All’s fair in lit and war. At the Los Angeles Review of Books, Kayla Williams disputes the assertion that all war literature is written by men, providing a heavy-hitting list of contemporary war literature penned by female authors to prove her point (P.S. Here’s how not to review women’s writing). Here’s North Korea‘s former poet-laureate-turned-defector Jang Jin Sung in conversation about poetry and politics. Twenty-five years after the Tiananmen Square crackdown, artists in China still face imprisonment by engaging in civil (artistic) disobedience (by the way, here’s a great piece commemorating the landmark protest). And finally, remembering slain Iranian-American singer and writer Ali Eskandarian as a punk Beat novelist.
Prize time. Swedish novelist Barbro Lindgren has snagged the (half-eponymous) Astrid Lindgren Prize, awarded to children’s literature (which, as we all know, is at least as valuable as adult literature!). The big-deal Prémio Camões has been awarded to Brazilian writer Alberto da Costa e Silva. And Mundo Cruel: Stories by Puerto Rican author Luis Negrón, translated by Suzanne Jill Levine, has snagged the Lambda Award for gay general fiction.
Recommended reading: Asymptote interviewee Anne Carson releases her much-anticipated Albertine Workout, and we’re sweating. Two poets from the Dominican Republic worth reading. Taiwanese author Qiu Miaojin’s final novel, Last Words from Montmartre, finally available in English translation. Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, Jeremy Paxman asserts that poets must start engaging with real people (what a novel idea!).
Hot tips for polyglots: passivity begets invisibility, and at we’re all about making our translators as visible as possible. Check out the the admirable venting tumblr, The Translator Writes Back (it’s hard to be invisible when you’re complaining!), and then tumble forth on to the British Centre for Literary Translation’s (rather more professional) twenty-fifth anniversary tumblr.
Former Asymptote contributor Brittani Sonnenberg has released a new novel, Home Leave, profiled here in the New Yorker (take a look at Sonnenberg’s April 2012 Asymptote featurette here). Without a doubt, publishing a book is nerve-wracking, but imagine doing it thousands of miles from home: at The Toast, Sonnenberg’s guide to overseas book-launching (“Thanks to your translator, you’re finally speaking flawless German, without screwing up the articles or the declension. For the next ten minutes of your reading, translation will seem like a small miracle, closer to transformation, or transcendence”). The artsy, non-New-York-folk among us (myself included!) might want to get in on the scene with this affordable artist-housing application. But then again, New York isn’t the center of it all, as these nine unconventional writers’ residencies will prove.
Finally, here’s the heartwarming story of our most hated font.