A smallish cluster of news before 2010 ends in flames.

The Book Bloc
Yes, yes. Don’t ask no more. “Book Bloc” is our coinage. To the best of our knowledge, we were the first ones to come up with the pun, on 24 November, a few hours after students clashed with the police in Rome carrying padded shields styled as books. That practice – which took us by surprise – is the real invention, not the name. Anyway, both the name and the practice extended like fire in a prairie. The Book Bloc showed up all over Italy, and – most notably – in Parliament Square, London, on “Day X 3″ of Demo 2010, 9 December 2010. Here’s an interesting meta-post entitled “A Book Bloc’s Genealogy”. (more…)

An interview with Wu Ming 1 is online at wordswithoutborders.com. Here’s an excerpt:

King’s style looks simple, but it is actually very difficult to translate. As an author, he’s very fond of puns, neologisms, idioms, local slang and so on. He plays with all the singularities of the English language, precisely the stuff that can’t be translated in any way! This is typical of, er, “monoglot” writers, by which I mean those writers who don’t care about what happens to their works when they’re translated into other languages.
There are basically two kinds of novelists: those who care about translations, like Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco, because they’re used to exploring foreign languages, and those who don’t care, like Elmore Leonard or Uncle Stevie, because they’re perfectly happy with inhabiting their native language, with no forays in other cultures and koines.
If you’re a careful, attentive reader, you can tell one kind of writer from the other simply by reading. There’s a prose that’s translation-conscious, and a prose that is not.

Read more

PDF, 13.7 mb

MOBI, 5.9 mb

ePUB, 4.7 mb
[Mind you, we used Calibre to convert from pdf to ePUB, and the result is CRAP. As we're just middle-age men of humanities, this is the most we can do at the moment. If you choose the latter format, you'll have to improve the layout yourself.]

Translated by Shaun Whiteside
Published by Verso Books
[They've got quite a cool website, by the way]

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