blogis librorum. A blog about books. Rare books.

The past few years have been big for small presses. The two most recent Man Booker Award-winning novels were published by the same small press in England: London’s Oneworld Publications put out both Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014) and the British edition of Paul Beatty’s The Sellout (2015). Meanwhile, in the United States, Coffee House Press in Minneapolis put out the first American edition of Eimear McBride’s acclaimed debut tour-de-force, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (2013) which won the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. Anyone who claims that we are entering a golden era of small press publishing certainly has a point; however, it remains the case that small presses have often been bastions of the literary avant-garde, championing works that would go on to become classics in the face of disinterest or adversity. A prime example of this phenomenon is James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922).

Since when has Detroit been an important setting for works of fiction? Sure, if you look to cinema, you might be able to name a number of movies set in Detroit that emphasize characteristics of the city, such as Alex Proyas’s The Crow (1994) or Curtis Hanson’s 8 Mile (2002). But in all honesty, Detroit really wasn’t seen by most readers as a productive literary space until Jeffrey Eugenides depicted the city in new and interesting ways for readers. Detroit, it turns out, is more than just Motown when it comes to artistic production. In both The Virgin Suicides (1993) and Middlesex (2002), Eugenides portrays sides of Detroit that are at once full of nostalgia while also being sites of sadness and great change.

After World War II ended in 1945, the de facto racism that had plagued Black South Africans for decades became institutionalized when the National Party came to power in 1948. The all-white Afrikaner government instituted the system of apartheid, which produced laws that required racial segregation and imposed severe penalties for those who opposed the regime. Through the 1960s, Black South Africans were forced into segregated townships outside the major cities of South Africa, such as Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Durban. For fiction writers and authors of creative nonfiction who sought to speak out against the policies of apartheid, publication possibilities became very limited. In many instances, writers were severely censored, and numerous authors saw their work banned in their home country of South Africa. Yet works of both nonfiction and fiction survive to help depict for us the early years of apartheid and the ways in which the government perpetrated irreparable harms upon many citizens of South Africa.

Who is Naguib Mahfouz, and why should you read his works of fiction? Mahfouz was born in Cairo, Egypt in 1911, and he wrote ten novels within a span of just over a decade. However, the reason that most of us know Mahfouz’s work has to do with a series of works he wrote in the late 1950s which ultimately led to him winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1988. In 1957, the “Cairo Trilogy” appeared, which included three texts: Between-the-Palaces, Palace of Longing, and Sugarhouse. According to the Nobel Prize committee, these narratives “made him famous throughout the Arab world as a depictor of traditional urban life.” In the years that followed, Mahfouz’s writing became more political, critiquing systems of governance in Egypt and intimating a deep-rooted need for freedom of expression. By the time he was awarded the Nobel Prize, he had written thirty novels and over one hundred short stories. When we think about Mahfouz today, what should we remember?

Did you know that the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has a “Creative Cities Network,” and did you know that only one city in the United States has been honored as a “City of Literature”? In short, the UNESCO Creative Cities Network has seven different fields through which it honors sites and cities across the globe, including for crafts and folk art, design, film, gastronomy, literature, music, and media arts. The only place in the United States that has been recognized for its literary significance is Iowa City, IA, home to the University of Iowa and the famed Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Want to know more about Iowa City’s literary status? Keep reading, and we’ll discuss the reasons that this place was selected as the sole UNESCO City of Literature in the states. 

In today's technological age, if you have an author you enjoy, learning more about him or her is as easy as doing a quick internet search. This search often leads to social media sites where fans can gain insider knowledge of their favorite authors and books. Beyond this direct access, the same simple search can yield dozens of articles and reviews as well as interviews given by the author in text, podcast, and even video form. Today, authors are more accessible than ever, and readers are easily able to satisfy their curiosity about the face and voice behind their favorite books. But what about writers and famous figures who lived before such forms of technology?

What kinds of literary journals have been most popular in New Zealand in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? This isn’t a question that most American readers have an answer to, given that many New Zealand literary journals simply are not readily available in the United States (or on the internet, for that matter). Yet New Zealand journals like Cave, Edge, and Landfall have been publishing scholarship, fiction, and poetry for decades, featuring works by famous New Zealand authors as well as award-winning poets and writers from other parts of the world. If you’re interested in learning more about these New Zealand journals, allow us to provide you with an introduction!

The 1900s was a golden era for literature. Hemmingway, Cummings, and Fitzgerald are just a few of the household names that might have found themselves socializing at the same bar on any given weekend (geographical inconvenience aside). It was a time of artistic exploration and social transitions that would change the course of history and produce works that would be well-loved for years to come. While many of these 20th century writers are easily recalled by anyone who has graced a middle-school English classroom, there are others who softly faded out of memory. Though their names may not be as popular, their works are no less brilliant. Two such writers are husband and wife Kathleen Thompson Norris and Charles Gilman Norris.

Robert Gottlieb, who famously edited the works of Joseph Heller, John Le Carré, John Cheever, and Toni Morrison (who was herself a literary editor before beginning her career as a novelist at age 39), said of editing books that the often-mysterious task "is simply the application of the common sense of any good reader." In the same Paris Review interview, he cautions against the "glorification of editors,” and says that "the editor's relationship to a book should be an invisible one."

Of the literature from all the Nordic countries, Finland may be the region that English-language readers tend to know the least about. To be sure, most readers in the U.S. have encountered (or at least have heard about) the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle series and Swedish novelist Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Even Icelandic Nobel Prize winner Halldór Laxness gained popularity here in the 1950s and 1960s, with first editions of his 1934 novel Independent People now highly collectible. And don’t get us started on the global fame of Danish fiction writers such as Hans Christian Andersen and Isak Dinesen. But what about writers and novels from Finland? We have a couple of recommendations to get you started.