A big decision about net neutrality approaches for those in the United States, and it’ll do more than make Netflix more expensive. For us at Asymptote, an online publication with a large American readership, this issue really hits close to home—here’s why the net neutrality argument is important for all arts organizations. Luckily, the digital revolution has finally made amends to poetry, as e-books finally become more poet-friendly. Still, reading on a Nook or a Kindle bothers us in other ways: an e-reader gives no page numbers, so how are we supposed to cite it? Please, let’s find a better way to reference.
Huge congratulations are in order for the recent MacArthur “Genius Grant” awardees. And the National Book Awards have announced their fiction, poetry, and nonfiction longlists, where even the big names are niche. Also in the longlist crew: Canada’s Scotiabank Giller Prize, for fiction. And a step away from the long, entering the short: the multi-language Singapore Literature Prize has announced its shortlists.
Got any good things to read? In a review of Irish author Eimear McBride’s sensation, A Girl is A Half-Formed Thing, critic Ron Charles questions the knee-jerk descriptors “Dickensian” and “Joycean,” suggesting that McBride’s book sidesteps both over-used qualifiers. Perhaps you might be interested in this review of Norwegian writer Kjell Askildsen’s Selected Stories (astute readers may recognize the title from a review we posted in June). Or you might fancy Trieste, by Croatian Daša Drndić, translated by Asymptote‘s very own Ellen Elias-Bursać. If you spotted the translation-sparse recent list of the ten books most talked about on social media, fear not: at Electric Literature, a list of ten books that stayed with critic Lincoln Michel, including Asymptote friends like Eliot Weinberger and Chinese surrealist Can Xue.
Finally, we end with some sad news: so many languages are going extinct, faster than animal species are. And we’re also losing their beautiful alphabets. Some may (falsely) consider translation a kind of mimesis: here are a few exercises to hone your imitative skill. At least you can enjoy Jorge Luis Borges’ Library of Babel in wordsearch format.