Sometimes it’s pleasant to post literary gossip and links to juicy articles about books. (Juicy by our unexciting standards.)

1.  Who is the  biggest publisher of literature in translation in the U.S.?  The New York Times reports,

It’s not Random House, and it’s not a specialized indie outfit like Europa Editions or New Directions. It’s Amazon.com. Last year, the company’s translation imprint, AmazonCrossing, brought out 44 new English translations from a diverse slate of literature, including Icelandic, Turkish and Korean. That’s more translated titles than any other American publisher, according to data from Three Percent, a literary translation blog at the University of Rochester.

2.  In The Guardian, Tessa Hadley writes about Margaret Drabble’s first novel, The Millstone.  She says, “For my money, it’s the seminal 60s feminist novel that Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook is always supposed to be.”

3.  In The Guardian, we also learned that Dorothy Richardson’s superb sequence of novels, Pilgrimage, is to be reissued by Oxford World Classics. 

Dorothy Richardson

4.  At the TLS blog, you can read Michael Caines’s article on rediscovering Brigid Brophy. Coincidentally, on my e-reader I have a copy of of Brophy’s The Finishing Touch, with an introduction by TLS editor Sir Peter Stothard.

5.  Karen E. Bender’s stunning collection of short stories,  Refund, is on the longlist for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story award.  (I blogged about this extraordinary book here.)

6.  Jo Walton has won the James Tiptree Award for her dazzling novel, My Real Children.  (I wrote about it here.)

7.  Wendy Pollard’s brilliant biography of Pamela Hansford Johnson, who is one of my favorite writers,  is a finalist for The People’s Book Prize. (You can vote here.) Wendy said in an email that it is “a vote for literary biography.” I interviewed Wendy here.

8. Penguin has reissued Shirley Jackson’s Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons.  Ruth Franklin in The New York Times Book Review describes them as “a collection of warm and funny magazine pieces chronicling the ups and downs of Shirley Jackson’s household.” Franklin also reports that  ten years after the publication of Life Among the Savages, “Betty Friedan accused Jackson of betraying her readers by contributing to the pernicious myth of the ‘happy housewife’ purveyed by women’s magazines of the era.”  Hm, I love Betty Friedan, but I also enjoyed Jackson’s funny memoirs.