Scott Esposito of Conversational Reading offers his take on the Three Percent Best Translated Fiction longlist (which he voted on) and mentions some worthy titles that didn't make the list:
http://www.
The litblog Squandermania and Other Foibles has a nice post about daybooks:
http://donshare.blogspot.com/
Among notables born on this date are President Richard Nixon (well, he's notable), adventurer Richard Halliburton, Czech novelist and playwright Karel Capek, Guatemalan activist and Nobel laureate Rigoberta Menchu, Croatian poet Ivan Gundulic, rockers Jimmy Page, David Johansen, and Dave Matthews, New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani, Hebrew poet Naim Nahman Bialik, cartoonist Chic Young (Blondie), science fiction novelist Algis Budrys, Irish playwright Brian Friel, actors Susannah York, Joely Richardson, and Imelda Staunton, French novelist and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, English playwright Thomas William Robertson, South African writer Eugene Marais, Italian writer Giovanni Papini, German writer Kurt Tucholsky, English poet Lascelles Abercrombie, singer-songwriters Joan Baez and Scott Walker, Australian novelist Robert Drewe, film director Sergei Paradjanov, and Wagnerian soprano Waltraud Meier (whom I have been lucky enough to hear in the opera house, and she is electrifying). Brian Friel, universally considered Ireland's greatest living playwright, turns 81 today and is still a legitimate candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, which I would love to see him get. His 1979 play Faith Healer is easily one of the best plays I have ever read. James Mason, Donal McCann, and Ralph Fiennes are among those who have played the lead role on stage. New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley, who reviewed the McCann and Fiennes productions, unequivocally called Faith Healer a "great play" and the McCann production "one of the transcendent experiences of my theatergoing life."
