This year's Society of Authors Translation Prizes honor literary translation into English from Japanese, Dutch, Swedish, French, Spanish, Arabic, and German.
Rrefractive Africa by Will Alexander; The Vulture by Gerard Woodward; Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke; Litanies by Naush Sabah; and Pilgrim Bell by Kaveh Akbar
Lionel Shriver Warns Readers Not to Meet Their Favorite Authors
Credit.Rebecca Clarke
May 27, 2021
“The warts-and-all version is almost always a disappointment, and they risk a retroactive taint,” says the novelist, whose forthcoming book is “Should We Stay or Should We Go.”
What books are on your night stand?
Two books to prime for my next novel: Eric Hoffer’s “The True Believer” and Charles Mackay’s “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.” One exercise in reverse research writing the novel first and then doing the homework: Katie Engelhart’s “The Inevitable,” about end-of-life suicide. Finally, mercifully, fiction: Ewan Morrison’s “How to Survive Everything,” which sounds like an antidote to the Engelhart.
ACCORDING to critic and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva, abjection involves either a confrontation with our sense of physical being or a separation between the self and a rejected “other.” Objects of revulsion can be tangible, such as faeces and bodily fluids, but some forms of dread are abstract and ambiguous.
The New Abject collection of horror stories draws on the broad nature of Kristeva’s definition, which has inspired a loosely related set of tales that deal with the things that make us shudder and retch.
There are science-fictional dystopias, traditional hauntings, tales of body horror, social realism and surreal satire. And, as is customary for Comma Press, there is a blend of new talent and established storytellers.