The husband-and-wife translation team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky on what draws us back to Russian novelists’ work over and over again:

I think there’s the phrase “the accursed questions” attributed to Dostoyevsky: What is the meaning of life, the existence of God, the mystery of death, the big metaphysical spiritual questions? Those questions were central to Russian literature in the 19th and 20th centuries in a way that they had all but ceased to be in Western European literature. The Russians were engaged in portraying a fully human destiny rather than one dictated by class, social position, personal ambition and so on—which is a vision similar to what we find first of all in Homer, as well as Dante and Shakespeare.  We thirst for that vision and are grateful to find it in the great Russians. The aliveness of Tolstoy’s heroes may come ultimately from the same wholeness of vision, which is not generalized and abstract, but deep in detail.

I had the pleasure of reading Pevear and Volokhonsky’s translation of War and Peace this year and I thank them for bringing “the accursed questions”—those we should be contemplating every day—to such wonderful life in my native language.

Cormac McCarthy interviewed by John Jurgensen of the WSJ:

WSJ: But is there something compelling about the collaborative process compared to the solitary job of writing?

CM: Yes, it would compel you to avoid it at all costs.

Ha!

The wonderful Charles McCarry from his “To The Reader” note at the end of Shelley’s Heart on the novel (one of my loves) and politics (one of my hates):

In fiction as in life, people do not always reveal the whole truth about themselves on first encounter, and the novel, like the Congress of the United States, makes its own rules, by which it abides at its own convenience.

Critic and literary historian DG Myers writes that “McCarry may be the best political novelist that the United States has ever produced.” I agree. His pen is as lethal as any sword. Thanks to Overlook Press for not overlooking McCarry.