PEN America #14: The Good Books
The new issue of PEN America, PEN’s literary journal, came out during last week’s World Voices Festival. As always, it’s loaded with good stuff, including excerpts of Marcelo Figueras’s Kamatchka, Andrzej Sosnowski’s Lodgings, Herve Le Tellier’s erotic as hell The Sextine Chapel, and Quim ...
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Which Is More True?: Students Have No Time to Read, or Students Have Crappy Taste
From The California Aggie, UC Davis’s student newspaper: Parsa is not alone. Though reading textbooks and articles is high on many UC Davis students’ to-do lists, reading books purely for pleasure? Not so much. A 2007 study conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts found that in 2005, 65 percent ...
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Book of Happenstance Giveaway
Just an FYI: We’re giving away 10 copies of Book of Happenstance via GoodReads. If you’re interested in getting in on the action, just follow the directions below. .goodreadsGiveawayWidget { color: #555; font-family: georgia, serif; font-weight: normal; text-align: left; font-size: 14px; ...
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Europa Editions Celebrates 100
Where: Lolita Bar, 266 Broome Street, New York, NY 10002 Please join us for a night of literary trivia to celebrate the launch of Alina Bronsky’s The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine. Europa Editor-in-Chief Michael Reynolds and translator Tim Mohr will be hosting the event. Prizes and giveaways galore! Including ...
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Day of the Oprichnik
Set in a futuristic Moscow (2028 according to the jacket copy), Day of the Oprichnik is exactly that: a day in the life of Andrei Danilovich Komiaga. The oprichniki were essentially a cultish “death squad” that was set up by Tsar Ivan the Terrible back in the mid 1500s to protect his ass and slay his enemies, and ...
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Latest Review: "Day of the Oprichnik" by Vladimir Sorokin
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece that I wrote on Vladimir Sorokin’s Day of the Oprichnik, which just came out from FSG in Jamey Gambrell’s translation. Since this is a day of Sorokin (the event write-up, the discussion in the podcast), I’m going to skip all the normal author and ...
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Vladimir Sorokin's Coming Out Party
As mentioned on last week’s podcast, and further elaborated on in this week’s one (BTW, you can subscribe to the Three Percent podcast at iTunes), Vladimir Sorokin was one of the authors I was most interested in seeing at the PEN World Voices Festival. Way back when, I read his short, early novel The Queue in a ...
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