News & Features » February 2013 » Weekly Roundup for 2/1/13

Weekly Roundup for 2/1/13

Every Friday, the Akashic team highlights industry news, reviews, and features from around the web. This week’s roundup comes to you from Akashic Publicist Kate Bogden and Production Manager Aaron Petrovich.

For our first weekly roundup, we bring you less “industry news” and more thoughtful articles and essays—informative, reflective, and entertaining—that caught our attention.

Around the Web

• Burton Pike, professor emeritus of comparative literature and Germanic languages and literature at CUNY Graduate Center, on “Cultural Homogeneity and the Future of Literary Translation,” brought to you by Publishing Perspectives.
• Jason Diamond, founder of Vol. 1 Brooklyn, rediscovers Edith Wharton (and strays above 14th Street) in the Paris Review.
• As Kate prepares to move for the first time in over five years, she was curious to read this advice by Claire Kelley, director of library & academic marketing at Melville House, on “Pruning a Personal Library.”
• Enough prose! Brad Leithauser at the New Yorker on memorizing poetry.
• And just for fun: NPR Books brings us ‘Pride And Prejudice’ Turns 200: A Cartoon Celebration; and The Onion interviews a disenchanted copy of the The Scarlet Letter.

Around the Office

• It’s Royalty Week at Akashic, a twice-a-year period in which our publisher Johnny Temple literally sprints the ten feet between his desk and the filing cabinets about 200 times a day, occasionally pausing long enough to breathe, drink coffee, exclaim incoherently, spasm involuntarily, and ask out of context questions of all of us.
• Senior Editor Ibrahim Ahmad, who’s been leading the charge to oversee the construction of our website, routinely forgot to breathe but made many guttural exclamations, some of which bore syntactical expressions not reproducible here. The only time he got out of the office was to have his car fixed. Damn.
• Managing Editor Johanna Ingalls took a “film crew” (Alexis from GVSB) to Melvin Van Peebles’s apartment to record Melvin’s welcome video. We stayed in the office answering phones, composing e-mails, and fulfilling metadata forms.
• Kate walked across the Old American Can Factory courtyard to letterpress posters for a party Ugly Duckly Presse’s literary magazine is hosting on February 16 in Queens (Kate is part of UDP’s all-volunteer editorial collective). Come to the party!
• We joined 100 people at Ian F. Svenonius’s reading at Word in Greenpoint.
• Our invaluable interns shipped out 200 promotional copies and somehow managed to maintain a greater sense of calm than the rest of us.
• Every Boy Should Have a Man by Preston L. Allen got a great review in Kirkus, which called it a “. . . bizarre but exquisitely composed fable that uses transhumanism as the prism to reflect on the nature of humanity.” They’re not kidding.
• A big shout out from all of us to Bangbay Siboliban, our indefatigable website developer, for shepherding Akashic Books into the twenty-first century. While 1998 was a good year, we’re happy to finally join the rest of you in the modern-day cybersphere.

Posted: Feb 1, 2013

Category: Weekly Roundup | Tags: Alexis Fleisig, Brad Leithauser, Burton Pike, Claire Kelley, Edith Wharton, Every Boy Should Have a Man, Girls Against Boys, Ian F. Svenonius, Ibrahim Ahmad, Jason Diamond, Johanna Ingalls, Kate Bogden, Melville House, Melvin Van Peebles, New Yorker, Paris Review, Preston L. Allen, Pride and Prejudice, Royalty Week, The Scarlet Letter, Ugly Duckling Presse, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Weekly Roundup, Word Bookstore