Beyond Trump’s Wall: Immigrant Literature in Washington, D.C.
Today, one in seven Washingtonians are immigrants, which has shaped literary trends and artistic output.
Industry News
Writers Descend on Washington, Promptly Resist
The literary community descended on Washington, DC last week for the Association of Writers & Writing Programs’ annual conference, and participants seized the opportunity to register their dissent with the current administration.
Why the MFA System Should Be Used to Subvert Cuts to the NEA
The scariest part of the proposed cuts to the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities is that people seem to have accepted them already.
When He Was King: The Words and Wisdom of Muhammad Ali
Standing in line at the grocery store the other day, I counted four magazines the published special issues to commemorate the remarkable life of Muhammad Ali, who died on June 3 at 74 years old.
Mexican Indigeneous
It might be considered anathema to our neighbors south of the Rio Grande but Phoneme Media is having a veritable publishing celebration of indigenous Mexican poetry. This small, indie publisher with one of the coolest catalogues of world lit understands what Anthony Seidman wrote recently in World Literature Today.
Han Kang’s THE VEGETARIAN Wins Man Booker International Prize
Last week, the winner of the newly refocused Man Booker International Prize was announced to be The Vegetarian, a novel by the Korean writer Han Kang, translated into English by Deborah Smith. Originally published as three novellas, the book is the surreal story of Yeong-hye, a young Korean woman who stops eating meat as a…
Shelf Aware Machines
When I was a kid, I loved the Barnes & Noble in Seattle’s University Village. It was one of Barnes & Noble’s flagship stores, at that time the largest bookstore I’d ever seen: forty-six thousand square feet over two floors. I spent hours in its expansive science fiction and fantasy section, ogling the covers and…
Stray Reflections: Korean Literature in France
Livre Paris, France’s annual largest book fair, took place last weekend, and the invited country this year was South Korea, in honor of the France-Korea Year, celebrating 130 years of cooperation between the two countries. Interest in Korean culture has grown exponentially over the last few years. Lack of strategic marketing and distribution networks, cultural…
Circumflexes and censorship: on the French spelling reform
Behold: a diacritic has got an entire country in an uproar. And of course that country is France. Let’s rewind a bit: in 1990, the Académie Française, prestigious gatekeeper of all things French, proposes a spelling reform that generates countless pamphlets and petitions to “save the French language.” Ultimately nothing much happens, the old spellings…