- Alison Flood reports for The Guardian on Roberto Saviano’s ballsy defense of his plagiarism and fabrication.
- Jake Rossen has a piece on mental_floss about how new techniques are rescuing lost texts.
- Scott diMarco shares his social experiment in banning a book on Gizmodo.
- Sloane Crosley defines a new disorder for writers on LitHub: Novel Dysmorphia.
- James Harbeck wrote a beautiful piece about untranslatable words. A small sample:
The idea of a purely accurate translation is like the idea of a truly authentic culinary experience from another culture. Say you want an authentic Thai curry. You go to a Thai restaurant. But they’re using Canadian-grown ingredients. So you go where they have imported Thai ingredients. But you’re still in a Canadian restaurant. So you go to Thailand. Ah. But you’re still… a Canadian in Thailand. You didn’t grow up eating Thai food. Look, imagine a person from another country (maybe Namibia or Vanuatu) eating fruitcake or roast turkey or tuna casserole for the first time. There is no way their experience of it is going to be like yours. You just have to accept that. Cultural experiences are not truly fully translatable. And language is a cultural experience. – James Harbeck, Sesquiotica
Also, because it’s the end of Banned Books Week, I wanted to share Grant Snider’s brilliant cartoon for the occasion:
