"Reading Alberto Moravia in Silvio Berlusconi’s Italy"
This past weekend, the NY Times Book Review included this interesting essay by Rachel Donadio about reading Alberto Moravia: In its culture as in its politics, Italy lives under the shadow of Silvio Berlusconi. With his endless legal entanglements and sexual imbroglios and his colorful manner of governing (or not ...
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Translation as Literary Ambassador
Last year around this time, Larry Rohter wrote this amazing piece about the mission of Open Letter and the need for literature in translation. Which did wonders for our reputation and subscription program, and was one of the coolest pieces of publicity we’ve ever received. Well, as the holidays roll back around, ...
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Michael Cunningham on Translation
Below is a guest post from intern/translation grad student Acacia O’Connor, who also used to work at the Association of American Publishers. Over the weekend the New York Times published a really great editorial about writing as an act of translation by Michael Cunningham, author of the Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner ...
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Bob Brown's Digitial Reading Device
Jennifer Schuessler has a really fun and interesting article in this week’s New York Times Book Review about Bob Brown, the Godfather of the E-Reader: Brown is perhaps best remembered for The Readies, a 1930 manifesto blending the fervor of the Futurists with the playfulness of Jules Verne. “The written word ...
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E-Books and Permissions
As we all know, on Saturday our understanding of the modern world was irreversibly altered when Butler upended MSU to represent the Horizon League (Horizon League?!?) in tonight’s National Championship Apple released the iPad. To mark this occasion, the Times ran an interesting op-ed from nonfiction author Marc Aronson ...
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Google, Machine Translation, and Literature
The other week, the New York Times ran a piece on advances in Google’s translation tools, focusing on the way Google essentially crowdsources its mechanical translations by searching its mammoth database of web pages, books, etc. Creating a translation machine has long been seen as one of the toughest challenges ...
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Unpacking Galassi's Op-Ed Piece
On the surface, the op-ed piece that FSG publisher Jonathan Galassi wrote for the Tiimes this past weekend seems pretty mundane. His main point seems to be that good editors at good publishing houses make good books better. Or more directly: publishers do more than simply print and sell books. They have special knowledge ...
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