Jonathan Franzen will publish his translation of essays by Austrian satirist Karl Kraus in October, reviving criticism from a critic who self-published his own magazine.
In The Kraus Project, Franzen translates and annotates his work. The Guardian ran an essay from Franzen about why this forgotten satirist still matters today. Check it out:
It’s not clear that Kraus’s shrill, ex cathedra denunciations were the most effective way to change hearts and minds. But I confess to feeling some version of his disappointment when a novelist who I believe ought to have known better, Salman Rushdie, succumbs to Twitter. Or when a politically committed print magazine that I respect, N+1, denigrates print magazines as terminally “male,” celebrates the internet as “female,” and somehow neglects to consider the internet’s accelerating pauperisation of freelance writers.