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
Michael Barron
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...
