“Many 19th-century newspapers are comprised primarily of content from other newspapers,” he said. “They were more aggregators than producers of original content. And often they were created by very small staffs, and scholars such as Ellen Gruber Garvey have shown that this aggregation is what allowed newspapers to spread as rapidly as they did in the 19th century, because you didn’t have to produce the whole thing.”

Breaking the Bulgarian structure out of the sentences and turning it into an equally strong and evocative phrase in English is a lot like doing 50 pushups. It’s painful and exalting. And one day, you get better. But sometimes you cry and swear, becoming haunted by Nabokov’s seminal, merciless essay, “The Art of Translation.”

“Conventional public discourse is boring, too familiar and brittle: the spray-on-tan blather of pundits on CNN, the coo of commerce, the drained, template-like rhetoric of political speech. That’s where poetry, that oft-forgotten form, comes in, a specific kind of verse called “civic poetry.” Civic poetry is public poetry. It is political poetry. It is about the hard stuff of life: money, crime, gender, corporate excess, racial injustice.”

“I’m tired of cultural pompousness passing as a form of intelligence and moral superiority, whether we’re talking about television, book, movie or music preferences. I record “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” while my boyfriend records “Nova”—does that make him a better person? Is that really what we want to pass down to the next generation—a way of one-upping ourselves over something that should be entertaining?”

“I don’t fear the long novel as much as pine for good editors. A book can be any length, if the words earn their keep on the page. I rarely see the point in huge chunks of prose that don’t serve the story: writing has to be mesmerisingly good before that doesn’t feel self-indulgent to me. I also worry that we might be overlooking short novels.”

“The Hungarian author, whose sentences roll out over paragraphs in what his translator George Szirtes has called a ‘slow lava flow of narrative, a vast black river of type’, has won the Man Booker International prize for his ‘achievement in fiction on the world stage’.”

“Maybe it was ever thus? ‘I don’t think the long novel ever went away,’ says Jennifer Brehl, who edited Neal Stephenson’s forthcoming 880-page sci-fi story Seveneves. … But the notable thing about these books isn’t that their heft is unprecedented; it’s that all the forces Hallberg alluded to in 2010″ – basically, culture-wide gadget-induced ADD – “are exponentially stronger today.”