I'm struggling at the moment with a work called "Against World Literature" by Emily Apter (Verso, 2013). Struggling because it is in great part written in academic language of theoretical discussion, far above my head. Let me cite an example -

"The emergent paradigm of a prophetic, discontinuous chronotope capable of releasing the now-time while projecting a narrative hologram of divine program, can be seen as nothing short of an attempt to reconcile worldly 'reality' (Weltwirklichkeit) with messianic eschatology."

(p.197)

Yet there is so much of interest in this book for me. Its theme is translation, translatability and untranslatability, a subject that does exercise my mind from time to time. There are essays here that I want to read, and will, perhaps without taking as much from them as one dedicated to the study of language and translation. I'm sure it was not intended for the lay person.
I didn't know that Eleanor Marx Aveling, daughter of Big Karl, translated Flaubert's Madame Bovary into English.
I was interested that the author discusses Wu Ming and the Novel "Manituana"; and I was pleasantly surprised that Umberto Eco is nowhere mentioned.
But most intriguing for me is a chapter entitled "Paranoid Globalism which covers the fiction of writers such as Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon, and apprises me of an American artist named Mark Lombardi, until now unknown.

"Anti-market cyber communism emerges as the tain of capitalism's paranoid mirror; both are world-systems that are everywhere and nowhere reliant on their formal invisibility to mobilize paranoid projection as a social imagery. It is a credit to the acuity of the artist Mark Lombardi that he devised ways of making visible this highly elusive relationality of the virtual world, mapping unseen economies that contour the globe. In a series of diagrams (assembled in his 2003 'Global Networks' retrospective at the Drawing Center in New York), based on information and statistics mined from public databases, Lombardi transforms corporate and political scandals into cartographies of conspiracy. He charts capital flow using a system of delicate skeins, arrows, and hubs that indicate the paths of illicit money transfers, laundering operations, and offshore accounting. The Bank of Credit and Commerce International is thus revealed in a compromising web of connectedness to the Saudi Bank of Paris, Osama Bin Laden, the Houston Main Bank, and George H. W. Bush. Whether it is Meyer Lansky's financial network circa 1960-78, Oliver North's Iran-Contra operation of 1984-86, the Keating savings and loan debacle of 1978-90, or the Harken Energy scam of 1979-90, Lombardi's maps of corporate kleptocracy clearly illustrate how all the dots are connected in ways that were always suspected but rarely worked out in such detail. Little surprise, then, that FBI representatives appeared at the opening of his posthumous retrospective and expressed their incredulity that an artist with access only to information in the public domain, and working without a computerized database, could have plotted the scandals with such accuracy. Rumors also flew that the artist's apparent suicide was actually a murder motivated by any number of possible parties whose illicit finances he had exposed."

(p.93)

More on Mark Lombardi here.