News
Monday Memo
October 1, 2018
- Doorways, and doorways in Paris, and our managing editor Megan Cummins, who is studying French in her spare time. She recommends APS back issues with translated French literature: Marcel Broodthaers’ poetry in No. 26, Marie NDiaye’s memoir, “The Woman in Green” in No. 21, and Noémie Goudal’s art in No. 12. All are available in our online store, alongside gorgeous new totes in a limited edition green design. There's still time to go back to school with A Public Space Academy master classes and short courses this fall.
- The Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination 2019-2020 Fellowship, which offers $75,000 for a full academic year (September through May), an office at the Institute in Paris, and access to Columbia’s libraries and various research facilities in Paris and in Europe is open now to applications from scholars, writers, and creative artists from outside the United States. Applications for the American Academy in Rome's Rome Prize are open as well. Our own 2019 Fellowships are open to applications until October 15. APS contributing editor Martha Cooley's Luni Writing Workshop is happening in Italy next summer.
- This year's CLMP gala honors two visionary founding editors–– our own Brigid Hughes and John Freeman of Freeman's. Come raise a glass (and lend vital support) to independent publishing and magazines on November 13. In New York, John Freeman and contributors launch an issue on Power at McNally Jackson SoHo this Wednesday, October 3. Elsewhere in the world of readers fascinated by the unique possibilities of print, In Fiore interviews Leonard Koren on "the totemic quality of a book object" and his groundbreaking WET magazine.
- Subscribers, log in to read our archive feature on New Writing From Cairo: "During the past decade, a generation of young writers who are breaking lots of rules—of what writing in Arabic is supposed to look like, of what young Egyptians can express about the world around them and how they might do so, and of what a new cohort of men and women might say about life in a city layered with centuries, even millennia, of intertwined cultural forms—has marked a significant shift in contemporary Egyptian literature. Merit has been at the center of this scene, and its founder and publisher, Mohammed Hashem, its impresario. An unpretentious uncle figure, modest patron, cheerleader, and jovial fellow traveler to a loose circle of young renegade writers, Hashem—who himself was active in Kefaya—has been celebrated as a publisher for pushing the limits of what can be said and who will stand up for it in public." As CairoBookStop reports, "A visit to Merit can be a bit intimidating (or exhilarating, depending on your personality and luck)."
- Off Assignment editor Lenora Todaro met Stacy Mattingly at an event here at A Public Space (we presented an edition of the translation series Another Way to Say, focused on new writing from Bosnia and Herzegovina), and this piece is the result–– talking with poet Jamie McKendrick about translating Italian writer Giorgio Bassani's novels of Ferrara. Meanwhile, Bookselling Without Borders 2018 is a community-led Kickstarter campaign that aims to send American booksellers to international book fairs.