DFW's latest cover makeover, plus a great-looking cover and a really not-so-great-looking cover. […]

Since buying The Selected Poems of Wallace Stevens at City Lights, I’ve been rereading many Stevens poems and trying to understand it from a more mature perspective.  Last time I read a vast amount of Stevens was when I was 22 for a class on Stevens, T.S. Eliot, Yeats, and Marianne Moore.  With fifteen years [...] […]

The 2010 Best Translated Book Awards were announced last night at Idlewild Books, Manhattan. The Confessions of Noa Weber by Gail Hareven, translated by Dalya Bilu won the fiction award, and the poetry award went to Elena Fanailova for The Russian Version, translated from the Russian by Genya Turovskaya and Stephanie Sandler. Check out the [...] […]

The National Book Critics Circle Award is announcing their winners tonight.  The diversity of their nominations, from the better known (such as Hilary Mantel and Mary Karr) to the less mainstream (such as Rachel Zucker and Eula Biss), makes the blog entries on the nominees an interesting read.  I added Stephen Burt’s Close Calls with [...] […]

Translator Jonathan Wright said last night that he felt, for the English-language reader, "religious references [in Arabic literature] are in general problematic." […]

Poems and Paintings by Salena Gerdes and Joseph P. Wood in the newest issue of Dear Camera […]

Haruki Murakami’s breakout novel, Norwegian Wood, is being made to a film. But wait! There’s more! It’s being scored by Radiohead. […]

To mark the one-year anniversary of his outstanding literary webzine, The Second Pass, editor John Williams asked a whole bunch of reading folks to wax on about their favorite OP titles. […]

Despite Eliot's oft-quoted line about April, we all know that March is really the cruelest month, refusing to set us free of winter's bleakness even as it tantalizes us with hints of spring. This year however, Thoreau's journals in hand, I've decided to choose my own March. […]

or, Artifacts from a World I Do Not Recognize I love coming across mass market editions of books by writers whom you wouldn’t normally associate with that format (at least for those of us who were born in the seventies or later). Below are a few I’ve come across in used book stores. I always wonder: [...] […]