Joseph Conrad at 150
The Guardian on Joseph Conrad on the 150th anniversary of his birth: “I have never learned to trust it. I can’t trust it to this day … A dreadful doubt hangs over the whole achievement of literature.” Thus wrote Joseph Conrad, in an essay published in the Manchester Guardian Weekly on December 4 ...
>
Selfdivider covers a Sebald Panel
Went to the Sebald panel that the Mercantile Library hosted to kick off the publication of The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W. G. Sebald (Seven Stories), edited by Lynne Sharon Schwartz. First of all, the library is beautiful, and I can’t believe I didn’t even know about its existence prior to last night. It ...
>
Miss Herbert and Translation
A.S. Byatt reviews Adam Thirwell’s Miss Herbert in the Financial Times: Miss Herbert is a thoughtful, and frequently hilarious, study of the nature of literary translation. It is also a work of art, a new form. Juliet Herbert was the English governess of Flaubert’s niece, Caroline. She wrote a translation of ...
>
Old Sebald interview
This is really old, but since it’s new to me I thought it might be new to some of you as well. Michael Silverblatt interviewed W. G. Sebald in 2001 on Bookworm. I’m listening to it now. Via ...
>
Gabo's Ghostwriter
In Guernica, David Ungar tells of how he became a ghostwriter for Gabriel García Márquez: It’s a brisk October day in 1975. I’m 24, driving through Central Park with Gabriel García Márquez. As we wend our way through the park, and exit on Central Park West, I am utterly dumbstruck, afraid I’ll say something ...
>
Esther Allen on reader's reports
Esther Allen—traductrice extraordinaire and Executive Director of the Center for Literary Translation at Columbia University—has a piece in The Guardian on reader’s reports. The reader’s report struggles to swim against this current but also has to take it into account. It’s a bit like being ...
>