For Vulture, Kira Josefsson writes about works in translation and why big publishers have been reluctant to include the translator’s name on book covers. “It’s possible that publishers believe readers will be scared off if they know that a book is a translation. . . . It raises the question of whom we are translating for and why we read.”
The Sycamore Review is asking readers for support as its host university, Purdue, is considering closing the magazine.
In The Guardian, Jacqueline Rose writes about how the pandemic has changed the way we think about death. Noting that Freud once said no one believes in their own death, Rose observes, “If the pandemic has changed life forever, it might therefore be because that inability to countenance death—which may seem to be the condition of daily sanity—has been revealed for the delusion it always is.”
Alex Shephard reports on a trip to Robert Caro’s archives with the legendary biographer and a group of CUNY journalism grad students. For more on Caro’s painstaking process, see Sasha Frere-Jones’s review of Caro’s memoir in the summer 2019 issue of Bookforum.
The winter issue of the Yale Review—a collaboration with the Windham Campbell prizes—is out now, with new work by Kate Briggs, Vivian Gornick, Nathan Alan Davis, Renee Gladman, and more. In an interview with editor Meghan O’Rourke, Gornick remembers writing criticism for the Village Voice in the 1970s, and explains what she learned from the great first-person stylists of the era, such as Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, and Norman Mailer: “What these talented personal journalists showed me . . . was that I had to teach myself how to bring the ‘I’ and the ‘it’ into the right proportion so that my feelings did not become the subject; my feelings were what I would use to explore the subject.”