Weekly News Roundup, 28th March 2014: Pretty literary pennies, Prison reading

This week's literary highlights from across the world

Writing is a notoriously penny-pinching métier, unless you’re Canadian Nobel winner Alice Munro—whom the Canadian government has graced with a $5 commemorative coin of her very own. Don’t count on making literary purchases with the coin any time soon, though: the coin costs $69.95, which—granted, we aren’t mathematicians here at Asymptote—seems like a not-so-smart investment.

Perhaps the Munro-coin is a more feasible venture for prizewinning authors. Australia’s Stella Prize, celebrating female authors, boasts a reward of 50,000 Australian dollars and has just announced its five-member shortlist; 25,000 Euros go to (Asymptote contributor!) Hungarian writer Péter Nádas via the pan-European Würth Prize. Swiss writer Peter Stamm has snagged the Bad-Homburg Friedrich-Hölderlin Prize and The Morning News’ decidedly more laid-back (and captivating to Internet-spectate) Tournament of Books has moved on to the Championship Round—via an upset in the Zombie Round. Finally, the New York Public Library has announced its shortlist for the Young Lions Fiction Award in a typically youthful fashion (Twitter).

Good to hear translators are being rewarded, as well: translator Angela Livingstone has won the Rossica Translation Prize for her translation of Russian author Marina Tsvetaeva’s Phaedra. Speaking of Russian-language translation, the Paris Review Daily interviews Katherine Dovlatov, who translated Pushkin Hills by her father, samizdat writer and émigré Sergei Dovlatov. Meanwhile, over at Russia Beyond the Headlines, Phoebe Taplin reports on some of this year’s most rebellious Russian-to-English titles, while over at Lizok’s Bookshelf, blogger and translator Lisa Hayden Espenschade lists this year’s most compelling new editions appearing in English-language translation.

We at Asymptote spend a good deal of mental energy thinking about translation: meta-translation, if you will. Here’s some food for thought: in the Brooklyn Quarterly, translator Karen Emmerich on writing in Cyprus, within a regional in-between.  In the same issue, Asymptote contributor Idra Novey on what’s new in translation. English-speaking lovers of Japanese manga comics, rejoice! Your digital downloads are getting a lot less sketchy, thanks to more professional manga translation and distribution. We might be preaching to the choir here, but here’s yet another funny Chineselanguage mistranslation—qualified translators are important, even if strict grammarians may be ruining the language they translate into

There are literary festivals of all kinds, but the International Edible Book Festival, held across the world in honor of French gourmand Jean Brillat-Savarin, sounds especially delicious. Italian futurism isn’t typically associated with gourmands, but the movement’s experimental cuisine could interest the likes of molecular gastronomists today.

The roundup frequently reports on the (often doomed) intersection between literature and civil disobedience, in ways Thoreau perhaps never imagined. This week’s news of a supposed book ban inside United Kingdom prisons is entirely within the realm of transcendentalist imagination.  Apparently, prison is just too much like vacation (what?!).

Weekly roundups aside, there is some seriously good syntax to be had in English-language writing. At least we are distinctive: this is not a generic blog post.