Michael Barron
The Past and Passed Over
Michael Barron
What makes a book a classic? Italo Calvino once suggested that the answer is ultimately a matter of personal choice. As he wrote in a 1986 essay for The New York Review of Books, “It is only by reading without bias that you might possibly come across the book that becomes your book” — one that you read and reread, always getting something from doing so. This is a nice...
Somewhere and Everywhere | Reading Literature in Translation
Angelo Hernandez Sias, Carey Baraka, Marta Figlerowicz, Michael Barron, Na Zhong, Siddhartha Deb, Yasmin Zaher, Zain Khalid
For too long, the American publishing industry has faced inward, bringing English-language writers to English-language readers, and sequestering everything outside the Anglosphere into a single, vague category of “world literature.” In 2007, only three percent of books put out in the U.S. were translations, and this sliver hardly offered a truly global tour: according to a study of translated titles published between 2008 and 2020, 45 percent were originally written...
