Kafka never said that, actually

Plus, the National Endowment for the Humanities makes its awards—and gets sued.

Over the weekend I finished the Big Summer Read: Middlemarch. I’m already halfway through Lonely Crowds, and I am very much enjoying it. Now that I’m out of 19th century novel land, I’ll be powering through all the 20th and 21st century fiction I please for the rest of the summer.

Sibylle by Camille Corot (1870)

Christine Baranski told the Boston Globe that today’s ultra-rich “have to step up and start supporting cultural institutions and universities and museums.” And she’s right! She added: “I don’t know if they need to be shamed into it. People usually don’t give money if they’re shamed. But we somehow have to insist on preservation, conservation, and philanthropy, because we’re really going to need it now, aren’t we? The private sector really has to step up.” To be clear—the stance of this newsletter is that the public sector should also support the arts, but in times like these, all support is critical.

The books that conservatives want you to read aren’t exactly what you’d expect, according to a new tome of literary analysis by Christopher Scalia (the son of that late Scalia). The Economist lays bare Scalia’s takes on what makes novels appealing to the right, picking out a few of his top choices, including My Ántonia by Willa Cather, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, and Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means. Why? These non-obvious choices explore themes on self-reliance, hard work, and Christianity. But as anyone who’s ever taken a literature seminar will be able to tell you, quality fiction often bears multiple interpretations and mixed analysis—rather than standing as a guidebook for what’s wrong and right. At least we can sometimes agree on what deserves its literary merit.

Another conservative who wrote a book that doesn’t quite hold up to scrutiny is art historian Victoria Coates, who runs Project Esther—an arm of Project 2025 which purports to quashing anti-Semitism, while being decried by Jewish leadership across the country, who wrote in an open letter that “A range of actors are using a purported concern about Jewish safety as a cudgel to weaken higher education, due process, checks and balances, freedom of speech and the press.” Coates, Greg Allen writes in a piece for Art in America, is also the author of the 2016 book, David’s Sling: A History of Democracy in Ten Works of Art. By Allen’s analysis, Coates herself is something of a shoddy art historian, inventing dialogue between historical figures, oversimplifying the relationship between governments and the works of art they created, and ignoring the history of such artworks beyond their moment of production:

Indeed, her misdirections, omissions, and speculative fabrications collude to subsume art into authoritarianism with remarkable consistency. Nine years later, here she is, with Project Esther, subsuming even more. Such was the fate of her titular artwork: in 2023, a Florida principal was fired for allowing 6th graders to see pictures of Michelangelo’s David, that supposed symbol of freedom conveniently cropped on Coates’s cover.

Kafka’s Metamorphosis isn’t actually called that. In LitHub—in a piece excerpted from Global Kafkas, edited by Sander Gilman and Victor Taylor, published by Parlor Press—translator Mark Harman explains that the 1915 story was originally titled Die Verwandlung (The Transformation) by its own author, while it was English folklorist A. L. Lloyd who gave the story its more widely known English title in 1937. There remains debate in the English-speaking world about whether Harman was right to title the story by its original name in his 2024 translation for Harvard University Press, but this is, perhaps, a good reminder of what may be lost (or at least be eroded) in translation.

All this said, we here are huge fans of literature in translation, and August is one of my favorite holidays: Women in Translation Month, an annual celebration that Meytal Radzinski started in 2014 as a means of recognizing women writers around the globe. Several publishers are offering sales books by women in translation this month. You can get 25% off at Seven Stories Press and 30% off at Open Letter. Deep Vellum is also offering four different bundle deals, including a $400 bundle of all of the publisher’s books by women in translation (don’t worry—the other bundles are available for $35, $45, and $50).

Vincenzo Latronico, author of the International Booker-nominated Perfection, wrote recently in The Guardian about how the global publishing landscape has become more open to non-Anglophone literature—yet this expansion has sometimes been clouded by stereotypes and limited viewpoints of what international readers may find engaging or accessible: “the international market for literature has tried to become more efficient by allocating the general discourse to a set of mostly English-speaking writers, while a peripheral circle of local colleagues are outsourced with producing gondolas, popes, crying madonnas, and pizza.” This landscape, luckily, has faded, he says, but still, books not written in English often only secure wider translation after the their English publication. “This could be seen as another, subtler form of imperialism,” Latronico says, but it is at least a new mode which brings the local to the global stage.

More than 200 writers from England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, including Zadie Smith, Jeanette Winterson, Elif Shafak, and Sarah Hall, signed an open letter calling for an “immediate and complete boycott of all forms of trade, exchange and business with the state of Israel until the people of Gaza are adequately provided with drinking water, food and medical supplies, and until all other forms of relief and necessity are restored to the people of Gaza under the aegis of the United Nations.” Writers Horatio Clare and Sean Murray organized and drafted the letter, The Guardian reported.

After canceling its production of Tosca in Tel Aviv, which we discussed last week, the Royal Ballet and Opera said that it made this decision before it was served an open letter from staff protesting the partnership with the Israeli Opera, and that the decision was instead made due to “concerns about the safety of company members in the region, in light of the ongoing conflict,” said chief executive Sir Alex Beard, The Times reported.

The National Association of Black Bookstores, a member-based nonprofit, officially launched on August 6, Publisher’s Weekly announced. The organization, founded by Underground Books owner Kevin Johnson, is dedicated to “promoting literacy, amplifying Black voices, and preserving Black culture.”

New York City Ballet principal Tiler Peck is incredibly booked and busy. This week, she’s overseeing the sold-out Robbins Festival at the Joyce Theater, which will feature dancers from NYCB, American Ballet Theater, the Paris Opera Ballet and the Royal Ballet. Most notably, Peck will become the first woman to perform “A Suite of Dances,” one of the last pieces Jerome Robbins choreographed for Mikhail Baryshnikov, which has historically only been approved for male dancers, the New York Times reported. The program will also include duos Aran Bell and Devon Teuscher, Roman Mejia and Peck, and Mejia and Cassandra Trenary performing “Other Dances;”but luckily, you can also see this lovely piece when Dutch National Ballet comes to New York City Center in the fall. You can read my review of that piece—which I saw in Amsterdam earlier this summer—in Fjord Review.

Peck herself also has a City Center show in October, “Turn It Out with Tiler Peck & Friends,” which will include choreography by William Forsythe, Alonzo King, Michelle Dorrance, Jillian Meyers, and Peck herself. And in February, she’ll be back at the Philharmonic for a concert with violinist Hilary Hahn—an encore of their sold-out 2025 recital.

Somehow, Peck found the time in July to star in a one-night-only production of the musical Little Dancer in London. Peck, who made her Broadway debut in 2000 in Susan Stroman’s revival of The Music Man, was also just in Argentina for a one-night performace at Teatro Colon, Colorado for the Vail Dance Fest, and, before that, Bora Bora and Hawaii for her honeymoon with her now-husband Mejia. Through it all, she has kept up her prolific posting cadence. Okay, Tiler. I recognize your game. And I am taking notes.

American Ballet Theatre announced its new slate of apprentices, which include ABT Studio Company standouts Paloma Livellara and Kayla Mak (a recent Juilliard alum who just won a Princess Grace Award for dance performance. Other notable winners this year include ABT’s Madison Brown and Isabella Boylston, and choreographer Houston Thomas). Brown, a current corps member, was also one of two ABT representatives at the recent BAAND dance festival—so you can officially consider her on promotion-watch. I’m stating here that I expect her to become a soloist no later than the 2027 season.

The Chicago Youth Symphony performed a 45-minute set at Lollapalooza, making history as the first orchestra to perform solo at one of the festival’s main stages, The Violin Channel reported. It follows in the footsteps of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which made history at Coachella earlier in this year.