Friday Lit Links — Week of May 11
News, Reviews, and Interviews
This October brings the 25th Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and the honoree this year is Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat. The New Yorker recently featured not only an interview with Danticat but also a terrific short story.
The 2018 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize has been awarded to Isabel Fargo Cole for her translation of Wolfgang Hilbig’s Old Rendering Plant. Cole, whom we interviewed in 2015, has translated other works by the German author as well, including the short piece “Coming.”
The Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize shortlist has been announced. The award goes to the top book-length translations into English from an extant European language. Among the nominees are Celia Hawkesworth for her translation of Daša Drndić’s Belladonna as well as for works by Yoko Tawada and 1970 Neustadt Prize finalist Pablo Neruda.
Northwestern professor Clare Cavanagh will be honored this month in New York by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Cavanagh, who graced us with her presence during the 2004 Neustadt Festival for Adam Zagajewski, is regarded as one of the world’s best translators from the Polish.
We’re dialed into spec-lit this month, in keeping with our new issue, and we’re really digging Electric Lit’s dive into the electronic album Ursula K. Le Guin made as a companion to her novel Always Coming Home.
Speaking of Le Guin, Storyological’s recent podcast on her work, as well as Kurt Vonnegut’s dystopian short story Harrison Bergeron, is dynamite.
The Academy of American Poets was recognized for their vanguard Teach This Poem program.
Don’t forget to check out the new issue of our partner publication, Latin American Literature Today. It’s their largest issue to date, and it’s packed with great reads, such as an interview with Colombian journalist Alberto Salcedo Ramos, an essay from Alberto Chimal on Mexican speculative fiction, Mayan poetry and prose, and more.
Fun Finds and Inspiration
Largehearted Boy brings us a playlist to chronicle the death of classic rock.
If you’ve never thought deeply about where you fall on the amount of spacing between your sentences, then hold that thought, because science has weighed in.
McSweeney’s offers up some tips on Midwestern rhetoric.
And, finally, Time brings us a piece on what’s going on with that letter you never knew you’ve been miswriting.
