Recent content by DWM

I was very sorry to learn of Eric's passing. I remember the exchanges I had with him on the forum - they were sometimes pretty intense, but I always felt that he cared much more about literary translation, and especially the translation of Nordic literature, than he did about being polite or...

The Danish literature thread is here: http://www.worldliteratureforum.com/forum/showthread.php/32956-Danish-Literature?highlight=danish+literature

BuzzFeed has photographs of 30 renowned authors inspired by cats - and the cats are in the photos, too: http://www.buzzfeed.com/summeranne/30-renowned-authors-inspired-by-cats

The question is asked by Ollie Brock, writing in the New Statesman: What makes a good translation? How is one produced? Young translators are usually advised to find an undiscovered author they might have a good relationship with and whose work they love. Yet both these roads are potholed...

Cargo Publishing have released a commemoration of the 1962 International Writers' Conference, which took place in Edinburgh, Scotland, and was attended by a large number of European and American authors including Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, William Burroughs, Hugh MacDiarmid, Muriel Spark...

The latest part of Sofi Oksanen's novel trilogy (or is it to be a quartet?) based on twentieth century Estonian history was published in Finland on August 31. When the Doves Disappeared (Kun kyyhkyset katosivat) is a sequel to her acclaimed novel Purge (Puhdistus). From Salomonsson's: The...

Is this the way to market translations, maybe? Via Three Percent, on the BTBA Fiction Longlist: The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson, translated by Thomas Teal Language: Swedish Country: Finland Publisher: New York Review Books Pages: 208 Why This Book Should Win: Big favorite among booksellers...

Writing in Publishing Perspectives, Amanda DeMarco notes that translations of Icelandic literature (Iceland is this year's guest of honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair) are nowhere so numerous as in Germany, with German translators struggling to keep up with the flow of work: Though it’s...

The Bookseller reports that The e-reader market doubled over Christmas, according to statistics given out by the Publishers Association at its annual digital seminar. The figures, compiled by Book Marketing Limited, showed that 7% of British adults received a dedicated e-reader over the...

In the Toronto Globe and Mail, John Barber takes a look at the Canadian publishing world - which is probably not all that different from the publishing world as a whole - and has some questions about the shrinking role of publishers' editors in the life of books: Toronto literary agent Anne...

Jamel is a village in Eastern Germany. Wooden signposts by the main road point to Vienna, Paris, and Braunau am Inn — the birthplace of Adolf Hitler. A far-right leader runs his demolition company from home, its logo featuring a man smashing a Star of David with a sledgehammer.

In the Guardian, Mary Midgley reviews Nicholas Humphrey's latest book, Soul Dust, and takes issue with his thesis which argues that human conciousness is a mere illusion of the brain: In fact, we know this rich and complex world in many ways, among which physical science is important, but our...

I'm currently trying to compile a reading list of translated books (fiction only) by German authors which document or in other ways describe the German resistance to Nazism. Ideally I want to include books that were written in the period 1933-1950, but earlier and later works could also figure...

An American publishing house which specializes in translations of foreign literature has recently come under fire for allowing changes to be made by the editor of a translated short story in one of its anthologies, apparently without the translator's knowledge. The incident was documented by the...

The Guardian has live coverage of Save Our Libraries day.