April 18, 2012
Literature and home
This past weekend I had the great pleasure of attending the 12th annual Juniper Literary Festival at UMass Amherst. A homecoming of sorts, since I received an MFA from UMass […]
April 6, 2012
“When they rise, it’s as if they were already falling”: On Magdalena Tulli’s “Moving Parts”
Last week I wrote about this year’s Best Translated Book Award and noted a few concerns about the relative lack of women authors in translation. So why not use this […]
March 29, 2012
A year in translation
I’m late to point this out, but throughout March the always rich international-lit blog Three Percent has been running its “25 Days of the BTBA” series, in which it highlights […]
March 13, 2012
“I wanted to speak about my event, but he insisted on history”: Jill Magi’s SLOT
To say that Jill Magi’s SLOT documents the experience of visiting a memorial or museum risks making the work sound smaller than it is. But what a complex achievement: the […]
March 9, 2012
David Grossman: Why? Who Died?
Today I’m re-posting this piece by Israeli writer David Grossman (discovered via)—an introductory note by the translator, Sol Salbe, appears in italics below. Last Friday Haaretz did something unusual: it […]
February 25, 2012
Translation and money laundering
A friend just sent me a link to this excellent interview at the Loggernaut reading series (dateless, it seems, and also timeless?) with Ammiel Alcalay—author, most recently, of “neither wit […]
February 17, 2012
“If you’re not there, the story won’t be told”: Anthony Shadid (1968–2012)
Yesterday brought the profoundly sad news that the extraordinary journalist Anthony Shadid has passed away, at the age of 43, apparently of an asthma attack suffered while on assignment in […]
February 13, 2012
Jonathan Franzen on Edith Wharton
Upon reading Jonathan Franzen on Edith Wharton The older I get, the more I’m convinced that a fiction writer’s oeuvre is a mirror of Jonathan Franzen’s character. It may well […]
February 6, 2012
Writing American empire
The most recent issue of Guernica features an essay by Kamila Shamsie on “The Storytellers of Empire,” which considers the insularity (my word, not hers) of contemporary US “post-9/11” literature. […]
January 28, 2012
The canon as home?
Tim Parks has a new post on the New York Review of Books blog (discovered via) making an argument for the role of the literary canon—”not an argument for staying […]
January 19, 2012
Reportage and poetry: on “abu ghraib arias”
In the January 3rd issue of the Nation, Stephen Burt reviews four new books of poems, by Juliana Spahr, Anna Moschovakis, Noah Eli Gordon, and Kathleen Ossip. In their work, […]
January 12, 2012
Whoz Side U On, Anyway
At the very end of last year I attended my grandfather’s funeral; he passed away at the age of 90, after a brief illness, surrounded by family. The service was […]