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The Wall in My Head Blog

Back a few weeks ago when The Guardian was running its series of short stories from Eastern Europe, I mentioned our forthcoming anthology, The Wall in My Head: Words and Images from the Fall of the Iron Curtain, which releases on November 9th, marking the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Well, to build ...

Interview with Susan Bernofsky

Very interesting interview with Susan Bernofsky (“widely considered to be one of the best English translators of German literature today,” who has translated Robert Walser, Jenny Erpenbeck, and Yoko Tawada, among others) in The Brooklyn Rail. Theoretically, this interview is supposed to be about her forthcoming ...

Richard Nash on the Future of Publishing

Very interesting speech from Richard Nash on the future of publishing and the need for publishers and readers to be more connected: (Some Twitterer mentioned that Richard seemed a bit like Tom Cruise in Magnolia . . . I can see that.) ...

New Issue of The Critical Flame

The second issue of The Critical Flame is now available online, including a review of J.M.G. Le Clezio’s Desert by Scott Esposito: Desert was acclaimed as Le Clézio’s “breakout” novel by the Swedish Academy, but the book’s mass appeal can be difficult to see at first — it is not the easiest read to get ...

Yet Another of My Big Mistakes

PW offers up some encouraging news about the book business on Wall St.: Led by a remarkable rebound by book retailers, the Publishers Weekly Stock Index jumped 23.9% in the first six months of 2009, easily beating the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which declined 3.7% in the January through June period. That’s ...

More on Benjamin Moser's Clarice Lispector Biography

From today’s Publishing Perspectives piece by Moser about the origins of his project (Why This World) and all that he went through to research this elusive figure: Maybe because the project began with such élan, I found myself undaunted by the many obstacles that were thrown at me. Neither the cuisine of rural ...

Agents and Editors

I agree with Michael Orthofer, the interaction between super-agent Andrew Wylie and super-awesome Playboy editor Amy Grace Loyd over the first-serial rights to Nabokov’s The Original of Laura is a bit gross. From the New York Observer: It was an inspired method, the flowers serving as a reference to Nabokov’s ...