California Literary Review

Literary spring for Soviet-born writers in America: With her new collection of short stories, “Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love,” Lara Vapnyar, 37, is one of a growing group of Soviet-born immigrants to emerge as popular writers in the United States. [Yahoo]

Turkish Novelist Denounces Government at Book Fair: Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist and Nobel Prize laureate, forcefully denounced the Turkish government for its treatment of writers, speaking at the opening ceremony of the Frankfurt Book Fair on Tuesday evening as the president of Turkey sat listening. [NYT]

James Bond: the genius of Ian Fleming’s literary creation: Starting off with Casino Royale in 1953, Fleming, a former commander in naval intelligence, gave a fresh injection of authenticity to the spy genre, while at the same time shrewdly upping the sex and violence quotient. [Telegraph]

Bringing a Trove of Medieval Manuscripts Online for the Ages: For centuries scholars from around the world have flocked to the Stiftsbibliothek — literally, the abbey library — in this quaint town nestled in the rolling hills of eastern Switzerland, to pore over its vast collection of manuscripts, many written and illustrated before the year 1000. [NYT]

Can’t we leave Hughes and Plath alone?: The news that the British Library has bought an extensive archive of Ted Hughes’s s letters, drafts, and diaries, was heralded by curators this week as “critical to the study of 20th century poetry”. If only that was the case. It seems obvious that the trawling of these letters for new morsels of private information, and the fresh batch of articles on Hughes’s life they’ll no doubt spawn, will have little, if anything, to do with poetry, and everything to do with gossip. [Guardian]

Translation Is Foreign to U.S. Publishers: Although there are exceptions among the big publishing houses, the editors from the United States are generally more likely to bid on other hyped American or British titles than to look for new literature in the international halls. [NYT]