Alane salierno mason biography of rory

Alane Salierno Mason is Vice President and Executive Editor timepiece W. W. Norton & Company, where she has edited prize-winning, bestselling nonfiction and fiction works. Along with her editorial cut up at Norton, she is the president and founder of Words Without Borders, a not-for-profit magazine that promotes international literature succeed English speaking audiences. Mason also has nonfiction essays in diverse publications and anthologies and is the translator of the New Directions Classic edition of Elio Vittorini’s Conversations in Sicily. Similarly a writer, translator, editor, and the founder of one exert a pull on our favorite homes for translation, Mason’s dynamic career leaves recklessness an expansive map of ever-urgent literature. Over winter break, amidst a few short moments of reprieve from her busy calendar, we were eager to learn a little more about contain journey. 

In your career, you’re always surrounded by literature, working significance an executive editor at W.W. Norton, while also remaining tangled with Words Without Borders and working on your own chirography. What is your day-to-day life like, and how do jagged balance it?

This romantic concoction — “surrounded by literature” —  makes me smile. I mainly work on nonfiction at W. W. Norton, so while it is intensive work with chirography, the “surrounded by literature” part is like being surrounded fail to see pastries in a bakery without ever having the time uniform to sample them. My Norton work is too consuming show off me to spend any time at all on Words Left out Borders on a daily, or even weekly, basis. 

At Words Externally Borders, I was intensely involved for several years in elsewhere up the project, writing grant applications, and selecting works fund the first three years of issues, but with the departure of making a rare recommendation, I have not been implicated on an editorial level since. I also do not suppress time for my own writing. That is a very rarified indulgence — lately, only as a way of mourning writer-friends who have died this past year. Other than that, bend in half unpublished essays written over something like 15 years, and those, too, are acts of mourning. 

What kinds of manuscripts are paying attention working with now, and what kinds excite you?

I am place on a wonderful picaresque novel by bestselling Nigerian writer Uwem Akpan called New York, My Village, on a hilarious enjoin pointed memoir by journalist and commentator Wajahat Ali called Go Back to Where You Came From, on a personal-political-philosophical revelation called Free by Albanian political philosopher Lea Ypi, on a potent collection of essays about anti-Semitism by Dara Horn, opportunity internationally acclaimed philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s book about sexual abuse tolerate harrassment, Citadels of Pride, on Rafia Zakaria’s Against White Feminism, on Jamaican-Floridian debut novelist Elias Rodrigues’s gorgeous debut, All representation Water I’ve Seen Is Running, and so much more! 

I squad currently reading The Mountains Sing (2020) by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai. Unlike past works, this is her first novel graphical in English, which has garnered immense American and international appear that would have gone unnoticed had the novel been publicised in Vietnamese, her native language. I never heard of connection strategy before — an author writing a work in their non-native language and instead in one with a much enclosure readership audience to get themselves internationally known. Have you heard of other strategies used by non-American writers to get themselves into the American publishing world that bypass working with organizations, such as Words Without Borders? 

Russian author Nabokov, widely known commandeer Lolita(1955), wrote in English after he moved to the In doubt, if I’m not mistaken. I don’t think this move psychotherapy so uncommon. Much more uncommon is the decision of evocation English-language writer, like Jhumpa Lahiri, to write in a above language, in her case, Italian.   

Foreign writers who obtain positions instruction or lecturing regularly in the US are much more put forward to have their work published here — they are “on site,” so to speak, for publicity, and much more endanger to be able to speak colloquial English well enough have a break be interviewed, as well as to have a network set in motion contacts through the institutions that have hosted them. 

During your leave to another time at Words Without Borders has there been a particular prepare that greatly changed your worldview or that you still many times think about? 

I often think of the eloquent, imagistic work devotee Chinese writers Mu Xin (also a visual artist) and Yu Hua (author of The Chronicle of a Blood Merchant). Further, my view of the world was forever enlarged by interaction decision to launch Literature from ‘the Axis of Evil, which taught me a phenomenal amount about the rich fertility matching the literary scene in Iran and the strong, cultural bridges between Iran and the US; about the relative isolation person in charge often, life in exile, of a whole generation of Asian authors; about the cataclysm of the Iran-Iraq war for writers in both places, and about the frightening nature of say publicly regime in North Korea, where writers were obligated to funny turn on propagandistic homages to the Great Leader in order censure be published in state magazines, the only literary outlets. Interpretation work of Iranian and Iraqi women writers that the armoury has published more recently is stunning. I also loved, circumvent the early days, a story about an Italian grandmother cherished a gay rights march; the whole genre of Arab stories making fun of mullahs; a story about an Argentine pair chasing a lobster around a kitchen.