A new year means new media! So let’s leave 2020 in the rearview and look ahead to this year’s round of books to read, films to watch, and other content to enjoy. With that in mind, we present January’s round of Staff Recommends: Lily Nilipour, Intern: For me, reading Andre Breton’s work always feels like living in a dream. Such is the space he and his co-author Philippe Soupault create in The Magnetic Fields, newly translated into English by Charlotte Mandell. People, sounds, and objects float murkily by, a bit languidly, but are then gone in a moment. Like the […]
Tag: Jonathan Franzen
ZYZZYVA Recommends February 2019: What to Read, Watch, & Listen to
by ZYZZYVA Staff
We are firmly entrenched in 2019 now and, as such, we thought we would tell you what ZYZZYVA recommends this month—a roundup of the works we’ve been reading, watching, and listening to: Katie O’Neill, Intern: This holiday season, one of the best gifts I received was Hannah Sullivan’s debut collection Three Poems. The winner of the 2018 T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, the collection is comprised of three long poems – “You, Very Young in New York,” “Repeat Until Time,” and “The Sandpit After Rain.” Quoting from and referencing Phillip Larkin, Claude Monet, and Joan Didion, among many others, the […]
Balancing Being Herself and Being True to the Author: Q&A with Silvia Pareschi
by Ilaria Varriale
In his novel Freedom, Jonathan Franzen has one of his characters make a pun that would make anyone groan. “Nor-fock-a-Virginia!” a character says in a fake Italian accent. When his German translator asked for clarification, Franzen explained: “Punchline of a pun about an Italian who won’t fuck virgins. The pun refers to the city of Norfolk, Virginia. Anything that works in German and is both dirty and refers to Italy or Italians would be fine with me.” If it was hard to come up with a solution in German, it was almost impossible in Italian: “It had to be something […]