Finalists for Bookstore of the Year
I was probably asleep at the wheel in years past, but I think it’s really cool that Publishers Weekly announced the names of the five finalists for 2014 Bookstore of the Year. Here’s the list of the finalists with some commentary on why they should win: The Elliott Bay Book Company (Seattle, ...
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French-American Foundation and Florence Gould Foundation Announce Translation Prize Finalists [Spoiler Alert: Margueritte Duras's L'AMOUR isn't one]
In a press release today, the French American Foundation and Florence Gould Foundation announced the finalists for their 27th annual translation prize for one work of fiction and one work of non-fiction. According to the release, the foundations received 84 submissions to the Translation Prize, from over 40 publishers. This ...
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Beckett's Influence in Ethiopia?
So, my friend, writer, and fellow critic of this year’s Duke basketball team, Paul Maliszewski, emailed me this morning with a really intriguing story: Here’s an odd thing I overheard yesterday. I went to the rare reading (rare for me) by John Banville, and a woman in the audience asked this question, which was ...
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There Is Reading, and There Is Looking at Letters
One of CLMP head Jeffrey Lependorf’s favorite sayings is that publishing is getting books to readers, without that, you’re just printing. That’s not a perfect analogy for why “Spritz,” an app that’s going to be part of Samsung’s wearable technology, irks me, but it’s a good ...
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Public Letter from Several Russian-language Writers in Kharkov
This morning, after reading my post on Ukrainian literature, the translator/writer/editor Tanya Paperny passed along the following letter, which is signed by twenty-one Russian-language writers living in Kharkov, the second-largest city in Ukraine. I think it’s important that more people have a chance to read this, so ...
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Open Letter Editor Getting Hit in the Face, Repeatedly
This isn’t exactly books related, but in case you’re one of the millions of people of people who have come across this photo recently (like on HuffPo, HLN TV, Reddit, Daily Mail The Sun, Bored Panda, the oft-ridiculed Flavorwire, and several others), I have two things to tell you: 1) Yes, that is a copy of ...
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Flowers & Mishima’s Illustrated Biography
Despite cries that literature is dead, dying, and self-replicating in the worst way, once in a while a book comes along to remind readers that there’s still a lot of surprise to be found on the printed page. To be sure, writers such as Cesar Aria and Medbh McGuckian are doing their part to keep literature interesting and ...
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