The author of The Emigrants and Austerlitz was haunted by his country's, and especially his own family's, history of violence and genocide. - The Observer (UK)
Author Helen Hoang took her own life experiences and folded them into her novel The Kiss Quotient. "IÂ spent a lot of my life pretending to be something else because I wanted to fit in. I put so much work into trying to fit in." But a diagnosis - and writing a novel - freed her. - NPR
With a young independent press, two women in Minneapolis want to take portrayals of Muslims in children's literature to a new place - a place of normality. - Sahan Journal
And her worries about how neither profession seems to be doing much good in this world. "Wash your hands for 20 seconds as often as you like, but you’ll never get that damned spot out: your fingerprints are all over the Earth." - The Guardian (UK)
"I cannot expect to have a good death if my life did not accomplish certain specific things. And these things are not material." - Los Angeles Review of Books
"This was a question I also grappled with: could my creative prostitution involve high art, be the literary equivalent of Belle de Jour (1967), stylish and sexy, or would I have to roil in whorish filth, using cheap metaphors and knocked-off cliches?" - Aeon
The manuscript was unfinished but well underway when Emily died at age 30. The legend has been that Charlotte, envious and conservative, threw it in the fireplace. Scholar Emily Zarevich considers whether this could be true and what might have been in the lost work. - JSTOR Daily
Translations exist only in their own time. While literature is out of time, translations are always, in the hapless plod of linear time, out of joint. - The Walrus
When Jeff Lowenfels began writing for the Anchorage Daily News in 1976, he had not expected that one day one of his readers would grow okra there. (The pod is native to Africa.) - The New York Times Magazine
The 3,500-year-old artifact, covered with cuneiform writing from the "dream" section of The Epic of Gilgamesh, is part of the enormous collection of objects acquired by Hobby Lobby founder Steve Green that turn out to have been illegally looted. - Artnet
Such disputes reflect a growing recognition across the publishing industry that the prestige and attractiveness of working in and adjacent to creative and cultural sectors – and the passion of its workers – can also form the preconditions for low wages and insecure work. - The Guardian
Mohammed Rezuwan is himself one of the hundreds of thousands of Rohingya driven out of Myanmar by that country's military and mobs. He now travels around the refugee camps at Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, recording and translating his people's traditional stories. - PRX's The World