(This was originally conceived of as a post for Three Percent to contextualize this interview with Jordan Stump, but I believe it makes more sense to appear here, on my personal site instead of the one for Open Letter/University of Rochester. …

All below quotes are from The End of the World Might Not Have Taken Place by Patrik Ouredník, translated from the Czech by Alexander Hertich (Dalkey Archive Press) THE FUTURE OF THE WORLD The future isn’t what it used to be. …

Half of this post is inspired by comments Sam Miller made about this article he wrote about the mystery surrounding Don Mattingly’s birthdate and his Topps 1987 baseball card. I’m not sure if these are immutable truths per se, but if you talk to enough people in the book industry…

“We live in a world of randomness.” -William Poundstone, The Doomsday Calculation It probably goes without saying, but publishing international literature is a precarious business in the best of times. On average, sales for translated works of fiction tend to be about one-third of the average sales for a mid-list…

Following the [Chernobyl] accident, physicists calculated that there was a ten percent risk that a nuclear explosion on an unimaginable scale would take pace within a fortnight. Such an explosion [. . .] …

. . . poor translations, he asserted, were the worst crimes an academic or a writer could commit, and a translator shouldn’t be allowed to call themselves a translator until their translation had been read by hundreds of scholars and for hundreds of years, so that, in short, a translator…

One of the most entertaining parts of my past three weeks of travel was the discovery that Norwegians refer to first-time authors as “debutants.” Which, OK, at first, is weird. The first time someone said it aloud, “she’s a debutant author,” I too had the urge to correct them. But…