NPR's Picks for Best Foreign Fiction
Today is a day of gushing posts . . . Up next: NPR’s year-end literary lists. I remember loving these last year, and am a big fan of the holiday lists they’ve posted so far. Even if I’m not planning on reading any of these books, the Indie Booksellers list is pretty cool, and Alan Cheuse has some intriguing ...
>
Wolf Totem on NPR
Over the next few days, NPR’s Morning Edition is going to be featuring Chinese writers, as a part of their ‘China at 60’ series that’s looking at the history of the People’s Republic. This morning they featured Jiang Rong, the author of Wolf Totem, which Howard Goldblatt translated and Penguin ...
>
NPR and The Sailor from Gibraltar
Jessa Crispin (the woman behind Bookslut) wrote a great reivew of Marguerite Duras’s The Sailor from Gibraltar) for NPR: But this is a novel by the cerebral French writer and filmmaker Marguerite Duras, so nothing much happens at all. And it’s all the more thrilling because of it. There are long philosophical ...
>
The Art of Translation at NPR
This piece doesn’t necessarily break any new ground, but it’s nice to see NPR covering the art of literary translation. Rick Kleffel’s piece begins by pointing out the impossibility of a literal translation, then focuses on three translators: Bea Basso, who points out the difficulty of capturing the ...
>
On NPR . . .
Yesterday, the NPR news program Day to Day talked at some length about “The Best Foreign Books You’ve Never Heard Of”—a discussion spurred, like so many others, by Jean-Marie Gustave le Clezio’s recently awarded Nobel Prize for Literature and the general U.S. reaction of “Ba?” So, ...
>
NPR Goes to Europe! Sort of . . .
It may be irrational, but this Three Books . . . column about doing the “Grand Tour” of Europe via literature just bugs me. Not the idea that “literature takes you places!” but the fact that the three books featured are Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and A Room with a View. This ...
>
Non-profit Bookstores
The other day NPR ran this segment about Wordsmiths in Decatur, Georgia, and the store’s recent decision to ask for donations from customers in order to stay in business. In its typical middle-of-the-road objective, NPR’s focus is on whether it’s good or bad for people to donate to a for profit business, ...
>