Granta announces its picks for “best young Spanish-language novelists.” I’m a big fan of Alejandro Zambra, whose The Private Lives of Trees I think of as a less abstract, more intimate counterpart to Robbe-Grillet’s mesmerizing Jealousy.
Jim Shepard, author of Love and Hydrogen and Project X, guest-edited the fall issue of Ploughshares. (Via.)
“Said felt he had to transform every situation he entered”; any less “smacked of victimage.” 3 Quarks Daily excerpts my former professor H. Aram Veeser’s new biography of Edward Said.
A professor emails her old MFA students in South Carolina to tell them how intellectually superior the new ones at Columbia are. I dunno. Columbia has graduated many outstanding writers but also, one professor contends, some demonstrably terrible ones.