It’s Friday, aren’t you glad? We’re glad. We’re especially glad because of the fresh-off-the-presses July issue we released this Wednesday! Don’t know where to start? You can check up on the blog’s helpful listicle highlighting just five must-reads from the July issue. Or you could simply take a gander, as there’s no way you can go wrong: we’ve got some heavy hitters this time around (like Ismail Kudare, Can Xue, Cia Rinne, and Patrick Modiano), so even blindfolded, you’re sure to land a home run—especially in this issue’s super-sparkly multilingual feature.
Our special feature’s got all sorts of experimentation—and prods how we figure intelligibility in the first place. Wonder what famous language-inventors, like J. R. R. Tolkien and George R. R. Martin, would have to say in the issue, and how we’d react in the everyday? There’s even an app for that. And if you’re wondering why your self-published vampire memoir isn’t selling, there are plenty of percentage points to tell you why it couldn’t possibly.
At Entropy, check out a great piece by James Wagner about his foray into homophonic translation—as opposed to the more-conventional denotative sort we typically associate with “translation”—in his book Tricle. The translation itself was mentioned in a recent roundtable discussion at the Best American Poetry blog, also worth checking out.
You might remember that we’ve just barely turned the page on the 2015 Best Translated Book Awards—but plans for 2016 are already underway, with the fiction judges’ names having been announced just this week. Recognize anyone you know? And the American Literary Translators Association has announced its prose and poetry longlists for its eponymous award.
You may have snagged our review of Yoss’s Cuban sci-fi last week. The genre’s on fire, and it’s not strictly an American phenomenon: sci-fi from the African continent appears to be making some serious (brain) waves, too.