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Book bits: Tom Stoppard, Ben Parzybok, Sara Nelson and more

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Bookslut’s new issue is online; it includes an interview with Benjamin Parzybok, author of ‘Couch,’ from Small Beer Press:

We went to buy a couch at a second-hand store. We’d just moved to Portland, Oregon, from Taiwan and we felt like outsiders in the neighborhood. The experience of moving this couch through a posh shopping district was weird. It was too heavy to carry more than half a block and when we put it down, we’d sit on the couch and everybody thought we were performance art. People were interacting with us, they wanted to sit on the couch or know what we were doing. I began to think how the phenomenon of a collective act -- in this case moving a couch -- would change someone who felt like an outcast. How would that change how they fit into the neighborhood? That was the genesis of the novel and then I moved to a place that felt magical and that affected the book too. Originally, I though I was going to write a straight literary book and then it went weird.

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The new Barnes & Noble Review has an interview with Tom Stoppard, who talks about the multiple forces that affected his writing a version of Chekhov’s ‘The Cherry Orchard’ for the stage. He had a word-for-word translation done and was also able to refer to earlier translations. ‘I am left to do the part that I really enjoy most, which is dealing with the utterance,’ he said. But then you get to the stage part:

While you’re writing the text, it seems to be a self-sufficient activity (there’s you, there’s the text, there’s the translation of it, and so on), as though you are writing a poem which you will then mail to somebody. But in the theater, it isn’t like that. Yesterday, for instance, I was throwing in phrases because the actor needed a couple more beats to get himself off-stage. I like that very practical side of theater.

If this provides a peek into the life of a master writer, elsewhere, you can read what it’s like to be a hardworking editor. A day in the life of Laura Mazer involves multiple book proposals with food and a computer that crashes at the wrong times.

And Sara Nelson, the recently laid-off editor of Publishers Weekly, told the New York Observer about the job as she packed up her office. ‘This had seemed like such a perfect job — like my whole life had been coming towards having this job, and now I’ve had it.’

There is some good news in books, though: Tina Brown’s Daily Beast has launched a books page. The only problem is, every time I look at that site I feel like I’M BEING SHOUTED AT! Is it just me?

-- Carolyn Kellogg

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