, “are not great books, and some of these people just don’t seem like good people. That doesn’t mean they wouldn’t make good Presidents, I guess, but it raises a question: Why do they write this stuff?” What are political autobiographies really for?
Democrats and the Written Word
Blurbing for Laughs
●
●
Literary Translators are Winners
The American Literary Translators Association has announced this year’s recipients of the National Translation Award. Prose honors went to William M. Hutchins’s translation from the Arabic of Ibrahim al-Koni’s The New Waw: Saharan Oasis, and the poetry winner was Pierre Joris’s translation from the German of Paul Celan’s Collected Later Poetry.
●
●
Next Up, Denmark
After waking us up to their favorite Brazilian novelists, the editorial board at Granta is turning its gaze to Norway. In the first issue of Norwegian Granta, you’ll find a slew of stories by illustrious contributors (among them Jennifer Egan, Roberto Bolano and Alice Munro) alongside new stories from authors native to the country. At Granta’s website, you can read an interview with the magazine’s online editor, Ted Hodgkinson.
●
●
Internet Tendency, Redesigned
The charmingly lo-fi McSweeney’s website gets a redesign and manages to stay charmingly lo-fi.
●
●
A Hideous Play
“Titus Andronicus is a hideous play…. In other words, it’s one of those tragedies that was just crying out for an illustrated edition.” View Leonard Baskin’s grotesque etchings of Titus Andronicus in The Paris Review.
●
●
Tuesday New Release Day
New this holiday week is former indie rocker Matthew Gallaway’s The Metropolis Case, an opera infused debut, written up favorably and excerpted at The Times.
●
●