E-books and justification
If:book has a really cool article on something that I hadn’t yet noticed (not having a kindle, a sony reader, or an iphone): all of the text on these devices is fully justified. if a computer is going to hyphenate something, it needs to know what language the text is in. This is a job for metadata: electronic books ...
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Europa in the News
This is a few days old already, but our friends at Europa Editions had a nice write up in the Times: Some larger publishers are starting to envy Europa’s selection and its frankly retro publishing model. Mr. Carroll “finds things, picks things up for a little bit of money and makes a lot out of them,” said Jonathan ...
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2009 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize longlist
The longlist for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize has (finally!) been announced. Here you go: Voice Over by Céline Curiol (trans. Sam Richard) A Blessed Child by Linn Ullman (trans. Sarah Death) The Blue Fox by Sjon (trans. Victoria Cribb) Friendly Fire by A.B. Yehoshua (trans. Stuart Schoffman) My ...
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Zone reviewed in The Quarterly Conversation
We’re publishing Mathias Énard’s Zone next year, and I couldn’t be more excited. There’s a review of it up now at The Quarterly Conversation, and while it’s not a wholly positive review, the review just makes me happier to be publishing it. Zone is definitely an Open Letter book: Zone ...
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Stephen to the rescue
As I don’t have the time, I want to respond very briefly to Michiko Kakutani’s review of The Kindly Ones. This is the most inept, ill-perceiving reviews of the novel I can imagine (though one other runs it close). “Aue is clearly a deranged creature,” she writes “and his madness turns his ...
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Kindle Review
In case you’re dying for more Kindle news, the New York Times has finally run their review: But as traditionalists always point out, an e-book reader is a delicate piece of electronics. It can be lost, dropped or fried in the tub. You’d have to buy an awful lot of $10 best sellers to recoup the purchase price. If ...
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More on The Kindly Ones
Kakutani takes her shot at Littell’s monster: No doubt the author intends such remarks to convey the horrors of the Holocaust, but “The Kindly Ones” instead reads like a pointless compilation of atrocities and anti-Semitic remarks, pointlessly combined with a gross collection of sexual fantasies. After this ...
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