If you’re in the United States: Happy fourth of July! Same goes to our readers elsewhere, though the fourth might be happy for different reasons…
Americans mourning a soccer loss: what a novel idea! Here’s how the United States turned a corner in football fandom. Sports aren’t really our thing, though: we’re more into Three Percent’s ongoing World Cup of Literature project, or Electric Literature’s suggestion to read a book for every remaining World Cup team.
Like Asymptote, ten-year-old Guernica is a digital journal, but a deal with a new publisher means it’s expanding to the print domain, right when technology watchdogs prophesy our inevitable switch to all-digi-reading, all the time. This might bode badly for readers too: German publisher Bertlesmann is shutting down its famous book-club model.
At the New York Times, writers Francine Prose and Pankaj Mishra discuss the value of labels like “New American” and “Immigrant” fiction. And again in the Times, a look at the wave of young writers from the massively under-appreciated and over-generalized African continent. (Flavorwire echoes this sentiment with a compilation of eight more African-born writers you should be reading). We’re not sure we agree with the willingness to group distinct voices from a diverse continent into one category, but we’ll let it slide, because there are some seriously great voices worth checking out.
Continuing the spirit of listicles: via the Guardian, here’s a list of the fifty greatest love poems spanning thirty countries. The list even includes Serbian poet and recent Asymptote contributor Ana Ristović; read some selections from her collection Little Zebras, translated by Steven and Maja Teref in our April issue, here!
Births and deaths: Spanish novelist Ana María Matute, literary chronicler-of-sorts of the Spanish Civil War, has passed away at age 88. Meanwhile, British novelist George Orwell’s birthplace in India is being turned into a museum.
Illegal activities: Syrian writers and artists anthologize their protest in an upcoming book. In Uganda, over 80,000 books have been seized in a government-wide initiative to counter the widespread piracy plaguing the country’s publishing industry. Why pirate books if you can borrow? Here are the loveliest libraries in Paris.