At Lit Hub, Sara Wheeler shares an excerpt from her book, Mud and Stars, focusing on Constance Garnett, an “indefatigable worker” who translated the works of Dostoevsky and Chekhov. As she brought these writers further into the English mainstream, the translator gained her fair share of admirers. “Garnett made Dostoyevsky a household name, and he did the same for her. Ernest Hemingway was one of many who admired her Dostoyevskys, as well as her Tolstoys. ‘I remember,’ he told a friend, ‘how many times I tried to read War and Peace until I got the Constance Garnett translation.'”
Constance Garnett Gets Her Due
Barnes & Noble to Go the Way of Borders
According to a report for The Wall Street Journal (paywall), Barnes & Noble will be lessening its floor space allotted to traditional books in order to make way for more Nook displays. Over at Melville House’s blog, MobyLives, publisher Dennis Johnson speculates that this move could signify the end of the road for Barnes & Noble as a bookseller.
Kraus on Amazon
Exciting news: Jill Soloway (Transparent) is adapting Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick for Amazon. You could also check out Kraus’s Year in Reading.
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Zadie Smith on Charity
“But money is not neutral; it changes everything, including the ability to neutrally judge what people will or will not do for it.” Zadie Smith has a short essay in the New Yorker on the trials of lending money to a friend.
Pynchon Possessed by the Spirit of a Teenaged Girl
“Though female authors write experimental novels about women—like Renata Adler’s Speedboat or Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be?—the avant-garde has long been associated with male authors and stories. That association made Alexandra Kleeman’s You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine seem doubly unusual.” On Kleeman’s debut novel and blatantly feminine themes in the avant-garde.
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Homes for Old Kindles
Tired of that ancient Kindle sitting around, gathering dust? Now you can trade it in.
On Her 126th Birthday
“Her poems shimmer most when they reflect on the yearning to rebel against the constrained space granted to women’s voices in literature and life.” On her 126th birthday, The Guardian argues that Edna St. Vincent Millay‘s poetry — not her reputation — should be remembered and celebrated. Pair with: an essay on being an uneasy, untamed women writer.
Pablo Neruda Was Murdered
Following the recent exhumation of Pablo Neruda, “there is new evidence showing he was likely murdered by agents of dictator Augusto Pinochet.” A judge has subsequently ordered a hunt for the poet’s killer.
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A New Quarterly Conversation
Another quarter, another Quarterly Conversation. Check out reviews of Kirsty Gunn’s “incantatory prose” in The Big Music, an interview with Lars Iyer, and much more.
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