Remember the “trolley problem?” (Should you kill one person in order to save five?). If it seems like your moral compass is irrefutable, you’re wrong: the ethical judgement you make depends on the language in which you are called to make it.
Shadowy truths: the origin of Yiddish is nebulous, and it may remain so indefinitely. At Tablet, the latest in an ongoing series examining how the academic field is destroying its own attempt to map an etymology. More verboten things: the Moscow Times takes a peek in a Soviet Union-era erotica collection.
Salman Rushdie’s novels are famously controversial, but the banned-books author has just snagged the 2014 PEN/Pinter Prize for a British writer who casts an “unblinking, unswerving” gaze on the world. Meanwhile, Australia‘s Evie Wyld has been awarded the Miles Franklin Literary Award for All the Birds, Singing. And HKW’s Internationaler Literaturpreis, a German-language prize in translation that boasts more renumeration for translators than any (sad) English-language one, goes to Haitian-Canadian author Dany Laferrière and translator Beate Thill.
Aspiring writers of the United States, take note: legendary Spanish literary agent Carmen Balcells, agent to the likes of Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel García Márquez, has teamed up with American Andrew Wylie to form a new literary agency. In related lit-business news: German publishers have filed a complaint against Amazon with the country’s antitrust commission, and France passed a law dubbed the “Anti-Amazon Law”; meanwhile in the States, leaked documents detailing the ongoing Hachette-Amazon conflict don’t reflect well on the online empire. Via Publishing Perspectives, here are the seventeen characteristics of a (bad) South Asian novel. And publishers might do anything to encourage you to buy books: Japanese author Haruki Murakami’s next novel will come complete with a sticker set.
World Cup frenzy abides: though soccer may be the great sportive equalizer, fans often have trouble finding sports commentary in their native languages. Also, according to Borges, soccer is popular because stupidity is popular. Harumph. Look through our past issues if you’ve got the World Cup on the brain.