Extra! Extra! Take a look at the November/December issue of the ever-venerable World Literature Today, or the latest (fifth) issue of Music & Literature hot off the press, featuring some Asymptote favorites like Norwegian phenom Stig Sæterbakken and Chinese avant-gardist Can Xue. While Music & Literature has always released a concurrent print publication, ten-year-old Internet mainstay Guernica is about to enter the world of physical print for the very first time. And while we’re at industry water-cooler chat, McSweeney’s also seems to be undergoing a shift: the publishing house/Internet Tendency/friendly lit journal has applied for nonprofit status. That “Nonprofit” denomination isn’t for nothing, either: according to Graywolf Press executive editor Jeff Shotts, the nonprofit status allows for some serious mission-driven publication.
In case you’re afraid for the future of books despite all these industry shifts: you do have reason to fear, as robots at the Georgia (that’s United States) Institute of Technology have been programmed to write literary fiction that is not totally awful (which is to say it makes sense). And new publisher Atavist promised a futuristic model for the industry not too long ago, but has just announced its demise.
So at this point, we’re practically done talking about Patrick Modiano, recent French Nobel literary laureate (did you know that he has a Swedish grandson?). But exactly fifty years ago, another French author was offered the Prize—and turned it down. Here’s what we can learn from Jean-Paul Sartre. We can learn a lot from other authors who don’t indulge their egoism: a small list of writers who rejected their own work, including Franz Kafka, Vladimir Nabokov, and Don Delillo. Or, often, writers indulge their personal vitriol, as was the case with Russian stalwart Leo Tolstoy in his Kreutzer Sonata, which was famously directed at his wife. Here’s her oft-forgotten rebuttal. For authors in political danger, the Pittsburgh City of Asylum celebrates its tenth anniversary this week.
You may be a polyglot, but if you find yourself poring over imaginary dictionaries while online, you aren’t alone: here’s a handy linguistic guide to the Internet. I can’t even.