News

New England Review is a nationally recognized literary journal published by Middlebury College.

The blog LitHub or Literary Hub has published a piece by Stephen Snyder, dean of the Language Schools and professor of Japanese Studies, that appears in the new edition of Middlebury’s literary quarterly, the New England Review. In his essay, “Insistence and Resistance: Murakami and Mizumura in Translation” (aka “The Murakami Effect”), Snyder discusses how translation is subject to the larger economic concerns of the publishing industry. “These concerns shape a canon of literature in translation that may bear little resemblance to that in the source literature and culture,” Snyder writes, “but that comes to play an important role in the way that culture or nation is perceived.”

Carolyn Kuebler, editor of NER, got the idea for the piece when she attended a lecture given by Snyder last February on the same topic. She worked with him to shape his talk into an essay for NER. “LitHub is kind of a pre-pub alert,” said Kuebler. “It brings together news from all over the literary world, from websites, journals, and publishers.”

A selection of works from the new edition is online and hard copies have just become available. This new edition also features NER’s first graphic novel excerpt, by artist Thi Bui, and a conversation with Polish social scientist Rafal Pankowski about recent threats to that country’s democracy. It also includes author debuts in fiction, poetry, and translation, as well as 15 poets new to NER.

Published by Middlebury College, New England Review is a nationally recognized literary journal that cultivates artistic excellence and innovation in contemporary writing and engages readers in the literary arts through its quarterly publication, website, and public reading series. NER is available in print and digital formats for all devices.