June 5th, 2013 § 0 comments § permalink
Huge congratulations to my friend and fellow French translator Alyson Waters for winning this year’s Florence Gould Prize from the French-American Foundation!
This year’s nominees were an incredibly strong group—I’m so glad to see my friend Jordan Stump among the nominees, and Laurent Binet’s HHhH, a novel Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud said was destined for great things (a member of the editorial committee at Grasset, he was among those who recommended it for publication).
June 4th, 2013 § 1 comment § permalink
The inaugural issue of ThunkBook will be featuring H.V. Chao’s story of raves in the shipbreaking yards, “The Scene” (also available online at theredline). What is ThunkBook? Well,
ThunkBook is a literary journal published out of Taiwan that has had its roots on this wild island since 2004 in the form of its mysterious cousin, Pressed, Taiwan’s English Literary Journal.
So what’s with the name, ‘ThunkBook‘? Well, apart from thunk’s Seussian roots, and hailing from the notorious ‘unk’ family of rhyme, whose dratted heritage of auditory cursedness include such gems as: sunk, funk, skunk, stunk, gunk, plunk, spunk, bunk, punk, junk . . . it, perhaps more pertinently, also happens to be the sound of an epiphany finding its mark deep down in your noggin’s abyss. And so, when thunk is married to something as monumentally sonorous as ‘book’, it creates in itself an entity as ineffably resonant as your thoughts on the matter. ThunkBook.
For those of you on hand in Taiwan to celebrate (who knows? the mysterious H.V. Chao may even make an appearance, for if ye know his momentum, then you cannot know his position), there’s a launch party this weekend featuring “readings, live music, drink specials, and top-drawer magnificence”–details below:
