It’s the first Friday of March, and the month’s madness is already underfoot. If you think we’re referring to the sort of lunacy of hoops, athleticism, and bouncing orange balls, don’t be fooled: in the wake of the madness that is AWP in Seattle, this March portends quite a bit for literary lunatics, as the finalists for several big-name prizes are announced…
We reported last week about the backlash regarding the contentious results of the VIDA count, showcasing the shameful amount of gender disparity in most literary criticism and publishing. The National Book Awards, however, seem to be an exception to the trend of sexist stasis. The longlist for this year’s English-language PEN/Faulkner Award has been announced, and includes the likes of Karen Joy Fowler, Valerie Trueblood, and Daniel Alarcón (side note: the VIDA stats for this list of nominees look decent!). Week after week, the roundup reports on voices of dissent across the globe: Xindex’s 2014 Freedom of Expression Awards look to pay dues to pathmakers.
In translation-y accolades, the French-American Foundation and Florence Gould Foundation have released the list of finalists for their joint translation prize, and the French runner-up to the prestigious Prix Goncourt (mysteriously titled the “Prix Goncourt du premier roman”) has been named: Frédéric Verger, for his novel Arden. Over at Three Percent, Best Translated Book Award judge Stephen Sparks speculates on the prize’s soon-to-be revealed longlist. Finally, The Independent’s Boyd Tonkin discusses the fresh-off-the-press longlist of the UK’s BTBA counterpart, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (including big-name authors-translators such as Karl Ove Knausgaard/Don Bartlett, Julia Franck/Anthea Bell, and Javier Marías/Margaret Jull Costa, among other remarkably talented translations!).
We’re all readers here, so it’s comfy to say that reading makes us smarter—but reading literature also makes us better at bullying (even if it feels like we’re the nerds being bullied). Literature certainly endows us with a certain level of introspection, even insight: via the New Yorker, on a 1979 book that predicted Russia’s invasion in Crimea eerily well. In light of the ongoing The Hindus book-pulping polemic (read our own Eric Gurevitch’s biting literary commentary here), author Wendy Doniger responds to the politics of censorship in India (here, an article about the difficulties of contemporary literary criticism in the diverse country). In Israel, Arabic literature is still a part of the country’s literary canon—here’s to its unveiling. And in The Guardian, Pakistani-British author Kamila Shamsie comments on the challenges of citizenship, nationality, identity, and privilege for immigrants in Britain. Finally, diasporas of a decidedly literary sort: Tibetan literature, exiled in New York, finds its way back home.
According to Melville House, the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books has gone full Amazon—for better or for worse. In related, more independent lit-festing: translation-and-Asymptote-friendly Archipelago Books is hosting its tenth-anniversary silent auction in New York City—make it a literary date night dedicated to ten more years in compelling publishing!
The future is now: we may not have rocket-powered cats (à la a 16th-century German warfare manual), but you might be able to finally tackle Proust: a new app, Spritz, attempts to redesign reading, allowing you to whiz through up to 1,000 words per minute. This year’s Cairo International Book Fair introduced a new Arabic e-book platform, called Kotobi (let’s hope it fares better than the Nook). Finally, since you’re reading this on the World Wide Web, here’s the Internet’s most Internet-y sentence: You’re Your an Idiot.