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Bonus Articles

Every Morpheme Counts: The Sam Lipsyte Interview

Lipsyte: Well these were the famous classes that he taught and others have written about it. He would kind of perform an amazing monologue for hours that would be a work of art in and of itself, in the way it was constructed in real time and kept pulling threads through and weaving all these elements together, but the content of it would be reflections on writing and art and what it is to be an artist and how one should approach the page. And then at the end of that—and that could go for four or five hours—at the end of that, he would call on students to read from whatever it was they were working on, but normally you wouldn't get too far, because he would stop you probably within a sentence or two and point out all that was false in what you had perpetrated.

PROPOSAL FOR TALK ON “GRANTS, PROPOSALS, AND QUERIES,” TO BE DELIVERED AT THE 2010 AWP CONFERENCE, THURSDAY, APRIL 8, COLORADO CONVENTION CENTER, STREET LEVEL, ROOM 203, 9:00 AM

In the brief essay that J.C. Hallman will deliver at a panel discussion at the 2010 AWP Conference in Denver, Hallman will offer up his own insights as to the nature of this admittedly flawed practice. The essay will be, to some extent, experimental. It will have a self-referential quality, it will aspire to innovation, indeed it will even be accurate to describe it as "meta-," but of course Hallman will use none of these terms, though he would like to. Book proposals are not places for words like innovation and experimentation. Instead, Hallman's essay will be "quirky and fun."

Lectures from the Argentine Master: Seven Nights by Jorge Luis Borges

Seven Nights Jorge Luis Borges (trans. Eliot Weinberger). New Directions. $12.95, 128pp. In Seven Nights, the recently re-released collection of lectures-turned-essays originally given in Buenos Aires in 1977, Borges does not discuss the phenomenon of déjà vu. He does, however, speak at great length about nightmares and dreams, which he describes as “a kind of modest [...]

The So-Called Other Europe: Best European Fiction 2010 edited by Aleksandar Hemon

Best European Fiction 2010 edited by Aleksandar Hemon, preface by Zadie Smith. Dalkey Archive Press.448 pp, $15.95. “The great pest of speech is frequency of translation,” Samuel Johnson once wrote, in the preface to his iconic Dictionary of the English Language: No book was ever turned from one language into another without imparting something of its native [...]

Field Guides to Elsewhere: How We Read Languages We Don’t Read

“There are, of course, newspapers to keep responsible Americans up to date when trouble looms, and public television or even the History Channel to inform us about the occasional historic battle or archaeological discovery or civil war. What else do we need?” Claudia Roth Pierpont frames her essay on the contemporary Arabic novel, published in [...]