Mabanckou review
Laila Lalami reviews Alain Mabanckou’s Broken Glass in The National “In Africa, when an old person dies, a library burns.” When the Malian writer and ethnologist Amadou Hampâté Bâ uttered these words at a Unesco assembly in 1960, he was attempting to draw attention to Africa’s tradition of oral ...
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Gallimard on Gallimard
For those of you who read French, the blog at the Nouvel Observateur has a really cool piece about the history of Gallimard that was written by Antoine Gallimard—the grandson of the founder of Gallimard, Gaston Gallimard, and the company’s current Président et Directeur Général [CEO]: Un jour, Daniel ...
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…you are also a consumer.
In The New Atlantis, Christine Rosen has a great article about reading and ‘digital literacy’. The Kindle will only serve to worsen that concentration deficit, for when you use a Kindle, you are not merely a reader—you are also a consumer. Indeed, everything about the device is intended to keep you in a ...
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Austro-Hungarian Lit.
In case your reading list isn’t long enough, Scott asked his readers to put together a list of great books/authors from the former empire: A couple weeks back I noted that a a great city (Vienna) surrounded by a great empire (Austria-Hungary) deserved great literature. I started making a list of this literature, ...
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The latest wave of e-book discussion
One of the best technology websites around, Ars Technica, takes a look at e-books. What’s most interesting to me about this particular article is that it was written by someone, John Siracusa, who was there at the very beginning of e-books. I honestly can’t remember the first e-book I read on its ...
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Lorin Stein on 2666
Lorin Stein, the American editor of Bolaño’s 2666, was on NPR last week. They broadcast a discussion he led about 2666 at Politics and Prose in Wasington, ...
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Charlotte Mandell Interview
Our own Charlotte Mandell (she’s doing Zone for us) is interviewed on Maitresse: The translator Charlotte Mandell did the heavy lifting for two of the more exciting imports from France: this year’s The Kindly Ones, by Jonathan Littell, and next year’s Zone, by Mathias Enard. Mandell, who lives in ...
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