Bookslut

An Interview with Margaret Jull Costa

I can’t think of any culture where literary translators are greatly respected. This is partly to do with the predominance of the English language, which means that non-English-speaking countries translate vast quantities of contemporary fiction from Britain and America. Publishers in those countries are not always that choosy about translators as long as they can work quickly. My colleagues in Spain and Portugal have to work to ridiculous deadlines and for very little money.

by Megan Doll

Failures of the Imagination

I don’t like to attack poetry in reviews. I can do that at home. I like to identify what is happening in the reading experience -- and then finesse the information into useful and interesting claims. I pride myself on this ability. But I am starting to feel that silence on the matter of Failures of the Imagination is condonation. by Olivia Cronk

Blowing Down Bleecker Street

In my own ebrity, I started thinking again about literary fame and what it might mean. You can have it and write like Chekov, you can have it and write like Elizabeth Gilbert, so that must make the fame part inherently disappointing, like pulling back the curtain in some electric green city and not even finding a meek little man tugging the levers, but finding no one back there at all.

by Elizabeth Bachner

Questioning Elephants on the Edge

To read accounts like the one about Ndume is a wrenching experience. To learn that some traumatized wild elephants are now killing other elephants, and in some cases killing rhinoceroses, is shocking; such violence is incompatible with everything we have come to understand about wild elephant culture. by Barbara J. King

Going Bovine

“We found that a lot of the stories or words or even ideas contained in most books could be negative or hurtful or make you question your happiness or even question the concept of happiness as an ideal, and that just wasn’t working for us...Don Quixote. Complicated ideas and language. Some people found it hysterical, but others felt inadequate about not understanding it right away. We don’t like to induce nonpositive experience feelings in people, so it had to go.” by Kati Nolfi

"That's just a pig thing."

Why is such scarce attention paid to the crucial role of animal agriculture in the outbreak of swine and avian flu pandemics? Why has America, a country that ostensibly glorifies heartland values and industries, allowed the family farm to be so rapidly marginalized? Given the increase in public awareness about the shit (literally) that goes into factory-farmed meat, why do we still eat it? by Becky Ferreira