Unless the underside of a rock is the roof of your home, chances are you’ve already checked out Asymptote’s stellar July issue. This summer’s pickings include some of the greatest: César Aira, Sergio Chejfec, Raúl Zurita, and Christina Peri Rossi figure as highlights from our sparkling Latin American feature. And elsewhere, the sights are no less spectacular: French author Violette Leduc, blog alum Faruk Šehić, and translators Daniel Hahn and J. T. Lichtenstein.
Related tidings of good news: Estonian composer and South African playwright Athol Fugard are among the happy recipients of Japan’s highest honor in the arts, the Praemium Imperiale Award. And Kenyan author Okwiri Oduor has won 2014’s Caine Prize for African Writing for her short story “My Father’s Head” (read it for free here!). Irish writer Colin Barrett has snagged the Frank O’Connor Prize for short fiction for his first short story collection, Young Skins. And Israeli writer Amos Oz has been awarded the inaugural Siegfried-Lenz Prize, with a 50,000-Euro prize.
Sad tidings: South African Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer has passed away at age 90, as has Pakistani writer Jamil Ahmad, erstwhile civil servant and 2011 Man Asian prizewinner for The Wandering Falcon, which “hibernated” for over 40 years before finding a publisher (and spectacular success). Also sad: Cuban poet Rafael Alcides Perez is resigning from his post in the Association of Cuban Writers due to government interference, while Singaporean government officials pull two children’s books featuring gay couples from library shelves.
Meanwhile, Tim Parks in the Financial Times wonders what it means to think, act, and write globally in literature (is context really everything?), while linguist John McWhorter disputes the popular claim that your language shapes your world (thus rendering translation’s difficulties virtually nonexistent—and as translators, we disagree just a bit). Translating itself is quite the investment, but some undertake exceedingly difficult translations in the interest of health. In France, reading is an “essential good”—along with food and water—meaning that titans like Amazon shouldn’t unfairly monopolize its market.