Our late August weekend reading suggestions continue to be brief as we’ve spent our mental energy willing Hurricane Bill out into the ocean, so here are a few tidbits that you might enjoy:

Listening: Rare interview with Nobel Laureate J.M.G Le Clézio at the BBC World Service

Watching: A decidedly weird claymation version of an odd interview with the iconoclastic Catalan writer Felipe Alfau by Ilan Stavans. The original conversation was from 1993 (Alfau died in ‘99), but you can read the text at the Dalkey Archive Website

If you insist on reading something other than that Danielle Steele novel tucked in your summer bag, I’ll at least point you to some commentary on an article by Marc Greif, which has nothing to do with lit-in-translation, but looks quite interesting. His piece, “The Death of the Novel” and Its Afterlives: Toward a History of the “Big, Ambitious Novel” is (behind a pay-wall) at boundary 2 and well commented on the academic blog, The Valve