Words Without Borders: Mexico
To bookmark and read: The February 2006 issue of Words Without Borders. The guest editor was novelist Francisco Goldman, who made his picks from the best of contemporary Mexican literature.
To bookmark and read: The February 2006 issue of Words Without Borders. The guest editor was novelist Francisco Goldman, who made his picks from the best of contemporary Mexican literature.
Over at the Times, Jeannette Winterson has a suggestion for publishers: Only publish books that need to be books, because:
People who don’t really read don’t really need books – so let them have Jordan and Becks in lots of other ways. Audio, animated-audio, that is, audio with pictures – is just about right for most celebrity publications. (…)
Too much is being published. It is time to use new technology to slim the bloat. It is no shame to find other formats for publications that should not be books at all.
Only if it spares us from The DaVinci Code.
I’ve never heard of Amir Khan, but according to the Guardian, he is the “future of British boxing.” Lucky kid: He gets to sit down with novelist Hanif Kureishi for an interview.
As you may have already heard, Betty Friedan has passed on, at the age of eighty-five. The NYT‘s obit:
With its impassioned yet clear-eyed analysis of the issues that affected women’s lives in the decades after World War II — including enforced domesticity, limited career prospects and, as chronicled in later editions, the campaign for legalized abortion — “The Feminine Mystique” is widely regarded as one of the most influential nonfiction books of the 20th century. Published by W. W. Norton & Company, the book had sold more than three million copies by the year 2000 and has been translated into many languages.
You can read an excerpt from The Feminine Mystique here. Articles by and about her can also be found here.
Last week, I mentioned The Colony, John Tayman’s history of the leper colony on Molokai, in Hawaaii, a book that seemed quite intriguing and which I wanted to add to my TBR pile. When it arrived in the mail earlier this week, I thought I’d read a few pages to see if it was any good, and I was immediately hooked. I haven’t been able to put it down since. You can hear the author talk about his book in this NPR interview with Terri Gross.
Elizabeth Crane, whose All This Heavenly Glory was a finalist for the Read This! program, gets the LBC treatment: Her collection is reviewed and discussed, she sits down for a podcast with Bat Segundo, she is interviewed by Dan Wickett, she posts about her book, and finally her editor, Reagan Arthur, also stops in. So hop on over there and take a look.