Hi, February Asymptote friends! Can you believe we’re already a whole month plus into the New Year? (No). This week also marks the inaugurating week of Indonesia editor-at-large (and blog contributor!) Tiffany Tsao’s debut novel, The Oddfits—give it a look, and we’re sure you’ll like what you find.
You can read Tiffany’s book for free (!) if you have Amazon unlimited, but if you’re of the more old-fashioned sort, search for one of these wacko litmobiles across the globe. Meanwhile, no one seems to believe that Internetty rumor that the Internet’s best/wort behemoth, Amazon, is really planning on building hundreds of brick-and-mortar bookstores.
You may be familiar with Jhumpa Lahiri’s (excellent) English-language writing (The Namesake, Interpreter of Maladies, Unaccustomed Earth, etc…), but did you know she writes in Italian, too? (In addition to speaking Bengali. No biggie). Her latest, called In Other Words, is Lahiri’s first nonfiction book—a memoir—is translated by the incomparable Ann Goldstein, of Ferrante fame. And we wonder how Goldstein finds the time to sleep, given her latest translation of Primo Levi’s The Truce.
In Canada, a Translation Rights Fair attempts to right (literary) wrongs by encouraging French-to-English sales of the country’s translated books. In India, writers appear to face greater injustices than dwindling sales: even writers like Arundhati Roy face legal drama, as she (and so many others!) are held in contempt of court for dissident anti-nationalist writing—and protest. Meanwhile, a parody New York Times “supplement” was passed out in New York, not-so-subtly criticizing the paper’s treatment of the Israel/Palestine conflict.
If you’re feeling sad about the shutdown of Al-Jazeera America, don’t be: this portfolio site collects some of the AJ Journalists’ best work (another reminder that nothing is ever lost in the Internet age).