Happy Friday, Asymptote friends! While you are struggling to convince your chapbook-making friend to publish your manuscript, in Iceland there’s the opposite “problem:” are there too many books being published? (I have a hard time believing such a thing exists). Meanwhile, the International New York Times wonders who publishes the most foreign fiction stateside (answer: Amazon. But you knew that already).
Like translations? Like the Internet? We forgive you for never having completed Finnegans Wake by Irish legend James Joyce—especially since the confounding book is confounded by an exciting and experimental turn in collaborative translations and readings: take a look at Waywords & Meansigns (and keep an eye out for an interview on the blog!). It’s a book designed for the Internet, after all. Asymptote alum, contributing editor, and all-out translator celebrity Adrian Nathan West has got a new book forthcoming: The Art of Flying by Spanish graphic novelist Antonio Altaribba. Check out Words Without Borders for ten tantalizing sample pages. And if you’re interested in re-iterations of epic tomes and animation, check out these animations of Crime and Punishment, by Russian lit-demigod Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
Prize time: The Italian by Tunisian author Shukri Mabkhout has snagged 2015’s International Prize for Arabic Fiction—which means this author is guaranteed an English-language translation (yay for us readers!). He gets a nice cash prize, also, but the true gift is translation.
People always moan there’s no cash in poems, but Ruth Lilly and American poet Alice Notley, winner of this year’s Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, might disagree ($100,000!). Perhaps Notley—or another poetic celeb!—will replace Geoffrey Hill’s position as England’s Oxford University Professor of Poetry. If you’re a writer and interested in real estate, cash, or a career, check out these four essayistic competitions. Perhaps the book of yours no one bought will be stolen sooner, rather than later, as in the case one of Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ most valuable print editions—a first edition copy of his most famous tome, One Hundred Years of Solitude—which was stolen while under display.
We all know the grammar pedant—or perhaps we are s/he. Professional proofreader Mary Norris is sick of anything “between you and I“—it’s erroneously grand and downright wrong. Wonder what Norris would have to say about the emergent emoji language—which is, quantifiably, the universal language of Instagram (I wonder what the red dress woman has to say about that).