New Issue of TLRWeb

Issue 2 of TLRWeb is live, featuring work by Robert Gibbons; George Godeau, translated by Kathleen McGookey; Oscar Hahn, translated by James Hoggard; Nathan Hoks; Bryan Tso Jones; Iztok Osojnik, translated by Barbara Siegel Carlson; Rush Rankin; Kent Shaw; Lesley Strutt; and Charles Harper Webb.

A snippet from Lesley Strutts's "Grace":

There’s a moment
when the day forgives you everything,
lights up its eyes for you.
And every branch of every tree
bends your name into a rising;
one swift shot at the mark -
a ladder to heaven, illuminated.
For one moment.
And then you move on.

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"Literature's Invisible Arbiters" by Esther Allen

Check out this interesting article by Esther Allen published in Guardian about "the make or break" of books. Straight from Allen:

Reader, I confess: For more than a decade, I've been writing reader's reports. I evaluate books written in or translated into French or Spanish for editors who, for the most part, can't read those languages. Writing the reports is a time-consuming, often frustrating, and always financially unprofitable pastime, and there can't be many of us willing to do it; sometimes two or three different publishers in sequence will, unbeknownst to each other, send me the same book to evaluate. I often wonder - particularly when a deadline is looming - why I do reader's reports at all.

More after the jump.