Bombay Stories
I must admit upfront that I went into reading Saadat Hasan Manto’s Bombay Stories almost entirely blind. I have not read Salman Rushdie. I have read, perhaps, two short stories by Jhumpa Lahiri. I might shamefully add that I really only remember the barest details of Gandhi’s life and deeds. I can say, in the ...
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Argentina vs. Nigeria [World Cup of Literature: First Round]
This match was judged by Lance Edmonds. For more info on the World Cup of Literature, read this, and download the bracket. This is where it ends: 1-0 because in the end Argentina scores and Nigeria plays very very well. That one doesn’t work. It happens like this: I find myself underlining and rereading and ...
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Switzerland vs. Honduras [World Cup of Literature: First Round]
This match was judged by Hannah Chute. For more info on the World Cup of Literature, read this, and download the bracket. I hear that soccer/football fans are pretty excited about Switzerland these days. (Sorry everyone, I haven’t been keeping up with the world of FIFA.) In a literary match-up against Honduras, though, ...
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Colombia vs. Japan [World Cup of Literature: First Round]
This match was judged by George Carroll. For more info on the World Cup of Literature, read this, and download the bracket. Garcia Marquez was my gateway into non-dead-white-guy authors in translation. I read One Hundred Years of Solitude on a chaise lounge in Waikiki, on a trip when my friend Howard and I drank the pool ...
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Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize Winner Announced
The winner of the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize 2014 is Susan Wicks for her translation of Valérie Rouzeau’s Talking Vrouz (Arc publications). From the judges: “Talking Vrouz is a wonderfully inventive and yet faithful translation of poems which are already at an oblique angle to their own language ...
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Spain vs. Australia [World Cup of Literature: First Round]
This match was judged by Mauro Javier Cardenas. For more info on the World Cup of Literature, read this, and download the bracket. In the year 2010, seventeen years after I stopped watching soccer, I wrote a paean to Your Face Tomorrow, claiming that “here’s the wonderfully parenthetical operations of a human mind in ...
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Russia vs. Algeria [World Cup of Literature: First Round]
This match was judged by Chris Schaefer. For more info on the World Cup of Literature, read this, and download the bracket. This first-round match pits a futuristic fantasy of reborn Russian czardom against a present-day fantasy of repressed Algerian Islamism in Paris. Male author against female. Slav against Arab. ...
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