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You’ll never believe this amazing sales technique! A bookstore is making clickbait headlines from classic novel plots. Bustle highlights some unconventional bookstores around the world. April 29 is Independent Bookstore Day and a Seattle area store is issuing a challenge to readers: visit 19 participating stores get your bookstore passport stamped.
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Laurie Sheck is the author, most recently, of Island of the Mad, and A Monster’s Notes, a re-imagining of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. A Pulitzer Prize finalist in poetry for The Willow Grove, she has been a Guggenheim Fellow, as well as a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and at the […]
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Will Evans, Executive Director of Deep Vellum Publishing, talks about publishing translated works as well as the Texas and Dallas literary scene he wants to help grow.
...moreMore than five hundred people will participate in a global event to read the roughly fifty works by Russian author Anton Chekhov, reports Russia Beyond the Headlines. On September 25th, venues around the world will begin an online broadcast lasting 24 hours. The event is part of Russia’s Year of Literature project.
...moreWhat’s one English word to sarcastically communicate Russian cosmopolitan refinement? How would you translate a page-long sentence from Tolstoy, or “the cacophonous competing voices of Dostoevsky”? Larissa Volokhonsky and Richard Pevear (who have been married for 33 years) have translated over 30 works from Russian to English, beloved by readers worldwide (including Oprah) and praised […]
...moreThis poetry was a poetry meant to be read loudly, breathlessly, full-throttle, full of sonic energy and internal rhyme. It felt less like a communication from a speaker to a reader and more like sheet music for a reader to perform with their own voice. Over at Lit Hub, Michael Dumanis explains how he found […]
...more“I hate literature,” wrote Varlam Shalamov in a 1965 letter. “I do not write memoirs; nor do I write short stories.” Despite his claim, Varlam Shalamov would become one of the most prolific Russian writers, producing 147 short stories about life in the gulag. The Guardian takes a look at his work.
...moreFor the New York Times, Francine Prose and Benjamin Moser share their experiences reading 19th century Russian literature. While Prose shows an appreciation for the timeless themes of Tolstoy and Gogol, Moser contends that what makes 19th century Russian writers distinctive is the way their work “echoed their particular national history.”
...moreIn addition to boasting one of the most beautiful subway systems in the world, Moscow commuters now stand to become the best-read. Per the Guardian, over 100 titles from authors including Pushkin, Chekhov, and Tolstoy are now available for download, simply by scanning a QR code in the station. The city has already implemented a […]
...moreWhen the people followed the Communists at the beginning of the twentieth century, they gave up Christ, but they found it impossible, as the revolutionary poets exhorted them, “to throw Pushkin overboard the steamboat of modernity.” Prominent Russian writer Mikhail Shishkin has an essay up at The New Republic, translated from Russian, about the fundamental conflicts […]
...moreHappy Sunday! I’m in upstate New York at my sister’s college graduation. She’s really smart, like Phi Beta Kappa smart. However, she’s insisting that I play drinking games with her, which I haven’t done for like ten years, so posts might be light today. You can blame her. “Baby’s Touch-n-Feel Guide to Russian Literature” (via […]
...moreElif Batuman offers a rogue’s gallery of Russian writers, scholars, and literary characters—the only oddball missing is herself.
...more“They couldn’t figure out exactly where the book fit. Part literary criticism, part travel writing, part memoir, Batuman’s collection of seven nonfiction pieces moves from the campus of Stanford University to Uzbekistan, contemplating everything from Isaac Babel to an overweight mathematician in Florence who confides in an e-mail to Batuman: “I haven’t had sex with […]
...moreAn anthology of stories from the new Russia shows the continuity between contemporary writers and their canonical predecessors
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