The novel Nabokov was working on when he died, The Original of Laura, is set to be released in the US on November 17th. (more…)
Horacio Castellanos Moya, author of Senselessness and eight other books, has written a piece about the “construction of the ‘Bolaño myth’ in the United States” that contrasts this myth with the man he knew.
Moya claims that Bolaño would probably be amused by the “marketing operation” in which his reckless youth has been played up at the expense of his sober, productive final decade, when “the greater part of [his] prose work” was written, when his “major preoccupation was his children, and that if he took a lover at the end of his life, he did it in the most conservative Latin American style, without threatening the preservation of his family.”
But he’d be less amused, Moya continues, at what this operation implies, as far as crafting a new narrative by which North Americans will understand Latin American literature. (more…)
I’m reading the recently-published retranslation of the Tin Drum, and this passage from the second page made me smile, despite its ominous note: (more…)
Praveen Mavdan and Christin Evans, owners for the past two years of the Booksmith in San Francisco, are writing a series of weekly articles on the Huffington Post about their experiences running the store and, most importantly, their efforts to make the store competitive in a “changed habitat,” the bookselling market.
Their most recent article, “Evolve or Die,” first spells out the familiar dismal story about independents closing year after year, and then spells out their reasons for believing that now is a time of great opportunity for independent bookselling. (more…)
Last Monday I had the good fortune to catch a talk given by Natasha Wimmer, translator of Roberto Bolaño’s novels the Savage Detectives and 2666, at the 111 Minna Gallery in San Francisco.
In the course of her opening remarks, she said that from the beginning, she was “struck by how different Bolaño’s novels are from one another.” (more…)
As you’ve heard by now, the Nobel Prize in Literature this year went to one Herta Müller, and even if you’re an avid reader and fancy yourself some kind of intellectual, you probably haven’t heard of her until this morning. (Disclosure: I fit that description exactly.) This makes two relatively obscure picks in a row, which is annoying and amusing some people.
As you probably recall, there was some controversy last October, when then-Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, Horace Engdahl, in the course of responding to criticisms that the Nobel Prize goes to too many Europeans, claimed that the main reason no American has won the prize in many years was because our literary culture is parochial and insular.
These statements angered people, but at least they had the virtue of being pretty much accurate: we simply don’t translate nearly as much world literature into English as we should, and Americans do prefer to read about themselves whenever possible. I know of a bookstore in Mexico City, for example, where you can find more of Eastern Europe in Spanish than is available in English anywhere I know of in the States.
But really, are we all that clueless? (more…)
The Book of William — the new book chronicling the fortunes of Shakespeare’s First Folio, by regular Rumpus contributor Paul Collins — gets a nice brief writeup in the “Nonfiction Chronicle” feature of the NYT Sunday Book Review:
“Part antiquarian-book primer, part chronicle of literary curiosities, The Book of William is divided into five acts, each evoking a significant place and time in the First Folio’s colorful history…
“Weaved throughout are accounts of Collins’s amusing efforts to examine a handful of the 230 First Folios known to exist; he writes of the mixture of horror and delight he felt on discovering that ’some Jacobean brat’ had doodled in a Folio’s margins. By the end, the reader is inclined to agree with Collins’s assertion that ‘books bear a tangible presence alongside their ineffable quality of thought: they have a body and a soul.’ “
Earlier today Chris blogged about a guy who’s translating Moby-Dick into emoji. Which reminded me of something.
Recently one of our favorite writers, Damion Searls, was pondering a 2007 abridgment of Moby-Dick called Moby-Dick in Half the Time. The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik had written of the abridgment that it improved the classic, by contemporary standards: it cuts out all “the self-indulgent stuff and present[s] a clean story, inhabited by plausible characters… You think, Nice job—what were the missing bits again? And when you go back to find them you remember why the book isn’t just a thrilling adventure with unforgettable characters but a great book. The subtraction does not turn good work into hackwork; it turns a hysterical, half-mad masterpiece into a sound, sane book. It still has its phallic reach and point, but lacks its flaccid, anxious self-consciousness: it is all Dick and no Moby.” (more…)
The other week, The New Yorker published an excellent article by Caleb Crain about the peculiar economics and politics of life aboard a pirate ship in the 17th and 18th centuries. When the captain of an English slave ship was captured by pirates in 1719, his crew begged the pirates to spare his life, since they “never were with a better man.” Thus he lived to tell the tale (and write it up). He was puzzled and intrigued by their strange ways: (more…)
At the New Republic, there’s an amazing review of a new Ayn Rand biography by Jonathan Chait that actually explains everything you need to know about the American right. An infatuation with Rand’s works is something of a rite of passage among right-wingers; “for over half a century,” Chait quotes the biographer, Jennifer Burns, “Rand has been the ultimate gateway drug to life on the right.” (more…)
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