This morning, on the day before the Frankfurt Book Fair, former Soft Skull editor Richard Nash announced the Spring 2011 list for Red Lemonade, the first imprint of his "insurgent publishing start-up" Cursor. It's an exciting list, which includes Someday This Will Be Funny, a new story collection by Bookforum contributor and American Genius: A Comedy author Lynne Tillman.
Elissa Bassist publishes the excellent notes she took during Lorrie Moore's witty conversation with New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman, in which she talked about humor, MFA programs, and her "ideal reader."
When the Nobel Prize for literature is announced on Thursday, the choice will probably be a "confounding one," says David L. Ulin at The Los Angeles Times.
Is anyone else bothered by the fact that Kathryn Harrison's New York Times review of the new edition of Madame Bovary says absolutely nothing insightful about the quality of Lydia Davis's translation? The author of The Kiss offers only four cliched sentences about Davis's new rendering, and here are two of them: "It is a shame Flaubert will never read Davis’s translation of Madame Bovary. Even he would have to agree his masterwork has been given the English translation it deserves." She does not mention any other translations, though there are many. Anyone looking for commentary on previous translators of Flaubert's classic can turn to Davis herself, who has written about her predecessors over at the Paris Review blog.
The latest from McSweeney's: Dave Eggers's animal renderings.
