Where Have I Been These Past Few Months
That I didn’t realize New Directions has a blog. Not terribly active, but still, today’s post about Borges’s history with ND is pretty interesting. To provide some context for this quote: earlier in the summer ND held a contest to see if anyone could identify the first publication of Borges by ND. Answer: ...
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E-Book Prices and the Possibility of Piracy
I’ve written in the past about the $9.99 ebook and my belief that supply and demand is the most important factor in arriving at this price point. Over in Slate, Jack Schafer argues that a side-effect of publishers trying to increase ebook prices (because they’re afraid that a cheap ebook will cannibalize the ...
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The Book of the Future
Over the weekend Bob Stein at the Institute for the Future of the Book blogged about the video below, calling it “the most exciting vision of the book of the future since Apple’s Knowledge Navigator in 1987,” and point out that “interestingly, the film also includes an elegant solution to the question ...
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Scandinavian Crime Novels
Although I’m personally not a reader of Scandinavian crime fiction (unless you can somehow count Jan Kjaerstad’s trilogy in that group, which is closer to a leap than a stretch), I find the debate between Nathaniel Rich and Larissa Kyzer about why these books are so popular pretty fascinating. First off, ...
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Texas and Translations
A few months ago we posted about the University of Texas Press’s decision to relaunch its Latin American literature in translation series. (And at some point soon we’ll have a full review of the first new title in the series, And Let the Earth Tremble at its Centers by Gonzalo Celorio.) Well on Friday I found ...
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European Union Prize for Literature
The first twelve winners of the European Union Prize for Literature were announced earlier this week with the aim of bringing increased attention to the contemporary European literature. This is a bit of an odd prize—each year an award is given to one author from 11 or 12 of the various EU countries. The list of ...
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Once Again, the Center for the Art of Translation Rocks
Jose Manuel Prieto’s Rex is one of my favorite books so far from 2009, and Esther Allen is one of my favorite translation people. Which is why I’m thrilled that CAT just made available this series of audio clips from a discussion between Prieto and Allen from earlier this year. ...
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