Happy Friday, friends! This should be a Friday like any other, but we’ve got a secret to share: Asymptote‘s July issue is just around the corner. There are a lot of top-secret and super-awesome things in store this quarter, so be sure to keep your eyes peeled on our home base in the coming days (!).
If Asymptote deals in world/global/international/whatever-you’d-like-to-term-it literature, domestic literature still does quite a bit in taking custody of national identity and mythology. So how is it that Vladimir Nabokov—admittedly as Russian as he was American—captured Americana so perfectly in his most famous novel, Lolita? And Spain‘s most famous novel—often considered the “first novel”—is terribly influential, but only two in ten Spanish readers admit to having read Cervantes’s Don Quixote. And if we agree that national literatures have any stability—which we don’t, at least not necessarily—we might be able to sustain the hypothesis that British television can attribute its popularity with American viewers to the fact that U.S. literature is simply “too dark.” Hm.
In the grand tradition of personal horn-tooting: LitHub‘s compiled a tantalizing listicle of ten writers no one reads (but should be reading). We’ve got a minor quibble, and if you’re a longtime blog reader, you might share it: at the top of the list is French writer Marcel Schwob, and you might recall the blog’s epic crowdsourced Mimes translation project from last year—he’s not so totally forgotten!
In literary prize news, something of particular interest for translators (and translation-lovers): the Man Booker International Prize, which is awarded every two years, and the International Foreign Fiction Prize, awarded yearly (and shared with the translator), are doubling up. The Caine Prize, arguably the most prestigious prize hailing from the African continent, has announced its winner: Zambian writer Namwali Serpell, for a short story titled “The Sack.” And would you believe it? She’s splitting the winnings! And if you read Asymptote, chances are you read other lit mags as well, and perhaps work with one (or three). How do we explain the peculiar persistence of lit mags?