paper trail

Nov 17, 2010 @ 9:00:00 am

Jonathan Galassi

Farrar, Straus & Giroux president Jonathan Galassi has just completed an impressive new translation of Giacomo Leopardi's Canti, the nineteenth-century collection of forty-one poems that Joseph Luzzi characterizes in the new Bookforum as covering a "dazzling variety of styles and themes, from confessions of private pain and humiliation to philosophical satires and grand pronouncements on current events." At the Work in Progress blog, Galassi shares images of his Canti proof pages, offering a fascinating glimpse at the revisions and edits that went into making his musical and faithful en face edition. As he writes: "Trying to make Leopardi sound plausible in English has been very, very laborious—and exhilarating."

One of our favorite Brooklyn bookstores, Unnameable Books, is the type of carefully curated new and used shop that has become increasingly rare, if not nearly extinct (Atlantic Books is also a precious exemplar of what a good used bookshop should be). Unnameable's owner Adam Tobin chats with The Prospect Heights Patch about what it takes to thrive as a local independent bookseller in the age of e-books and Amazon.

The inimitable New Yorker music critic Sasha Frere Jones is becoming an editor of the forthcoming iPad newspaper, The Daily, headed by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. New Yorker editor David Remnick doesn't sound worried: “People who write here do all sorts of things—books, other writing—so he can do what he wants as long as the work here doesn’t suffer.”

Alix Christie estimates that there are ten million people currently writing novels, the majority of which will never be published. What keeps these writers going?