Found in Translation

“I read foreign novels because they’re better,” was a remark I began to expect (surprisingly, a senior member of the Dutch Fund for Literat...

modern times

But, more than the data-compressed brevity and just-the-facts utilitarianism forced on us by our times, it's the etherealization of wri...

ancient moderns

Going through notebooks, too lazy to translate. Coming across passages I read in the mid-80s (!), thinking How lovely!  And because this was...

motivation...

Il faut cependant fair droit, hors narrativité, à l'éventuelle fonction immédiate du discours motivant. Une motivation peut être onéreus...

prime time

It’s one of the most meticulously covered stories of the moment, except for one its more particularly disturbing implications:  Amazon ‘s an...

the stork brought it

LM : What gave you the initial impulse to make Severian a torturer? Was it that abstract notion of wanting your hero to deal with the natur...

not satirizing anything

TM: I was really struck by the tone of the book. It seems weirdly refined in a way that was oddly familiar to me, but that I couldn’t qui...

over the rainbow

My job is not only watching film. The most interesting part will be in June, July, and August when I meet the filmmakers, read scripts, and...

bookseseses

A London book market founded by independent booksellers is to launch in Hackney, selling new and second-hand titles. Goldsmith Row Book Ma...

Siu Kam Wen

¿QUÉ SIGNIFICA PARA TI, UN CHINO DE PRIMERA GENERACIÓN, ESCRIBIR EN ESPAÑOL? ¿HAS INTENTADO HACERLO EN CANTONÉS O EN MANDARÍN? Comencé a...

[it's 3.32]

Meg Wollitzer has a piece in the NYT about the rules of literary fiction for men and women.   I really don't pay enough attention to wh...

I started doing exercises on the Khan Academy about 8 months ago as a way of taking my mind of crazymaking things I can do nothing about.  I...

the ‘p' is silent, as in pshrimp

Norton will be publishing a new release of Leave it to Psmith in July.  (The phrase 'pterodactyl with a secret sorrow', another fav...

pa pa pa PAAAAAAAAA pa

n+1 held a panel discussion at Fordham back in late October last year, a reprise of an earlier discussion of "What we wish we'd kno...

rerererereading

 As I've said, a journalist wrote to me back in November asking if I'd reread any books that mattered to me and asking various quest...

more bookses, precioussss

Back in November a journalist wrote asking if there were any books I had reread, why rereading might matter to a writer, a few other questio...

baffled

Came via the Book Bench to a piece on Publishers Weekly by a book addict, a man who habitually goes to bookstores with no particular book i...

Tyler Cowen at MR , linking here : Coffee shops around the world have employed loyalty card schemes for many years, but now we’ve come acro...

Think about it: Almost 40 percent of Amazon’s customers, according to this poll, have added a complicated step (the time-consuming and not...

¿K?

Always the last to know. From to time to time people ask whether The Last Samurai is available as an e-book, to which I reply, Not to my kno...