Right back at you, Michael! It was so lovely to meet you and hear about how you translate dialect! I wish Bill Weaver could have been with us :)

Fascinating piece! Premise is that being a translator makes u a better writer. Interview: Jenny Croft themillions.com/2024/05/want-t…
Most US novelists don't translate bcos...monolingual; also their novels are shaped/constricted by academe/MFA progs leading to narrower types of bks.

“My years as a translator have taught me to judge all works on their own terms. And as a writer, to try and understand the terms of the work I’m embarking on.” — Jenny Croft

This person should be immediately fired. What is Félix V. Matos Rodríguez doing about this?

The Harlem Renaissance show The Metropolitan Museum of Art is stunning. It excited me to see a few issues of THE CRISIS and FIRE!! on display, and pages from Langston Hughes’s ONE-WAY TICKET were perfectly paired with the Reiss portrait. Oh, those wicked canvases by Archibald Motley…

Lovely article focusing on the wonderful translator community in Seattle! In my final event, I told them they have something rare and beautiful and I envied them. Seattle is truly a city of world literature, largely thanks to University of Washington, NOTIS Folio Seattle Third Place Books

I'm about 80% through Solenoid now and it's the best novel I've read since 2666.

Congrats to Newmark J-School’s distinguished professor masha gessen !

A rare Pynchon letter. Pynch was on a Borges kick in the early 60s. Many of Borges' short stories are alluded to in Gravity's Rainbow.

5 women and 2 men killed by russian missiles . Why so many women? Because men are mobilized to the army ad women come to replace the men. And they die doing the most civilian job - being the printers of fiction and non-fiction!

Some news

Little did they know…

This image perfectly encapsulates the trustee/regent view of 'free speech' on campus. No one there speaking, but nice lawns.

“I think pretty much all of the writers I have talked to are in agreement that PEN has lost the trust of the literary community, and it can’t function effectively until there is a change of leadership.”
monsteryoun 윤영나 via Literary Hub

lithub.com/monica-youn-on…

FREEDOM TO WRITE FOR PALESTINE: Esther Alan reads an excerpt of Dunya Mikhail’s poem “America”, translated from the Arabic by Elizabeth Winslow.

Today, Humboldt University of Berlin, across the street from the square where Nazis famously burned books by Jewish authors, is being occupied by anti-genocide protesters.

Students AND faculty. We love to see it.

'At this point, I think pretty much all of the writers I have talked to are in agreement that PEN has really lost the trust of the literary community, and it can’t function effectively until there is a change of leadership.'

Thanks, monsteryoun 윤영나. Agreed.

The destruction of cultural heritage is a form of genocide. Striking how unembarrassed Israeli society is by the images of war crimes routinely posted by IDF soldiers on social media. Abu Ghraib was embarrassing to the Bush administration but Israel is proud of what it's doing.

Celebrating Mircea Cărtărescu's 'Solenoid' winning the Dublin Literary Award? Enjoy this interview with Sean Cotter about translating the novel:

wordswithoutborders.org/read/article/2…