Category: literary life

Boulder-area librarians are joining others in the country: they will stop keeping records on patrons’ reading habits in an effort to thwart the PATRIOT act.

The New York Times has an interesting article about foreign literature in translation. Why are there so few foreign books in translation in the US? Even with highly acclaimed writers, sales are dismal. The article also covers the weird mechanics by which a lack of translation into English affects a book’s sales in all other languages but its own:
“‘Since English is the lingua franca, translating a book into English puts it in a position to be translated into many different languages,’ said Esther Allen, a translator who is chairwoman of the PEN translation committee. ‘We’re the clogged artery that prevents authors from reaching readers anywhere outside their own country.’ ‘It’s a great paradox of American life,’ Ms. Allen said, ‘that on the one hand we feel very cosmopolitan, with Mexican restaurants and cab drivers who speak Swahili, and we feel that we inhabit a mind-boggling multicultural universe, but at the end of the day, it breaks down to different ways of being American.'”
Read America Yawns at Foreign Fiction.

John Le Carre’s next book, Absolute Friends, due out in 2004, is the story of rival spies during the Cold War who become “caught up in the fallout of the American war against Iraq.”

except it isn’t. Jayson Blair has landed two assignments, one for Esquire and one for Jane magazine, the latter an article about “workplace pressures.” I wonder if those pressures include the pressure to actually do your job.
Link via Moby.

Neal Pollack throws in his two cents on the Believer vs. ULA feud. And who better than him can distill the fight to its essentials?

The Guardian has an edited version of Ahdaf Soueif’s introduction to Jean Genet’s Prisoner of Love.