Welcome to this week’s Free Book Friday, wherein we give you the best titles in indie publishing for the low low price of nothing. Congrats to last week’s winner Denae for getting a free copy of boring boring boring boring boring boring boring by Zach Plague.

This week, we are giving away a copy of Scorch Atlas by Blake Butler, a novel of 14 interlocking stories set in ruined American locales where birds speak gibberish, the sky rains gravel, and millions starve, disappear or grow coats of mold. In ‘The Disappeared,’ a father is arrested for missing free throws, leaving his son to search alone for his lost mother. In ‘The Ruined Child,’ a boy swells to fill his parents’ ransacked attic. Rendered in a variety of narrative forms, from a psychedelic fable to a skewed insurance claim questionnaire, Blake Butler’s full-length fiction debut paints a gorgeously grotesque version of America, bringing to mind both Kelly Link and William Gass, yet turned with Butler’s own eye for the apocalyptic and bizarre. Read an excerpt here.

This week’s Free Book Friday is sponsored by Featherproof Books. Read more »

Above: fictional characters used as real-life psychiatric case studies. While we’re on the subject, here are some letters written to fictional characters, from real people.

Literary perfume, via.

Librarians do Gaga. In related news, librarians are awesome.

Why PANK thinks you’re not ready to be a writer.

Books not selling well in paper form? Then sell them on vinyl.

Bookshelf porn. (SFW)

And just for kicks, something that is not related to anything literary at all but transcends borders in its awesomeness: a single-subject blog dedicated to photos of a velociraptor stalking Michael Buble. You’re welcome.

Welcome to this week’s Free Book Friday, wherein we give you the best titles in indie publishing for the low low price of nothing. Congrats to last week’s winner Grahame Turner for getting a free copy of AM/PM by Amelia Gray.

This week, we are giving away a copy of boring boring boring boring boring boring boring, written and designed by Zach Plague. When the mysterious gray book that drives their twisted relationship goes missing, Ollister and Adelaide lose their post-modern marbles. He plots revenge against art patriarch The Platypus, while she obsesses over their anti-love affair. Meanwhile, the art school set experiments with bad drugs, bad sex, and bad ideas. But none of these desperate young minds has counted on the intrusion of a punk named Punk and his potent sex drug. This wild slew of characters get caught up in the gravitational pull of The Platypus’ giant art ball, where a confused art terrorism cell threatens a ludicrous and hilarious implosion. Zach Plague has written and designed a hybrid typo/graphic novel which skewers the art world, and those boring enough to fall into its traps. Check out Part 1 in a free online version here.

This week’s Free Book Friday is sponsored by Featherproof Books. Read more »

Last night, I saw Edith Grossman, writer, translator, and critic, speak in conversation with Mary Ann Caws. The talk was fascinating–it was on the occasion of Grossman’s recent book “Why Translation Matters,” a collection of essays on the practice of literary translation. (Grossman has translated “Don Quixote,” many of Gabriel García Márquez’s works, and much more.)

The most interesting conversation of the evening came from a question posed by Kamy Wicoff, author and founder of the website SheWrites.

Wicoff talked about being stumped at how works have many lives–many iterations–in translation, while the original work in the original language doesn’t get revisited or updated for contemporary readers in that original language. Jane Austen will never be translated into contemporary English while there is probably a new Spanish edition every generation.

I think Wicoff has a great point. And one that I can’t quite wrap my head around.

I think it’s awful strange that non-English readers may have a better sense of Shakespeare than I do. They read translated versions that may be written in a contemporary version of their language, one that doesn’t sound foreign to them. I, on the other hand, read Shakespeare in Early Modern English, which means that as a high schooler, it was like reading a foreign language. Perhaps international readers can have a greater appreciation of Shakespeare than I can.

What does it mean that literary works (and plays, and poems, and memoirs for that matter) are resuscitated and revised and revisited only in translation while they only have one form, one life, in their original language? Should we be updating Old English texts into Modern English?