Last night, James Baldwin became the top trending search on Google worldwide, up 3,400 percent, after Regina King won best supporting actress for her role in If Beale Street Could Talk, which was based on Baldwin’s novel of the same name.
W.E.B. Griffin, the author of dozens of bestselling spy and war novels, has died at eighty-nine. According to Griffin, he wrote more than 150 books, but as the New York Times points out: “Determining the exact number of books he wrote is not so easily done. . . . He was a ghostwriter for many, and many others were published under a variety of pseudonyms.” A 1997 article in the Washington Post in portrayed Mr. Griffin as “the grizzled griot of the warrior breed” and “the troubadour of the American serviceman.”
At Electric Lit, Adam Vitcavage talks with Natasha Wimmer about her translations of Roberto Bolano. “That’s the great toggle of translation: back and forth from the closest possible translation of a sequence of words to a more idiomatic or loose rendition. There is no such thing as a literal translation, as any translator will tell you. Every translation is an interpretation. I fall on the looser end of the spectrum (I think), but I question every choice, debating whether I’ve stretched too far.”
Amir Ahmadi Arian has sold first book in English, Then the Fish Swallowed Him, to a new (as yet unnamed) Harper’s imprint for international publishing. According to literary agent Jessica Craig, the novel, about Iran’s infamous Evin prison, is a “1984 for the 21st century and a stark warning about the psychological impact of totalitarianism.” It is scheduled to be published in winter 2020.
Tonight in New York, feminist writer Silvia Federici discusses her new book Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women, which links institutional violence against women to new forms of capitalism.
