A Beginner's Guide to Canadian Literature

The Millions can start you off, here.

Think You Know World Literature?

Take this quiz and find out!

Spreading Literature Through Africa...

...via cell phone.

From a piece in the Christian Science Monitor...

As e-readers boom in popularity in the West, African publishers are stretching their reach with the help of a device millions already have in their pockets: their cellphones. 

"You can give people instant access to work now," says Angela Wachuka, executive director of Kenya's Kwani Trust, which publishes the popular Kwani? literary journal. "Before, you had to rely on delivery or people coming to find you."

Mobile internet now accounts for well over half of all web traffic in some African countries, and it is expected to grow 25-fold on the continent in the next four years, according to the Groupe Speciale Mobile Association, an industry organization.

Brazillian Literature's Plans to Go Global

This, according to Language Magazine.

From the story...

The Brazilian government is anteing up over US$35 million to fund a program over the next eight years that aims to inject Brazilian literature into international markets by funding translations into other languages, grants to publishers outside of Brazil to promote Brazilian publications in translation and in other Lusophone countries, and travel grants to send Brazilian authors on world publicity tours. Meanwhile, Brazilian publishers, authors and translators are preparing for the 2013 Frankfurt Book Fair, where Brazil will be the Guest of Honor. International companies are also looking to Brazil as an untapped digital publishing market.

Last month’s announcement that e-commerce leviathan, Amazon, closed deals with some of Brazil’s largest publishers, including Globo, Objetivo, and most recently Companhia das Letras is more evidence that Brazil’s culture industry is bleeding into the rest of the world. With the new Brazilian Kindle Store, readers everywhere have access Brazilian literature in a digital format.

Happy Birthday, Norton Anthology

Fifty years ago this fall, undergraduates were assigned their first Norton Anthology, often the only required text for a college freshman’s survey of English literature. 

The editors discuss its importance for the New York Times.

From the piece...

The Norton Anthology plays a crucial role in a humanities curriculum that is said to be under great pressure. Have you noticed the effects of this pressure?

Greenblatt: Of course we have noticed. The issue is not so much the anthology, but rather the fate of the whole enterprise of studying what Matthew Arnold called the best which has been thought and said in the world. For generations that enterprise occupied a key place in college and university education everywhere, but there are signs that it is in trouble. Humanities departments are fretting about a decline in majors, and those students who do major in literature, art, philosophy and history often clamor only for contemporary topics.

Has the Norton Anthology then lost its relevance?

Greenblatt: Not at all. The Norton Anthology was based on the idea that it actually matters to plunge into a comic masterpiece written in the 1300s or to weep at a tragedy performed in the 1700s. What would it mean for a culture to give up on its past? It is vitally important to remind people that the humanities carry the experience, the life-forms of those who came before us, into the present and into the future. Through reading literature we can make ghosts speak to us, and we can speak back to them. Besides — as many studies have shown — cultural knowledge turns out to be good for your career.

Why Read Italian Literature?

That's the question posed recently by the Oxford University Press blog.

From the piece...

But why isn’t Italian literature read more widely? Is there a continuing English mistrust of ‘abroad’? Or should we be citing linguistic incompetence? Neither is to be underestimated. Or, are we to go on the attack and say that Italy’s not produced much that’s exciting or innovative in intellectual or literary terms for a few hundred years? This is about as convincing, when you look into it, as saying that Italians aren’t good soldiers.

One starting point is the fact that classic Italian literature (Dante included) isn’t much read by Italians either, unless they have to, though they are often grandly patriotic about their great authors in a way English literature enthusiasts rarely are. The reason for both the grandeur and the non-reading is that Italian literature is written in a language that most Italians have never spoken (literary Tuscan) and prefers to operate at higher points on the rhetorical scale than is normal in ordinary language. So abstraction and generalisation win out over concreteness and particularity, the present is defined by reference to what predecessors have done, and again and again the Latin classics are perceptible just below the surface.

The Best Canadian Chinese-British Japanese Author You've Never Heard Of

Her name is Winnifred Eaton.

From a brief showcase of her books on AbeBooks...

Winnifred Eaton (1875-1954) was a Canadian author, who published her books under a Japanese pen-name, despite her British and Chinese heritage. She was born and raised in Montreal, Quebec, where she was first published at age 14, then moved to the United States, where she adopted the pseudonym Onoto Watanna and began writing under the guise of being a Japanese-American. Her books were largely met with success, and she published everything from novels to cookbooks to romance short stories, from 1899 until 1925.

Joycean Joy - James Joyce Manuscripts Now Online

The National Library of Ireland has put its collection of James Joyce manuscripts online, free of charge. It’s an excellent resource, but appears daunting at first – so where should the reader start?

From a story in the Irish Times...

The library’s website currently offers a brief “summary”, stressing the manuscripts’ importance, but this alone does not get a reader very far. There is also a very fine bibliographic introduction and description of the documents by assistant keeper Peter Kenny; once more, however, it is more of an introduction to the form of the manuscripts than to their content.

Access to the Joyce manuscripts is discreetly hidden on the National Library’s home page ( nli.ie) behind the rubric “more service enhancements”, under the News category. (Even allowing for the special circumstances, a bit more of a fanfare is in order.) Having found this and done a few more mandatory clicks, a reader will espy “The Joyce Papers 2002, c.1903-1928”. (This confusing title means that they were acquired in 2002 but themselves are dated between 1903 and 1928.) Having clicked on this, the reader will be confronted by a daunting array of numbers listing different manuscripts, each one of which can be clicked on. The detailed “Collection List” provided by Kenny as the first item on this series is helpful at this point. It makes it clear that the manuscripts fall under three main categories: early notes, Ulysses notes and drafts, and Finnegans Wake material.

Taliban Poetry to Be Published

An anthology of Taliban poetry will be published soon for English speakers.

From an article on the Huffington Post...

Many of the works in "Poetry of the Taliban" center on the movement's campaign to expel foreign forces from their territory, with angry battle anthems or mournful dirges devoted to civilian casualties. But others touch on themes of religious devotion, nostalgia, or even love.

Alex Strick van Linschoten, one of the anthology's coeditors, said he had collected the 240-odd poems off the Internet and in the field – not for novelty's sake, "but as a way of understanding who the Taliban are."

"This is one of the big problems of the conflict, which is one of making decisions without properly understanding the circumstances of the people around which these decisions are being made."

Although the Taliban's Web presence is closely monitored, few people showed much interest in the group's poetry. Strick van Linschoten suggested that was a mistake.

"The only way you're going to understand who the Taliban are is reading and understanding what they have to say," he said.

The International Legacy of Homer

He's still going strong and he's been dead for a little while now.

From an article in the London Review of Books...

At the beginning of January, in the bookshop of Terminal 2 at San Francisco airport, I looked for a translation of the Iliad – not that I really expected to find one. But there were ten: one succinct W.H.D. Rouse prose translation and one Robert Graves, in prose and song, both in paperback; two blank verse Robert Fagles in solid covers; one rhythmic Richmond Lattimore with a lengthy new introduction;[*] and three hardback copies of the new Stephen Mitchell translation, with refulgent golden shields on the cover and several endorsements on the back, of which the most arresting is by Jaron Lanier, author of You Are Not a Gadget: ‘The poetry rocks and has a macho cast to it, like rap music.’

There was also one translation of the Odyssey, by Fagles again. It was ever thus: for all its well-remembered adventures and faster pace, the Odyssey has always been outsold – out of 590 Homer papyrus fragments recovered in Egypt at the last count, 454 preserve bits of the Iliad. The ready explanation – that ancient schoolmasters preferred the Iliad because the other Homer is just too much fun – is no doubt true but doesn’t explain why the Iliad has been preferred outside the schoolroom as well, from antiquity and the Byzantine millennium to the Terminal 2 bookshop.

Why are our contemporaries so keen on buying and presumably reading the Iliad’s Iron Age reminiscence of Bronze Age combat? Publishers certainly view it as a paying proposition: at least twenty new English-language translations have been published since 1950, not counting ones from private presses.

110-Year-Old Sudan Bookshop Struggles On

Perhaps the oldest bookshop in Sudan, maybe in all of Africa, has seen his business virtually stop.

From a piece in Africasia...

It's as if the dust-caked volumes have been sitting on the shelves of Sudan Bookshop for the past half century since some of them were published. Three weeks might pass without a single book being sold, said the shop's general manager, El Tayeb Mohammed Abdel Rahman, who has been associated with the business for decades.

But shutting the doors is not really an option for the 110-year-old store which Abdel Rahman believes is the oldest in Sudan, "and maybe in Africa."

"It is a famous place," he said, recounting how people tell him: "Please do your best not to close this shop."

Tucked away on a garbage-strewn side street in downtown Khartoum, the business reflected a "book culture" which developed under British and Egypt rule and in the post-independence years after 1956, said historian Abdullah Ali Ibrahim.

"So it is a very sad thing" to see the store decline along with the role of books in Sudanese society, Ibrahim said.

Vietnamese Kids Seek Out Banned Books

The government can ban all the books they want. The young people of Vietnam will read them anyway.

From an article in the Washington Post...

“The more the government tries to ban something, the more young people try to find out why,” the 20-year-old said in the capital, Hanoi.

Vietnam’s graying Communist Party is all about control: It censors all media, squashes protests and imprisons those who dare to speak out against its one-party system. But today, as iPhone shops rub shoulders with Buddhist pagodas, cultural authorities are finding it increasingly difficult to promote their unified sense of Vietnamese culture and identity — especially among the country’s youth.

“This is a key turning point for the younger generation,” said Thaveeporn Vasavakul, a Southeast Asia scholar who consults on public sector reform in Vietnam.

“Despite one-party rule you see pluralism in the cultural and political thinking. And the younger generation is standing there, looking around, and seeing a lot of options to choose from.”

Visions of the Arabian Nights

What's the history of the Western interpretation of the Arabian Nights?

From a piece in the Times Literary Supplement...

Nowhere is the fascination felt in Western culture for the East more evident than in its avid consumption of The Arabian Nights. Ever since Antoine Galland issued the first translation in French in the early eighteenth century, the stories have become a permanent part of the Western literary and visual landscape, spawning numerous adaptations, tributes and imitations. Princess Scheherazade, Aladdin, Sinbad the sailor and Ali Baba have acquired the status of cultural icons; genies, flying carpets and magic lamps, once curiosities of medieval Arab and Persian mythology, are now the stock-in-trade of modern occidental fantasy. There have been musical interpretations of the tales by Rimsky-Korsakov and Weber; cartoon versions by Disney, and lavish Hollywood incarnations. The influence of the Nights extends from the poetry of Goethe to Wordsworth to Rilke, to modern fiction from Fielding through Proust to Borges. In fact, so much of European and American literature has been influenced by the tales that it would be far easier, as Robert Irwin suggests in his The Arabian Nights: A companion (1994), simply to list the handful of writers who were not influenced by them.

Irwin returns to the theme in this sumptuous history of the illustrated Western editions of The Arabian Nights. Visions of the Jinn is part bibliographical exposition, part dazzling magic lantern show: its 164 colour-saturated facsimiles, photographs and black-and-white images and their accompanying analysis offer a visually stunning and sensitive account of the European response to this important text.

6 Fresh Voices in Canadian Fiction

The list, care of the CBC.

Literature After the Revolt

In an interview with Spiegel Online, Moroccan-born author and poet Ben Taher Jelloun talks about the Arab Spring and the burgeoning creativity in post-dictatorship countries. He also describes the challenge of writing from the perspective of Libya's former leader Moammar Gadhafi.

From the piece...

SPIEGEL ONLINE: How has the revolt reflected in the literary scene?

Jelloun: I think there will be a creative boom. The fact that people are finally free means that we are seeing a surge in creativity of all sorts.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: What was the situation for writers during the dictatorships?

Jelloun: There was a lot of state censorship but there was also the powerful force of auto-censorship. Even those who lived in exile were very, very cautious. Exiled writers from Iraq and Syria, for example, could not talk or write freely out of fear for the safety of family members still in their home countries. For instance, Lebanese writers who criticized Syria and its role in Lebanon have received death threats. Samir Kassir, a Lebanese writer who published articles speaking out against the Syrian dictatorship, was assassinated in June 2005. It is widely thought that the Syrians killed him.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Will there now be a wave of writers in exile returning to their countries?

Jelloun: Yes, that is happening already, for example, in Egypt. This trend is not restricted to intellectuals. We are also seeing a wave of entrepreneurs and high-level businesspeople returning to their native countries because they see new opportunities there. There is reason to be hopeful, but our hopes may be disappointed in the long run.

International Children's Digital Library

Touting itself as a digital library from the world's children, ICDL exists, according to their mission statement, to support the world's children in becoming effective members of the global community - who exhibit tolerance and respect for diverse cultures, languages and ideas -- by making the best in children's literature available online free of charge. The Foundation pursues its vision by building a digital library of outstanding children's books from around the world and supporting communities of children and adults in exploring and using this literature through innovative technology designed in close partnership with children for children.

Enjoy!

50 Great Hispanic Novels Every Student Should Read

The list, care of Online College Courses.

New Scottish Literature

What's the best writing coming from the land of Scots? The Guardian finds out.

Cultural Heart Beats Again in Baghdad

Bookselling is becoming brisk business again in Baghdad.

From a piece on MSNBC...

Reading books, buying books and discussing books are the defining pleasures of being a Baghdad intellectual, and for generations the life of the mind has orbited around this lane, the booksellers' market of the Iraqi capital.

Four years ago, in a blow felt deeply by Iraq's intelligentsia, a car bomb killed 26 people here. Now, the street is again open, guarded and seemingly safe, and jammed every Friday with students, professors and professionals.

The street begins, overlooking the Tigris, at a statue of Mutanabi, a 10th century poet and one of the towering figures of Arabic literature. It runs past ransacked Ottoman-era government buildings into the heart of Baghdad's old town.

"Mutanabi Street is the cultural catharsis point for Iraqis," says al-Radi. "Mutanabi is a place where intellectuals of Iraq come, not just to buy books but to see the new place, to see the statue of Mutanabi, to meet friends on a Friday."

The book business, which dwindled to nothing at the height of Iraq's sectarian violence from 2006-07, is now booming like never before, he says.

The Very Expensive Islamic Manuscript Page

It's 500-years-old and worth $5 million. Reuters has more, here.