Beware, multilingual pedagogues: your job may be outsourced soon—to a robot. Robots are now check-out-able at the Chicago Public Library—be sure to pick one up alongside your non-electronic devices. (Perhaps you can check out the world’s smallest comic strip, etched on a piece of human hair, one day). Interesting timing on this one, in light of the (totally obvious) discovery that active, engaged learning consistently beats passive learning methods.
Who says literature doesn’t do anything in the real world? At the University of Sheffield in England, the world’s premier road-cleaning poem literally tackles pollution. This book might quench your thirst: A Drinkable Book, developed by the organization WaterIsLife, is covered in bacteria-killing nanofilters aimed at providing for both clean water and H2O-literacy. And the quasi-Mexican food giant Chipotle just got a lot more literary: that cup you’re sipping might feature quotables by the likes of Johnathan Safran Foer, Toni Morrison, and George Saunders. Reading might be profitable for a fast food chain, but in Zimbabwe, writers struggle to make ends meet amid rising piracy rates.
Art persists through wartime: Syrian actor Jihad “Jay” Abdo launches his career outside of his war-torn native country by starring in German director Werner Herzog’s latest project. Agatha Christie’s famous sleuth Hercule Poirot may have had a real-life inspiration: a Belgian refugee who fled to Torquay, England during the First World War is rumored to have inspired Christie’s legendary character. Reading is not a crime—and it might reduce your sentence for one. In Italy, prisoners benefit from shortened sentences for reading (while in the United Kingdom, the prison book ban unfortunately persists). And in China, publishing dissident literature might get you time—controversial publisher Yao Wentian got ten years for “smuggling.” With all this literature about wartime, The Guardian asks: Where is the writing about conscientious objectors?
Prize time: this year’s Kakehashi Literature Prize, awarded to German-language authors with particular interest for Japanese audiences, has been awarded to writer Arno Schmidt and translator Jun Wada for Schmidt’s book Lake Scenery with Pocahontas. The (50,000-Euro!) Dutch Libris Literature Prize has been given to Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer for La Superba.
Why do books about an enormous continent sport such identical cover pages? The blog “Africasacountry” takes a look at the evidently Lion-King-inspired trend. And here, a graphic for our United States readers: what language is spoken most often in your state (after English and Spanish, of course)?
It’s Friday, which (hopefully) means free reading for at least two days. Be sure to check out B O D Y’s European Fiction Saturdays, which last week featured translated work from Patricia Esteban Erlés’s Dollhouse.