Jennifer Howard

As I write in my latest feature for the Chronicle (UPDATE: the link is now free), translation is “having a moment, or a series of moments.” It was the presidential theme of the Modern Language Association’s most recent convention. Two university-affiliated publishing ventures, Dalkey Archive at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Open Letter Books at the University of Rochester, have been working overtime to get more translated literature into the hands of American readers. One of Dalkey’s recent titles, Best European Fiction 2010, edited by Aleksandar Hemon, has gotten some nice mainstream attention. The WSJ wrote about the… Read more...

Happy New Year, everyone. Like a lot of people I know, I was not sorry to see the back of 2009, a year in which some very unpleasant things—personal, financial, global—occurred. There were good moments, too, which I try to remember to be grateful for—catastrophes narrowly avoided, for instance, and some fiction published. Even though a new year is supposed to be a clean slate, a fresh start, there’s always some lingering business from the old year to wrap up. I finished the year, as I have for the last 5 years, at the Modern Language Association’s annual conference. The… Read more...