John Updike (1932-2009)
I think I read the Rabbit books at too young an age to ever fully appreciate John Updike’s work. But once I started working at Dalkey, the thing I did appreciate was his amazing literary taste. Over and again we would be reprinting a somewhat obscure author, like Robert Pinget, and in searching for reviews and quotes ...
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Obituary: Richard Seaver
One of the legends of publishing, Richard Seaver died from a heart attack on Tuesday. The New York Times has a very nice obituary that highlights his stint at Grove Press, and a bit about what he did at Arcade over the past twenty years. For the past 20 years, Mr. Seaver and his wife ran Arcade Publishing, which has ...
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Book Industry's Schizophrenia, and Hey, That Sounds Familiar
Motoko Rich’s piece in yesterday’s New York Times points out the crazy extremes of the book business in these times, comparing Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s “temporary” acquisitions freeze with the situation at Hachette: As first reported by Publishers Lunch, an industry newsletter, Hachette ...
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Ugresic on Karadzic
Yesterday, Sign and Sight ran a brand-new essay by Dubravka Ugresic called “Radovan Karadzic and His Grandchildren” and which opens in typical Ugresic fashion: One hundred and forty-one old men Over the weekend of the 19th and 20th of July 2008, the town of Key West in Florida played host to one ...
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What's Up With Romania?
From Literary Saloon: We missed their announcement from a few weeks ago, but Jennifer Schuessler recently mentioned it at their Paper Cuts weblog: The New York Times Book Review is now available in Romanian, the only international edition of the NYTBR, licensed to Editura Univers and with a print run of 40,000 to start ...
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NY Times Top 10 List
The NY Times just posted their Top 10 list for 2007, and the five fiction selections are actually pretty solid: Man Gone Down by Michael Thomas. (Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic) Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson. Translated by Anne Born. (Graywolf Press) The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño. Translated by Natasha ...
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Arguments about the Translation Quality of War and Peace
This post on Languagehat.com is fascinating, especially in the context of yesterday’s post on the way reviewers review translations. Over the past few weeks, there’s been an ongoing discussion of the new Pevear and Volokhonsky translation of War and Peace in the i>NY Times Reading Room. According to ...
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