E.M. Forster

While you were pondering your happy hour plans on Friday, the Associated Press reported that literary lion Philip Roth is hanging up the quill, having spilled the news in October to French publication Les inRocks.

“Némésis sera mon dernier livre,” said Roth of Nemesis, his latest and allegedly last novel. He added, and our French is a little rusty here, that, essentially, he's happy with what he's done, but he's tired of reading and writing fiction and doesn't think further works will significantly impact his legacy.

Friends and writers seem skeptical that he's actually finished. —Brian Howard

 

When the first issue of its new Chinese-language edition appears next month, the London-based literary journal Granta, a publication that has existed in English since the Victorian era, will have a presence in four of the five most widely spoken languages. But plans for the globalization of a leading quarterly that proudly calls itself “the magazine of new writing” don’t stop there.

“In five years I could see us with 15 or 17 foreign editions,” John Freeman, the editor of Granta, said in an interview in New York this summer.

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