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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 audacity to perpetrate these selfsame acts upon the reader, but we assure you this is […]
...moreThe 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 novel has been deemed “untranslatable” and the translations that are successful tend to be consuming: […]
...moreA 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 from the art of book blurbing—and offers some of her favorite Shteyngart blurbs—in a reflection […]
...moreBrooklyn 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 life as a bookstore owner: These days, The Community Bookstore is open when Scioli decides […]
...moreWe’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 speculates as to how hypothetical Amazonians might answer that question.
...moreWriting 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 the world every year in every language imaginable, but only a couple hundred of those […]
...moreLast 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 gentrification of their new neighborhoods, asking three bookstore owners in rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods to […]
...moreDespite 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 as an opportunity to look at short form horror fiction known as creepypasta: This type of […]
...moreMobyLives 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 Koons, who won a copyright infringement suit in 2006 for his appropriation of fashion photographs. […]
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