MobyLives
-
Satan is Everywhere
Watch yourself. The intrepid investigators at Melville House discovered secret Satanic messages in John Darnielle’s Wolf in White Van: It may seem farfetched to imagine a book which actually uses backmasked Satanist messages as a plot point would have the…
-
Joyce Proves as Difficult to Translate as to Read
The first of three parts of a Chinese translation of Finnegans Wake consumed eight years of translator Dai Congrong’s life. The almost unreadable book proves even more difficult to translate because of the many puns and layered meanings, explains MobyLives: The…
-
Gary Shteyngart Won’t Blurb Your Book
A Gary Shteyngart blurb seemed almost a rite of passage in recent years, with the author of Super Sad True Love Story offering his recommendation to more than one hundred books. But Kirsten Reach reports that the author has retired…
-
The Tale of Two Community Bookstores
Brooklyn has two independent Community bookstores—Park Slope’s Community Bookstore and Cobble Hill’s The Community Bookstore. John Scioli, owner of the latter, tells MobyLives that he founded the original with his ex-wife before they split. Scioli goes on to talk about…
-
Amazon Guilt
We’ve all felt a little bit guilty saving a few pennies buying from Amazon rather than our neighborhood independent bookseller. But what about Amazon employees—do they experience guilt when shopping at independent retailers rather than with their megastore employer? MobyLives…
-
Is There Too Much Translation?
Writing over at Brooklyn Quarterly, Will Evans discusses why he founded a publishing house dedicated to translation: In addition to being a philosophical problem, literary translation is also a contentious business matter. There are thousands of good to all-time-great books published in…
-
Bookstores and Gentrification
Last week, the New York Times wrote about the end of Manhattan’s bookstore culture as the shops follow the city’s literary scene into the outer boroughs. Now Dustin Kurtz over at MobyLives raises the possibility that bookstores are responsible for…
-
The Horror, the Horror of Short Form Fiction
Despite the publication this past year of behemoth novels like Donna Tartt’s 750 page The Goldfinch and Eleanor Catton’s 850 page The Luminaries, current trends increasingly embrace truncated fiction. MobyLives took the conclusion of the third annual Twitter Fiction Festival…
-
Some More on Fair Use
MobyLives has extended the discussion Andy Baio started on his project Kind of Bloop, which I wrote about for The Rumpus on Saturday. MobyLives makes a good point when talking about one of Baio’s examples, that of the artist Jeff…