Panel Discussion on THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON
TATTOO

Since Ali Karim was kind enough to trumpet this event over at the Rap Sheet, I ought to make it as official as a blog notification can be. On Tuesday, October 14 at 6:30 PM over at Scandinavia House, I'll be moderating a panel on Stieg Larsson's international (and now NYT) bestselling novel THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO along with:

• Val McDermid, author most recently of A DARKER DOMAIN (Harper, January 2009)
• Jeffrey Frank, senior editor at the New Yorker and author most recently of TRUDY HOPEDALE
• Edward Kastenmeier, VP and Executive Editor, Vintage/Anchor Books

I also have a sneaking suspicion there will be talk of the follow-up, THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE, which will be out in the UK in January and in the US a few months after that...

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http://www.sarahweinman.com/confessions/2008/10/panel-discussio.html

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Lewd Fruit or Plum Bums

NBAnd the coco de mer, of course…

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http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/nigelbeale/yxOu/~3/416005773/

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Blog Blog Blog

Blogging is a tough business, and it's only getting tougher--projected drops in advertising could soon rewire the blogosphere.

Even book executives are pondering the future of this mysterious art. Debbie Stier, Associate Publisher at HarperStudio, confessed that she never imagined what sort of mental gymnastics authors endured following her digital evangelism:

"First of all, it's really hard. Do you know how many times I told authors, without batting an eye, 'Blog Blog Blog.' I feel so guilty now that I've discovered how hard it is to be 'on' when someone says 'go.'"

After a few weeks in the driver's seat of a blog, Stier is looking for blogging advice from the Internets. GalleyCat suggests this RSS feed primer from Yen Cheong. What do you think? Help Stier and her authors answer the question: "What makes a good blog?"

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media

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http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/on/blog_blog_blog_96632.asp?c=rss

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Weekend Reviews (on a Monday, again)

I hope posting the weekend reviews on a Monday doesn't become a habit. Still, better late than never. Here we go...

Check out this week's set of reviews from Publishers Weekly. The new Sabuda Peter Pan looks great.

Craig Wilson talks to Marlo Thomas about the 35th Anniversary reissue of Free to Be...You and Me for USAToday. Free to Be...You and Me was the most influential book of my childhood. Did you read it, too?

Lisa Carricaburu reviews Halloween books for The Salt Lake Tribune.

In this week's Not-a-Review category: Kate Agnew asks "Why are there still so few attractive reading books featuring black and Asian children?" in the Guardian.

Also in the Guardian, Diane Samuels reviews Alexie Sherman's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.

Barbara Britsch reviews Middle Grade fiction and non fiction for The Toledo Blade.

The Detroit Free Press posts Children's Ambassador Jon Scieszka's "good books for boys" list.

And speaking of Scieszka, Jennifer Miller talks with him in the Rocky Mountain News.

Preston Williams talks to Chris Crutcher in a superb profile piece (including analysis about why high school students like Crutcher's books) in the Washington Post. Thanks, Sara, for the link!

And in the Washinton Post Book World, Kristi Jemtegaard reviews Halloween books for children, including Judy Sierra's newest book Beastly Rhymes to Read After Dark.

Helen Mitsios reviews what I think is an adult title teens will like--Real World, by Natsuo Kirino and translated by Phillip Gabriel--in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Interview Alert: Amanda Craig interviews Julia Donaldson in the Times.


Mary Harris Russell reviews four new books for The Chicago Tribune, including the new Polly Horvath novel, My One Hundred Adventures.

Interview Alert: Justin Berman talks to Neil Gaiman about The Graveyard Book for the San Fransico Chronicle.





Read The Full Article:
http://kidslitinformation.blogspot.com/2008/10/weekend-reviews-on-monday-again.ht
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Navigating the labyrinth

Reading notes on Translating Poetry: The Double Labyrinth, ed. by Daniel Weissbort

~ p. x: "Yet, as Ezra Pound remarked, translation is also a form of criticism, the highest in his view, since it represents a fusion of the creative and the critical."

~ p. xi: "Translation, as a specialised branch of practical criticism, of concentrated reading, is well worth exploring."

~ p. 10: János Csokits' discussion of how Ted Hughes translated János Pilinszky's work without knowing a word of Hungarian. (Csokits supplied word-for-word translations, plus notes.)

~ p. 18: Ted Hughes:

But even more exciting, for me, was the knack [Csokits] had of projecting a raw, fresh sense of the strange original--the particular and to me alien uniqueness of the original. I know from experience with quite a few translators that this is a very rare ability. Most translators, inevitably, translate the strangeness of the original work into the standard of their own sensibility--and the best one can hope for is that their sensibility can adapt itself interestingly. But again and again János Csokits transmitted the characters of several quite different poets, while introducing me to modern Hungarian poetry.

p. 36: John Felsteiner on translating Celan: "A translator, I think, needs to become the reader par excellence--or perhaps I should say par exigence. Here I would borrow from Kafka's Trial, where Joseph K., trying to interpret the parable 'Before the Law', is told by a priest: 'The Scripture is unalterable and its interpretations often merely betray bewilderment at this.'"

~ p. 107: Weissbort interviews Stanley Kunitz on his collaboration with Max Hayward in his translations of Anna Akhmatova's poetry. (A similar procedure to that of Hughes and Csokits.)

~ p. 108: Kunitz: "During our sessions together he would read the poems aloud to me in Russian. This was of the utmost importance, for the soul of a poem, I have always felt, is in its sound. When I read my versions back to him, above all I wanted them to sound right."

~ p. 110: Kunitz: "What is most readily translatable is the matter of a poem, its substantive ground, which there is no excuse for betraying, even in the absence of equivalents. All the rest--its music, its spirit, its complex verbal and psychic tissue--one tries to suggest as best as one can."

~ p. 126: Rika Lesser on translating Sonnevi's poetry: "Perhaps it is because he is alive and still very productive and therefore I cannot devour and digest his works in my usual fashion; his next book may cast more light on an earlier book or books, which could make me read them and translate poems from them in a different way. Perhaps it is simply because there is so much more uncertainty about every aspect of a massive new undertaking, so much more inertia to overcome."

~ p. 139: W.S. Merwin (!): "I continue in the belief, you know, that I don't know how to translate, and that nobody does. It is an impossible but necessary process, there is no perfect way to do it, and much of it must be found for each particular poem, as we go."

~ p. 202: William Jay Smith: "Poets must translate poets; even if they know little of the other's language, something of the fine frenzy of the original will somehow work its way through."

~ p. 220: William Jay Smith: "Translating the poems of Andrei Voznesensky over the past twenty years has brought me closer to him, to his country and to his language. 'Form isn't what counts,' he has said; 'form must be clear, unfathomable, disquieting, like the sky in which only radar can sense the presence of a plane.' In my translations I have tried to keep the form--that clear, unfathomable sky--in which his lines may remain airborne as those of a poet of his talent and courage deserve to be."

~ p. 232: Paul Auster to Richard Wilbur on the latter's translation of Apollinaire's "Le Pont Mirabeau": "What strikes most about it is the thickness of the language, a feeling of texture...you've tackled the work as a whole, not just as a series of isolated lines, and the result is something that hangs together."

Read The Full Article:
http://outofthewoodsnow.blogspot.com/2008/10/navigating-labyrinth.html

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Curiosities

• Try out our new "Random Post" button below the search boxes on the sidebar.
• CJR unveils new software in the quest to stamp out "gotcha journalism."

  * Charlie Gibson, September 11, 2008:
  Question: "Have you ever met a foreign head of state?"
  Gotcha Quotient: 95
  Reason: First of all, foreign policy-related questions are incredibly unfair...

• Tennis reprints David Foster Wallace's feature essay from its September 1996 issue.
• Perhaps not the most useful link in these tight times: "The Most Expensive Things I could Find On Amazon.com" (Note: several of these are out of stock. Coincidence?)
• None of you saw this coming: Rapper Coolio to release his own cookbook.
• Cindy Sherman's famous librarian "Untitled Film Still" fetched $900k at a recent auction.

Read The Full Article:
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/themillionsblog/fedw/~3/aAtQ6ZT9PEE/curiosities.ht
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AvantGuild: Alexandra Machinist Is Ready for Your
Queries

In this week's installment of mediabistro.com's "Pitching an Agent," M. David Hornbuckle visits the Linda Chester Agency, where Alexandra Machinist (right) is actively looking for new authors, with "a particular affinity for historical fiction, plot-driven literary fiction, women's fiction that straddles the line of commercial and literary, narrative nonfiction, and revealing (but not self-indulgent) memoir." She's willing to search through the slush pile, but if you're going to contact her directly, make sure to explain why you think she might be the agent for you.

This article is one of several mediabistro.com features exclusively available to AvantGuild subscribers. If you're not a member yet, you can register for $59 a year, and start reading those articles, receive discounts on mediabistro.com seminars and workshops, and get all sorts of other swell bonuses.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media

Read The Full Article:
http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/agents/avantguild_alexandra_machinist_is_rea
dy_for_your_queries_96633.asp?c=rss

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That Time of Year

 NBThat time of year thou mayst in me beholdWhen yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hangUpon those boughs which shake against the cold,Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. 

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BOOK: Miss Julia Hits the Road by Ann B Ross

Miss Julia Hits the Road by Ann B Ross, 339 pages

series challenge

Apple crisp in the fall. Macaroni and cheese casserole on a winter day. Bread pudding any time. Comfort foods are not necessarily meant to be high cuisine, but they are tasty and reliable and bring back great memories of childhood. Miss Julia is a comfort read as I can usually fill a day with a book and enjoy some time in North Carolina with characters I know and enjoy. No earth shattering literature here, just a 'Southern comedy of manners', as I learn what outfit would be suitable for a motorcycle Poker Run, how a yard should be kept clean, and what topics are suitable for discussion in mixed company (not labor or Viagra type medication.)

Miss Julia continues to grow and thrive on her own after the death of her husband, Wesley Lloyd Springer. She is realizing some of the choices she missed out on during her marriage, and getting closer to Sam, in a romantic manner. That is one slow moving courtship. All the great characters are back - JP Pickins, Hazel Marie and Little Lloyd, Lillian, Binkie and Coleman, and Sam.

Best scene - Miss Julia convincing Emma Sue Ledbetter to enter a poker Run motorcycle event; and Miss Julia having to get changed out of her dress to ride a motorcycle as well. Am I the only one who uses the feed footer? I should be more pithy in my comments here.

Read The Full Article:
http://raidergirl3-anadventureinreading.blogspot.com/2008/10/book-miss-julia-hits
-road-by-ann-b-ross.html

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Betting on the Nobel Prize

Nothing could be more foolish than betting on the Nobel. At least with the National Book Award and the Man Booker you have a shortlist to choose from. With the Nobel, it's anyone's guess. Besides, I've lost plenty of money betting on the stock market, which these days might be even more foolish than betting on an award for literature than no one successfully predicts.

But still: guesses are free, and involve only pride. So here's mine: Haruki Murakami. Formerly 10/1 odds, now 7/1 odds. We'll find out on Thursday.

Read The Full Article:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Bookfox/~3/412948499/betting-on-the-nobel-prize.ht
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