Happy Friday, Asymptote! This week marked the excited announcement of the poetry judges for our very-special-favorite book award—Three Percent‘s Best Translated Book Award. In the poetry-judging lineup is the blog’s very own co-editor and GIF extraordinaire Katrine Øgaard Jensen, among many other qualified and interesting names. But Katrine’s got plenty of award-reading experience: she judged last year’s BTBA fiction prize, too. If you’re interested in BTBA-buzz (the best kind there is!), it’s worthwhile to catch up on some early, “On Location” 2016 musings, featuring French writer Anne Garréta, William Burroughs, and Czech phenom Bohumil Hrabal.
Like listening to your poems? To honor Hispanic Literature Month, the United States Library of Congress has made over 700 audio recordings of Spanish-language literary readings—including the likes of Argentine cipher Jorge Luis Borges and Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa—available online. And speaking of alternative “reading” methods: the New York Times reports this week that the literary hullabaloo around e-books may have been a bit overwrought: print book sales rise as e-books falter.
Carmen Balcells, literary agent to many of the Latin American literary kings above-mentioned (as well as Colombian legend Gabriel García Márquez), passed away this week. And C.K. Williams, American poet and champion of translation and radical empathy, passed this week, as well (here’s a lovely profile, courtesy of the New Yorker).
Brace yourselves for a controversial opinion: is Nabokov’s Lolita not-as-good as we think it is? (I couldn’t disagree more, but the opinion stands). And at the Millions, a rediscovery of Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet. You may rediscover every other American writer’s least favorite fancy American writer—on the side of a burrito bag—as Jonathan Franzen comes to a Chipotle near you.
Given the discovery of a 4,000-year-old book in Egypt—a book that measures 8.2 feet long—will your writing stand the test of time (and if so, how)? Being a peripheral writer isn’t so bad, at least if you’re Hamid Ismailov, Uzbek author of The Underground (and interviewed at Electric Lit!).