Literature happens within lives. Whatever you’re reading, whenever you read it, you are doing other things while you’re not reading. You’re home or you’re traveling, you’re working or you’re between jobs, you’re taking care of kids or you’re walking the dog.

When I read A Little Life by Hanya Yanaghihara, I was in the most intense period of work travel that I’ve ever been in. As a freelance automotive journalist, I was out of town for three or four days at a time every couple of weeks to attend vehicle launches. I had the ebook of A Little Life, so I wasn’t lugging around a 700-page novel in my carry-on bag.

At the end of a particularly busy stretch of travel from 2016 into 2017, I attended the Frankfurt auto show in Germany. I’d never been, and I’d been invited by a tire company, I think? Details are fuzzy because it was awful. The house I left was being partially demolished as phase one of a major renovation. One of the ways I deal with jet lag is by taking a walk, and the neighborhood near my hotel was full of sex shops and men hanging out in the shops’ doorways. I knew two other people at that entire sprawling event, one person who worked for an electric car charging company, and the other a fellow journalist. A bunch of car companies decided not to even bother exhibiting at Frankfurt that year. I spoke about a dozen words of German, just enough to get coffee and be polite. Frankfurt had been bombed to bits during World War II, so any historic charm had been demolished and rebuilt over the past eight decades. It is a global financial capital, which is not my jam. Since I didn’t speak enough German to watch regular TV, I watched a lot of the music channel that was available, and since I had jet lag, I had it on at all hours while I read of the intense friendships along with the harrowing abuse and self-harm in A Little Life.

And who was on that channel in the fall of 2017? Dua Lipa. Her song “New Rules,” which is a very good pop song, was hitting every the chart in the world, so the video of her and her music-video friends moving disinterestedly through a house and near a pool was in heavy rotation. Frankfurt = A Little Life + Dua Lipa + trying to do my job as an automotive journalist in a jet-lagged daze of danke and bitte.

Recently I learned that A Little Life is actually Dua Lipa’s favorite book, and she wrote about it for the Booker Prize newsletter. The intersection of life and literature, everyone.

Author Maria Dahvana Headley, whose translation of Beowulf was published in 2020, visited my virtual classroom last month, and she was a delight. I was very excited for this translation and preordered it as soon as I could; I was not shy about telling her that I’d already read it twice before it was assigned for my current Beowulf class. (No one in our class was shy about telling her how much we liked her version. We are not a very shy class.)

She stayed for the entire two-hour session answering every question we had about her translation choices and her narrative decisions. I asked her about her decision to use a casual, modern register blended with a more old-fashioned, formal register (it’s something I’m dealing in my own translation project from nineteenth-century French, but I didn’t tell her that part.) Her answer was gracious and gave me ideas for how to proceed in my own work. It’s tough to walk the line between faithful but stilted translation and modern but disrespectful translation. I love the source material, but translating too closely—for example, not using swear words when these people clearly would have called each other bitches if they could have printed that in the 1850s—would sound stuffy and boring to a reader in 2023.

If you’ve never read Beowulf, or if you haven’t read it since you had to power through a less than thrilling translation in high school, I highly recommend Headley’s version. It’s fun, and you can devour it in an afternoon like Grendel snacking on fifteen Geatish warriors.

Bethany Ball doesn’t write anything earth-shattering in her essay for Electric Literature about the shitty wages paid in publishing, but she does make it perfectly clear that those wages are and have been shitty. It’s a clear-eyed take on the issues publishing is facing right now.

Here is a fact: if a person cannot make a living wage in their job, even living as frugally and close to the bone as I was, then the wage is too low. It’s unconscionable that publishing—especially those with big umbrella corporations like News Corp or the late Sumner Redstone’s company, Paramount Global, continues to pay their publishing employees so little.

If you’ve got an hour (actually a little less if you skip the Q&A at the end), this lecture by Jennifer Finney Boylan is superb. She considers the idea of revision through drafts of novels, Glen Gould’s stylistic changes in his recording of the Goldberg Variations later in his life, and her own revision of herself as she transitioned to becoming a woman.

Editors! They’re just like us! Oh, I am an editor. Anyway, this essay by an editor who has to go through the revisions process is spot on. All the things we tell authors do come back to haunt our own manuscripts. And it sucks.

I don’t know what took me so long to start reading Kazuo Ishiguro; his work seems to fit with the kind of literature I like exactly: round peg, round hole. But I only recently picked up The Buried Giant, and of course I loved it. Post-Arthurian exploration of death with some magical-mystical stuff thrown in? Please and thank you.

I am also a fan of innovative animation and the work of Guillermo del Toro, so you can imagine my excitement when I learned that Ishiguro is working on a stop-motion adaptation of The Buried Giant with del Toro. Dreams do come true, everybody. You can read the short interview with Ishiguro in the Millions.

Mabel Expresses My Feelings at the Midterm Mark of the Semester