TOBI'S DESK

In honor of Women in Translation month, The Guardian asks 10 female translators and writers about the work that inspires them , with answers ranging from  Visitation  by  Jenny Erpenbeck  to  Valeria Luiselli ’s The Story of My Teeth , which we reviewed when it came out in the States. Pair with this  survey of the work of Argentine writer  Leila Guerriero . The post Lingua Donna appeared first on The Millions . from The Millions http://ift.tt/2gtxxEF

A textile design by Varvara Stepanova, 1924.   Don’t trust those Judas Iscariots, those chameleons! In our day, faith is easier to lose than an old glove—and I’ve lost it! It was evening. I was taking the horsecar. It isn’t right that I, as a high-ranking official, take the horsecar, but on this occasion I wore a fur greatcoat and could conceal my face in its marten collar. It’s cheaper, you know … Despite the cold and late hour, the car was crammed full. Nobody recognized me. The marten collar allowed me to travel incognito. Riding, I dozed and studied the little ones … “No, that isn’t him!” I thought, gazing at a little man in a rabbit-fur coat. “It isn’t him. No, it is him! Him!” I pondered, believing and not believing my eyes … The little man in the rabbit-fur coat looked awfully like Ivan Kapitonich, one of my clerks. Ivan Kapitonich is a small, dumbstruck, squashed-up creature, existing only to retrieve fallen handkerchiefs and offer his salutations. He’s young,...

In June, we announced a call for submissions by The Afro Vibe, the newest African pop culture magazine. Launched on 18 August 2017, The Afro Vibe is owned by Expound magazine editor, Wale Owoade, whose beautiful poetry is currently shortlisted for the inaugural Brittle Paper Literary Awards. In an email to Brittle Paper, Owoade had stated that The Afro Vibe will be offering […] from Brittle Paper http://ift.tt/2vLg9gB

“[S]he and her sister should not be affected by the riot. Riots like this were what she read about in newspapers. Riots like this were what happened to other people.”  The Guardian runs ‘ A Private Experience ,’ a short story from Year-in-Reading alum   Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie . The post A Public Private Experience appeared first on The Millions . from The Millions http://ift.tt/2wU2Z6b

Author  Terry Pratchett ‘s archives have been destroyed by steamroller , according to  The New York Times . The hard drive containing all of his unpublished work was, per his wishes, run over by a close friend. We ran this remembrance on the occasion of his passing two years ago. The post Well That Was Dramatic appeared first on The Millions . from The Millions http://ift.tt/2gr3NrZ

At this year’s BookExpo, surrounded by stacks of galleys (most of which I tried to haul from the Jacob Javitz Center in Manhattan on two different train rides to the South Bronx in an effort to claim the world’s nerdiest #FirstWorldProblems award) I was introduced to the Irish novelist John Boyne by a woman who saw me staring at the pink and red tome with a puzzled look on my face. It was a doozy of a galley, thick and intimidating. I wasn’t sure I could stand to bring one more book home. Still, I find epic novels sexy. All I ever need is an enabler. “You really need to pick that one up,” she said, as if my internal voice had gone external. “It’s the best book you’ll read all year.” I’m a trained librarian, a proud bookworm who prefers Goodreads to all other social media, and a writer. Reader, I could not resist. I was raised Catholic and my frame of reference for all things Ireland is the Catholic Church. I wanted to read Boyne, who has written 10 novels for adults and five for y...

All photographs by Alex Harris.   Reynolds Price’s enthusiasms could not be contained to one form: he wrote novels and stories, poems and plays, memoirs, essays, and songs; made translations; and taught creative writing and literature at Duke University for fifty-two years. If that weren’t enough, Price also collected art. Confined to a wheelchair for the last twenty-seven years of his life, he created a salon-like refuge in his Durham, North Carolina, house in which every wall, bookshelf, and piece of furniture reflected his eclectic passions and preoccupations, paid homage to his influences, and illuminated his interior life. After Price’s death in 2011, his family asked the photographer Alex Harris to document the art and objects as a living collection before it was disassembled. During the winter and early spring of that year, Harris took more than seven hundred photographs of every corner, wall, and nook. A selection of the images are on view through November 5 at the Rub...

Look how these men move through the earth, carelessly, eyes forward, shoved towards an urgent destination (though never feeling they have arrived). Look how closely the man stands his ground, hard-eyed, half-smiling, while the woman beneath him buckles, compromises, second-guesses her strength. In the most simple moments, the flow of the earth is revealed. Skip […] from Brittle Paper http://ift.tt/2vJGBak

Two weeks ago, we launched a new series, “When Writers Talk Music,” for readers like us who recognize when the books are getting way too much and crave for something else from their favourite writers. The series’ first volume featured clever words from Teju Cole on Fela and WizKid and a cool take on Soukous […] from Brittle Paper http://ift.tt/2xxpjj3

The 2017 Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas (NLNG) Prize for Literature has unveiled its shortlist, and it comprises three poetry collections: Tanure Ojaide’s Songs of Myself: Quartet, Ogaga Ifowodo’s A Good Mourning, and Ikeogu​​ Oke​’s The Heresiad.​​ The longlist had eleven poets.​ At $100,000, the NLNG Prize for Literature is the richest in Africa, and honours a published […] from Brittle Paper http://ift.tt/2xxxFqP

James McNeill Whistler, Nocturne, Blue and Silver: Battersea Reach , 1872–78, oil on canvas. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston.   The Morgan Library is the perfect place to muse on Henry James: John Pierpont Morgan’s scholarly sanctum, with those lapis columns and rare woods, is as much a tribute to costly good taste as to literature. James himself mused there on January 18, 1911; record of his attendance is on display in a logbook at the door to the summer-long exhibition “ Henry James and American Painting ,” curated by Colm Tóibín and Declan Kiely and on view for another week and a half. It’s possible that the Morgan’s show on James’s relationship with expatriate painters won’t convert the uninitiated, but it will undoubtedly serve as a pilgrimage stop for the faithful. There are some titillating letters from James to a probable lover, and who doesn’t love a Whistler? I heard my favorite lines from The Ambassadors , about the clink of unseen bracelets, when I paus...

Way back in March, we brought you news of Uzodinma Iweala’s second novel. Iweala had hinted during an interview with Guardian Nigeria that a new novel was in the works and touched on the novel’s broad themes. But he didn’t give away specific details about the book. Well, the tease is finally over! The novel […] from Brittle Paper http://ift.tt/2vrGZz5

As eras accrue and each literary movement gives way to the next, canon space (which remains fixed) becomes survival of the fittest. Ludwig Tieck , William Congreve , and Francisco de Quevedo were household names in their day, but are now anthology also-rans of their respective movements. So who gets to be heard from among those morbid aesthetes known as The Decadents? Charles Baudelaire features most prominently as the movement’s inaugural figure. And Arthur Rimbaud , certainly, though he is more sui generis than representative. Oscar Wilde abides, but as a pithy epigrammatist. If Rachilde survives, it will likely be under an alternative rubric (her Monsieur Vénus is a proto-feminist, gender-fluid masterpiece). Dyed-in-the-wool Decadents like Joris-Karl Huysmans , Théophile Gautier , Octave Mirbeau , Auguste Villiers de L’Isle-Adam , and Jean Lorrain are in all likelihood battling it out for one or zero paragraphs in literary history. (Huysmans being the favorite grandson of E...

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE   Mid-May, the Phillips travelled to Ibadan to meet with the Da Silvas for the introduction ceremony of their children, Abisoye and Gbemiga. They arrived a day before the D-day and lodged in a hotel close to Abisoye’s parents’ bungalow. Gbemiga called his fiancée and informed her that they were around. She promised … Continue reading Bukky Alakara 45 → from NaijaStories.com http://ift.tt/2gqbZsC

On June 5th 2015, Teju Cole gave the keynote address at the opening ceremony of the African Literature Association Conference held in Bayreuth. The transcript of the lecture, titled “Do African Digital Natives Wear Glass Skirts?,” is now available online. It was recently published in JALA, the official journal of the African Literature Association. In […] from Brittle Paper http://ift.tt/2vrt38f

A textile design by Varvara Stepanova, 1924. In the opinion of well-read governesses and educated governors’ wives, the soul is an indeterminable entity of psychological substance. I have no reason to disagree with this. One scholar writes: “To discover the soul, take a man just given a dressing-down by management, and tie off his foot with a belt. Make an incision in the heel and you’ll find what’s sought.” I believe in the transmigration of souls… I’ve come to this belief through experience. My own soul, in all the time of my earthly suffering, has traversed many animals and plants, and endured all the stages and realms spoken of by the Buddha… I was a pup when I was born, and a goose when I entered public life. Starting in government service, I became small potatoes. My boss dubbed me a brick, friends—a jackass, freethinkers—a sheep. Traveling along the railroads, I was a rabbit; living in a village among peasants, I felt myself a leech. After one instance of embezzlement I wa...

A textile design by Varvara Stepanova, 1924.   The other day I stopped to see a friend, the journalist Misha Kovrov. He was sitting on his couch, cleaning his fingernails and drinking tea. He offered me a glass. “I don’t drink without bread,” I said. “Let’s get some bread!” “Under no conditions! I’d offer an enemy bread, certainly, but never a friend.” “That’s peculiar. Why not?” “This is why. Come here!” Misha walked me to the table and pulled out a drawer: “Look!” I looked into the drawer and saw distinctly nothing. “I don’t see anything … Rubbish of some sort … Tacks, rags, some little rat tails … ” “Take a look at exactly that! I’ve been collecting these rags, twine, and tacks for ten years! A remarkable collection.” And Misha gathered up all the rubbish and shook it out on a sheet of newspaper. “See this burnt match?” he said, showing me an ordinary, slightly charred one. “This is an interesting match. Last year I found it in a baranka pastry bought at Sevastia...

“ Bertelsmann’s 7% decline in 2016 revenue was due entirely to a drop in sales at Penguin Random House. The lack of a big new bestseller hurt results at the company, and it divested some smaller divisions in the year. ”  For those interested in inside baseball,  Publishers Weekly takes a look at how the world’s 50 largest publishers are faring . (TL;dr: Although their total revenue topped $50 billion, more than half of the list’s publishers reported sales declines – oh, and Harry Potter still really, really sells). As a counterpoint to all that capitalism, read our own  Edan Lepucki ‘s survey of self-published authors . The post Inside Litball appeared first on The Millions . from The Millions http://ift.tt/2iHdHGX

Ugo Rondinone, THANX  4 NOTHING , 2015, multichannel film installation.   In any given decade of his life in New York, John Giorno could be found right in the middle of whatever the new scene might be, hanging out with the era’s defining figures and embodying the moment: in the fifties, meeting Jack Kerouac at Columbia’s West End; in the sixties, making a movie with Andy Warhol; in the seventies, studying Buddhism in India; in the eighties, playing in a band at CBGB. He has always been a poet who operates primarily in the art world. His practice is multimodal and collaborative: he’s experimented with sound recording, painting, video, and has been muse and lover to a number of artists, including Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns. This last detail, which is so often salaciously foregrounded in the literature and mythos surrounding Giorno, would appear to put him in a passive or sidelined role, but his work gleefully subverts this, showing just how potent and acti...

Planning to attend this Saturday’s National Book Festival in Washington, D.C.? The   Washington Post has provided five sample itineraries . And for an entirely different, vicarious trip, revisit  Mythili G. Rao ‘s account of visiting the Jaipur Literature Festival a few years back: “To voice their disapproval of the circumstances of Salman Rushdie ’s absence, four writers read from The Satanic Verses — a book that has been banned in India. They were advised to leave. What kind of real intellectual discussion could go on in a setting that had proved itself so hospitable to self-censorship?” The post Eat Your Heart Out, Fyre appeared first on The Millions . from The Millions http://ift.tt/2x1f0pG

I confess I am not by nature an early adopter. I still like manual typewriters, stick-shift cars, and simple appliances with on and off buttons instead of confusing symbols. I still do not know how to text. I am, however, very proud that I was in the vanguard when it came to hating the circus. I remember how out of sync I was when, at age nine, my parents took me to the circus at Madison Square Garden. I screamed in horror at the clowns, I was a whining bummer when the ringmaster with a whip made the frightened horses jump through fiery hoops, and I only perked up when the lion tamer stuck his head into the lion’s mouth. I was hoping he would be decapitated. Now everyone has jumped on the “I hate the circus” bandwagon. It is under attack by animal-rights activists and fire departments and performers unions. The glory days of Barnum and Bailey are long gone. People with compassion no longer want to see elephants paraded down Main Street holding tail in trunk; the dirty-water ...