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The Book Report: There’s Going to Be a Harry Potter Version of Pokemon Go!

Welcome back to the Book Report, where we find book-related news and we chat about it. This week, we’re going to be talking about Niantic’s upcoming Harry Potter version of Pokemon Go, the very first edition of The Odyssey to be translated by a woman, and piracy (the online kind, not the sword-fighting kind). Let’s get to it!

11/8/17: There’s Going to Be a Harry Potter Version of Pokemon Go!

It’s been over a year since Pokemon Go! launched and we all spent that one summer wandering around outside in search of augmented reality monsters. Now Niantic’s saying they’ve got something brand-new in the works: an AR version of Harry Potter called Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, set for release in 2018.

How will this work? I haven’t the slightest clue. Details are scarce. What I do know is that I will be downloading the app without question. I can’t wait to be standing in someone’s backyard, waving my phone around and shouting, “WINGARDIUM LEVIOSA.”

11/6/17: The Odyssey Has Been Translated Into English by a Woman for the First Time Ever

We’ve had dozens of dude-translated versions of The Odyssey. We’re good there, I think. And that’s not to say women have been completely absent from Homeric translating altogether; Caroline Alexander translated The Iliad into English in 2015, and Anne Dacier translated both The Iliad and The Odyssey into French back in 1699 and 1708.

But this is the first time a woman has translated The Odyssey into English, which is fantastic not just in terms of women’s history and literary milestones but because The Odyssey is such a gendered tale, full of monster women and seductresses and goddesses and wives whose only role is to hinder or help our hero. And it’s awesome to have the option of looking at those things from a woman’s perspective rather than several male ones exclusively. The translator in question is Emily Wilson, and she has a lot of cool things to say about her accomplishment in this TIME article:

As a translator, I aim to be responsible to my own readers and to the English language, as well as to the language of Homer, and to the original poem’s ethical complexity as well as its literary form. I hope to be, like Odysseus himself, a flexible, strategic person “of many turns.”

11/6/17: Authors Who Are Victims of eBook Piracy Are Being Told to “Be Grateful They Even Have Readers”

Authors like Maggie Stiefvater (The Raven Cycle) and Samantha Shannon (The Bone Season) are speaking out against eBook piracy, which has become a real problem in recent years. Pirating eBooks, they explain, is something that often results in lost sales, slashed print runs, and even canceled future books. Read the Guardian article here.