Posts filed under 'roundup'

Weekly News Roundup, 5th February 2016: Brick and Mortar? Doubt it.

February 5, 2016  |  in News  |  by Patty Nash

This week's literary highlights from across the world

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.  READ MORE…

Weekly News Roundup, 29 January 2015: Great on Paper

January 29, 2016  |  in News  |  by Patty Nash

This week's literary highlights from across the world

What’s up, Asymptote friends? We’re nearing the end of January, which means this is the time for checking in on those good intentions. You might want to consider a well-intentioned check-in at Asymptote blog columnist Anaïs Duplan’s awesome Kickstarter campaign for the Center for Afrofuturist Studies in Iowa City. Take a look, and support friends (and friends of friends) of Asymptote blog!

Speaking of sponsorships: Scotland has inaugurated its first translation fund, which mean that English-speaking readers can expect some literature from Macedonia, Albania, Norway, and Spain (among others). And our friends at Words Without Borders have opened up nominations for the 2016 Ottaway Award for the Promotion of International Literature (past winners include Carol Brown Janeway and Sara Bershtel).

READ MORE…

Weekly News Roundup, 22 January 2015: Armchair Travel, Twilight Bio

January 22, 2016  |  in News  |  by Patty Nash

This week's literary highlights from across the world

Happy Friday, Asymptote readers! If you’re in the Northern Hemisphere, you might be itching for warmer climes—though budgetary constraints mean that armchair travel‘s your only option. Take to this list of the Guardian‘s best-of world literature if you’d like handheld globetrotting.

We frequently report on literary awards here at the roundup—in fact, it seems like every week there’s a new accolade—but rarely do these awards go to books published over a year before.  Not so for scholarly translations: an 80-year-old work of journalism and ethnography by Russian writer Vladimir Gilyarovsky, Moscow and the Muscovites, has snagged the 2015 AATSEEL Award for Best Scholarly Translation into English (the translator is Brendan Kiernan). Congratulations!  READ MORE…

Weekly News Roundup, 15th January 2015: Hardy-Har, Mordor

January 15, 2016  |  in News  |  by Patty Nash

This week's happy literary highlights from around the world

Happy Friday, Asymptote! Biggest big deal this week: our new issue, which features so. many. literary standouts and standouts-to-come—an interview with Junot Díaz, an essay by Ingo Schulze, writing from Sibylle Lacan, and on, and on. As per tradition, we’ll be sharing our bloggy favorites here on Monday, but you could click blindfolded and come across a gem. Happy reading!

If you’re a translator in 2016 (!), you’re sure to have a fraught relationship with Google Translate. On one hand, the mystic algorithmic Googlic properties of the service provide for an interesting alternative to the usual bilingual dictionaries we translating folk tend to turn to, but on the other hand, Google’s app supposedly threatens to bully us into irrelevance. And that’s why this glitch—in which Google Translate translated every instance of “Russia” into “Mordor,” as in The Lord of the Rings, is especially hilarious.  READ MORE…

Weekly News Roundup, 8 January 2016: Happy New Year!

January 8, 2016  |  in News  |  by Patty Nash

This week's literary highlights from all across the world

It’s the first news roundup of the new year—and I’m still stuck in the last one: I very nearly typed “2015.” Lots of good things happened since we last caught up—not least of which that Asymptote happily reached its Indiegogo goal (“Indiegogoal?”)! This means you can look forward to our fifth-anniversary celebrations in fifteen events happening all across the globe between now and April. And don’t forget: we’ve extended the deadline for our translation contest—scramble your materials and get it together by February 1st for a chance at literary wealth, fame, and renown!

READ MORE…

Weekly News Roundup, 11 December 2015: Gift’s No Poison

December 11, 2015  |  in News  |  by Patty Nash

This week's top literary links from all around the world

Happy Friday, Asymptote pals! Have you had a chance to check out Asymptote‘s year-end fundraiser yet? Our fifth(!) anniversary is just around the corner, and we’ve got fifteen events planned in cities all around the world to celebrate—but we need your help. Take a look at this year’s end-of-year Indiegogo, with all its tantalizing prizes (postcards! bookmarks! anniversary tickets—of the Asymptote sort), and remember the greatest gift is knowing you’re part of an organization doing seriously good work for world literature.  READ MORE…

Weekly News Roundup, 4 December 2015: Best-Of Lists Of Best Lists

December 4, 2015  |  in News  |  by Patty Nash

This week's (and year's!) literary highlights from across the world

Happy Friday, Asymptote friends! The end of the calendar year is nigh, and that means one thing: there are no more new releases (or—there are less of them, as you’ll see in next week’s New in Translation post), and there are a whole lot of year-end lists. Impressively, the New York Times’ famous top 10 includes three whole books (!) in translation (Magda Szabo’s The Door, translated by Len Rix, Elena Ferrante‘s The Story of the Lost Child, translated by Ann Goldstein, and Asne Seierstad’s One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre of Norway, translated by Sarah Death). If you’d like the scope to zoom out a bit, look at the Times’ notable 100 in 2015, thirteen percent of which is composed of literature in translation (given sad stats of the past, this is actually pretty darn good!—though the translation statistics of the past two years, available at Three Percent, make us less giddily optimistic). Finally, take a look at another English-language publication across the pond: the Guardian asks famous writers what their favorite reads of the year proved to be.  READ MORE…

Weekly News Roundup, 20 November 2015: We’ve Got Ted to Thank

November 20, 2015  |  in News  |  by Patty Nash

This week's literary highlights from across the world

Happy Friday, Asymptote! Do you have Thanksgiving reading? Distract from your family with novels from Korea—here are five Korean-language tomes (in translation) you should read now. Or you could use Jamaican novelist Marlon James’ recent Man Booker win as an opportunity to uncover more about today’s Caribbean writing. Belarusian Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich isn’t widely available in English—yet: three more of her nonfiction works will soon be published through Random House. And if you haven’t by now, you’ve no excuse anymore: check out new Azerbaijani literature through a new, super-easy online portal. READ MORE…

Weekly News Roundup, 13 November 2015: The Most Knausgaardy

November 13, 2015  |  in News  |  by Anonymous

This week's literary news from around the world

Happy Friday, Asymptote! If you need a pick-me-up this week, here’s a friendly reminder of why translation’s so important: translating books often means saving them (essay comes to us thanks to LitHub, by former contributor André Naffis-Sahely). After all, without translation (and translators), we could never read this New York Times book review: literary phenomenon and badboy Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgaard writes the most Knausgaard-y book review on  French writer Michel Houellebecq’s latest-into-English, Submission. 

READ MORE…

Weekly News Roundup, 6 November 2015: Top Notch, Middle Notch

November 6, 2015  |  in News  |  by Patty Nash

Highlights, lowlights, and mid-lights in literary news from around the world.

Happy Friday, Asymptote. Hard to believe a week has already passed since the American Literary Translators Association conference in Tucson, Arizona—but it has, and the National Translation Award-winners have been announced: prose honors went to William M. Hutchins’s translation from the Arabic of The New Waw: Saharan Oasis, and Pierre Joris’s iteration of the later poems of famed German poet Paul Celan—collected in an edition titled Breathturn into Timestead—won the poetry bid.

Meanwhile, the Lucien Stryk Prize, which focuses on Asian-language translations, went to Eleanor Goldman, who snagged top prose honors for her translation of Something Crosses my Mind by Wang Xiaoni, translated from the Chinese (be sure to read some of Goodman’s Wang Xiaoni translations in our July 2014 issue here!). And the Italian Prose in Translation Award went to Anne Milano Appel, for her translation of Blindly, by Claudio Magris. Congrats to all!

READ MORE…

Weekly News Roundup, 30th October 2015: New City, Neustadt

October 30, 2015  |  in News  |  by Patty Nash

This week's literary highlights from across the world

Hi Friday! Greetings from Tucson, Arizona, which is hosting this year’s American Literary Translators Association conference. Both blog editors Katrine and Patty are in attendance, and happy to tan, talk translation, eat tacos, meet Asymptote‘s long list of contributors and staff, and fangirl about all things lit-related. How exciting that the winners of the National Translation Awards are being announced right as this blog post is being written—stay tuned on this page if you’d like on-the-minute updates, or poke around this corner of the web next week! We’ll be sure to give a full report.

Although the American translation world has stopped for ALTA, translation never sleeps in the other corners of the world. And new issues in translation, globalization, and migration also make room for new terminology: here’s how the concept of “fourth-world” literature can provide opportunities for translating the voiceless.  READ MORE…

Weekly News Roundup, 23 October 2015: Goog, Good Books

October 23, 2015  |  in News  |  by Patty Nash

This week's literary highlights, lowlights, and mid-lights from across the world.

Hey, happy Friday! First, brilliant news we’re bursting to tell: The Guardian has just announced their brand-new “books network,” and Asymptote is one of eleven launch partners thus formalized—we’re extra chuffed to be the only one dedicated to world literature! The partnership will see content from both our quarterly and blog shared with The Guardian‘s vast international readership up to eight times a month (all the better to catalyze the transmission of world literature, we say); watch for the very first Asymptote article on this space next Tuesday.

This week, we noted technological inroads into the way we read: giant love-em-or-hate-em behemoth Google won a big fair use lawsuit—and its massive Internet-library project means literally billions of books are set to be scanned for your onscreen perusal. And upon the announcement that the New York Times will partner with Google to provide perusal-via-virtual reality: the future is now.

Speaking of archives—but of the decidedly more old-fashioned kind: Colombian literary giant Gabriel García Márquez’s archive is openly available for research at the University of Texas’ Harry Ransom Center.  READ MORE…

Weekly News Roundup, 16 October 2015: Extra! Extra Money!

October 16, 2015  |  in News  |  by Patty Nash

This week's literary highlights from across the world.

First things first: our brand-spankin’ new October issue is hot from the digital presses, and it’s more than worthy of your weekend perusal. With heavyweights like Yves Bonnefoy, Sjòn, and Yasutaka Tsutsui (among so many others!) you can’t go wrong, but in case you’re feeling overwhelmed, we featured five of our favorite pieces on the blog yesterday—check it out!

This week also marked the announcement of this year’s Man Booker Prize—and for the very first time, the award went to a Jamaican writer. Marlon James snagged top honors for his novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings. Often poised as an “imitation-Man-Booker,” the prestigious German Book Prize was awarded to Frank Witzel’s Die Erfindung der Roten Armee Fraktion durch einen manisch-depressiven Teenager im Sommer 1969 (deep breath). The award was a surprise, but deserved—and we’re crossing our fingers for a quick and successful translation to hit English markets soon. 

But while American National Book Awards have announced its shortlisted finalists, we’re altogether more interested in the American Translation Award shortlist, posted this week over at ALTA, and the list includes several friends of the blog and journal! 

READ MORE…

Weekly News Roundup, 9th October 2015: Noble Nobel!

October 9, 2015  |  in News  |  by Patty Nash

This week's literary highlights from across the world.

Happy Friday, Asymptote pals! Unless your habitation is rock-like, you’ve probably heard this week’s biggest, most high-stakes literary news: the Nobel Prize in Literature has been announced, and this year’s honors go to Belarusian Svetlana Alexievich, journalist and prose writer recognized for her meticulous, “polyphonic literature of witness.” Alexievich was at the top of the betting pools, but for those not in-the-know, the Nobel Prize is again an excellent opportunity to discover another author (often through translation!). Voices from Chernobyl, translated by Keith Gessen, is of particular interest. But much of her work—which voices the unvoiced—remains as-of-yet untranslated. Here’s a helpful primer to her work. READ MORE…