Yay, it’s Friday! Here at Asymptote we are especially giddy this weekend because of a gosh-wow shortlist nomination from the London Book Fair—alongside two other notable organizations, Asymptote journal is nominated for an International Excellence Award, for Initiative in International Translation. Keep your fingers crossed for us!—but really, it is such an honor to be recognized for the hard literary work we do. And the PEN Awards longlists have been announced—of special interest to us, of course, are the poetry in translation and fiction in translation categories (we’re happy to note that Danish writer Naja Marie Aidt, blog interviewee, has been nominated—read a selection of Baboon, featured on Translation Tuesday, here)!
In older news—though no less breaking—it seems as though literary archeologists are certain they’ve dug up the old bones of Spanish novelist and legend Miguel de Cervantes, of Don Quixote fame (looks like there’s a new literary destination to add to the itinerary). The author requested burial in a convent nearly 400 years ago, so we haven’t been certain of his exact remains—until now.
In Iran, a play called Hamhavaie features three nameless women, whose pain, love, and turmoil are voiced on stage in Tehran—and is in the works for production in the United States and the United Kingdom (meanwhile, Granta tells us how to be a woman in Tehran). Sadly, some stories simply aren’t vocalized: Karen Dawisha’s academic indictment of Vladimir Putin, Kleptocracy, which won the Pushkin House Prize for best book about Russia, will not be published in the United Kingdom, after all: turns out UK publishers fear they may be put to task over potential libel. And though he’s since passed, Chilean novelist and thick-book legend Roberto Bolaño will live on—on stage: a powerball jackpot winner who’s pledged his cash to the performing arts is sponsoring Chicago’s Goodman Theatre in a production of Bolaño’s epic 2666.
If you’d like some weekend reading, take a look at Irish writer Colm Tóibín’s latest short story in the New Yorker, titled Sleep. If you prefer your reading on-demand, China’s massive enterprise may overtake even the most behemoth-y of behemoths: looks like the website Tencent Literature is gunning to publish over 200,000 ebooks—available for a whopping 820 million users.