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Calque Ideas provides an opportunity for writers to think aloud, using their own experiences and knowledge to approach topics in an accessible and attractive way.
Our first three pamphlets, in a perfect gift bundle.
FIVE: When Star-Stuff Tells Stories: Translating Science Fiction as a Metaphor of Technology and Wonder, bu Sue Burke
Starting from the very earliest forms of human communication, the ways in which language developed into languages, and created the role of the translator, Sue Burke offers an invaluable guide to the importance and difficulties of translation on Earth, and gives us fascinating speculation about what might happen if we ever do come into contact with extraterrestrial intelligence. This pamphlet addresses questions of what communication is, and how the translator is uniquely positioned to work at escaping the bounds of the medium and bringing pure meaning into an intelligible form.
SIX: The People on The Wall, by Charlotte Cory
A compressed history, The People on the Wall tells us a lot about family dynamics and the ways in which the past unavoidably colours and sketches the present, via an account of a pair of sketches Charlotte Cory's parents kept in their house, and then employed, as was their habit, as emotional bargaining chips. Taking in Edward Elgar, the <i>Titanic</i>, society portraiture of the nineteenth century, student life, boiled cake, Charlotte Brontë, a box of buttons and the work of a vandalising picture-framer, in Cory's hands a whole dynamic world explodes out of a few resonant details.
SEVEN: Olives and Eyeballs: In Defence of the Short Story, by Camilla Grudova
One of the most intelligent contemporary writers of short fiction takes the opportunity to lay out a cogent and subtle description of the world within which short stories are produced and consumed. Grudova defends the short story as something unique of itself, no poor cousin to the novel, and shows the ways in which it can function in a sharp and pungent way all of its own.
EIGHT: Rendering Justice, by Vida Cruz-Borja
In a highly personal and emotionally direct essay, Vida Cruz-Borja discusses the ways in which writing is sometimes perceived as an emotional outlet for an author, a way to write/right the wrongs of the world, and then complicates this perception, revealing the ways in which a deeper humanity - and the fundamental power of narrative structure - guides, and sometimes forces, an author to write in a way that is more just, and whose acknowledgement of injustice is its most important effect.
