Zoo, or Letters Not about Love [Excerpt]
Forthcoming in a new "Dalkey Archive Essentials" version (with a different cover than the one depicted to the right), Zoo, or Letters Not about Love, translated from the Russian by Richard Sheldon, is one of Viktor Shklovsky's most beloved works. An epistolary novel written while Shklovsky was in exile in Berlin—and in ...
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TMR Fresán Relisten Ep. 14: “What We Talk About When We Talk About Dreaming” [THE DREAMED PART]
Welcome to the Great Fresan Relisten of 2023! Over the next four weeks, we'll be reissuing an episode a day from the The Invented Part and The Dreamed Part seasons of TMR so that you can catch-up, refresh your memory, have a few laughs, etc., before the May 10th launch of Season 19 on The Remembered Part. Here are the ...
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TMR 15.11: “Everyone’s Been Talking to Me About You” [Vernon Subutex]
Following up on last week's catastrophic technical difficulties, Brian recaps some of his conversation with Frank Wynne before he and Chad dive into volume three of Despentes's Vernon Subutex. They talk about hippies, Dan Deacon, cults, Cultish, Vernon's purity, and much more. This week's music is "The Crystal Cat" by ...
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Writing about Granta’s “Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists 2”
Just about a decade ago, Granta released their first ever list of "young Spanish-language novelists." This was a momentous occasion for a number of reasons, starting with the point that, until then, only young British and American writers had been featured by the magazine. (There had been three lists of best British ...
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Five Questions with Michael Holtmann about HOME
As part of our ongoing series of short interviews featuring the people who helped bring great new translations to the reading public, we talked to Michael Holtmann, the executive director and publisher of the Center for the Art of Translation and Two Lines. Before getting into the interview, I wanted to point out ...
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Five Questions with Annie McDermott about “Dead Girls”
To mark the release of Dead Girls by Selva Almada (Charco Press), we asked translator Annie McDermott a few questions. Enjoy! How did you come to Dead Girls? Annie McDermott: In fact, Dead Girls came to me. Chris Andrews, who translated—brilliantly—Selva’s first novel, The Wind that Lays Waste, was too busy ...
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TMR 11.3: “”What We Talk About When We Talk About Dreaming” [THE DREAMED PART]
Aside from talking about how we're all about five days away from becoming Howard Hughes, Chad, Brian, and special guest Derek Maine talk about dreams vs. rationality, Nabokov and Bob Dylan, dream lovers and MTV videos, Twin Peaks and fantasy baseball. (OK, not the last one.) It's a fun podcast, a minor distraction that ...
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What Did We Have to Talk About, Now That He Was Dead? [CONTEXT]
As part of a larger series of initiatives involving Open Letter and Dalkey Archive Press, over the next few months, we'll be running a number of articles from CONTEXT magazine, a tabloid-style magazine started by John O'Brien and Dalkey Archive in 2000 as a way of introducing booksellers and readers to innovative writers ...
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10 Anecdotes About the 2019 National Book Award Translated Literature Longlist
As you likely know already, the National Book Foundation announced the longlist for the 2019 National Book Award for Translated Literature yesterday. It's always hard for me to figure out what to say about something like this—it's exactly the sort of thing we should be presenting here on Three Percent, as part of our ...
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Interview with Damion Searls about Anniversaries [Part II]
I'm on a self-imposed hiatus from writing posts for this site until I finish two other articles for other publications (almost done!), but I am lifting this restriction for one post to share the next set of answers from Damion Searls in my (probably never-ending) interview with him about Uwe Johnson's Anniversaries. To ...
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Interview with Michael Reynolds about Europa’s Nonfiction Line
Thanks to AWP I'm a few days behind in my April posts, but as will be explained in full tomorrow, this month's main focus is going to be on nonfiction in translation. Our nonfiction titles are 30% off all month (use NONFICTION at checkout), and I'll be writing a lot about recent nonfiction titles, ...
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Interview with Damion Searls about Anniversaries [Part I]
Assuming that I'll be reading Anniversaries slowly but surely over the next four months, I thought it would be fun to talk to translator Damion Searls about the book along the way. If all goes according to plan, these monthly installments will develop into a rich conversation about the book, translation issues, and much ...
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Why Are Ebooks [Let’s Talk about Catalonia]
Just like with last week's post, I want to kick off this mini-survey of a couple Catalan titles with a chart of the presses who have brought out the most Catalan translations (according to the Translation Database): My first response is: Thank god I finally realized how easy it is to change the color on these charts! I ...
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Books about Death [BTBA 2019]
Today's Best Translated Book Award post is from George Carroll, retired publisher rep living in Seattle, rooting for the Sounders, and kicking ass in our Fantasy Premier League league. In his preface to Best European Fiction 2016, Jon Fosse wrote “But crime fiction is not literature; it is the opposite of it . . . for ...
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Two Month Review: #5.02: FOX by Ugresic (“A Story about How Stories Come to Be Written”)
This week's podcast is pretty fast and loose, with Fortnite disruptions, embarrassing pronunciations, lots of ribbing, and a deep dive into the various games going on in Part I of Dubravka Ugresic's Fox, "A Story about How Stories Come to Be Written." Starting from Pilnyak's story of the same name, this section revolves ...
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Some Clues About the BTBA Fiction Finalists
Patrick Smith deserves all the credit for coming up with these clues about which books made the shortlist for fiction for this year's Best Translated Book Awards. As you may already know, the BTBA finalists will be officially unveiled tomorrow, Tuesday, May 15th at 10am Eastern over at The Millions. (And the winners will ...
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Death by Poetry and The Lies about Me
I have a litany of reasons for why I’m combining a few posts here and writing a shorter, more condensed, straightforward post than most of the others. Baby (always an excuse), other obligations—such as the Best Translated Book Award longlists announcement and a bachelor party in which “what happens in Boiceville, stays ...
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About
Three Percent launched in the summer of 2007 with the lofty goal of becoming a destination for readers, editors, and translators interested in finding out about modern and contemporary international literature. The motivating force behind the website is the view that reading literature from other countries is vital to ...
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Thinking About Book Reviews
Clarice Lispector is undoubtedly one of the great writers of the past century. Her recent rediscovery—sparked off by the reissuing of The Hour of the Star in Ben Moser’s new translation—is definitely merited, and will hopefully usher in a time in which any number of very deserving female authors from the ...
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Interview with Allison M. Charette about "Beyond the Rice Fields" by Naivo
This semester, in my World Literature & Translation class, we’re reading twelve translations from 2017-18 and talking with almost all the translators, including Allison M. Charette, who is responsible for the publication in English of Naivo’s Beyond the Rice Fields. Over the past few weeks, we conducted this ...
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Third Season of the "Two Month Review" is All About Mercè Rodoreda
The voting is in and . . . Well, The Physics of Sorrow and Maidenhair ended up with the most votes. That said, we’re not going to do those books next. Instead, since we haven’t featured any books by women yet—and since Catalan is undergoing some serious shit right now—we’re going to start by ...
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Two Month Review #7: "A Few Things You Happen to Think About When All You Want Is to Think About Nothing" (The Invented Part, Pages 231-300)
This week, Jonathan Lethem (Motherless Brooklyn, Chronic City) joins Chad and Brian to talk about The Writer’s trip to a hospital, where he assumes something horrible is happening, which is countered by a gushing forth of new story ideas. Jonathan tells of his own experience coming up with one of his most famous books ...
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Five New Clues about the 2017 BTBA Fiction Longlist [Day Two]
Following on yesterday’s post about the upcoming Best Transated Book Award longlist announcement, I thought I’d give you some more clues, all centering around “new” additions to the “BTBA family.” 1) There are five presses with a book on the BTBA longlist for the first time ever; 2) ...
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Quick Clues about the BTBA Finalists
I wanted to write a lot more about this, but I’m running out of time . . . Here are a few clues about the fiction and poetry finalists for the 2016 Best Translated Book Awards. The shortlists will be officially unveiled tomorrow morning (Tuesday, April 19th) at 10am over at The Millions. Fiction ...
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Let's Talk about Lists
If you’ve been reading this blog for more than a few months, you’ve probably come across one rant or another about listicles and lists in general. Aside from the ones on the ROC in Your Mouth blog I think most of these things are pretty stupid. Actually, let me refine that a bit: “Best of” lists can ...
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An Article about a Book I'm Working On [100 Best Translations of the Century]
I’ve made reference to this a few different times—in a couple posts, on the podcast—but this article in today’s Frankfurt Show Daily (also available as a PDF) is the first official mention of the book that I’m writing with Stephen Sparks of Green Apple Books. (Granted, we don’t have a ...
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Books (In Translation) About Books [BTBA 2016]
This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is from Amanda Nelson, managing editor of Book Riot. For more information on the BTBA, “like” our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter. And check back here each week for a new post by one of the judges. Jose Alberto Gutierrez is a garbage truck driver in ...
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Who We Talk About When We Talk About Translation: The Bloggers
Who We Talk About When We Talk About Translation: The Bloggers* Bloggers increasingly lead in reviewing international literature, as column inches for book reviews in traditional outlets have shrunk. Prominent bloggers discuss their role and how it’s evolving. Where: Albertine Books, 972 Fifth Avenue (at 79th ...
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Who We Talk About When We Talk About Translation: Women's Voices
Who We Talk About When We Talk About Translation: Women’s Voices Where are the women authors in translation? A panel of experts—writers, translators, editors—will consider the gender bias in literary translations published in the United States. Where: Albertine Books, 972 Fifth Avenue (at 79th Street), New ...
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Why This Book Should Win: Q&A with Annelise Finegan Wasmoen about The Last Lover
Annelise Finegan Wasmoen is an editor and a literary translator. She is pursuing a PhD in Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis. Daniel Medin teaches at the American University of Paris, where he helps direct the Center for Writers and Translators and is Associate Series Editor of The Cahiers ...
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Why This Book Should Win: BTBA Judge Daniel Medin Q&A with John Keene about Letters from a Seducer
John Keene is the author of Annotations, and Counternarratives, both published by New Directions, as well as several other works, including the poetry collection Seismosis, with artist Christopher Stackhouse, and a translation of Brazilian author Hilda Hilst’s novel Letters from a Seducer. Daniel Medin teaches at the ...
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Three Percent #76: All about László
Inspired by Bromance Will’s blog, this podcast is all about how New Directions came to publish László Krasznahorkai and how they stuck with him—a situation that resulted in back-to-back Best Translated Book Award victories. Speaking of, here’s a picture of all three of us from the BTBA party on May ...
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Interview with Kazim Ali and Libby Murphy about Duras's "L'Amour"
Over at the Fiction Writers Review, Jennifer Solheim has posted a great interview with the two translators of Duras’s L’Amour, which just pubbed this past Tuesday. You can read the whole thing here, but here are a few highlights. Jennifer Solheim: In your beautiful introduction, Kazim, you write, ...
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"The Black Spider" by Jeremias Gotthelf [Books I'm Excited About]
I think it was two summers ago that I was last in Chicago for the annual Goethe Institut Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize Extravaganza. (I love these gatherings. The award ceremony, the people involved with German literature, the panels, etc. It always seems to be a beautiful couple days weather-wise as well, which ...
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Last Minute Reminder about PEN Literary Awards
Just a reminder for everyone out there that you have a few more days to submit to the 2013 PEN Literary Awards. From the email I just received: Good news: there’s still time to submit to 2013 PEN awards before the deadline this Friday, February 1, 2013. If you haven’t already, submit today! Our awards ...
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In Conversation about Queneau's "Exercises in Style"
One of the coolest releases of the winter has to be the new version of Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style—the classic Oulipian text in which Queneau tells and retells the same story of two men who get on a bus and have a minor row, ending with one telling the other to replace a button on his overcoat. The ...
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Intriguing Questions about Translation and Culture
Over at today’s Publishing Perspectives, there’s an interesting piece by translator Burton Pike about “Cultural Homogeneity and the Future of Literary Translation.” This essay was written in preparation for a German Book Office panel discussion, and as such, it focuses more on bringing up issues and ...
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Quick Note about BTBA Poetry
Just a FYI for all poets, poetry publishers, and translators: We’re in the process of nailing down the last judge for this year’s BTBA Poetry committee, after which time (probably early next week), I’ll post an announcement with everyone’s mailing address, etc. Just so you know, the deadline for ...
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More about Mo Yan's "POW!"
One of the things that may have gotten buried in all the articles about Mo Yan receiving this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature is the fact that Seagull Books is bringing out his next work in English translation—POW!, which sounds pretty wild, and has been compared to the works of Witold Gombrowicz and Javok ...
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Latest Review: "The Truth about Marie" by Jean-Philippe Toussaint
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Katie Assef on Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s The Truth about Marie, translated from the French by Matthew B. Smith and available from Dalkey Archive Press. Katie Assef is another of Susan Bernofsky’s students who very kindly offered to write reviews for Three ...
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The Truth about Marie
In The Truth about Marie, Belgian writer Jean-Philippe Toussaint takes us on a journey from Paris to Tokyo, with a sensuous detour to the island of Elba. It’s a book that begins with a thunderstorm and ends in massive forest fires, a love story examined through the lens of a tumultuous breakup. When the novel opens, Marie ...
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"The Truth about Marie" by Jean-Philippe Toussaint [25 Days of the BTBA]
As with years past, we’re going to spend the next four weeks highlighting the rest of the 25 titles on the BTBA fiction longlist. We’ll have a variety of guests writing these posts, all of which are centered around the question of “Why This Book Should Win.” Hopefully these are funny, accidental, ...
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About Time
From this PW piece on BookExpo America and changes to the show: Reed is already looking to bigger changes in 2013. In a blog post yesterday Rosato discussed a move to B2C, enabling publishers to connect directly with consumers. The show would move to Thursday to Saturday with the general public invited to attend author ...
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Ruth Franklin on Five Books She Wished She Had Written About
Over at The New Republic Ruth Franklin (who is working on a biography of Shirley Jackson, which should be amazing) has a piece detailing the five books that came out in 2011 that she wishes she had reviewed. It’s a great list that includes Teju Cole’s Open City (“Reminiscent of the works of W.G. Sebald, ...
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One Interesting Translation Person Talking About Another
Last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review had a few interesting pieces, including Adam Thirlwell’s review of David Bellos’s new book Is That a Fish in Your Ear?, which is, by far, one of the best reviews I’ve read about this title. That’s not all that surprising, since Thirlwell is such an ...
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"There Are Things I Want You to Know" About Stieg Larsson and Me
I will admit, right off the bat, that I have never read anything by Stieg Larsson. Not a word, not a page, not even the back of a book cover. Yes, I am aware of the existence of the Millennium Trilogy, with the movies and the books and the commercials and whatnot, and I have perhaps eavesdropped on a few hushed, excited ...
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Latest Review: "'There Are Things I Want You to Know' About Stieg and Me" by Eva Gabrielsson
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Julianna Romanazzi on the punctuation-confused “There Are Things I Want You to Know” About Stieg and Me by Eva Gabrielsson, translated by Linda Coverdale and published by Seven Stories. Julianna’s been posting here for the past few months during her ...
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Nabokov and Books about Nabokov
Although I haven’t read all of his works, Vladimir Nabokov is one of my personal favorite writers. I love Pale Fire and Lolita, but also like the less tricksy novels, like Laughter in the Dark. (Which was on Lost!) And for the past year(s) I’ve been planning on reading The Gift and Ada, or Ardor, both of which ...
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I Can't Keep Writing Posts about Cutting You Up
So the last time I went to BookExpo America, I ended up writing a five-part series that was basically about how everything sucked, the publishing industry was imploding, BEA’s focus was fuzzy at best, etc., etc. Well, last week BEA took place in the fairly dysfunctional Jacob Javits Center in NY and the mood was . . ...
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Three Percent #2: So, about that revolution . . .
As you may have noticed, last week, we launched a new Three Percent podcast featuring myself and Tom Roberge of New Directions. Our goal with this is to talk every week about books, events, some industry stuff, and so on. Hopefully these will be around 20 minutes long (we both talk a lot) and will provide a nice preview of ...
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PEN: Who Tells the Story? Children’s Book Writers Talk About Voice
Where: Greenwich House Music School, Renee Weiler Concert Hall, 46 Barrow St., New York City Must the writer get inside the head of the child in order to find an authentic voice for a young character? Or does the authentic voice come from someplace else? Three distinguished writers share ideas about how their lives shape ...
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Don't Forget to Tweet about Granta
As mentioned yesterday, this morning we’re having a special “Twitter Party” regarding Granta‘s special issue featuring the “Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists.” So fire up your TweetDeck and join us . . . At this moment, I’m probably trying to cram a dozen hyperbolic statements ...
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And a Reminder about Submitting Books for the BTBA
Following up on the earlier post about the updated Translation Databases, I just wanted to encourage all translators, authors, and publishers to send copies of your eligible translations to all the Best Translated Book Award judges to ensure that all these titles are considered for this year’s awards. All original ...
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And While We're Talking about England . . . [New Translation Prize]
As seems to be the case always and everywhere these days, I’m way behind with e-mails, announcements, blog posts, etc. So you may already have heard about this, but a couple Fridays ago English PEN announced that Putin’s Russia by Anna Politkovskaya, translated from the Russian by Arch Tait, is the winning title ...
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OR Books & A Bit about TOC
OK, I’m bloody exhausted. There’s only so many meetings, parties, dinners, jokes, and seven-hour plane rides one can take before totally crashing. I’ve been traveling since October 1st—after spending a late night out with Paul Auster on the 30th, which seems like maybe two months ago—so forgive ...
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And While We're Talking about PEN . . .
As if my inbox wasn’t jacked enough—trips to NY, Frankfurt prep, etc., and etc.—PEN is pouring on the press releases . . . Last night they announced the winners of this year’s Literary Awards. You can find them all here, but below are a few notable ones: PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in ...
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A Rational Discussion about Amazon
Over at The New Republic, Ruth Franklin has one of the most rational pieces on Amazon.com that I’ve seen in a long while. She wrote this in response to Colin Robinson’s The Trouble with Amazon article that appeared in a recent issue of The Nation. (And which I haven’t read, because after subscribing to The ...
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Where People Talk about Books
The other week, the first Future of Reading conference took place at the Rochester Institute of Technology. It was a fantastic few days, very interesting, with a range of great speakers. Rather than summarize each panel or person, I want to try and explore a few of the topics that came up. A lot of these posts will be simply ...
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What We Talk about When We Talk about the Future of Reading
The other week, the first Future of Reading conference took place at the Rochester Institute of Technology. It was a fantastic few days, very interesting, with a range of great speakers. Rather than summarize each panel or person, I want to try and explore a few of the topics that came up. A lot of these posts will be simply ...
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A Final Post about Lost
So the other week when I joked about how Lexiophiles referred to Three Percent as containing “random, unrelated informational debris”? Well, this post sort of proves their point . . . At 2:30am this morning, I finished what I think will be the last real piece that I’ll ever write about Lost. (Not counting ...
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Let's Talk about Amazon for a Minute
I’ve been meaning to write about The AmazonCrossing announcement all week, but it’s taken a few days of Torino detox to partially regain my ability to put words into some sort of meaningful order. (Emphasis on “partially” . . . my mind is still unfurling, but hopefully by the time I’m drowning in ...
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A Tipsy Post about Drunken Literature [Pilch's "A Thousand Peaceful Cities"]
This was written late last night and set aside for, um, proofing. For the sake of accuracy, one should never drink while proofreading. But in the case of Jerzy Pilch, it just feels right . . . After all, The Mighty Angel is—despite all of the narrator’s attempts to artfully beautify this away with words and ...
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Little Video about Open Letter
The other week, media strategist David Henderson came to the University of Rochester to give us some media training on how best to present yourself on TV, how to buy a second to think of a good answer to a tricky question, how to speak slowly, etc., etc. (And no, that last one didn’t stick. At least not for ...
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Douglas Rushkoff's Optimism about the Book Industry
PW‘s Soapbox pieces can be a bit hit-or-miss, but the one this week from Douglas Rushkoff (author of several books, including Life, Inc., which, along with Gaddis’s JR, should be mandatory reading for all business school students) is pretty fantastic. There’s nothing particularly new in Rushkoff’s ...
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One More Thing about V-Books . . .
Following up on yesterday’s rant about v-books, from what we can find, Amazon is the exclusive retailer for these videos. I’ll bet that’ll go over well. ...
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Some Good News about Reading from the NEA
This past Monday, the National Endowment for the Arts released some promising findings about the reading habits of Americans, showing that for the first time in 25 years, the percentage of adults reading literature increased over the previous study. (Studies have been done five times since 1982, which is why this phrasing is ...
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An Echo of My Post about Schuler
From Charlotte Higgins’s piece in The Guardian about shopping in her local Borders: Walk in and you are bombarded with the visual cacophony of three-for-two offers, TV chefs and Parky’s biography. Of course they have a wide selection of books, but the place is such a jungle – Aldi is surely more of a ...
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More about the End of Book Culture as We Know It
I realize this is an old article (I think I’ll be catching up for days . . .), but this piece in the Independent is strange, conventional, and interesting all at once. Can intelligent literature survive in the digital age? starts with the question of how the internet age is changing the way we read, with Nicholas ...
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Kharms short stories about Pushkin
Someone has collected some short (very short) stories that Daniil Kharms wrote and put them online, including some about Pushkin: 1. Pushkin was a poet and was always writing something. Once Zhukovsky caught him at his writing and exclaimed loudly: – You’re not half a scribbler! From then on Pushkin ...
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Latest Review: Night Wraps the Sky: Writings By and About Mayakovsky
Our latest review is by Margarita Shalina, who reviews a collection of writings by and about Vladimir Mayakovsky, Night Wraps the Sky, which was edited by Michael Almereyda. ...
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Night Wraps the Sky: Writings By and About Mayakovsky
“A Mayakovsky Bestiary” Maria – Don’t you want me? You don’t want me! “A Cloud in Pants” (p. 103), Vladimir Mayakovsky Big man with a big voice, Futurist, prisoner in solitary confinement, graphic designer, propagandist, early Soviet film star, Poet, suicide. There is no ...
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Insert Your Own Joke/Complaint About Government Spending Here
According to PW: President Bush’s proposed 2009 budget eliminates all the funding for Reading Is Fundamental’s book distribution program that has, since 1966, provided more than 325 million books to more than 30 million underprivileged children. “With 13 million children living in poverty in this country, ...
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Whereabouts Press
Chad’s thorough investigation of the economics of publishing translations all over the world based on the PEN/Ramon Llull To Be Or Not To Be Translated report has left me amazed that people bother to translate books, since the business is so unreliable and financially risky. Highly deserving literary voices are passed over ...
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More from Lawrence Venuti about Literature in Translation
A couple weeks ago we linked to Lawrence Venuti’s article on Words Without Borders about the business of publishing translations. It’s a very interesting piece that was written for a panel on the To Be Translated or Not To Be report and puts forth a somewhat provocative stance on what should be published in ...
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Lots of Love for Lost and a Little Secret about Episode 4
So, the highly-anticipated fourth season of Lost premieres tomorrow night, picking up where last season and its mind-blowing flash forward left off. And I for one can’t wait. (Especially for episode 4 . . . feel free to scroll to the bottom if you want to know why.) I unabashedly love Lost, and over the past few years ...
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I Think Today Is All About Esposito and Barcelona
Following on the Monzo review, Conversational Reading has an interesting Friday Column by Barcelona author Neus Arques called “On Translations or the Pursuit of the Domino Effect.” Arques recently published her first novel, and discussing the long, winding road to trying to get her book published in ...
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One Last Post about Karl Pohrt in China
In reference to Karl’s earlier posts re: the Beijing Book Fair, here’s a picture of him with Allison Hill in front of the entrance to the Forbidden ...
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And While We're Talking about Scott Esposito
Here’s a link to his recommendation of Enrique Vila-Matas’s Moreno’s Malady. In these seemingly anti-literary times, authors tend to do all they can to support literature; Spanish novelist Enrique Vila-Matas (pictured above) is the first I’ve seen to treat it like a disease. That’s not to ...
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On the Media's Episode about Books
I made a snarky mention of this yesterday, but now that I’ve listened to the entire program, I have to say, the recent episode of On the Media is actually a really solid overview of publishing issues. The program primarily focuses on business issues as they relate to the emergence of new media, so there’s a bit ...
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Arguments about the Translation Quality of War and Peace
This post on Languagehat.com is fascinating, especially in the context of yesterday’s post on the way reviewers review translations. Over the past few weeks, there’s been an ongoing discussion of the new Pevear and Volokhonsky translation of War and Peace in the i>NY Times Reading Room. According to ...
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Translation Buzz — Finally, a Panel about Books
When I was out in Iowa with Dedi Felman from Words Without Borders, we talked about how rare it was to have a panel about translations in which people actually talked about the books they’re reading. Usually panelists wax on and on about “obstacles” and “problems” and about “losing ...
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PW Reviews — More about Priorities
Publishers Weekly is one of my favorite review sources, providing a slew of brief, intelligent reviews every week. I especially like the fact that they cover a higher percentage of independent, small press, and university presses than most newspapers or magazines. In this week’s reviews there’s a nice write-up ...
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Vs. When a Publisher Talks about Books
It’s only available online in German at a cost of .50 Euro, but Der Spiegel recently interviewed Diogenes publisher Daniel Keel about his life’s work, the state of literary publishing, etc. Diogenes just sent me a fully-translated version, which is absolutely fascinating. I can’t find a copy of this ...
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When a Publisher Talks about Sales . . .
Related to my comment yesterday that publishers love to exaggerate sales figures, comes this little nugget about Booker Prize winner Anne Enright: The latest British figures from Nielsen BookScan show that, since it was published in May, only 3,306 copies have been sold in hardback, with a further 381 in paperback. ...
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The Neverending Debate about the E-Book
Joe Wikert has an interesting post today about the iPhone, its price drop, and the way in which people get jacked about Apple’s “revolutions” in ways that they never do about eReaders. Even those of us who aren’t Apple fans marvel when Steve Jobs announces the next big thing; it’s guaranteed ...
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Another Damn Novel about the Spanish Civil War!
Another Damn Novel about the Spanish Civil War! provides an interesting take on the nature of writing and revision. On its most immediate level, Another Damn Novel is simply a re-release of Isaac Rosa’s first novel The Bad Memory, which was published when the author was just twenty-five. Flawed, yet engaging—at least ...
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What do you say about something like this?
The poet and novelist Taslima Nasrin has been attacked at the launch of her book Shodh (Getting Even) in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Reports suggest that a crowd of between 20 and 100 protesters, led by three local politicians (MLAs) belonging to the Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (MIM) party, burst into the ...
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Little Bit of Breaking News about Lost
Since almost every brilliant book person I know is a huge fan of Lost, and since there isn’t a more literary show out there, I figure I’m justifying in spreading the news that Michael (Walt’s father, the one who left the island) will be back in Season 4. (Via Entertainment Weekly) And before we all get too ...
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TMR 23.4: “Homo A Se Coctum Esumque Crustum Est Hoc Fecit Separation” [Lanark]
Chad and Brian break down the loss of Duncan Thaw's mother, his entrance into art school, his reasons for creating art, religious imagery throughout the book, fathers who are better than Bandit, mispronounciations, the "engine" that drive the two distinct parts of this novel, and much more. This week's music is "It's All ...
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TMR 23.3: “Normal Underworlds” [Lanark]
Come for the book discussion, stay for Thaw's unproven remedies for asthma! One of the most fun, and conventional, sections of the book so far, Chad, Kaija, and Brian follow Duncan Thaw through his childhood, discussing his reasonable dad, why math sucks, school journals, and a tinge of sinister violence that might presage ...
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TMR 23.2: “Can He Help Lanark Out of Hell?” [Lanark]
As mentioned from the top, we had severe technical difficulties, so the sound quality on this is janky. (Mostly Chad's voice is quiet, which, for many, is likely to be a relief.) Nevertheless Chad and Kaija power on, talking about "The Institute" as a metaphor, the allusions to Duncan Thaw, dragons, dragon scales as ...
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TMR 23.1: “Book Three” [Lanark]
Mostly a set-up episode about Alasdair Gray and Lanark, in which Chad, Kaija, and Brian discuss the introduction (weird), the start of the novel (which opens with "Book 3"), the influence of Dante's Divine Comedy and Kafka, and much more. There are some good laughs, a bit of insight into where we are, all building toward ...
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Two Month Review Season 23: “Lanark” by Alasdair Gray
Before we get into the selection for next season, I want to remind everyone to vote in our poll for the Best TMR Class. The hypothetical is that you have to sign up for one of these courses being offered based on the books included. "Let the Bodies Hit the Floor" Death in Spring by Mercè Rodoreda; The Physics of ...
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TMR 22.10: “Butterfly Coma” [Praiseworthy]
Praiseworthy ends with some praise, a bit of exhaustion, questions about satire and the ending, and a dirty phrase Chad can't quit competing. Then there's the TMR Class Draft in which Chad, Kaija, and Brian each selected five previous TMR titles to create imaginary classes: "Dismal Lady Stuff," "Let the Bodies Hit the ...
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TMR 22.9: “One Donkey at a Time” [Praiseworthy]
Like a first time marathon runner, Chad, Brian, and Kaija are losing steam this season, but persist in talking about the book and their mixed feelings. They do learn some things about donkeys and mules though! And they set up next week's game: each co-host will draft five books from the twenty-two seasons of the podcast which ...
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TMR 22.8: “Madder Than White Heat” [Praiseworthy]
Little discussion of Priaseworthy in this episode. Instead there's a longer discussion about publishing, art, sales, how do these books get made?, favorite lines, future games, and much more. It's a 20,000 foot view of book culture with an emphasis on success, investment, and more. Enjoy! This week's music is "Pedestrian ...
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TMR 22.7: “@CheapIllegalPeopleSmuggler” [Praiseworthy]
Talk of Australian cartoons—and not just Bluey—morphs into a look at several specific passages in Wright's Praiseworthy, discussion what makes the book "difficult" to read, the style of humor, what pushes us away from the text and then re-grabs out attention, and much more. This week's music is "Frontier ...
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TMR 22.6: “Nuisance Bugger Donkeys” [Praiseworthy]
Chad and Kaija make up this week's panel as they play the "Slang Game," then discuss the elliptical meta-structure of the book and how this impacts their reading and the book's effectiveness. They also discuss Sam Rutter's New York Times review of the novel, addressing the difficulties of discussing the workings of the text ...
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TMR 22.5: “Maximum Superhero Cop-God” [Praiseworthy]
"Who's Stronger?" is the game of the week in this episode about the Maximum Superhero Cop-God's arrival in Praiseworthy to quell the frantic search for Aboriginal Sovereignty. There are lots of moths, discussion about acknowledging the land which we occupy as a good first step, and more about the difficult reality of life in ...
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TMR 22.4: “Devotion to Off-Grid Religions” [Praiseworthy]
Emmett Stinson (Murnane) joins Chad W. Post and Kaija Straumanis this week to educate us about Australian culture and literature and things we should keep in mind while reading Praiseworthy. He also participates in a round of the world-famous trivia game: "Australian Baseball Player or Indigenous Australian Writer?" There ...
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TMR 22.3: “Tommyhawk!” [Praiseworthy]
This episode could be titled, "Dead Bodies in Water," as Chad and Brian talk about the unfortunate situation in Rochester and the juxtaposition of Absolute Sovereignity trying to drown himself while his brother, Tommyhawk!, watches, doing nothing to save him. There's also more talk about Bluey, but also the tone of the book, ...
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TMR 22.2: “God Donkey” [Praiseworthy]
From discussion of Ohio and disturbing news about everyone's favorite Australian export, this episode skirts talking too deeply about Alexis Wright's Praiseworthy (New Directions, And Other Stories, Giramondo) to discuss challenges of getting into particular books, what the purpose of this podcast is in trying to assist ...
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TMR 22.1: “Kick the Haze in its Guts” [Praiseworthy]
The first episode of the new season of the Two Month Review—covering Alexis Wright's Praiseworthy (New Directions, And Other Stories, Giramondo)—start off with Chad crapping on golf, then rolls on into book design and books as objects, the pacing and rhythms of Wright's work, its humor, its orality, what ancillary ...
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More “Montao’s Malady” (Excerpt)
Following up on yesterday's post, this excerpt from Montano's Malady is just too perfect not to share. Enjoy and preorder the forthcoming Dalkey Archive edition of Vila-Matas's brilliant, twisty book here. April 21 “I’m absolutely convinced that publishing being in the hands of businessmen is just a ...
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A Venn Diagram of Not Reading
“If I actually finish a book, I feel like I deserve a Nobel Prize.” “I can't even guess when I last read a book. But I'd watch movies all day if I could. Especially Marvel ones.” Overheard on a University of Rochester Shuttle “In the last decade, she says, history has toppled from the king of disciplines to a ...
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Season 22 of the Two Month Review: “Praiseworthy” by Alexis Wright
It's almost time for the next season of the Two Month Review to get underway! We announced the book—Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright—but here, at long last, is the official schedule and some background information. I'm going to be completely honest here: All I've read by Wright is the first 58 pages of Carpentaria, the ...
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TMR 21.8: “MOON IS A MENACE” [Same Bed Different Dreams]
We've reached the end which, in Chad and Brian's opinion, Ed Park totally lands. There's Friday the 13th talk. Reagan makes an appearance. The structure of the book is revisited. As are all the ideas of mirrors and patrimony, assassins and conspiracy theories. Note: Information about the "Opening the Channel" translation ...
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TMR 21.7: “Taro Tsujimoto” [Same Bed Different Dreams]
The threads all come together in this week's section as the book barrels toward its conclusion. On this episode, Chad describes his visualization of the book's structure, Tim Hortons and Dunkin Donuts get crapped on, 2333 gets a new meaning, the Moonies make an appearance, as does Ronald Reagan (boo, hiss), Philip Roth, and ...
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TMR 21.6: “Interview with a Mirror” [Same Bed Different Dreams]
Korean food, Grocery Games, VCR tapes, screenplays, gazebos, a thumb drive, Amsterdam, and the statement, "TRANSLATION IS A LONG CON." This week's music is "I'll Be Your Mirror" by Velvet Underground. You can find all previous seasons of TMR on our YouTube channel and you can support us at Patreon and get bonus ...
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TMR 21.5: “A-Bomb Destroys Downtown Buffalo” [Same Bed Different Dreams]
The connections proliferate and the threading together of the three sections continues. Interactive rights to 2333 are finally, properly sold; the mystery surrounding Echo grows; and The Buffalo Evening News brings the concept of "fake news" to a whole new level. That and more in this week's episode. This week's music ...
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TMR 21.4: “The Second Bae” [Same Bed Different Dreams]
Brian's back and everyone is (mostly) healthy. They talk about Korean history, double (or triple) agents, the idea of history as coincidence or plot, North and South Korea, and more. This week's music is "Two States" by Pavement. You can find all previous seasons of TMR on our YouTube channel and you can support us at ...
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TMR 21.3: “Wildwording” [Same Bed Different Dreams]
Protect yourself: There's a chance you'll catch Chad's illness simply by listening to this episode. An episode in which he tries to recap a number of elements of the book—the 2333 game, the louse, wildwording—to Kaija Straumanis amid coughing fits and a dissolving brain. He also shares the most bizarre dream he's ever ...
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TMR 21.2: “2333” [Same Bed Different Dreams]
From their respective hotel rooms, Chad and Brian talk about science fiction, 2/3/33 (and 2/6/66??), conspiracy vs. coincidence, Ohtani and Lee, the ASS black satchel, the assassinations we don't learn much about in high school, Hegemon, more KPG connections, and the (not great) alt-newspaper of the week. This week's music ...
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Eleven Books, Selected
My parents are straight-up hoarders. Not of foodstuffs or other animal attractant stuff; nothing that will quite land them on a nightmare HGTV show (one that airs right after Flipanthropy), but hoarders nonetheless. Of paper, mostly. Checklists from the early 80s show up on the regular. I currently have a gym bag ca. 1993 ...
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TMR 21.1: “What Is History?” [Same Bed Different Dreams]
Season 21 of the Two Month Review kicks off with a discussion of Taylor Swift and the demise of alt-weeklies, then segues into a long discussion about the opening party scene in Same Bed Different Dreams. Chad and Brian talk about what's real and not in both the party scene and the "Dream One" section about the Korean ...
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TMR Season 21: Ed Park’s SAME BED DIFFERENT DREAMS
We're back! Due to a change in how one logs into University of Rochester hosted websites and services, I've been blocked from accessing this website for over a month now . . . But it's all resolved (still can't submit course adoptions to B&N College Stores—who happen to be on credit hold with our distributor 🙄—but ...
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TMR 20.5: “Bubble in My Fizziness” [MULLIGAN STEW]
Wacky Aphorisms vs. Cowboy Clichés. A title change that indicates a change in attitude. A bizarre publisher's catalog. The Red Swan. More letters! This section of Mulligan Stew is jam packed with fun riffs, more evidence of the intricate construction underlying this book, paranoia, puzzle pieces, and anger. This week's ...
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TMR 20.4: “The Sweat of Love” [MULLIGAN STEW]
"I SUCK!" Kicking off with an "erotic" "poem," this week's episode is nuts from the very start. There is a very serious explanation for the "Flawless Play Restored: The Masque of Fungo" (thanks to Tyrus Miller's piece in the Review of Contemporary Fiction), but this is surrounded by Nobel Prize talk, a breakdown of Lamont's ...
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TMR 20.3: “Drunken Condition of Both Teams” [MULLIGAN STEW]
This section of Mulligan Stew is particularly wild, featuring a western populated by Irishmen speaking in bad accents (and worse accents in The Club Zap), a long rambling set of hypotheticals about why the police haven't arrived to find Ned's body (spoiler: Halpin hasn't called them), a drunken baseball game featuring ...
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Three Percent #191: Raymond Queneau
To celebrate the first-ever English-language publication of Raymond Queneau's Sally Mara's Intimate Journal, and the reissue of Pierrot Mon Ami as a Dalkey Essential, Chris Clarke (whose retranslation of Queneau's The Skin of Dreams is forthcoming from NYRB) and Daniel Levin Becker (infamous member of Mujeres Encinta, ...
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TMR 20.2: “THE ULTIMATE IN BIZARRE BEAUTY!!” [MULLIGAN STEW]
Loveletters galore! Lists without context! Repurposing life for fiction! More puzzles! Terrible book reviews! An insufferable, pretentious elementary school essay! This episode has it all—and more! (As Lamont would say.) This week's music is "All Your Fails" by Kevin Drew. You can find all previous seasons of TMR on ...
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Three Percent #190: John Barth
In honor of two recent John Barth reissues—The Sot-Weed Factor and Chimera, both Dalkey Archive Essentials—John Domini (The Archeology of a Good Ràgu, The Color Inside a Melon, and this appreciation of Barth, among other works) and Max Besora (author of the intro to Sot-Weed Factor along with the very much Barth ...
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TMR 20.1: “Then You Do Not Approve of Nabokov?” [MULLIGAN STEW]
Chad and Brian kick off the new season in near hysterics over the first little chunk of Gilbert Sorrentino's Mulligan Stew. From talking about the rejection letters—and near batshit reader's report—prefacing the book, to all the bad writing about the "flawless blue" sky, to the ever-changing dialog tags in Anthony ...
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“Vladivostok Circus” by Elisa Shua Dusapin & Aneesa Abbas Higgins [Excerpt]
Today's #WITMonth post is a really special one—with a special offer. What you'll find below is an excerpt from the very start of Vladivostok Circus by Elisa Shua Dusapin & Aneesa Abbas Higgins. You might remember Dusapin & Higgins as the winners of the 2021 National Book Award for Literature in Translation ...
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Revisiting the “Summer of Spanish-Language Women Writers”
As part of Women in Translation Month—and to shine a spotlight on some of our best Two Month Review seasons—I thought I would repost information about a few relevant TMR seasons that might be of interest. Today, we're going to revisit a wild TMR season in which we featured three books originally written in Spanish, all ...
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“Un Amor” by Sara Mesa and Katie Whittemore [Excerpt]
Today's #WITMonth post is an except from Un Amor by Sara Mesa and Katie Whittemore, coming out in October. This was the "book of the year" in Spain when it came out in 2o20, and was praised to the skies by all the major Spanish newspapers and media outlets. There's even a film version coming out this fall directed by Isabel ...
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Revisiting “Monsterhuman” by Kjersti Skomsvold
As part of Women in Translation Month—and to shine a spotlight on some of our best Two Month Review seasons—I thought I would repost information about a few relevant TMR seasons that might be of interest. First up is Monsterhuman by Kjersti Skomsvold, translated from the Norwegian by B. L. Crook. Here's the jacket ...
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“The River” by Laura Vinogradova and Kaija Straumanis [Excerpt]
Today's #WITMonth post is a preview for an Open Letter title coming out next summer, which isn't even available for sale anywhere yet. It's River by Laura Vinogradova, translated by Kaija Straumanis, and part of Straumanis's "Translator Triptych" coming next summer. The novel was the Latvian representative for the European ...
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Four Books for Women in Translation Month
Given that the posts over the past week plus have been very heavy on Open Letter and Dalkey Archive titles (*cough* and or exclusively about OL and DAP titles *cough*),, I thought I'd take a minute to point out a handful of Women in Translation books that I recently found out about and am adding to my "to read" ...
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“The Lecture” by Lydie Salvayre and Linda Coverdale [Excerpt]
Today's #WITMonth post is an excerpt from The Lecture by Lydie Salvayre, translated by Linda Coverdale, a wonderfully funny and playful French writer who Dalkey published for quite a while (The Power of Flies, Everyday Life, The Company of Ghosts, Portrait of the Writer as a Domesticated Animal), and might again! Warren ...
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TMR 19.12: “Fill Up with Karmas” [THE REMEMBERED PART]
Brian returns to help breakdown the ending to Rodrigo Fresán's "Part Triptych." Is it earned? Is it sincere?? Is this all a Jacob's Ladder scenario??? Chad and Brian debate that along with concepts of time in fiction, the Karmas, the wetness of Latvian meat, Melvill and Mulligan Stew. Fun is had as this long, amazing ...
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The Visual Success of Women in Translation Month [Translation Database]
Women in Translation Month is EVERYWHERE. Whenever I open Twitter (or X?), my feed is wall-to-wall WIT Month. Tweets with pictures of books to read for WIT Month, links to articles about WIT Month and various sub-genre lists of books to read during WIT Month, general celebratory tweets in praise of Meytal Radzinski for ...
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“Year After Year” by Hwang Jungeun and Janet Hong [Excerpt]
To celebrate Women in Translation Month, we will be posting excerpts, readings, summaries from the Translation Database, former Two Month Review seasons, and various special offers—so stay tuned! Today's excerpt is from Year After Year by Hwang Jungeun, translated by Janet Hong as part of her Translator Triptych. ...
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Women in Translation Month: The Open Letter 40% Off Sale
So, if it's not clear already, it will be soon: there are Women in Translation Month posts plotted out for every day of this month. We have excerpts of past and forthcoming titles, four related "Reading the Dalkey Archive" posts, weekly Translation Database updates centered on WIT, recaps of WIT seasons of the Two Month ...
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Anatomy. Monotony. [Reading the Dalkey Archive]
Anatomy. Monotony. Edy Poppy Original Publication: 2005 Original Publication in English Translation: 2018 Original Publisher in English: Dalkey Archive Press Although I’m filing this as a “Reading the Dalkey Archive” post, it’s actually about two books: Anatomy. Monotony. by Norwegian ...
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“Flame Trees in May” by Karla Marrufo and Allison A. deFreese [Excerpt]
To celebrate Women in Translation Month, we will be posting excerpts, readings, summaries from the Translation Database, former Two Month Review seasons, and various special offers—so stay tuned! And to kick things off (technically a day before the start of #WITMonth, but whatever, time is a construct), here is an ...
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TMR 19.11 “Exit and No Return and Gone Forever” [THE REMEMBERED PART]
Kaija Straumanis guest stars on this episode in which we discuss brain tumors, memory loss, the true story behind the story of The Impossible Story sending the exwriter into exile, whether of not Saint George is a saint (and dragons), paternity, and the next Fresán book to come out from Open Letter, Melvill. This ...
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Re-Reading David Markson’s “Wittgenstein’s Mistress”
This piece by Philip Coleman first appeared in CONTEXT #23. To celebrate the recent release of Wittgenstein's Mistress as part of the Dalkey Archive Essentials series, it seems like the perfect time to revisit this re-reading of David Markson's classic novel about language, memory, grief, and possibly the end of the ...
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“Not Even the Dead” by Juan Gómez Bárcena [Excerpt]
Officially out last Tuesday, Not Even the Dead is a throwback—an ambitious, philosophical, grand novel taking on nothing less than the history of progress over the past four hundred years. In it, Juan—at the bequest of the Spanish government—pursues "Juan the Indian" across time and Mexico, almost catching up to him ...
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TMR 19.10: “The Fine Art of Leaving Something Out” [THE REMEMBERED PART]
For the first time in the history of the Two Month Review, Chad had to go it alone. He stuck in there, didn't get too crazy, and covered the last chunk of Part II of The Remembered Part. Illness, heartbreak, mental anguish, suicide, Ella, and a mission. It's all in this episode. This week's music is "Bloodletting (The ...
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Mulligan Stew [Reading the Dalkey Archive]
Mulligan Stew Gilbert Sorrentino Original Publication: 1979 Original Publisher: Grove Press First Dalkey Archive Edition: 1996 "Cheers!" So this may be the first—but definitely not the last—entry in this series that is kind of weird. First off, unlike the earlier posts, which try to say ...
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TMR 19.9: “The Dream of the Invention of the Memory, Etc.” [THE REMEMBERED PART]
Veeeeekingdor!!!!! This week's episode is pretty wild, with stories of Riga FC, stoic faces, Fresán's visit to the University of Rochester, Kurt Vonnegut, Andrei The Untranslated (follow his blog!, support his Patreon!), the purpose of book readings and the most uncomfortable ones, time and fiction, and much more! And ...
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“Europeana” by Patrik Ouredník [Excerpt]
Forthcoming in a new "Dalkey Essentials" edition, Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century is an "eccentric overview of all the horrors, contradictions, and absurdities of the past century." It's a book that is mesmerizing in its curious patterns, which at times can sound like Snapple Fun Facts—but tend to be ...
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The Book of Jokes [Reading the Dalkey Archive]
The Book of Jokes Momus Original publication: 2009 Original publisher: Dalkey Archive The Book of Jokes is first original Dalkey Archive title to be part of this series, and woo-boy is it a doozy. If you're playing “Offensive Dalkey Archive Content Bingo," you're all set! There are ...
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TMR 19.8: “Notes for a Theory of the Fabric of Memory” [THE REMEMBERED PART]
Brian is back and Chad flubs the intro, so things are basically as they should be . . . They talk about fragmentation, big flawed double albums (and why they're so intriguing), how comedy works, Hey Uncle Walrus vs. Uncle Hey Walrus, memory and the losing of it, and much more. This week's music is "1979" and 'Tonight, ...
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Ryder [Reading the Dalkey Archive]
Ryder Djuna Barnes Original Publication: 1928 Original Publisher: Boni & Liveright First Dalkey Archive Edition: 1990 This is a baggy novel of excess, and as someone who finds it nearly impossible to keep the thread—or develop a coherent thesis (any and all AI grading systems ...
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Three Percent #189: Baseball
Well, we did it: One whole episode just about baseball and books about baseball and baseball memories and anything else baseball. Caitlin Luce Baker of Island Books, James Crossley of Madison Books, and Dan Wells of Biblioasis join Chad W. Post from Open Letter to pick their "all-time favorite" books about baseball. This ...
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“Diary of a Blood Donor” by Mati Unt [Excerpt]
Diary of a Blood Donor by Mati Unt translated from Estonian by Ants Eert (Dalkey Archive Press) AN UNEXPECTED INVITATION A crow was riding the wind that came in low over the beach. Sand blew through the window, landed on my papers, entered my mouth. A yellowish light tainted the room, even my ...
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Mati Unt (1944-2005)
This piece originally appeared in CONTEXT 18, shortly after Mati Unt's passing. It was written by the translator Eric Dickens, Unt's translator, who also left us in 2017. Mati Unt was born in Estonia and lived there all his life. He spent his early years in the village of Linnamäe near the university town of Tartu. His ...
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TMR 19.7: “The Good Rememberer (A How-To Guide)” [THE REMEMBERED PART]
Former TMR guest Patrick Smith returns to discuss his reread of the first two volumes of the trilogy, how Fresán's writing inspires him, hanging on to flights of prose, all of the wind in this book, what it means to fall, dogs, and much much more. It's a comprehensive, deep look into what it takes to be a good reader, ...
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TMR 19.6: “The Impossibility of Painting with Watercolors in the Rain” [THE REMEMBERED PART]
Chad and Kaija break down the final bit of the first part of the third volume in Fresán's trilogy (phew), revisit the "is this difficult to read?" discussion, and talk about the articles about Fresán in the new issue of Latin American Literature Today. And at the very, very end, Chad makes a startling admission. This ...
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Perfect Lives [Reading the Dalkey Archive]
Perfect Lives Robert Ashley Original Publication: 1991 Original Publisher: Archer Fields Press First Dalkey Archive Edition: 2011 Let’s start with the cover. When this first arrived in the mail, I was certain that Ingram had sent it to me on accident. It looks nothing like ...
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TMR 19.5: “The Burning Gaze of Vladimir Nabokov” [THE REMEMBERED PART]
Separated by 10 hours—like podcasting jet lag?—Chad and Brian work through some observations and rants (specifically about a shitty NY Times list of the best American books between 1981 and 2006, which consists almost entirely of Philip Roth and John Updike and only two books by women), about this section of The ...
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TMR 19.4: “Read like Dracula and write like Frankenstein!” [THE REMEMBERED PART]
From Nobel Prize favorites to Proust to competitive cliques on the mountain, this week's episodes is almost as sprawling as the ex-writer's airplane thoughts. Bit more plot dropped into this section of Fresán/Vanderhyden's book, but there's also a lot about IKEA, his death and rebirth, his insincerity, and his loathsome ...
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TMR 19.3: “DREAM + MEMORY = INVENTION” [THE REMEMBERED PART]
Kaija Straumanis pinch hits this week for a discussion about Lost, airplanes, the past and nostalgia, writers vs. narrators, autofiction, how hard it is to sustain a rant, ghosts, pop culture references, where we are in Fresán's trilogy, and much more. The Remembered Part keeps gathering steam, and you'll want to catch up ...
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TMR 19.2: “Now That Everything That Has To Happen Has Happened” [THE REMEMBERED PART]
And they're off! Brian and Chad start remembering all that they're supposed to remember about the first two volumes of the trilogy (green cows!) and get oriented with the ex-Writer on the plane (and in the desert reading and burning Ada, or Ardor), fall right back into Fresan's humor, cynicism, bits on love, and everything ...
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TMR 19.1: Where Are We At? [THE REMEMBERED PART]
Maybe not the most informative of recaps, but Brian and Chad discuss what the love about Fresán's writing, things they recall from the first two volumes of the trilogy, ideas about what to maybe expect (Dracula + Proust), peppered with the usual amount of jokes and antics. This week's music is "Pontius Pilate's Home ...
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TMR Fresán Relisten Ep. 22: “The Dream Ends” [THE DREAMED PART]
Welcome to the Great Fresan Relisten of 2023! Over the next four weeks, we'll be reissuing an episode a day from the The Invented Part and The Dreamed Part seasons of TMR so that you can catch-up, refresh your memory, have a few laughs, etc., before the May 10th launch of Season 19 on The Remembered Part. Here are the ...
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TMR Fresán Relisten Ep. 21: “IKEA” [THE DREAMED PART]
Welcome to the Great Fresan Relisten of 2023! Over the next four weeks, we'll be reissuing an episode a day from the The Invented Part and The Dreamed Part seasons of TMR so that you can catch-up, refresh your memory, have a few laughs, etc., before the May 10th launch of Season 19 on The Remembered Part. Here are the ...
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TMR Fresán Relisten Ep. 20: “Living in Pandemica” [THE DREAMED PART]
Welcome to the Great Fresan Relisten of 2023! Over the next four weeks, we'll be reissuing an episode a day from the The Invented Part and The Dreamed Part seasons of TMR so that you can catch-up, refresh your memory, have a few laughs, etc., before the May 10th launch of Season 19 on The Remembered Part. Here are the ...
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TMR Fresán Relisten Ep. 19: “This Is a Bullshot” [THE DREAMED PART]
Welcome to the Great Fresan Relisten of 2023! Over the next four weeks, we'll be reissuing an episode a day from the The Invented Part and The Dreamed Part seasons of TMR so that you can catch-up, refresh your memory, have a few laughs, etc., before the May 10th launch of Season 19 on The Remembered Part. Here are the ...
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TMR Fresán Relisten Ep. 18: “The Past Is a Broken Toy That Everyone Fixes in His Own Way” [THE DREAMED PART]
Welcome to the Great Fresan Relisten of 2023! Over the next four weeks, we'll be reissuing an episode a day from the The Invented Part and The Dreamed Part seasons of TMR so that you can catch-up, refresh your memory, have a few laughs, etc., before the May 10th launch of Season 19 on The Remembered Part. Here are the ...
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TMR Fresán Relisten Ep. 17: “Adaptations” [THE DREAMED PART]
Welcome to the Great Fresan Relisten of 2023! Over the next four weeks, we'll be reissuing an episode a day from the The Invented Part and The Dreamed Part seasons of TMR so that you can catch-up, refresh your memory, have a few laughs, etc., before the May 10th launch of Season 19 on The Remembered Part. Here are the ...
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TMR Fresán Relisten Ep. 16: “Wuthering Heights Is Weird” [THE DREAMED PART]
Welcome to the Great Fresan Relisten of 2023! Over the next four weeks, we'll be reissuing an episode a day from the The Invented Part and The Dreamed Part seasons of TMR so that you can catch-up, refresh your memory, have a few laughs, etc., before the May 10th launch of Season 19 on The Remembered Part. Here are the ...
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TMR Fresán Relisten Ep. 15: “Tulpas” [THE DREAMED PART]
Welcome to the Great Fresan Relisten of 2023! Over the next four weeks, we'll be reissuing an episode a day from the The Invented Part and The Dreamed Part seasons of TMR so that you can catch-up, refresh your memory, have a few laughs, etc., before the May 10th launch of Season 19 on The Remembered Part. Here are the ...
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TMR Fresán Relisten Ep. 13: “Who Dreams the Dreamer” [THE DREAMED PART]
Welcome to the Great Fresan Relisten of 2023! Over the next four weeks, we'll be reissuing an episode a day from the The Invented Part and The Dreamed Part seasons of TMR so that you can catch-up, refresh your memory, have a few laughs, etc., before the May 10th launch of Season 19 on The Remembered Part. Here are the ...
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TMR Fresán Relisten Ep. 12: “We Remember Everything” [THE DREAMED PART]
Welcome to the Great Fresan Relisten of 2023! Over the next four weeks, we'll be reissuing an episode a day from the The Invented Part and The Dreamed Part seasons of TMR so that you can catch-up, refresh your memory, have a few laughs, etc., before the May 10th launch of Season 19 on The Remembered Part. Here are the ...
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Three Percent #188: Cultural Support in Multilingual Spain [A Riveting Event]
In this episode, Chad talks with Olga Castro (Univ. of Warwick), and translators Jacob Rogers (Galician), Mara Faye Lethem (Catalan), Robin Munby (Asturian), and Aritz Branton (Basque) about literatures from the official (and unofficial) languages of Spain, ways in which the regional governments support translation from these ...
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TMR Fresán Relisten Ep. 11: The Author Himself!
Welcome to the Great Fresan Relisten of 2023! Over the next four weeks, we'll be reissuing an episode a day from the The Invented Part and The Dreamed Part seasons of TMR so that you can catch-up, refresh your memory, have a few laughs, etc., before the May 10th launch of Season 19 on The Remembered Part. Here are the ...
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TMR Fresán Relisten Ep. 10: THE INVENTED PART [Pgs. 441-552]
Welcome to the Great Fresan Relisten of 2023! Over the next four weeks, we'll be reissuing an episode a day from the The Invented Part and The Dreamed Part seasons of TMR so that you can catch-up, refresh your memory, have a few laughs, etc., before the May 10th launch of Season 19 on The Remembered Part. Here are the ...
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TMR Fresán Relisten Ep. 9: THE INVENTED PART [Pgs. 405-440]
Welcome to the Great Fresan Relisten of 2023! Over the next four weeks, we'll be reissuing an episode a day from the The Invented Part and The Dreamed Part seasons of TMR so that you can catch-up, refresh your memory, have a few laughs, etc., before the May 10th launch of Season 19 on The Remembered Part. Here are the ...
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TMR Fresán Relisten Ep. 8: THE INVENTED PART [Pgs. 361-404]
Welcome to the Great Fresan Relisten of 2023! Over the next four weeks, we'll be reissuing an episode a day from the The Invented Part and The Dreamed Part seasons of TMR so that you can catch-up, refresh your memory, have a few laughs, etc., before the May 10th launch of Season 19 on The Remembered Part. Here are the ...
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TMR Fresán Relisten Ep. 7: THE INVENTED PART [Pgs. 301-360]
Welcome to the Great Fresan Relisten of 2023! Over the next four weeks, we'll be reissuing an episode a day from the The Invented Part and The Dreamed Part seasons of TMR so that you can catch-up, refresh your memory, have a few laughs, etc., before the May 10th launch of Season 19 on The Remembered Part. Here are the ...
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TMR Fresán Relisten Ep. 6: THE INVENTED PART [Pgs. 231-300]
Welcome to the Great Fresan Relisten of 2023! Over the next four weeks, we'll be reissuing an episode a day from the The Invented Part and The Dreamed Part seasons of TMR so that you can catch-up, refresh your memory, have a few laughs, etc., before the May 10th launch of Season 19 on The Remembered Part. Here are the ...
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TMR Fresán Relisten Ep. 5: THE INVENTED PART [Pgs. 208-230]
Welcome to the Great Fresan Relisten of 2023! Over the next four weeks, we'll be reissuing an episode a day from the The Invented Part and The Dreamed Part seasons of TMR so that you can catch-up, refresh your memory, have a few laughs, etc., before the May 10th launch of Season 19 on The Remembered Part. Here are the ...
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TMR Fresán Relisten Ep. 4: THE INVENTED PART [Pgs. 99-207]
Welcome to the Great Fresan Relisten of 2023! Over the next four weeks, we'll be reissuing an episode a day from the The Invented Part and The Dreamed Part seasons of TMR so that you can catch-up, refresh your memory, have a few laughs, etc., before the May 10th launch of Season 19 on The Remembered Part. Here are the ...
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TMR Fresán Relisten Ep. 3: THE INVENTED PART [Pgs. 46-98]
Welcome to the Great Fresan Relisten of 2023! Over the next four weeks, we'll be reissuing an episode a day from the The Invented Part and The Dreamed Part seasons of TMR so that you can catch-up, refresh your memory, have a few laughs, etc., before the May 10th launch of Season 19 on The Remembered Part. Here are the ...
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TMR Fresán Relisten Ep. 2: THE INVENTED PART [Pgs. 1-45]
Welcome to the Great Fresan Relisten of 2023! Over the next four weeks, we'll be reissuing an episode a day from the The Invented Part and The Dreamed Part seasons of TMR so that you can catch-up, refresh your memory, have a few laughs, etc., before the May 10th launch of Season 19 on The Remembered Part. Here are the ...
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TMR Fresán Relisten Ep. 1: THE INVENTED PART [Introduction]
Welcome to the Great Fresan Relisten of 2023! Over the next four weeks, we'll be reissuing an episode a day from the The Invented Part and The Dreamed Part seasons of TMR so that you can catch-up, refresh your memory, have a few laughs, etc., before the May 10th launch of Season 19 on The Remembered Part. This was our ...
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Season 19 of TMR: “The Remembered Part” by Rodrigo Fresán & Will Vanderhyden
Are you ready? Like, really, ARE YOU READY? We announced this months ago, but given the size of this book and all of the various reading obligations Brian and I have respectively had (writing, editing, teaching for him; editing, teaching, and Iceland prep for me), we wanted to wait until we could give this book the attention ...
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An Echo Chamber of One [Sustainability]
Hello! I am ChadGPT, an AI chat generator that has been asked to produce a blog post in the style of Chad W. Post, about the future of publishing. After ingesting over a thousand articles from this website, literally hundreds of thousands of (mostly coherent) text messages, and zero email responses (apparently Chad is 100% ...
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To All the Posts I Didn’t Write Last Year
If I could control space-time (a resolution for 2023 that's about as likely as the others I've made), I would have put in an additional 10 hours of research and data entry into the Translation Database before posting this. But knowing that I'll surely be crunched for time all this week, and next, and the week after, I figure ...
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TMR 18.10: “Looks Like a Lump of Shit to Me” [Ann Quin]
The final episode of this season focuses on The Unmapped Country: Stories and Fragments, focusing on the titular story/unfinished novel, along with a few other shorter pieces. The gang looks back at all of Ann Quin's books, speculate on what her career might have been had she lived another couple decades, whether of not she ...
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TMR 18.9: “Your Name? Your Trauma?” [Ann Quin]
Chad, Brian, and Kaija finish up their discussion of Tripticks, which basically devolves into reading out the funniest lines they can find from the this trippy-dippy, wild-ass ending. Some analysis is made of the deconstruction of male narratives, the Beats, the Dashiell Hammett of it all, and more, but come prepared for ...
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TMR 18.8: “No. 1 X-Wife” [Ann Quin]
NIGHTRIPPER!!!!!!!!! This week's music is "Dirty Boots" by Sonic Youth. You can watch next week's discussion of Tripticks live on YouTube. (Reading schedule can be found here.) And you can find all previous seasons of TMR on our YouTube channel. And you can support us at Patreon and get bonus content before anyone ...
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TMR 18.7: “I Would Like To Exhaust the Limits of the Possible” [Ann Quin]
Kaija Straumanis filled in for a domestically distressed Brian, and Chad went all psych0-philosophical on this week's episode, talking about schizoid personality splits, R. D. Laing, reading the various parts of Passages simultaneously, postulating wild hot takes, and saying "fuck off" to a wide swath of bad actors. (Looking ...
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TMR 18.6: “Forms Forming Themselves” [Ann Quin]
This week, Brian, Chad, and Kaija discuss the first half of Passages, arguable Quin's most poetic book, and definitely most experimental one to date. They talk about the way the two characters try to define themselves and create their identities, flow versus points, geometry and parallax, masks and threesomes, and more. It's ...
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TMR 18.5: “Reads Without Turning a Page” [Ann Quin]
Kaija Straumanis joins Chad and Brian this week to talk about orchids, hot takes (did S. sleep with L.?? how exactly did she die?), creepy British dudes, symmetry in Three, Ann Quin's statement on threesomes, the ambiguity of the text, and much more. This week's music is "What Went Down" by Foals. You can watch next ...
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TMR 18.4: “Pursuit to the Point of Indiscretion” [Ann Quin]
Chad and Bria dive into Three, discussing the humor of the dialogue, the poetic-cinematic techniques Quin employs, monogamy and marriage, whether or not L was a collaborationist or worse, the importance of the number three, the play-like elements of the books, anti-mimetic writing, and much more. It's a fun episode complete ...
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TMR 18.3: “Why This Eternal Escaping?” [Ann Quin]
Dead dummies, drowned tramps, resolving the Oedipal complex, the forever incompleteness of the number "3," sex, the sea, slapstick comedy, irony, competing desires of domesticity versus the desire to escape, the beautiful ending and the reverse coda, and much more is discussed on this episode covering the whole of Ann Quin's ...
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TMR 18.2: “BUY BERG’S BEST HAIR TONIC” [Ann Quin]
Chad and Brian dive into the first half of Berg this episode, mispronouncing words, talking about the literary scene Quin came out of, whether or not Berg/Greb is an incel, the humor found in the book, and more. (Inevitably there's a dig at Ohio somewhere in this recording.) This week's music is "When a Woman Is Around" ...
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TMR 18.1: Who Was Ann Quin?
The eighteenth season of the Two Month Review is all about Ann Quin's books—all four novels and her collected stories and fragments—and starts off with an overview of who she was, the context of experimental British writing in the 1960s, how/why Quin has been underappreciated, some info on supplementary critical ...
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Season 18 of the Two Month Review: Ann Quin Is the Missing Link
Before we get into this post, I just wanted to congratulate Annie Ernaux and all of her publishers and translators on winning the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature. She's a legend, and I have a special place in my heart for Cleaned Out, since that was a Dalkey book. (And the first of hers I read.) And also want to send a shout ...
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TMR 17.8: “On This Bed, On This Same Mattress” [Eltit + Hahn]
In the final episode of this season of the Two Month Review, Brian, Chad, and Katie debate whether or not our narrator is in limbo, whether or not this book has a point, what revolution looks like today, and much more. (Chad checks out about 1/2 way through, which, to be honest, makes the episode smarter.) If you're a ...
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TMR 17.7: “I Erased Your Face” [Eltit + Hahn]
Katie and Chad tackle this section alone, discussing the revolutionary background of the main characters, going off into Bernadine Dohrn, the SDS, the Weather Underground, and direct action. They also talk about the timeline—as far as they understand it—the challenges of translating legal terms, Danny's multiple read ...
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TMR 17.6: “The Letters Defeated You” [Eltit + Hahn]
In addition to talking about the Trump/Tesla/Lockwood conspiracy theory, our hosts this week discuss "bone avalanches," how translators are paid, the global literary network available for "experimental" books translated into English, "runts," Lativa's obsession with MILF graffiti, "catching fire," and driving a convertible ...
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TMR 17.5: “Our Organicity” [Eltit + Hahn]
Chad and Brian go it alone and discuss "navel gazing" novels, books that entertain vs. ones about the prose, where Eltit's novel resides on that spectrum, Tommy Pham slapping Joc Peterson, shit in the bed, and much more. This week's music is "It Was Us" by Arms and Sleepers. If you like what you hear, review, rate, and ...
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TMR 17.4: “I Watched the Death Machine” [Eltit + Hahn]
Technical difficulties are kept to a minimum on this week's episode, as Chad, Brian, and Katie talk about the advancement of plot, the French New Novel, the title and its translation, the body, trauma, touching eyeballs, and more. This week's music is "Monday" by The Regrettes. If you like what you hear, review, rate, ...
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TMR 17.3: “Mónica & Carlos & Tony” [Eltit + Hahn]
In lieu of a live episode, this week's TMR features interviews with Mónica Ramón Ríos and Carlos Labbé about their relationship with Diamela Eltit and her role in Chilean letters. That's followed by a conversation with Tony Malone (of Tony's Reading List) about the two books under discussion this season and the Shadow Man ...
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TMR 17.2: “Pure Hatred” [Eltit + Hahn]
Technical difficulties abound as Chad struggles to find reliable Wifi in Latvia. (While being recruited by the Russian mafia?) Katie and Brian take the lead this episode, discussing the next few chapters of Never Did the Fire, gendered adjectives and information, Marxist groups and analysis, and much more. Also: Stay tuned ...
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TMR 17.1: “You Behaved Like a Dog” [Eltit + Hahn]
TMR is back, breaking down Daniel Hahn's translation diary, Catching Fire, alongside his translation of Never Did the Fire by Diamela Eltit. In this episode, they contextualize Eltit and this particular book, talk about intentional ambiguity, Franco and Pinochet, action vs. analysis, bad and hard to eat rice, and ...
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Three Percent #187: Is This The End?
After a two-year hiatus, Chad and Tom are back! In this episode—maybe the final one of this particular scope and format—they talk about what's gone on over the past couple years, how much printing sucks right now, distribution issues, Fum d'Estampa, ELADATL: A History of the East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport ...
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Season 17 of the Two Month Review Brings the Fire
It's been a minute, but we're coming back on May 4th with the all new, all fire season of the Two Month Review. Before getting into the books for this season, we have a couple of announcements. First off, we now have a twitter account just for Two Month Review, so please please follow us. Also, following the trend of ...
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Time Must Have a Stop
I haven't been feeling much like myself lately. Doubt anyone has, what with COVID time making everything take twice as long and be four times as frustrating, with Putin being, well, a massive, invasive dick, with inflation the highest it's been since I was five years old, and with no spring baseball. [UPDATE: Baseball is ...
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TMR 16.13: “Fürst Pückler” [2666]
We've reached the end of 2666 and Chad, Katie, and Brian convene to talk about how amazing the ending is, publishers protecting authors, love and family, the book being a "love letter to literature," the circular nature of the book, and James Joyce. This week's music is "Swoonn" by The Chemical Brothers. If you'd ...
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TMR 16.12: “Senselessness” [2666]
Chad and Brian talk about more vampires, about semen, about senseless scene after senseless scene, about WWII, about masterpieces and mediocre writing, about publisher laments, and about other things. This week's music is "Damn These Vampires" by The Mountain Goats. (The Jordan Lake Sessions version, specifically.) If ...
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TMR 16.11: “Hello, Big German” [2666]
We're in the home stretch, as Archimboldi appears at last. Chad, Katie, and Brian discuss his origin story, vampires, seaweed, the nature of time, various echoes appearing in this final section, what Bolaño might be saying about himself as a writer through Hans Reiter, and masturbation. Here's a link to the blog post ...
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TMR 16.10: “Three Men and a Congresswoman” [2666]
Chad and Brian tackle the braided narratives that close out "The Part About the Crimes," discussing Michel Butor's thoughts about detective novels (from Passing Time) and the "rules" laid out in 20 Master Plots: And How to Build Them against 2666. Some interesting observations about what the core "mystery" of the book ...
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TMR 16.9: “Repetition” [2666]
Brian's back to talk about dead baby jokes, repetition, the power of reading, snuff films, matriarchal lineage, and much more. Chad didn't sleep before this episode, which explains some of the wackiness. This week's music is "World Gone Deaf" by Bill Baird. If you'd prefer to watch the conversation, you can find it on ...
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TMR 16.8: “Klaus Haas” [2666]
Chad and Katie go it alone on this special Thanksgiving episode, going deeper into "The Part About the Crimes," talking about Chris Andrews's critical book on Bolaño's fiction (in particular the ideas about aimlessness and narrative identity), about Klaus Haas's arrest, about the failure—and disinterest—of most police ...
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TMR 16.7: “The Next Dead Woman” [2666]
Chad, Brian, and Katie dive into "The Part About the Crimes," talking about the fact that the Penitent gets more detective time than all of the murdered women, about the seer, about ventriloquism, about Lalo Cura, and about the existence of Ciudad Juárez in 2666. This week's music is "Highlights of 100" by Kiwi ...
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TMR 16.6: “Fire, Walk With Me” [2666]
After Chad, Katie, and Brian finish recapping the end of "The Part About Fate"—including the Twin Peaks reference, representations of violence, the apocryphal Robert Rodriguez porno, blindness and impaired sight, and much more—they're joined by Dr. Andrew Martino, a massive Bolaño fan who raises more questions and ...
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TMR 16.5: “DANGER MONEY FOOD STARS USEFULNESS” [2666]
In the first chunk of this week's episode, Brian, Chad, and Katie break down the first half of "The Part About Fate" and look specifically at Kessler's speech in the diner, the areas of exploitative capitalism, femicide and how it's everywhere, the idea of a system that kills, and much more. (They literally run out of time.) ...
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TMR 16.4: “Ramon Llull and His Fantastic Machine” [2666]
This two-part episode opens with Katie, Brian, and Chad talking about madness, the pursuit of knowledge, what great authors "struggle against," and much more. Then, Chad and Katie are joined by Emily Hall (The Longcut) to discuss the art works on the covers of the three-volume edition of 2666, along with Duchamp, ...
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TMR 16.3: “El Cerdo” [2666]
One of the brainiest TMRs to date, this episode talks a lot about doubles and mirrors in 2666, religious iconography, coincidence vs. fate, disappearances and vanishing, the creeping horror found in this novel, the abyss and the void, musicals, and much more. Brian, Chad, and Katie cover the entirely of "The Part About the ...
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TMR 16.2: “Can Anyone Solve the Riddle?” [2666]
This week's episode opens with 'Professor Post" poking a bit of fun at academics, then dives headfirst into the first 75 pages of 2666. Brian, Katie, and Chad talk about the representation of Liz Norton, of the voids that exist in 2666, the religious experience of becoming obsessed with an author, violence, made up books, ...
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TMR 16.1: “Roberto Bolaño Overview” [2666]
Season 16 is here! At long last, Bolaño's 2666 takes center stage, and Chad and Brian are joined by translator and Bolaño enthusiast, Katie Whittemore. In this opening episode, they discuss the myth-making of Bolaño's biography, they talk about sudden fame, the grind of the artist, and of the way that everything is ...
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Season 16 of the Two Month Review: “2666” by Roberto Bolaño
2666 has been a potential TMR title right from the jump and now, years after launching this podcast, we're finally going to tackle one of the most discussed and admired works of Latin American literature of the past century, translated by Natasha Wimmer: "Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolaño's life, 2666 was ...
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TMR 15.15: “The End” [Vernon Subutex]
Chad and Brian recap the wild end to Vernon Subutex, debate whether it was predictable or not, whether Despentes earned it or not, and what to make of the proto-history chapter that rounds out the trilogy. And, in classic TMR fashion, the episode ends abruptly when Chad's wifi suddenly dies. (Technical difficulties for the ...
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TMR 15.14: “And Then Evil Showed Its Face” [Vernon Subutex]
Covering what's probably the most disturbing section of Vernon Subutex, this is an intense, fairly dark episode of the Two Month Review. They discuss how the most evil character is a manager/agent, about how men are everywhere, ready to ruin things, and much more. On the upside, Chad and Brian recorded early in the morning, ...
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Edith Bruck: Recounting the Holocaust Until She Can’t
Il Pane Perduto by Edith Bruck (La Nave di Teseo, 2021) Review by Jeanne Bonner When Edith Bruck was 12 years old, she was deported to Auschwitz, and was immediately separated from her mother in a brutal scene. In her new memoir, Bruck writes that later, after being yanked away, another prisoner who had been at the camp ...
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TMR 15.13: “Gangland Shooting” [Vernon Subutex]
Chad almost had to do this episode solo, but all of you were spared that catastrophe by Kaija Straumanis and David Smith (whose delay makes for some funny moments). The talk about what you would do for $100 million dollars, what most terrifies them, fear in general, Max as Lex Luthor, and much more. This week's music is ...
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TMR 15.12: “New Age Bullshit” [Vernon Subutex]
Kate Sherrod joined Chad and Brian on this episode to talk about the TV show version of Vernon Subutex, about which characters she's missing the most, and why this section dragged a bit. A very fun—and fruitful—discussion that lead to a better understanding of how this volume is constructed. This week's music is ...
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Translation Jobs [Granta]
Following on the first two posts about the latest Granta issue of "Best Young Spanish-language Novelists," I thought I'd take another crack at trying to define success, this time through the lens of the translators included in the two issues. This might be the most controversial approach to date (I do have two more that ...
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“Last Words on Earth” by Javier Serena and Katie Whittemore [Excerpt]
Last Words on Earth by Javier Serena, translated from the Spanish by Katie Whittemore (September 21, 2022) Eventually, the professor redirected the conversation toward more exotic subjects: he asked Funes to tell me about negacionismo, a poetic movement Funes had apparently founded as an adolescent in Mexico, where he ...
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Dainerys Machado Vento & Will Vanderhyden [Granta]
In addition to a series of posts about the 25 pieces in the new Granta, I asked a handful of the translators to provide short videos introducing the piece they worked on for the issue and reading a section from it. And today we have a special treat! First up is a video of Will Vanderhyden reading from his translation of ...
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TMR 15.9: “You Shouldn’t Have Hurt My Mother” [Vernon Subutex]
Chad and Brian get into some fun and vengeful parts of Vernon Subutex 2 this week, talking about Gaëll, the proliferation of diereses in this section, getting revenge, Vernon's magical music, and more. This week's music is "The Modern World" by The Jam. If you'd prefer to watch the conversation, you can find it on ...
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Three Percent #186: Italian Science Fiction
In this special episode, Chad talks with Rachel Cordasco about a new Three Percent project focusing on translators as curators. Over the course of the next month, we'll be posting a number of different types of posts—excerpts, profiles, readings, shorter podcasts, movie clips—using the five works of Italian science ...
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TMR 15.8: “Bourgeois Shitdick!” [Vernon Subutex]
Kaija Straumanis pinch hits this week to talk about Céleste, about spray painting insults, the best forms of revenge, how to upend a system, and whether of not a good dad can be an alcoholic. This episode is a great prelude to one of the major plot points of the trilogy, so listen to this and get ready for next week . . ...
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Robin Myers Reading Mateo García Elizondo [Granta]
In addition to a series of posts about the 25 pieces in the new Granta, I asked a handful of the translators to provide short videos introducing the piece they worked on for the issue and reading a section from it. Our last reader of the week is Robin Myers, who translated Mateo García Elizondo's "Capsule." ...
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Frances Riddle Reading Martín Felipe Castagnet [Granta]
In addition to a series of posts about the 25 pieces in the new Granta, I asked a handful of the translators to provide short videos introducing the piece they worked on for the issue and reading a section from it. Up today is Frances Riddle, who translated Martín Felipe Castagnet's "Our Windowless Home." ...
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Kevin Gerry Dunn Reading Cristina Morales [Granta]
In addition to a series of posts about the 25 pieces in the new Granta, I asked a handful of the translators to provide short videos introducing the piece they worked on for the issue and reading a section from it. Next up is Kevin Gerry Dunn, who translated Cristina Morales's "Ode to Cristina Morales." ...
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Statistical Noise [Granta]
It took a few more days than I had hoped, but I have officially read all twenty-five pieces included in this new Granta issue. (I wonder how many people actually do read it from cover to cover. And what percentage that is of all the copies in circulation. God, I'll bet that number is depressing, whether it's Granta, ...
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TMR 15.7: “You Don’t Look Your Best” [Vernon Subutex]
Derek Maine returns for his second appearance this season to talk about Alex Bleach's tapes, Vodka Satana's death, how the system is rigged, horrible men, the complications of passing judgement, Motörhead, mushroom powder, and much more. This is a pretty key episode, as the trilogy veers into detective novel territory, and ...
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Three Percent #185: More Granta!
Veronica Esposito joined Chad and Valerie Miles to continue talking about Granta's second list of "Best Young Spanish-language Novelists." They talk about some of the recent Spanish reviews—and criticisms—of the list, about writing the periphery, about science-fiction and the differences between the 2010 list and the ...
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Kelsi Vanada Reading Andrea Chapela [Granta]
In addition to a series of posts about the 25 pieces in the new Granta, I asked a handful of the translators to provide short videos introducing the piece they worked on for the issue and reading a section from it. First up is Kelsi Vanada, who translated Andrea Chapela's "Borromean Rings." ...
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TMR 15.6: “Looking for Subutex” [Vernon Subutex]
Chad and Brian go it alone this week to talk about whether this is one book or three (or three "seasons" of one book), or how Xavier and Patrice are both awful people but in entirely different ways, the breadth of characterization in Despentes's writing, all the jokes you can make knowing "Subutex" is Methadone, how to ...
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The Predictive Success of Listmaking [Granta]
Let's start by saying what really shouldn't need to be said: Being included in one of Granta's "Best Young XXX Novelists" special issues is an incredible honor. These come out once a decade, with four iterations of "best young" British novelists, three for American writers, and, as of this month, two for Spanish-language ...
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TMR 15.5: “I Am a Hobo Perched on a Hill” [Vernon Subutex]
Translator Frank Wynne joins Chad and Brian to talk about slang, about yummy mummies, about why Vernon's pseudonym is so weird, and much much more. This is an episode as much about translating and reading as it is about the book proper, and is definitely worth listening to. This week's music is "Waiting Room" by ...
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Three Percent #184: Valerie Miles on Granta’s Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists 2
To kick off a month of features on the new Granta "Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists" issue, Chad talked with editor/translator Valerie Miles about the process of selecting these 25 authors amid a pandemic, about the shifts in demographics between the first list (from 2010) and this one, about voice and the ...
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TMR 15.4: “Marxist Hells Angel” [VERNON SUBUTEX]
Translator Katie Whittemore (Four by Four, The Communist's Daughter, World's Best Mother, Last Words on Earth) joins Chad and Brian to talk about the horrible actions of Patrice, and whether he could be redeemed, about childbirth, about Aïcha and Hyena, and about Disney. Funny and cutting, this episode explores the book's ...
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TMR 15.3: “Vodka Satana” [VERNON SUBUTEX]
Caitlin Luce Baker of Island Books joins Chad and Brian to talk about a very nicely framed section of Vernon Subutex. We get introduced to Aïcha, who has, through Pamela Kant, just found out that her mom was a porn star before her death. (And had a fling with Alex Bleach.) We also get to see how the Hyena works (kind of), ...
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TMR 15.2: “Yummy Mummy or MILF” [VERNON SUBUTEX]
Emma Ramadan—translator of Despentes's Pretty Things and Anne Garreta (among many others), and recent winner of the PEN Translation Prize—joins Brian and Chad to talk about how cool Despentes is, and how much slang she uses in her work. They also discuss the conflict that will drive the plot (Laurent Dopalet vs. ...
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TMR 15.1: “Alexandre Bleach Is Dead” [VERNON SUBUTEX]
The fifteenth iteration of the Two Month Review kicks off in a big way, giving a quick overview of Virginie Despentes's life and work for Brian, and then launching into the wonderful world Despentes constructs filled with characters who are past their prime, who are flawed and don't hide their warts. The subtle ways in which ...
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Season 15 of the Two Month Review: “Vernon Subutex” by Virginie Despentes
Following on the sprawling, propulsive, voice-driven masterpiece J R, we're turning to another amazing assemblage of unforgettable characters in Virginie Despentes's Vernon Subutex trilogy. Here's the description of Volume 1: From the provocative writer and filmmaker Virginie Despentes comes volume one of her acclaimed ...
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TMR 14.11: “Hey . . . You Listening?” [J R]
The final episode of the season! First off, Chad and Brian wrap things up, and preview season 15 (Virginie Despentes's Vernon Subutex trilogy, coming in April!), then Nick Sullivan talks to Chad about recording the audiobook, how he got into that business in the first place, the challenges of recording a book like this, and ...
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TMR 14.10: “Hoppin’ with Flavor!”
Kaija Straumanis joins Chad and Brian this week to talk about toxic masculinity, the genius of the J R audiobook, Bach, "up yours, up mine," connections to Pynchon, shit & money & the American Dream, and the implosion of J R's paper empire. This week's music is "Deadlines (Hostile)" by Car Seat Headrest. If ...
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TMR 14.9: “J R Shipping Corp”
This week, Sam Rutter and Nick During join Chad for a long, sprawling discussion of J R, of the interesting quote Joy Williams attributes to Gaddis instead of Gibbs, of Gibbs's knowledge of financial doings, of how great Rhoda is as a character, and so so much more. This is the longest episode to date, but also one of the ...
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TMR 14.8: “$$$$$$$$” [J R]
Chad and Brian talk about church parking lots, relationship entropy, millionaires, corporate logos ("Just Rite"), the uneasy alliance of art and commerce, and much more on this week's episode. This week's music is "Highlights of 100" by Kiwi Jr. If you'd prefer to watch the conversation, you can find it on YouTube along ...
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TMR 14.7: “Alsaka” [J R]
Dan O'Brien (The House in Scarsdale, A Story that Happens) joins the podcast this week to talk about J R from a playwriting perspective. Lots of interesting insights in this episode, about theater, about the relationship between art and commerce in the book, and about GameStop. This week's music is "Our Life Is Not a ...
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TMR 14.6: “A Strolling Game of Pocket Billiards” [J R]
Chad and Brian go it alone this week, and prove that even the most claustrophobic sections (trigger warning for anyone who grew up with hoarders) of J R are also riotously funny. They also don't understand money or business, but no one else in the book seems to either . . . There's also a lot of talk about Gibbs's footwear ...
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TMR 14.5: “Eagle Mills Employees’ Glee Club” [J R]
Rodrigo Fresan (The Dreamed Part) joins Chad and Brian to talk about one of his favorite authors and books. There's good banter, some insight into J R, tell a (false) story about Fire the Bastards!, and generally try and entertain you. If you'd prefer to watch the conversation, you can find it on YouTube along with all ...
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BTBA #1: GUANTANAMO by Dorothea Dieckmann and Tim Mohr
The year-long Best Translated Book Award retrospective kicks off with this episode featuring the very first winner of the BTBA: Guantanamo by Dorothea Dieckmann, translated from the German by Tim Mohr and published by Soft Skull. There are three discussions on this episode: Chad W. Post and Patrick Smith talk about the ...
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TMR 14.4: “Who Made the Rules” [J R]
Ryan Chapman (Riots I Have Known) joins Chad and Brian to crap on Jonathan Franzen's "famous" "essay" about Gaddis, "Mr. Difficult." They also talk about the casual sexism present in so many of the male characters, the parallels and reversals connecting various scenes, just how funny and readable this book is, and the ...
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TMR 14.3: “Stamp Out Smut” [J R]
Vince Francone made his TMR debut on this episode about one of the funniest sections of J R to date. They talk about the dirty photos, how the book isn't as challenging as its reputation indicates, the maybe incest scene, shitting in a piano, and much more. If you'd prefer to watch the conversation, you can find it on ...
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Three Percent #183: Sound on Sound on Sound
The first new Three Percent Podcast since May! This is an episode all about sound and curation—in books, in music. It's unlike all the previous episodes, featuring three readings and two interviews. Here are all the songs featured on this episode: Without Me Americana The Pull of You Impossible Weight Living ...
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Christmas Eve at Dixie Truck Stop [Dear Editor]
In the early 2000s, a number of issues of the Review of Contemporary Fiction featured "Letters to the Editor." It was a poorly kept secret that all of these—the letters and responses—were written by John O'Brien. Obsessed with failing marriages and sad sack lives, these letters are wonderful bits of satire and voice, ...
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TMR 14.2: “How to Make Big Profits Overseas” [J R]
First time Gaddis reader Elizabeth DeMeo from Tin House joins Chad and Brian to talk about J R's field trip to the New York Stock Exchange where his class buys a share of Diamond Cable stock. In addition to recapping this somewhat chaotic segment—just imagine twelve sixth graders loose in NYC—they talk about Gaddis's ...
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TMR 14.1: “Money?” [J R]
Chad, Mauro Javier Cardenas (Aphasia), and NYRB publisher Edwin Frank kick off season 14 by talking about entropy, Gaddis's humor, how best to approach reading this book (fast and out of control), the little plot hints that are left to figure out, the lack of interiority in J R and how he develops characters and voice, and ...
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TMR Season Fourteen: “J R” by William Gaddis
To celebrate the NYRB reissue of J R by William Gaddis—one of my all-time favorite books—we're going to feature it as the next title in the Two Month Review. The full schedule is below, but in short, the first live episode will be on Wednesday, December 16th at 3pm eastern (available as a podcast the next ...
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TMR 13.12: “Time, Science Fiction, Heaven & Hell” [ADA, OR ARDOR]
This is a bonus episode in which Chad and Brian talk about three different essays on Ada, two boring ones by academic males, and an incredible chapter from Azar Nafisi's That Other World. There is good banter, a lot of jokes, and a true appreciation for this novel. Plus, Chad throws down a very unpopular hot take at the end ...
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TMR 13.11: “Instantogram” [ADA, OR ARDOR]
After a bit of business banter about publishing mergers and the future of books, Chad and Brian break down the final two parts of Ada, or Ardor, debating the purpose of the book as a whole, whether the ending "works," the unreliable unreliableness of Van Veen, and much more. On next week's episode, they'll talk about three ...
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TMR 13.10: “Madhouse Babble” [ADA, OR ARDOR]
As Chad and Brian finish part III of Ada, or Ardor, they talk about Ada and Van's reunion, the passage of time within this book, moustaches, who knows what about whom, and much more. This week's music is "Endless Night" by Holy Motors. If you'd prefer to watch the conversation, you can find it on YouTube along with all ...
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Best Translated Book Award 2021
Over the past year, we (mostly me and Patrick Smith) have been discussing ways to tweak the Best Translated Book Awards to continue to serve the international literature community in a way that can supplement the other major translation awards out there. When the pandemic hit and the world went on pause, we realized that we ...
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TMR 13.9: “Pale Fire with Tom Cox Up” [ADA, OR ARDOR]
Following a long discussion about what actually happens on this podcast (spoiler: definitely not critical analysis), Chad and Brian dive into Part III of Ada, or Ardor, asking what the point of whole book is, what type of fragmented postmodernism Nabokov is playing with, the passage of time and action in this novel, and the ...
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TMR 13.8: “Vinelander” [ADA, OR ARDOR]
In a rather subdued (re: election night hangover) episode, Chad and Brian discuss the relationship between cinema and writing, photos and memory, and what seems to be Nabokov's relationship to movies as art. They also talk about the screwball comedy nature of Van and Ada being found out, discuss the way in which part II ...
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TMR 13.7: “From Dodo to Dada” [ADA, OR ARDOR]
From the International House of Prostitutes to the reunion of Ada and Van, this week's episode is quite a trip. Chad and Brian talk about dreams, John Garner, Martin Amis on "obscure" and "difficult" novels, how to actually pronounce Van, and much more. This week's music is "Money" by Widowspeak. If you'd prefer to ...
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The Hole vs. The Hole vs. Algorithms vs. Booksellers
Although it's still hard to get truly excited about writing—and harder to imagine anyone reading this, given all that's going on in the world—it was pretty fun working on that last post about October titles that I wish I had the time and attention to read. So, why not do it again? Even if these posts are shambolic and ...
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TMR 13.6: “Star Rats and Space Aces” [ADA, OR ARDOR]
Chad and Brian wrap up Part One of Ada, or Ardor—which features a duel, multiple deaths, an existential diatribe, and canes—and move onto Part Two, which is very Pynchon-esque. They get to dive into Van's "philosophical novel," ideas of time, questions about Terra, and much more. This episode is as fun and wild as the ...
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Why I Haven’t Written Any of My Posts
The other night, when I first attempted to write this post, I was shocked to find that the last "real" post I'd written (the nutty Baudrillard in the Time of COVID/Baseball is Back! experiment), posted on July 29th. July! That was almost three months ago. Where did the time go? And why haven't I written anything since ...
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TMR 13.5: “The Accursed Children” [ADA, OR ARDOR]
A family dinner, a picnic in the woods—what could be more innocent? Well, in Ada, or Ardor, everything is tinged with a baseline feeling of "kind of creepy," especially the "passionate pump-joy exertions." Chad and Brian break it all down, talking about Demon, unraveling Nabokovian puns, finding subtle hints about Van's ...
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TMR 13.4: “Terra: Eremitic Reality of Collective Dream?” [ADA, OR ARDOR]
Things shift in Ada, or Ardor this week, with Van's second trip to Ardis being much darker, much more perverse and troubling than the first, "more innocent" summer with Ada. There's also another couple hints about Terra, and the possiblity of Ada having another lover . . . And, as is par for the course, some amazing writing ...
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TMR 13.3: “Lettrocalamity” [ADA, OR ARDOR]
Chad and Brian cover a ton of topics in this relatively short episode including: Adam and Eve, botany, butterflies, the Wild West, enchantment, incest, codes, and Bosom Buddies. It's a fun episode filled with lyrical Nabokovian passages and speculation about what's to come in this sprawling novel. And Isak, Brian's ...
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TMR 13.2 “Hammock and Honey” [ADA, OR ARDOR]
Rodrigo Fresán (The Invented Part, The Dreamed Part, Bottom of the Sky) joins Chad and Brian to talk about the only Nabokov book he hasn't read. In addition to talking about all the reasons to love Nabokov, about how this book is the one where he actually seems to be measuring himself against the all time greats, they talk ...
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Five Questions with Jordan Stump
My plan for this short interview—along with the ones I have scheduled for the rest of the month—was to write about Igifu by Scholastique Mukasonga and That Time of Year by Marie NDiaye earlier in the week (along with a few other French books) as a way of providing a context for this interview. I did end up writing ...
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TMR 13.1 “All Happy Families” [ADA, OR ARDOR]
Chad and Brian try their best to unpack the first three chapters of Vladimir Nabokov's Ada, or Ardor, in an attempt to find some solid footing for this sci-fi (?), ambitious, reference-laded masterwork of one of the greatest writers of our times. Lots of questions about where we are (Terra or Anti-Terra?); mirrors; the ...
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“The Adventures and Misadventures of the Extraordinary and Admirable Joan Orpí, Conquistador and Founder of New Catalonia” by Max Besora and Mara Faye Lethem
In honor of the Catalan Fellowship organized by the Institut Ramon Lllul and taking place virtually this week, I thought I would share the opening of next Catalan title to come out from Open Letter: The Adventures and Misadventures of the Extraordinary and Admirable Joan Orpí, Conquistador and Founder of New Catalonia by Max ...
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Death and Afterlife in September 2020
Dead Girls by Selva Almada, translated from the Spanish by Annie McDermott (Charco Press) Yesterday, on Twitter, I promised that the rest of this month's posts on new books in translation would be way more positive, but, well, sorry everyone—I momentarily forgot which books I was planning on writing about today (and ...
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2020 Has Been Rather Suboptimal
I can't imagine I'm the only person who feels like they haven't been their best work self over the course of the past six months. We all have acedia. Some days are foggy, others start out fine and then you find out that your local police department killed a black man in MARCH and just released the information about it. I ...
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Let’s Try This Instead
Now that I've taught a few hybrid sessions of my "Intro to Literary Publishing" class, I can confirm that teaching during COVID is WEIRD. So weird. (And not just because I couldn't figure out the technology on day one, or because I can't hear the students very well without being able to see their faces. Although both of those ...
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TMR Season Thirteen: “Ada, or Ardor” by Vladimir Nabokov
The public has spoken, and the next book to be featured in the Two Month Review is Ada, or Ardor by Vladimir Nabokov! Which is kind of perfect. We follow the thread of Anna Karenina from The Book of Anna by Carmen Boullosa to this novel, originally written in 1969, which opens: "All happy families are more or less ...
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“The Discomfort of Evening” by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld [#WITMonth]
In an amazing coincidence, we were already planning on running this excerpt from The Discomfort of Evening today as part of our Women in Translation Month coverage, and lo and behold, the book just happened to win the International Man Booker this morning! Congrats to Marieke Lucas Rijneveld and Michele Hutchison, and to ...
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Spanish-Language Speculative Fiction by Women in Translation. [#WITMonth]
Today's post is by Rachel Cordasco, founder and curator of Speculative Fiction in Translation, co-translator of Creative Surgery by Clelia Farris, and is working on a book about speculative fiction from around the world. Despite 2020 being a downright awful year, it has given us several excellent works of ...
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A SINGLE SWALLOW by Zhang Ling [#WITMonth]
A Single Swallow by Zhang Ling, translated from the Chinese by Shelly Bryant (AmazonCrossing) Forthcoming on October 1st from AmazonCrossing, A Single Swallow by Zhang Ling, the award-winning author of nine novels along with several short story collections. Here's the jacket copy: On the day of the historic 1945 ...
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TMR 12.12 “Finale” [THE BOOK OF ANNA]
Carmen Boullosa joined Chad and Brian this week to talk about The Book of Anna, memories of watching baseball, why she (today) supports Karenin and thinks Anna K made a mistake with Vronsky, the origin and structure of the novel, her system of having a book in the queue before the previous one is published, and much ...
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TMR 12.11 “The Book of Anna” [THE BOOK OF ANNA]
Translator and Words Without Borders co-founder Samantha Schnee joined Chad and Brian this week to talk about Anna's "opium-fueled" fairy tale that was referenced in passing in Anna Karenina, and a centerpiece of Boullosa's "sequel." A lively conversation about language, various Tolstoy translations, the book's origin, ways ...
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New Spanish Literature: 10 of 30 [#WITMonth]
As part of the buildup to being Guest of Honor at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2021, the Spanish government launched a program last year under the (possibly confusing) name of "10 of 30." The plan is that each year, a new anthology featuring ten authors in their 30s will be released—all of which are translated by Katie ...
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TMR 12.10 “Karenina’s Portrait” [THE BOOK OF ANNA]
After talking a bit about Women in Translation Month and the voting process for choosing the Season 13 title, Chad and Brian get into the twisty nature of Part III of The Book of Anna, in which Anna's portrait is given to the tsar, and Leo Tolstoy appears in the dreams of two characters, both to berate them and make a case ...
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Open Letter Sale [#WITMonth]
This post is a bit of a cheat so that I can get caught back up tomorrow with my "post a day" promise, but I want to make sure that everyone knows that for all of August we're offering 40% off on all Open Letter books written by women OR translated by women. All you need to do is use WITMONTH at checkout. Here's a complete ...
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An Interview with Karen Sotelino [#WITMonth]
For today's Women in Translation post, we're going to highlight a female translator, Karen Sherwood Sotelino. Sotelino translates from Portuguese and has worked on a couple incredibly big names in Brazilian literature—Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis and Raduan Nassar. A few years back, she gave this interview with Luciana ...
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Polish Reportage [#WITMonth]
Starting in 2021, Open Letter will be launching a "Polish Reportage" series. This came out of a trip I made to Krakow back in 2017 (when the Astros cheated their way to a World Series, which, remember when that mattered?) to attend the Conrad Festival and meet with a variety of authors, editors, and the like. I've always been ...
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A Very Incomplete List of Books by Women in Translation in 2020 [#WITMonth]
I know that I'm a day behind—trying to make up for that right now—but my goal for Women in Translation Month 2020 is to post something each and every day of the month related to this topic. I'm inviting any and all readers, translators, publishers to contribute to this and, with a lot of luck a bit of work, we should have ...
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TMR 12.9 “Bloody Sunday” [THE BOOK OF ANNA]
This week's episode is one of the more political ones to date, as Chad and Brian talk about Russia's "Bloody Sunday," comparing the Tsar's actions to Trump and what's going on in Portland. (They also sigh loudly over his most recent attempt to stoke racial and class anger.) They talk about the pacing and balance between these ...
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Baudrillard in the Time of COVID / Baseball Is Back!
There are two types of people who read these posts: people into international literature who like baseball, and those who don’t. What follows is an experiment—one that might not work at all. Before you get started, you have a choice: 1) if you hate genuine writing about baseball, then click here, where I’ve edited ...
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Baudrillard in the Time of COVID
There’s never been a better time to read Baudrillard. There’s also never been a worse. Thanks to quarantine, the unprecedented nature of this situation, Trump, government response to the protests—everything feels like an illusion. Not an illusion in the sense that “nothing is physically realm,” although one could ...
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Baseball Is Back!
The other day, the Major League Baseball season—or, rather, “season,” given that it’s 60 games; given that instead of ten teams making the playoffs, sixteen will, which is more than half the league; that every extra inning starts with a runner on 2nd base, which is very weird; and, obviously, COVID protocols and a ...
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TMR 12.8 “Anna’s Sergei and Anya’s City” [THE BOOK OF ANNA]
The final part of season 12 kicks off with Chad and Brian discussing the first part of Carmen Boullosa's The Book of Anna, translated from the Spanish by Samantha Schnee and published by Coffee House. Chad gives a brief recap of Leo Tolstoy's novella, Anna Karenina, then they discuss how and what type of sequel this is, get ...
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TMR 12.7: “Heroes and Mercenaries” [FOUR BY FOUR]
Katie Whittemore joins on this episode to refute a list of crazy fan theories about Four by Four, and to talk about the difficulties of translating a book in which there's really no where to hide. Chad also shares some new, bad, jacket copy, and makes a pitch for one of Katie's next books to come out: World's Best ...
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TMR 12.6: “A Substitute’s Diary, Part II” [FOUR BY FOUR]
ALTA executive director and Arabic translator (Minor Detail), Lissie Jaquette joined Chad and Brian to talk about Bedragare's breakdown and all the events in the second half of his journal. They also wonder what the "mystery" of the novel is, and talk about various (possibly nutty) theories about who killed Lux and Ledesma. ...
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TMR 12.5: “A Substitute’s Diary, Part I” [FOUR BY FOUR]
After being taken over by Chad's daughter, the podcast gets back on track, and Chad and Derek Maine (Read the World YouTube channel) break down the first half of part two of Four by Four, talking about the ways in which power structures are replicated, the increasing scope of the novel's construction, reading between the ...
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TMR 12.4: “Never More Than Two Hundred” [FOUR BY FOUR]
This week's episode kicks off the four-week discussion of Four by Four by Sara Mesa, translated from the Spanish by Katie Whittemore. A great book for our time (for all times) in relationship to power structures and their systems. And whether it's better to be "free and vulnerable or protected but under control." In this ...
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Propose a Session or Reading for ALTA 43
Proposal Deadline: July 6 Click here to submit a proposal. The ALTA Conference Committee invites proposals for readings and sessions for ALTA's 43rd annual conference. ALTA43: "In Between" will take place virtually in fall 2020, and we’ve moved back our proposal deadline to give us all time to adapt to our new ...
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TMR 12.3 “Scenes from the Spectral Zone” [CARS ON FIRE]
On this episode of the Two Month Review, translator Robin Myers joins Chad and Brian to talk about her translation, Mexican and Argentine poetry, what was most challenging/liberating about the text, ALTA 2009, and much much more. Very insightful conversation for anyone interested in professional translators, or starting out ...
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TMR 12.2 “Invocation” [CARS ON FIRE]
This week, Mónica Ramón Ríos joins Chad and Brian to talk about her literary career, how she came to write Cars on Fire, Rutgers, some movies she's recently watched, how to read "Invocation," protests in Chile and NYC, and much much more. An incredibly interesting and informative episode that serves as an incredible guide ...
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“La vita bugiarda degli adulti” by Elena Ferrante
La vita bugiarda degli adulti by Elena Ferrante 283 pgs. | pb | 9788833571683 | €19,00 edizioni e/o Review by Jeanne Bonner If all had gone as planned—which is to say if a global pandemic hadn’t bulldozed our normal lives—this summer, you might have been reading Ann Goldstein’s English translation of La vita ...
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TMR 12.1 “Obituary” [CARS ON FIRE]
Season 12 of the Two Month Review kicked off with Cristina Rodriguez from Deep Vellum Bookstore joining Chad and Brian to talk about the first section of Mónica Ramón Ríos and Robin Myers's Cars on Fire. They talk about The Gits, "Dead Men Don't Rape," the connections between academy and power structures, how "timely" ...
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“The Erotics of Restraint: Essays on Literary Form” by Douglas Glover
The Erotics of Restraint: Essays on Literary Form by Douglas Glover 203 pgs. | pb | 9781771962919 | $21.95 Biblioasis Review by Brendan Riley The Erotics of Restraint is an excellent companion—with a no less provocative title—to Mr. Glover’s previous collection, Attack of the Copula Spiders, published in ...
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Nothing Adds Up Until You Overthrow the System
It's weird trying to write this today, May 31st, with all that's going on across the country—and around the world—right now. The images of our overly-militarized, super aggro, disgusting police officers running unarmed people over, throwing women to the ground, shooting teenagers with pepper balls and rubber bullets (that ...
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Season Twelve of the Two Month Review: “Cars on Fire,” “Four by Four,” and “The Book of Anna”
As announced during the last season of the Two Month Review, we're going to try something different this time around. Instead of focusing on a single, long book, we're going to cover three short ones—all written by Spanish female writers, all translated by women, and all released during the lockdown. First up—and ...
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“The Cheffe: A Cook’s Novel” by Marie NDiaye [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2020 Best Translated Book Awards. Marcel Inhoff is completing a doctoral dissertation at the University of Bonn. He is the author of the collection Prosopopeia (Editions Mantel, 2015), and Our Church Is Here (Pen and ...
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“The Wind That Lays Waste” by Selva Almada [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2020 Best Translated Book Awards. Pierce Alquist has an MA in Publishing and Writing from Emerson College and currently works in publishing in Boston. She is a freelance book critic and writer. She is also the ...
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BTBA 2020 Streaming Events
In a normal year, we would be gathering in NYC to announce the winners of the Best Translated Book Award, followed by a nice reception. Well . . . Since that's obviously not going to happen, we actually came up with TWO replacement events that—if I'm being totally honest—might be even better than our normal party, ...
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“Beyond Babylon” by Igiaba Scego [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2020 Best Translated Book Awards. Barbara Halla is an Assistant Editor for Asymptote Journal. She works as a translator and independent researcher, focusing in particular on discovering and promoting the works of ...
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“Aviva-No” by Shimon Adaf [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2020 Best Translated Book Awards. Adriana X. Jacobs is the author of Strange Cocktail: Translation and the Making of Modern Hebrew Literature (University of Michigan, 2018) and associate professor of modern Hebrew ...
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“The Boy” by Marcus Malte [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2020 Best Translated Book Awards. Lara Vergnaud is a literary translator from the French. She was the recipient of the 2019 French Voices Grand Prize and a finalist for the 2019 BTBA. Her work has appeared in The ...
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TMR 11.11: “The Dream Ends” [THE DREAMED PART]
Rodrigo Fresán himself joins Chad and Brian to talk about phones, Riverdale, Ada or Ardor, Dracula, the world-building in Fresán's oeuvre, the overall structure and focus of the triptych, what to read and watch in quarantine, and much more! If you'd prefer to watch the conversation, you can find it on YouTube along ...
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“The Catalan Poems” by Pere Gimferrer [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2020 Best Translated Book Awards. Henry N. Gifford is a writer, emerging translator from German to English, and Assistant Editor at New Vessel Press. The Catalan Poems by Pere Gimferrer, translated from the ...
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TMR 11.10: “IKEA” [THE DREAMED PART]
This week's episode is quite possibly the wildest one yet . . . Chad paid a BookTuber for some promotional love and, well, you'll have to watch/listen to see how that went. Then they talk about outsiders, Franco Moretti, autofiction, HE-IKEA (the Writer's nemesis), overblown rants about reading and phones, and much ...
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“Space Invaders” by Nona Fernández [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2020 Best Translated Book Awards. Chris Clarke grew up in Western Canada and currently lives in Philadelphia. His translations include books by Ryad Girod, Pierre Mac Orlan, and François Caradec. His translation of ...
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. . . At the End of the World
All below quotes are from The End of the World Might Not Have Taken Place by Patrik Ouredník, translated from the Czech by Alexander Hertich (Dalkey Archive Press) THE FUTURE OF THE WORLD The future isn’t what it used to be. You must have noticed this yourself: the future isn’t what it used to be. In the past, ...
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. . . The Underappreciated Masses . . .
Half of this post is inspired by comments Sam Miller made about this article he wrote about the mystery surrounding Don Mattingly's birthdate and his Topps 1987 baseball card. I'm not sure if these are immutable truths per se, but if you talk to enough people in the book industry, you're likely to encounter two strains of ...
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We’re Still Here . . .
"We live in a world of randomness." —William Poundstone, The Doomsday Calculation It probably goes without saying, but publishing international literature is a precarious business in the best of times. On average, sales for translated works of fiction tend to be about one-third of the average sales for a mid-list author ...
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“The Next Loves” by Stéphane Bouquet [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2020 Best Translated Book Awards. Laura Marris is a writer and translator from the French. Recent projects include Paol Keineg’s Triste Tristan (co-translated with Rosmarie Waldrop for Burning Deck Press) and In ...
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Three Percent #181: Unraveling Women and Hard-Working Peasants
A bit of an experimental episode, Chad is joined by five indie booksellers to talk about the "new normal," fears of reopening, what booksellers are doing now, and—most importantly—actual books. The complete rundown of recommendations is below, but one note: please buy these titles from the bookseller who recommended them. ...
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TMR 11.9: “Living in Pandemica” [THE DREAMED PART]
This week, Chad and Brian talk about the desires of readers, the "middle mind," writing without a hook, Nabokov's "The Vane Sisters," the one contribution Chad made to this book, vocal tics, cocaine, and much more. They both came in high energy on this episode, so sit back and enjoy all the jokes and enthusiasm. This ...
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“Territory of Light” by Yuko Tsushima [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2020 Best Translated Book Awards. Kári Tulinius is an Icelandic poet and novelist. He and his family move back and forth between Iceland and Finland like a flock of migratory birds confused about the whole “warmer ...
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“The Way Through the Woods” by Long Litt Woon
The Way Through the Woods by Long Litt Woon Translated from the Norwegian by Barbara J. Haveland 320 pgs. | hc | 9781984801036 | $26.00 Spiegel & Grau Review by Hana Kallen How does one heal after the death of a loved one? How does define oneself again after tragedy? Author and anthropologist Long Litt ...
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“The Book of Collateral Damage” by Sinan Antoon [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2020 Best Translated Book Awards. Tara Cheesman is a freelance book critic, National Book Critics Circle member & 2018-2019 Best Translated Book Award Fiction Judge. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review ...
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The Winter Garden Photograph by Reina María Rodríguez [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2020 Best Translated Book Awards. Anastasia Nikolis recently received her PhD in twentieth and twenty-first century poetry and poetics from the University of Rochester. She is the Poetry Editor for Open Letter Books ...
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TMR 11.8: “This Is a Bullshot” [THE DREAMED PART]
In his most dangerous gag to date, Chad drinks a giant bullshot as he, Brian Wood, and special guest Carlos Labbé talk about Nabokov's Transparent Things, transparency as a concept, the wild bed that The Writer is insomniacing in, Uncle Hey Walrus's hypnosis gone awry, why quarantine time is so crazy yet our dreams are ...
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“Vernon Subutex 1” by Virginie Despentes [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2020 Best Translated Book Awards. Dorian Stuber teaches at Hendrix College and blogs about books at www.eigermonchjungfrau.blog. His work has appeared in Numéro Cinq, Open Letters Monthly, and Words without ...
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“Camouflage” by Lupe Gómez [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2020 Best Translated Book Awards. Kelsi Vanada is a poet and translator from Spanish and sometimes Swedish. Her translations include Into Muteness (Veliz Books, 2020) and The Eligible Age (Song Bridge Press, 2018), ...
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“God’s Wife” by Amanda Michalopoulou
God's Wife by Amanda Michalopoulou Translated from the Greek by Patricia Felisa Barbeito 144 pgs. | pb | 9781628973372 | $16.95 Dalkey Archive Press Review by Soti Triantafyllou Why do people get married? Maybe because they need a witness to their lives, someone to watch them do whatever it is that they do. In Amanda ...
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“Animalia” by Jean-Baptiste del Amo [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2020 Best Translated Book Awards. Jeffrey Zuckerman is an editor at Music & Literature and a translator from French, most recently of Jean Genet's The Criminal Child (NYRB, 2020). A finalist for the ...
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“Good Will Come from the Sea” by Christos Ikonomou [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2020 Best Translated Book Awards. Julia Sanches is a translator working from Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan into English. She has translated works by Susana Moreira Marques, Daniel Galera, Claudia Hernández, and ...
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There Are Worse Timelines [An April 2020—Is It Still 2020?—Reading Journal]
Following the [Chernobyl] accident, physicists calculated that there was a ten percent risk that a nuclear explosion on an unimaginable scale would take pace within a fortnight. Such an explosion [. . .] would have been equivalent to forty Hiroshima bombs going off at the same time, and would have rendered Europe ...
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Three Percent #180: Bookfinity Is the Dumbest Name
Stacie Williams joins Chad and Tom this week to talk about the role of sales reps at this moment in time and then, after she bolts, Chad and Tom poke fun at Bookfinity (which, really, WOW), the confused messaging of #BooksAreEssential as a hashtag, why bookshops shouldn't open, and how Publishers Weakly is funny AND NOT RUN ...
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TMR 11.7: “The Past Is a Broken Toy That Everyone Fixes in His Own Way” [THE DREAMED PART]
This week's episode brings us back to The Writer, unable to sleep, living near where Penelope's house burned down (see: The Invented Part), and living off the fortunes of Penelope's writings (RIP). There's a great bit in this section about FBI agent Johnny Dancer and Vladimir Nabokov, there's a horrifying (yet funny!) death ...
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“Welcome to America” by Linda Boström Knausgård [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2020 Best Translated Book Awards. Katarzyna (Kasia) Bartoszyńska is a former BTBA judge (2018 and 2017), a translator (from Polish to English), and an academic (at Monmouth College, and starting this Fall, at Ithaca ...
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“Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead” by Olga Tokarczuk [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2020 Best Translated Book Awards. Louisa Ermelino is the author of three novels; Joey Dee Gets Wise; The Black Madonna (Simon and Schuster); The Sisters Mallone (St. Martin’s Press) and a story collection, ...
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Three Percent #179: “Hey! What’s New?”
How is COVID-19 impacting bookstores, publishers, translators, and our general sanity? These are the questions Tom and Chad talk about on this episode—the first in a while, but also the longest ever—along with minor jokes, an appeal to authors and publishers to "read the room," a rant that will likely get Chad in ...
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TMR 11.6: “Adaptations” [THE DREAMED PART]
Chad and Brian go deep into the underlying structure of the second section of Fresan's The Dreamed Part, talking about Penelope's story, her relationship to her parents and the Karmas, and the moment in which she lost her son. We finally get to read about her wrecking house (literally) and see how everything circles back to ...
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“Death Is Hard Work” by Khaled Khalifa [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2020 Best Translated Book Awards. Tony Messenger is an Australian writer, critic and interviewer who has had works published in many places including Overland Literary Journal, Southerly, Mascara Literary ...
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Lola Rogers on “The Colonel’s Wife” by Rosa Liksom [The Book That Never Was, Pt. 2]
You can find part one here. Finnish Literature LR: As you know, Finnish literature is just like the language. It's different. It's more different from English literature than, say, German literature is. CWP: What kind of things mark Finnish literature as “different”? LR: Well, I think The Colonel’s Wife is a ...
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Lola Rogers on “The Colonel’s Wife” by Rosa Liksom [The Book That Never Was, Pt. 1]
The Colonel's Wife by Rosa Liksom, translated from the Finnish by Lola Rogers (Graywolf Press) BookMarks Reviews: Five total—Four Positive, One Mixed Awards: None Number of Finnish Works of Fiction Published in Translation from 2008-2019: 65 (5.42/year) Number of Those Translations Written by Women: 40 of the ...
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The Book That Never Was
I have no idea how to write anymore. Every week, I come up with some dumb idea for how to get back into posting here—"Five Outcomes for International Literature Post-COVID," "Escapism During Quarantine," "Can You Stress Drink AND Read Real Literature?," "Why Are All the Quarantine Listicles So Dumb?: The Virus and ...
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“Labyrinth” by Burhan Sönmez [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2020 Best Translated Book Awards. Tim Gutteridge is a Scottish literary translator, working from Spanish into English. His translation of Miserere de cocodrilos(Mercedes Rosende) will be published later this year by ...
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“Tentacle” by Rita Indiana [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2020 Best Translated Book Awards. Tobias Carroll is the author of the books Reel, Transitory, and the forthcoming Political Sign. Tentacle by Rita Indiana, translated from the Spanish by Achy ...
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“A Dream Come True” by Juan Carlos Onetti [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2020 Best Translated Book Awards. Spencer Ruchti is an intern at Tin House Books and formerly a bookseller at Harvard Book Store in Cambridge. His writing has appeared in The Adroit Journal, The Rumpus, and ...
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TMR 11.5: “Wuthering Heights Is Weird” [THE DREAMED PART}
Chad reaches a new quarantine low at the beginning of this week's episode (highly recommend checking out the video version), but after a lot of banter and deep dives into international speculative fiction, The Invention of Morel, Lost, and more, Chad and special guest Rachel Cordasco break down the first part of the ...
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“Will and Testament” by Vigdis Hjorth [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2020 Best Translated Book Awards. Elisa Wouk Almino is a Los Angeles-based writer and literary translator from Portuguese. She is the translator of This House(Scrambler Books, 2017), a collection of poetry by Ana ...
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“Book of Minutes” by Gemma Gorga [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2020 Best Translated Book Awards. Nancy Naomi Carlson is a poet, translator, and editor, whose latest book was called "new & noteworthy" by the New York Times. Recipient of two NEA literature translation grants ...
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“The Memory Police” by Yoko Ogawa [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2020 Best Translated Book Awards. Tony Malone is an Australian reviewer of fiction in translation, whose site, Tony’s Reading List, has been providing reviews continuously since 2009. His main focus is on Japanese ...
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“Time” by Etel Adnan [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2020 Best Translated Book Awards. Brandon Shimoda is the author of several books, most recently The Grave on the Wall (City Lights), which received the PEN Open Book Award, The Desert(The Song Cave), and Evening ...
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TMR 11.4: “Tulpas” [THE DREAMED PART]
This episode got off to a rough start, with Chad losing his shit over the May IndieNext list [ed. note: he still has not recovered] before Streamyard crashed and the whole episode had to be recorded. In the new, much calmer episode, Chad, Brian, and special guest Patrick Smith talk about tulpas, the night, Fresán writing in ...
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TMR 11.2: “Who Dreams the Dreamer” [THE DREAMED PART]
Chad, Brian, and special guest Mark Haber tried their damnedest to bring some levity to our current crisis on this week's episode. They laughed a lot while discussing Chad's surprisingly dull dream city, the way The Dreamed Part just drops you right into the flow, dream logic, how Fresan is the exception that proves the ...
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TMR 11.1: “We Remember Everything” [THE DREAMED PART]
In this week's preview episode for Season 11 of the Two Month Review--featuring The Dreamed Part by Rodrigo Fresán and Will Vanderhyden--Chad and Brian try their best to recall details from the plot of The Invented Part, the first book in the trilogy. They do . . . well, question mark? As cracked out as their descriptions ...
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Three Percent #178: This Podcast Is Not Contagious
Today's episode is all about small presses. Chad and Tom breakdown, discuss, elaborate on, and praise, Matvei Yankelevich's recent Poetry post 'The New Normal: How We Gave Up the Small Press." This is a rather wide-ranging conversation about grant applications, distribution for small presses, AWP, professionalization, how ...
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Three Percent #177: Eight Books
After a bit of banter about how baseball front offices might be as bad at naming things as book people, and a plug for Paul Vidich's The Coldest Warrior, Chad and Tom each draft four forthcoming books from a total of eight different presses that they've both agreed to read and discuss in future episodes. How could this ...
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Is It Real? [A January 2020 Reading Diary with Charts & Observations]
It's been sooooo long since I actually wrote something for here . . . I'm not entirely sure how to start! Chad 1.0 would open with something like "$%*# agents" and then go off on a couple individuals who are currently driving me INSANE. Chad 2.0 would come up with some wacky premise that blends ideas behind sabermetrics ...
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Three Percent #176: Dirty Bookshop
After a bit of a hiatus, Chad and Tom return to talk about the two biggest things to happen during Winter Institute: The American Dirt controversy and the launch of Bookshop.org. If you haven't been following the American Dirt debacle, here are a couple pieces to read: Laura Miller's piece in Slate, Rebecca Alter's ...
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“Reading Christine Montalbetti” by Warren Motte
As part of a larger series of initiatives involving Open Letter and Dalkey Archive Press, over the next few months, we'll be running a number of articles from CONTEXT magazine, a tabloid-style magazine started by John O'Brien and Dalkey Archive in 2000 as a way of introducing booksellers and readers to innovative writers ...
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Three Percent #175: Biggest News Stories of 2019
On this week's episode, Chad and Tom discuss Tom's recent piece on Jean-Patrick Manchette for LARB and talk about which of his books are best to start with, and why there haven't been more breakout international noir authors. Then they pivot to this Publishers Weekly article on the "Top News Stories of 2019," discussing ...
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TMR 10.14: “We Made it to the End” [DUCKS, NEWBURYPORT]
We did it! Chad and Brian reflect on the somewhat surprising ending to Ducks, Newburyport and reflect on all 1,000+ of its glorious pages in the season finale to this Two Month Review. They debate whether the book is hopeful or pessimistic, the way in which its solipsism infects the reader's way of seeing the world, and they ...
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“Italian Short Stories” ed. by Jhumpa Lahiri
Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories ed. Jhumpa Lahiri Translated from the Italian by Various 528 pgs. | hc | 9780241299838 | $30.00 Penguin Random House Review by Jeanne Bonner Novels and memoirs often become labors of love for the authors who birth them. But what about an anthology? How often do we imagine ...
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TMR 10.13: “Dogs” [DUCKS, NEWBURYPORT]
Elizabeth DeMeo (assistant book editor at Tin House) joins Chad and Brian in the penultimate episode of this season of the Two Month Review. They talk family therapy. They talk about the Jim's encounter with the lioness. They make predictions about how the book will end. They debate whether it's better to read the book in a ...
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TMR 10.12: “Gone Missing” [DUCKS, NEWBURYPORT]
Chad and Brian go it alone on pages 777-862, talking about Galley Beggar's "go fund me" campaign, hardcovers vs. paperbacks, Stacy, what makes something Kafkaesque, the narrator's stasis, and much more. This week's music is "The Surprise Knock" by The New Pornographers. If you'd prefer to watch the conversation, you can ...
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“Seeing People Off” by Jana Beňová
Seeing People Off by Jana Beňová Translated from Slovak by Janet Livingstone 126 pgs. | pb | 9781937512590 | $14.99 Two Dollar Radio Review by David DeGusta Jana Beňová’s novel Seeing People Off, translated from the Slovak by Janet Livingstone, exists between clarity and confusion. Set in the Petržalka ...
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“The Book of Disappearance: A Novel” by Ibtisam Azem
The Book of Disappearance: A Novel by Ibtisam Azem Translated from the Arabic by Sinan Antoon 256 pgs. | pb | 9780815611110 | $19.95 Syracuse University Press Review by Grant Barber This wonderful, important second novel by Ibtisam Azem in English translation came out just in time for the observance of Women ...
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TMR 10.11: “Establish Justice” [DUCKS, NEWBURYPORT]
This week, Chad is joined by Rebecca Hussey (BookRiot) and Josh Cook (Porter Square Books, An Exaggerated Murder) to talk about pages 700-776 of Ducks, Newburyport. They make comparisons to any number of modernist authors (Proust, Woolf, Joyce), discuss mother-daughter relationships, "mom shaming," Stace's general sense of ...
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TMR 10.10: “A List of Definites” [DUCKS, NEWBURYPORT]
Jeremy Kitchen (Chicago Public Library, Eye 94) joins Chad and Brian to talk about "a list of definites" about the future, the (pretty silly) controversy surrounding Lucy Ellmann's recent Guardian interview, the way the themes of Duck, Newburyport make it difficult for some people to read, the ways in which this novel is ...
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Dark, Strange Books by Women in Translation [BTBA 2020]
This week's Best Translated Book Award post is from Pierce Alquist, who has a MA in Publishing and Writing from Emerson College and currently works in publishing in Boston. She is a freelance book critic, writer, and Book Riot contributor. She is also the Communications Coordinator for the Transnational Literature Series ...
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Three Percent #174: Devil’s Bargains
Chad and Tom play a short game on this podcast—when Tom isn't ranting about Amazon. They also discuss Bookshop, when the decade officially ends, favorite translations of the past ten years, Chad's upcoming hiatus from writing for Three Percent, and much more. Next episode Chad and Tom will discuss Tom's recent article on ...
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TMR 10.9: “Pattern Recognition” [DUCKS, NEWBURYPORT]
Chad and Brian deliver a true Thanksgiving treat in this episode, digging in deep to the narrative patterns in the book, the way Ellmann constructs the narrator's subjectivity, how the novel is a radical call to action, how some facts aren't really facts, terrible new slang terms, save the turtles, and much much more. This ...
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Book 6 [The No Context Project]
If you want the context for the "no context project," check out this post, which lays everything out and applies a 20-80 grading scale to "Book 7." Since I really want to get through these mystery books sooner rather than later--so that I can find out what they are and grade myself--I put aside my Charco reading for a bit ...
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Three Percent Bonus: Charco Press
Founded in 2016 with their first releases coming in late 2017, Charco Press is one of the most recent additions to the growing number of publishing houses focused on literature in translation. And although they've established a solid reputation in the UK, they just started distributing their books Stateside in October 2019. ...
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A Couple Turkish Authors [BTBA 2020]
This week's Best Translated Book Award pose is from Louisa Ermelino, who is the author of three novels; Joey Dee Gets Wise; The Black Madonna (Simon and Schuster); The Sisters Mallone (St. Martin’s Press) and a story collection, Malafemmina (Sarabande). She has worked atPeople, Time International, and InStyle magazines ...
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TMR 10.8: “Real Life Is Sad” [DUCKS, NEWBURYPORT]
Another late night conversation about Ducks, Newburyport! This week, P.T. Smith joins to discuss illness, the verbal virtuosity in this novel, sadness, relationships between parents and kids, and much more. Lots of quotes are read throughout this episode, and in honor of Lucy Ellmann's stated like of whisky, some of that ...
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“Beasts Head for Home” by Abe Kōbō
Beasts Head for Home by Abe Kōbō Translated from the Japanese by Richard F. Calichman 191 pgs.| pb | 9780231177054 | $25 Columbia University Press Review by Brendan Riley Crisp, stark, pristine scenes of gaunt settlements, vast wilderness, and tense human encounters fill this 1957 novel by Abe Kōbō, the ...
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Three Percent #173: The Poetry in Translation Episode
Anastasia Nikolis (poetry editor for Open Letter Books) and Emma Ramadan (translator, co-owner of Riffraaff) join Chad and Tom to breakdown ALTA 42, talk about poetry in translation, and go on a handful of minor rants—and one major one. (Thanks, Emma!) The Sarah Dessen controversy pops up, as does this article about ...
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TMR 10.7: “Blossom, Stasis, Spiral, Whoa” [DUCKS, NEWBURYPORT]
This week's Two Month Review was recorded pretty late (on the east coast), so things are a bit loopy. Nevertheless, James Crossley from Madison Books joins Chad and Brian to talk about pages 429-487 of Ducks, Newburyport. They talk a bit about the cultural references in this section—the old movies, Blossom—flip ahead to ...
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Book 7 [The No Context Project]
A couple months ago, while writing about Suzanne Jill Levine and Jessica Powell's translation of Silvina Ocampo's The Promise, I came up with a sort of crazy scheme: But this gave me a grand idea: What if I could review twenty books from twenty publishers in as blind as a fashion as possible? I wouldn’t know ...
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TMR 10.6: “The Simple Things” [DUCKS, NEWBURYPORT]
Chad and Brian break format a bit and discuss a number of the concerns, anxieties, and social issues that the narrator of Duck, Newburyport thinks about. From spiders to Morning Routine videos, active shooter situations to Trump feeling up Kurt Suzuki, this episode is a deep, yet funny, dive into our neuroses and ...
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How to Launch a Publishing House [Charco Press]
It's Charco Press month! After stepping away from these "monthly themes" for a minute (or, well, actually, a full month), I'm excited to get back to this, and have a bunch of posts planned out for November. If all goes according to plan (spoiler: HA!) I'd like to post a couple interviews with Charco Press translators, a ...
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“Garden by the Sea” by Mercè Rodoreda
Garden by the Sea by Mercè Rodoreda Translated from the Catalan by Maruxa Relaño and Martha Tennent 230 pgs. | pb | 9781948830089 | $15.95 Open Letter Books Review by Kira Baran Originally published in 1967 in the Catalan, Garden by the Sea is just one of several works that has earned ...
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TMR 10.5: “The Buzz Must Go On” [DUCKS, NEWBURYPORT]
Lori Feathers of Interabang Books in Dallas joined Chad and Brian for this special episode to talk about the destruction of her bookstore, what's next for Interabang, and information about how you can help. (Answer: Order Joytime Killbox and The Dreamed Part from their website.) Then they talk about Lori's interview with ...
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“The Teacher” by Michal Ben-Naftali
The Teacher by Michal Ben-Naftali Translated from the Hebrew by Daniella Zamir 138 pgs. | pb | 9781948830072 | $14.95 Open Letter Books Review by Kira Baran Michal Ben-Naftali’s background in philosophy shines through in her debut novel, The Teacher. Originally published in Hebrew in 2015, the work was ...
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TMR 10.4: “Is it Translatable” [Ducks, Newburyport]
Rhett McNeil (translator of Machado de Assis, Gonçalo Tavares, Antonio Lobo Antunes, and more) joins Chad and Brian to talk about the way in which Ducks, Newburyport is less of a single-sentence and more of a never-ending list, about how it is and isn't like Ulysses, about time in the novel, about Ellmann's playfulness, ...
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A Good, Exciting Translation [BTBA 2020]
Today's Best Translated Book Award post is from Elisa Wouk Almino, a writer and literary translator from Portuguese. She is currently the L.A. senior editor at Hyperallergic and an editor of Harlequin creature’s online translation platform. She teaches translation at Catapult and UCLA Extension. I teach an online ...
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Three Percent #171: Can We Go a Week Without an Award Controversy?
This week's podcast is about two kerfuffles: the Booker Prize one and the one between King County Library and Macmillan. There's also some discussion as to why UK book culture allows for critique and small voices to be heard (vs. the American way in which everything is fine), Chad goes on and on about On Becoming a God in ...
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TMR 10.3: “How Do I Promote This?” [Ducks, Newburyport]
Vanessa Stauffer from Biblioasis came on this episode to talk about the Booker Prize, about the jacket copy she wrote for the Ducks galley, about types of moms, about things in the book that pay off and mysteries that remain mysteries, about the ways in which Ellmann is breaking form and the strong feminist perspective ...
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Time Does Not Bring Relief
"History is written by the victors" is one of those cliches that's so obviously true that it requires next to no explanation. But the ability to provide evidence for what the victors do when writing history is usually a bit more circumspect and tricky to get ahold of . . . Last Thursday, the Nobel Prize for Literature was ...
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Three Percent #170: Don’t Give a Million Dollars to a Fascist
This podcast comes in HOT. Lots of talk about how Peter Handke doesn't deserve any award, much less the Nobel Prize. (And if you don't know why, just listen for his quote at the end denying Serb atrocities at Srebrenica by saying "You can stick your corpses up your arse.") Then things transition to an existential conversation ...
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TMR 10.2: “The Fact That” [Ducks, Newburyport]
Due to an unforeseen illness, Chad and Brian ended up going this one alone, and focus mostly on the way that "the fact that" functions, both in building the character and impacting the reader. Chad asks Brian some craft questions, they debate what makes a book "difficult" (and whether this is difficult or just long), more ...
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TMR 10.1: “Brave Publishing” [Ducks, Newburyport]
The tenth season of the Two Month Review gets underway with special guest Dan Wells of Biblioasis talking about how they came to publish Lucy Ellmann's Ducks, Newburyport, and the risks involved in doing a 1,020-page book. They also introduce Ellmann--who has one of the greatest bios ever--and the novel itself. Conversation ...
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Value & Controversy
A few weeks ago, I wrote a post on Vernon Subutex I by Virginie Despentes, translated by Frank Wynne, and Sympathy for the Translator by Mark Polizzotti in which I teased a future post (this one!) in which the "value" and "controversy" terms would be inverted: the nonfiction book from the translator would supply the heat, ...
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The Best Book Might Be The First Book You Read [BTBA 2020]
Today's Best Translated Book Award post comes from Christopher Phipps, who has been a Bay Area bookseller for years. He worked with DIESEL and East Bay Booksellers in Oakland and can be found slinging tomes these days at City Lights in San Francisco. EEG by Daša Drndić, translated from the Croatian by Celia ...
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TMR 9.10: Monsterhuman by Kjersti Skomsvold (pgs 407-448)
And just like that, season nine of the Two Month Review comes to an end. But first, we have a very nice discussion with Kjersti Skomsvold herself about Monsterhuman, trends in Norwegian writing, autofiction vs. creative nonfiction vs. memoir, authors to read, and much more. (Spoiler: She's just as interesting and charming in ...
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Season 10 of the Two Month Review: “Ducks, Newburyport” by Lucy Ellmann
This Thursday (9/26), the final podcast in the ninth season of the Two Month Review will drop, wrapping up our discussion of Kjersti Skomsvold's Monsterhuman, which is translated from the Norwegian by Becky Crook. Which means that it's time for SEASON TEN. (Ten!?!) And for the first time ever, we're going to be focusing ...
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Three Percent #169: Year Two of the NBA for Translated Literature
After an update from Chad about his trip to London and Amsterdam, he and Tom break down the National Book Award for Translated Literature longlist, exposing their general ignorance along the way. (They've read, combined, like two of the ten titles?) Also, sure are a lot of Penguin Random House books on these longlists! They ...
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TMR 9.09: Monsterhuman by Kjersti Skomsvold (pgs 360-406)
Translator Becky Crook comes on this week's podcast to talk about the process of working on Monsterhuman, all the things that she couldn't quite get in there, ones she's very proud of, the reasons why she thinks the book works, and much much more! Only one episodee left! You can watch the Wednesday, September 25 episode ...
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TMR 9.08: Monsterhuman by Kjersti Skomsvold (pgs 316-360)
This week, Brian is AWOL BUT Patrick Smith brings his A-game. He and Chad talk about the self-conscious humor in Monsterhuman, awkward interactions, the shape and evolution of the narrative as a whole, some info about The Faster I Walk, the Smaller I Am, and much more. A very fun episode that opened as awkwardly as ever . . ...
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Smelling Books [BTBA 2020]
This week's BTBA post if from Justin Walls, a bookseller with Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon who can be found on Twitter @jaawlfins. The conceptual artist Anicka Yi's olfactory-based installation Washing Away of Wrongs (2014, created in conjunction with French perfumer Christophe Laudamiel) consists of two ...
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Controversy & Value
I absolutely love the Virginie Despentes books that I've read, and Vernon Subutex 1—the first part of a trilogy that she concluded in 2017—is no exception. Like her other novels, the prose is direct, unadorned, and based very heavily in character. Very unlikeable characters. Offensive characters. Characters who are most ...
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TMR 9.07: Monsterhuman by Kjersti Skomsvold (pgs 275-316)
Although this episode isn't as funny as last week's discussion of "lay-down Sally," it does get into some of Brian's neuroses about his forthcoming book, which is entertaining. They talk a lot about Skomsvold's humor, about the creepy ways in which various photographers and interviewers treat her as a young female artist, ...
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Flash Sale on Open Letter Preorders!
For a few different reasons—mainly that I wasn't able to get the new excerpt from Sara Mesa's Four by Four online until the WITMonth discount code had expired, but also to celebrate The Dreamed Part being on Kirkus's list of "30 Most Anticipated Fiction Books"—we've decided to have a flash sale on all of our ...
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Three Percent #168: The 6% Improvement
On this episode, Chad shares some interesting data about the number of books by women in translation before and after the creation of Women in Translation Month, Tom talks about the most recent Amazon controversy, they breakdown the National Translation Award for Prose Longlist (they'll talk poetry in a future episode), and ...
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“Four by Four” by Sara Mesa [An Edited Excerpt]
Information about Katie Whittemore's translation of Four by Four by Sara Mesa has been floating around this website (and my twitter) since the beginning of the year. January was "Spain Month" and featured an interview with Katie and an early excerpt of Four by Four. Well, by the middle of September, advanced reader copies ...
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Thirty-One Books by Women in Translation [BTBA 2020]
This week's BTBA post is from Pierce Alquist, who has a MA in Publishing and Writing from Emerson College and currently works in publishing in Boston. She is also a freelance book critic, writer, and Book Riot contributor. She can be found on Twitter @PierceAlquist and on Book Riot. Women in Translation Month is nearing ...
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TMR 9.06: Monsterhuman by Kjersti Skomsvold (pgs 226-274)
Caitlin Baker from Island Books joins Chad and Brian this week to talk about "The Herring Factory" from Kjersti Skomsvold's Monsterhuman. After a strong pitch for nominating Brian for "Best Local Author" in City Paper's annual Best of Rochester voting, they get into the book itself, talking about the meta-textual moment of ...
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“Cars on Fire” by Mónica Ramón Ríos [Excerpt]
Now you're really getting to preview our books . . . Although Cars on Fire by Mónica Ramón Ríos, translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers, is available for preorder from various online retailers, we don't even have this book up on our website yet and, as of yesterday, on our website as well. We haven't even presented ...
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“The Nocilla Trilogy” by Agustín Fernández Mallo
The Nocilla Trilogy by Agustín Fernández Mallo Translated from the Spanish by Thomas Bunstead pb | 9780374222789 | $30.00 FSG Review by Vincent Francone Most reviews of The Nocilla Trilogy (written by Agustín Fernández Mallo, recently translated into English by Thomas Bunstead, beautifully packaged by ...
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Women in Translation by Publisher
Earlier this week I posted a few infographics about the breakdown of books (fiction + poetry) in translation by men vs. women from the sixteen countries that have produced the most new translated titles since 2008. Lots of qualifiers in there! To clarify: I took all countries with more than 100 books in translation in the ...
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Three Percent #167: We Could All Do Better
Meytal Radzinski joins Chad and Tom to talk about Women in Translation Month, depressing statistics, Virginie Despentes, nonfiction in translation, hopes for the future, and much more. As always, feel free to send any and all comments or questions to: threepercentpodcast@gmail.com. Also, if there are articles you’d like ...
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TMR 9.05: Monsterhuman by Kjersti Skomsvold (pgs 180-225)
Tom Flynn from Volumes opens up today's episode with a reading from Brian's first book, Joytime Killbox. Then, along with Chad, they break down the rest of "The Human School" from Monsterhuman, talk about how much they love Skomsvold's voice and sense of humor, look at the way in which she starts playing with first- and ...
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“The Teacher” by Michal Ben-Naftali [Excerpt]
There are three more forthcoming Open Letter titles by women that I want to share for Women in Translation Month. First up is The Teacher by Michel Ben-Naftali, translated from the Hebrew by Daniella Zamir. Here's the jacket copy: No one knew the story of Elsa Weiss. She was a respected English teacher at a Tel Aviv high ...
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Releasing Today: THE TRANSLATOR’S BRIDE by João Reis
“A neurotic little gem: fast, fun, frenzied, and feisty.” —Jeremy Garber, Powell's A humorous attempt to get one's life back in order that's part Thomas Bernhard, part Max Frisch At the start of The Translator's Bride, the Translator's bride ...
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The Most Anticipated Translation of 2019
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk, translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Riverhead) Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead may well be the most anticipated translation of the season. Olga Tokarczuk’s second novel in as many years is a mystery novel that never declares ...
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Women in Translation by Country
Since I skipped last week, I'm going to post a few WITMonth infographics this week, starting with the three charts below. But first, a bit of methodology and explanation. I was curious about which countries were the most balanced in terms of books in translation written by men and women. We know from the earlier ...
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TMR 9.04: Monsterhuman by Kjersti Skomsvold (pgs 144-180)
Even though the first few seconds ("On today's Two Month Review we'll be talking about . . . ") got cut off, Chad gives his most professional podcast introduction to date, before he and Brian talk about the Nansen Academy, the cyclical nature of chronic illness, the idea of plot points vs. events, and reasons their respective ...
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Reread, Rewrite, Repeat
Some years ago, I was invited on an editorial trip to Buenos Aires, where we were given a walking tour of the more literary areas of the city, including a bar where Polish ex-pat Witold Gombrowicz used to hang out. The tour guide told us a story about how Gombrowicz hated Borges and would frequently, drunkenly, ...
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Women in Translation for BTBA 2020
It's time for weekly BTBA posts! First up is one by Louisa Ermelino, who is the author of three novels; Joey Dee Gets Wise; The Black Madonna (Simon and Schuster); The Sisters Mallone (St. Martin’s Press) and a story collection, Malafemmina (Sarabande). She has worked ...
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TMR 9.03: Monsterhuman by Kjersti Skomsvold (pgs 92-143)
In this episode, Chad and Brian applaud Kjersti for not getting back together with her ex-boyfriend, talk about circular structures, about the evolution of her written voice, about Antony and the Johnsons, the myth-making behind Babe Ruth, and much more. This week's music is "Patterns Prevail" by Young Guv. Next episode ...
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Two Spanish Books for Women in Translation Month
Like usual, this post is a mishmash of all the thoughts I've had over the past week, mostly while out on a 30-mile bike ride. (I need to get in as many of these as possible before winter, which is likely to hit Rochester in about a month.) Rather than try and weave these into one single coherent post, I'm just going to throw ...
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Garden by the Sea by Mercè Rodoreda [Excerpt]
To celebrate Women in Translation Month, we're going to post excerpts from several of our forthcoming books, starting with the new Rodoreda title, Garden by the Sea. You can get 40% off this and ALL Open Letter titles written or translated by women by using the code WITMONTH at checkout on our website. Garden by ...
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40% Off All Open Letter Books Written or Translated by Women
Women in Translation Month is always an exciting time to discover, read, discuss, and celebrate books by women from around the world. It was created by Meytal Radzinski back in 2014 (who we're hoping to have on a podcast this month), and has since spawned numerous articles, events, and even the Warwick Prize for Women in ...
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TMR 9.02: Monsterhuman by Kjersti Skomsvold (pgs 46-92)
One of the funniest TMR episodes in weeks, Chad and Brian crack each other up over writerly anxieties, the sharp wit Kjersti displays in this section, the White Claw Phenomenon, writer vs. author vs. journaler, Kjersti's distain for bad poetry (and TV) about chronic fatigue syndrome, pop culture references from the ...
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Info on the 2020 Best Translated Book Awards
We're happy to announce the 2020 Best Translated Book Award! All the relevant information is below. Please let me know if you have any questions. Award Dates In terms of dates, this is subject to change, but currently we’re planning on announcing the longlists for fiction and poetry on Wednesday, April 1st, the finalists ...
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Embrace the Chaos
So, for the first time in, probably ever, when I didn't have an idea for this week's post, I didn't steal one of Sam Miller's ideas from the Effectively Wild podcast. Instead, in a real reversal, I went back to the podcasts I recorded last week and came up with two completely unrelated concepts that I'm going to jam ...
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“The Naked Woman” by Armonía Somers
The Naked Woman by Armonía Somers Translated from the Spanish by Kit Maude 168 pgs. | pb | 9781936932436 | $16.95 Feminist Press Review by Rachel Crawford A woman turns thirty, decapitates herself, and after repositioning her severed head onto her neck, wanders through the woods stark naked. In part, this is ...
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Three Percent Bonus: John Erik Riley
To celebrate Norwegian Month at Three Percent, Chad talked with John Erik Riley, author, photographer, editor of Norwegian literature for Cappelen Damm, and member of the "Blindness Circle." They talk about current trends in Norwegian literature, American comparisons for various authors, a couple really long books, Norwegian ...
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TMR 9.01: Monsterhuman by Kjersti Skomsvold (pgs 1-45)
The new season of the Two Month Review starts here! Through the end of September we'll be discussing Kjersti Skomsvold's Monsterhuman, translated from the Norwegian by Becky L. Crook. Marius Hjeldnes from Cappelen Damm joins Chad and Brian to provide a bit of background on Skomsvold, on trends in Norwegian literature, on ...
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“Thick of It” by Ulrike Almut Sandig
Thick of It by Ulrike Almut Sandig Translated from the German Karen Leeder 96 pgs. | hc | 9780857425560 | $19.00 Seagull Books Review by Talia Franks Thick of It by Ulrike Almut Sandig is a slender book of poetry, vibrantly translated from the original German into English by Karen Leeder. The poems are prefaced ...
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Publishers: Come to ALTA 42 in Rochester!
For all editors and publishers out there, we wanted to put make sure you knew about the American Literary Translators Association conference in Rochester on November 7-10 and some of the opportunities available to publishers. Nowadays the ALTA conference attracts ~450 literary translators to a conference featuring ...
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Three Percent #165: Disorder in the Book Shelves
This episode of the Three Percent Podcast never gets to its actual topic, but includes minor disagreements about ebooks in libraries and its impact on ebook revenue, more questions about Book Culture's situation, a general sense of malaise, trying to make sense of Dean Koontz, Audible's "Caption" program, a wild idea about ...
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The All or Nothing of Book Conversation
In theory, this is a post about Norwegian female writers in translation. I know it's going to end up in a very different space, though, so let's kick this off with some legit stats that can be shared, commented on, and used to further the discussion about women in translation. Back in the first post of July—Norwegian ...
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Season 9 of the Two Month Review: Monsterhuman by Kjersti Skomsvold
Now that I'm back from a week-long self-imposed retreat, it's time to overwhelm this site with posts about Norwegian literature. There are two special audio interviews in the works, a post about a few female Norwegian writers (and Shirley Jackson) that will go up on Monday, and the kick off of the new season of the Two Month ...
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Jan Kjærstad [Sort of the Open Letter Author of the Month]
Prior to the start of July, my plan was to highlight Jan Kjæstad, author of the "Jonas Wergeland Trilogy" about a famous TV director who is jailed for murdering his wife. The three books present three different histories of Wergeland's life, which is interesting enough, but what's really great is how each one employs a ...
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TMR 8.11: CoDex 1962 (Pages 451-517)
We did it! Chad and Rachel Cardasco (with an assist from Tom Flynn of Volumes) talk about the last sections of Sjón's CoDex 1962. It's been quite the season and they bring it home in old school TMR style with a lot of Twin Peaks talk, many many digressions, acknowledging motifs and ideas that may or may not actually be ...
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Dalkey Archive and Graywolf Press [Norway Month]
I initially had some fun ideas for this post—mostly trying to work in my theory of the "2019 Sad Dad Movement" and Elisabeth Åsbrink's forthcoming Made in Sweden, the pitch for which is "How the Swedes are not nearly so egalitarian, tolerant, hospitable or cozy and they would like to (have you) think"—but I think I'm ...
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TMR 8.10: CoDex 1962 (Pages 407-450)
Things start to come clear in this penultimate episode of this season of the Two Month Review. We get a new story about Joséf's birth, along with some absolutely incredible writing by Sjón. Lots of parallels and mirroring in this section, and the discussion helps set up next week's conclusion. The next episode will focus ...
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Three Percent Bonus: Becky Crook
As part of "Norwegian Month" here at Three Percent, translator Becky Crook (The Black Signs, Monsterhuman, Silence: In the Age of Noise, and many more) came on the podcast to talk about her first cover letter, in which ways she's become a better translator over the past half-decade, what to watch out for in contracts, the ...
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Nordic Literature In Translation: A Huge Data Dump
As listeners to the Three Percent Podcast already know, last month I went on an editorial trip to Norway to meet with Norwegian publishers, agents, and authors, and to participate on a panel at the Lillehammer Book Festival. The panel ended up being a really enjoyable, wide-ranging discussion (which I will try and replicate ...
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TMR 8.09: CoDex 1962 (Pages 344-406)
We're into the homestretch! Today episode, featuring special guest Katie Whittemore, kicks off the discussion of the third and final volume of Sjón's CoDex 1962, "I'm a Sleeping Door: A Science-Fiction Story." More origin myths in this volume, ranging from the epic and literary, to the mundane and realistic. A woman gives ...
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Three Percent #163: What Do You Want
Chad and Tom talk about a number of interrelated issues related to the costs of bookstore ownership and being a bookseller. They talk about the recent letter from Chris Doeblin at Book Culture, The Book Diaries, Human Rights for Translators, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Internet and Book Culture, and the ...
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Three Percent Bonus: Ben Lindbergh
In this special bonus episode, Ben Lindbergh of The Ringer and Effectively Wild talks with Chad about his new book, The MVP Machine. They talk about the premise of the book—how player development is the new "Moneyball" and is being driven by players and technology—about the process of co-writing, feedback loops for ...
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“The Book of Collateral Damage” by Sinan Antoon
The Book of Collateral Damage by Sinan Antoon Translated from the Arabic by James Richardson 312 pgs. | hc | 9780300228946 | $24.00 Yale Margellos Press Review by Grant Barber Author Sinan Antoon is an Assoc. Professor at the Gallatin School of Individual Study of NYU. His undergraduate degree was in 1990 from ...
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TMR 8.08: CoDex 1962 (Pages 303-343)
This week, Tobias Carroll joined Chad and Brian to talk about werewolves, puns that don't exactly work in translation, evil baseball card shop owners, weird Masonic rituals, Party Down South, and Fred Durst and John Travolta's The Fanatic. They also have a lot of praise for Sjón and the wild, fun nature of the second volume ...
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TMR 8.07: CoDex 1962 (Pages 257-302)
This week's episode covers a lot of ground, from disturbing American racism circa 1917 to codswallop; from werewolves to parliamentary fights, from ghosts to crime/heist narratives. It's a really fun episode that has a good take on this section of the book mixed with some really fun segues and digressions. The next episode ...
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Three Percent #162: I Am a Wild Rose
Chad and Tom are joined by Mark Haber from Brazos Bookstore and author of the forthcoming Reinhardt's Garden (October 1, Coffee House Press). They talk a bit about Translation Bread Loaf (two thumbs up) and about a special poster for anyone who buys the First 100 from Open Letter, before trying their best to breakdown a ...
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The Five Tools, Part II: Translators [Let’s Praise More of My Friends]
. . . poor translations, he asserted, were the worst crimes an academic or a writer could commit, and a translator shouldn't be allowed to call themselves a translator until their translation had been read by hundreds of scholars and for hundreds of years, so that, in short, a translator would never know if they were a ...
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The Five Tools, Part I: Authors [Let’s Praise My Friends]
One of the most entertaining parts of my past three weeks of travel was the discovery that Norwegians refer to first-time authors as “debutants.” Which, OK, at first, is weird. The first time someone said it aloud, “she’s a debutant author,” I too had the urge to correct them. But then, like any great joke that's ...
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TMR 8.06: CoDex 1962 (Pages 199-256)
Chad and Brian break down the next few chapters of "Iceland's Thousand Years" by Sjón, which really set the plot in motion. They also talk about water, what it means to be an Icelander, how "bacon-eater" is an insult, Danes in general, myth-making, and much more. The next episode will focus on pages 257-302 (all in the ...
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Three Percent #161: Will a French Book Win the BTBA?
Chad and Tom took some time off on Memorial Day to bring you this little podcast about the Best Translated Book Award finalists (winner will be announced at 5pm on 5/29 at BEA/NYRF, and there will be an informal afterparty at The Brooklyneer on Houston starting at 7), about the Man Booker International winner, about the ...
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TMR 8.05: CoDex 1962 (Pages 156-198)
Even without an expert to guide them, Chad and Brian dissect the end of the first volume of CoDex 1962, talking golems and tenderness, speculating about the film behind the narrator's eyes, evaluating origin myths (and their apocalyptic counterparts), and praising the overall narrative structure of "Thine Eyes Did See My ...
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Four Attempts at Approaches [Drawn & Quarterly]
This post comes to you thanks to a few different starting points: a box of translated graphic novels that Drawn & Quarterly sent me a couple of weeks ago, the fact that Janet Hong translated one of them (see last week’s interview), the fact that I don’t have time this month to read a ton of novels for these weekly ...
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Carlos Labbé “Ofri Afro”
One of the many very cool things about Carlos Labbé (our "Author of the Month!" use LABBE at checkout for 30% off all his books) is that he's not only a fascinating writer--he's also a very interesting musician. You can hear all of his music on Soundcloud and Spotify, but I wanted to take a post just to push his latest ...
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Spiritual Choreographies [Excerpt]
As mentioned last week, in celebration of the imminent release of Carlos Labbé's Spiritual Choreographies, we decided to make Carlos our "Author of the Month." From now until June 1st, you can use the code LABBE at checkout to get 30% off any and all of his books. (Including ePub versions. And preorders.) And to try and ...
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TMR 8.04: CoDex 1962 (Pages 110-155)
Kári Tulinius joins Chad and Brian this week and provides some incredibly valuable insight into the translation itself, connections to Iceland and to other writings, and much much more. This is one of the most difficult parts of the book to read, given the horrific actions of one of the characters, but also points toward ...
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“Melville: A Novel” by Jean Giono
Melville by Jean Giono Translated from the French by Paul Eprile 108 pgs. | pb | 9781681371375 | $14.00 NYRB Review by Brendan Riley In The Books in My Life (1952), Henry Miller, devoting an entire chapter to French writer Jean Giono (1895-1970), boasts about spending “several years. . . . preaching the ...
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Three Percent #160: Double Controversy
One of the calmest podcasts to date featuring two controversial topics: the new Open Letter cover design, and the side-effects of suddenly doubling (or quadrupling) the number of translations published every year. In terms of recommendations, this week Chad is all about the completely wild Bred from the Eyes of a Wolf by ...
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Dezafi [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Awards. P.T. Smith reads, writes, and lives in Vermont. Dezafi by Frankétienne, translated from the French by Asselin Charles (Haiti, University of Virginia) Every year, the BTBA ...
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Transparent City [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Awards. Tobias Carroll is the managing editor of Vol.1 Brooklyn and the author of the books Reel and Transitory. He writes the Watchlist column for Words Without Borders. Transparent ...
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Negative Space [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Awards. Tess Lewis is a writer and translator from French and German. She is co-chair of the PEN America Translation Committee and serves as an Advisory Editor for the Hudson Review. Her ...
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the easiness and the loneliness [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Awards. Laura Marris is a writer and translator. Her poems and translations have appeared in The Yale Review, The Brooklyn Rail,The Cortland Review, The Volta, Asymptote, and elsewhere. ...
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Pretty Things [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Awards. Giselle Robledo is a reader trying to infiltrate the book reviewer world. You can find her on Twitter at @Objetpetit_a_. Pretty Things by Virginie Despentes, translated from ...
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Interview with Janet Hong [Graphic Novels in Translation]
Off to a bit of a slow start here, but this month's focus on Three Percent is going to be graphic novels in translation. I'll have a post up on Monday about some Drawn & Quarterly titles I've been reading, then one on NYRB Comics later in the month. Also hoping to have another interview or two, but I'll keep those to ...
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Carlos Labbé [Author of the Month]
In celebration of the release of Carlos Labbé's Spiritual Choreographies later this month--and because of a little surprise we'll unveil soon enough--we decided to make Carlos our "Author of the Month." From now until June 1st, you can use the code LABBE at checkout to get 30% off any and all of his books. (Including ePub ...
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Disoriental [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Awards. James Crossley has stood behind the counter of one independent bookstore or another for more than fifteen years and is currently the manager of brand-new Madison Books in Seattle. ...
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Bride and Groom [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Awards. Ruchama Johnston-Bloom, who writes about modern Jewish thought and Orientalism. She has a PhD in the History of Judaism from the University of Chicago and is the Associate Director of ...
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TMR 8.03: CoDex 1962 (Pages 58-109)
Chad's just back from a 7 hour train ride. Brian is inebriated. Tom Flynn is . . . Tom Flynn? It's a classic episode of the Two Month Review about horny avenging angels, chamber pot dumps, how many books actually last for a hundred years, the name "Karl," whatever Bumble is, and much more. A fun, loose podcast about a ...
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People in the Room [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Awards. Tom Flynn is the manager/buyer for Volumes Bookcafe (@volumesbooks on all social sites) in Chicago. He can often be found interrupting others' work in order to make them read a ...
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Congo Inc.: Bismarck’s Testament [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Awards. Noah M. Mintz is a translator, a former bookseller, and a PhD student at Columbia University. Congo Inc.: Bismarck’s Testament by In Koli Jean Bofane, translated from the ...
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Architecture of Dispersed Life: Selected Poetry [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Awards. Aditi Machado is the author of Some Beheadings and the translator of Farid Tali’s Prosopopoeia. She is the former poetry editor at Asymptote and the visiting poet-in-residence ...
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TMR 8.02: CoDex 1962 (Pages 1-57)
This is a special episode of the Two Month Review featuring Chad's "World Literature & Translation" class, who read CoDex 1962 (and ten other contemporary works in translation) this semester. They talk with Chad and Brian about interpretation and translation, how they judge whether a translation is good or bad, Werner ...
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A Guesstimation of a Booklist Review-type Post
I alluded to this in an earlier post, but the main reason Three Percent has been light on this sort of content (and heavy on BTBA content, which is all stellar and worth checking out) isn't due to a lack of desire or interest, but a confluence of other events: deadlines for two pieces (one that should be available shortly, ...
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“Dark Constellations” by Pola Oloixarac
Dark Constellations by Pola Oloixarac Translated from the Spanish by Roy Kesey 216 pgs. | pb | 9781616959234 | $22.00 Soho Press Reviewed by Grant Barber Dark Constellations, the second novel in translation by the author of Savage Theories, continues the intriguing, complex narratives of science, ...
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Öræfi: The Wasteland [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Awards. Keaton Patterson buys books for a living at Brazos Bookstore in Houston, Texas. Follow him on Twitter @Tex_Ulysses. Öræfi: The Wasteland by Ófeigur Sigurdsson, translated ...
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Three Percent #159: Publishing in 2025?
Chad and Tom are back to talk about Independent Bookstore Day (and Free Comic Book Day and Record Store Day), the Indie Playlist Initiative, fascists storming Politics & Prose, Alex Shephard's Mueller Report article, how much money Stanford (the Duke of the West?) is wasting on their crappy football program instead of ...
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After the Winter [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Awards. Rebecca Hussey is a community college English professor, a book reviewer, and a Book Riot contributor, where she writes a monthly round-up of indie press books, including many books ...
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Love in the New Millennium [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Awards. Rachel Cordasco has a PhD in literary studies and currently works as a developmental editor. She also writes reviews for publications like World Literature Today and Strange Horizons ...
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Convenience Store Woman [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Awards. Elijah Watson is a bookseller at A Room of One’s Own Bookstore. He can be found on Twitter @wavvymango. Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata, translated from the ...
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TMR 8.01: CoDex 1962 (Introduction)
The new season of the Two Month Review kicks off with a pretty wide-ranging discussion. Sure, there is a bit about Sjón (pronounced SYOHN, which is not how Chad says it) and a few things about his earlier books and CoDex 1962, but a good part of this introductory episode is about patterns in narrative, cinematic realism, ...
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CoDex 1962: Introduction
The podcast version of this will be live tomorrow morning, but in the meantime, you can always watch us talk about literature, Iceland, my silly theories, a mystery project, cinematic realism, and Game of Thrones. Subscribe to our YouTube channel and you can catch every Two Month Review episode before the official ...
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The Governesses [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Awards. Pierce Alquist has a MA in Publishing and Writing from Emerson College and currently works in publishing in Boston. She is also a freelance book critic, writer, and Book Riot ...
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The Hospital [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Awards. Justin Walls is a bookseller with Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon and can be found on Twitter @jaawlfins. The Hospital by Ahmed Bouanani, translated from the French by ...
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The Man Between [Genre of the Month]
I've been very lax in writing about the Open Letter author/genre of the month for April: nonfiction. But, there are still a couple of weeks left to share some info about our previously published and forthcoming works of nonfiction. And, as always, you can get 30% any of these books by using NONFICTION at ...
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Bricks and Mortar [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Awards. Tony Messenger is an Australian writer, critic and interviewer who has had works published in Overland Literary Journal, Southerly Journal, Mascara Literary Review, Burning House ...
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Season Eight of the Two Month Review: CODEX 1962 by Sjón
If you're a long-time listener to the Two Month Review podcast, or even a part-time follower of the Open Letter twitter, you've probably already heard that the next season of the podcast (it's eighth?!) is going to be all about Sjón's CoDex 1962. "Spanning eras, continents, and genres, CoDex 1962—twenty years in ...
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Moon Brow [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Awards. Tara Cheesman is a blogger turned freelance book critic, National Book Critics Circle member & 2018 Best Translated Book Award Fiction Judge. Her reviews can be found online at ...
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Three Percent #158: 2019 Best Translated Book Award Longlists
Best Translated Book Award fiction judge Kasia Bartoszynska joins Chad and Tom to talk about the recently released longlists. After providing some insight into the committee's thinking and discussions (and confirming that Chad had no knowledge of the lists beforehand, while not 100% confirming that Chad isn't Adam ...
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Seventeen [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Awards. Adam Hetherington is a reader and a BTBA judge. Seventeen by Hideo Yokoyama, translated from the Japanese by Louise Heal Kawai (Japan, FSG) In August of 1985, Japan Airlines ...
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Three Percent BONUS EPISODE: Antonia Lloyd-Jones and Sean Bye on Polish Reportage
As part of Nonfiction in Translation Month at Three Percent, Polish translators Antonia Lloyd-Jones and Sean Bye came on the podcast to explain Polish Reportage, talk about some key figures and forthcoming books, and more or less introduce Open Letter's new nonfiction line. Some of the titles mentioned on this podcast ...
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The 2019 Best Translated Book Award Longlists
Although it doesn't seem like everyone believes me--I've gotten a few emails about titles that didn't make the Best Translated Book Award longlists, and one promoting a conspiracy theory that I am Adam Hetherington—I had no clear idea which titles made the BTBA longlists until they appeared on The Millions yesterday ...
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Who is the Chris Davis of Books? (AKA Does Literature Have “The Room”?)
Let's just get this out of the way, right here at the start: The nonfiction in translation data I've compiled for the PW Translation Database is incomplete. Which you can interpret, with no ill will, as "Chad has done a poor job with this research." To be fair, there is a two-year period in which the nonfiction data is ...
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Meet the BTBA Judges!
Tomorrow morning at 10am the 2019 Best Translated Book Award longlists will be revealed over at The Millions. As a bit of a preview, the judges wanted to introduce themselves . . . Keaton Patterson, a lifelong Texan, has an MA in Literature from the University of Houston-Clear Lake. For the past five years, he has been ...
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Mike Trout Floats All Boats
Let's start with what this post isn't going to be. It's not going to be a post about nonfiction in translation even though I declared, just yesterday, that this is "Nonfiction in Translation Month" at Three Percent. That's really going to kick off next week with a post about two true crime books in translation and a weird ...
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Are These Clues? [BTBA 2019]
We are days away from finding out which titles made the 2019 BTBA longlist! In the meantime, here's a post from Katarzyna (Kasia) Bartoszyńska, an English professor at Monmouth College, a translator (from Polish to English), and a former bookseller at the Seminary Co-op Bookstore in Chicago. There are simply too many good ...
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Three Percent #157: Post-Portland AWP
On this atypically subdued episode, Chad recounts some of his adventures in Portland at the AWP conference, and speculates about why this was his favorite one to date. Tom helps illuminate some of the mysteries behind IndieBound and what might be next for independent stores trying to capture some online sales. (And how this ...
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Two Month Review #7.9: Radiant Terminus (Chapters 39-49/END)
Chad and Brian finish off Radiant Terminus and talk about possible interpretation of the ending, whether anyone came out of this book OK, the balance between humor and horror, written vs. oral culture, possible readings or approaches to the novel, and a desire for a "Post-Exotic" journal. They also revisit Volodine's ...
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Blogging Like It’s 1967 [Anniversaries, Volume 1]
Tomorrow afternoon we'll run the first of several interviews with Damion Searls, translator of the first complete version of Anniversaries to appear in English. If things go according to plan, each month we'll dig deeper and deeper into this massive book, a twentieth-century masterpiece that weighs something ...
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Three Percent #156: The Netflix of Titles
On this week's podcast, Chad and Tom talk laugh about how HarperVia conceives of itself, praise this year's National Book Award for Translation judges, give some spotty analysis of the Man Crankstart (?) Booker International longlist, the idea of an International Writers Hall of Fame (vote here), the one NCAA Basketball ...
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BTBA-Eligible Books from Japan [BTBA 2019]
We're exactly 24 days away from finding out which titles are on the 2019 BTBA longlist! (It will be announced at The Millions, and I [Chad] won't know what's on it until everyone else finds out. I'm so excited! I love being completely in the dark about this.) If you're interested in joining the conversation about which books ...
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“Ergo” by Jakov Lind [Excerpt]
Slowly and heavily, a hippopotamus rising from the Nile, he rose from the paper mountain, beat the nightmare of virginal lewdness out of his clothes and stood there, a squat man of sixty with short gray hair and swollen lips, crossing his hands over his forehead, and looked around him darkly. Have you been watching me again ...
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“Landscape in Concrete” by Jakov Lind [Excerpt]
When you lose your way in the Ardennes, you’re lost. What use are plans and prayers. A landscape without faces is like air nobody breathes. A landscape in itself is nothing. The country through which German Sergeant Gauthier Bachmann was making his way on the second Monday before Easter was green but lifeless. [. . .] And ...
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Joshua Cohen on Jakov Lind [Author of the Month]
Our featured author of the month is Jakov Lind, an author whose biography, as you'll read below, is absolutely fascinating. To celebrate his work, we're offering 30% off on Landscape in Concrete and Ergo all month—just use the code LIND at checkout. Joshua Cohen (The Book of Numbers, Witz) wrote an amazing ...
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Three Percent BONUS EPISODE: Interview with Edwin Frank of NYRB
Following a trip to India to speak at the Seagull School of Publishing, Edwin Frank sat down to talk about Uwe Johnson's Anniversaries and NYRB's overall editorial history, including surprise hits, books he wishes more people read, and much more. A brilliant reader, publisher, and thinker, this episode will be of great ...
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Two Month Review #7.8: Radiant Terminus (Chapters 27-38)
This is a jam-packed episode as Rachel Crawford joins Brian and Chad to talk about Kronauer's "trial," Hannko and Samiya in the Taiga, the lasting impact of PTSD, the post-post-apocalyptic world, Russian literature and French minimalism, New Jersey, and more. This is the penultimate episode of season seven, and sets up a lot ...
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Which Living Writers Are Sure-Thing Hall of Famers?
Last Thursday, I must've sent two dozen people a variation on that question above, usually in the form "Name me ten living 'Hall of Fame' writers." No explanation, no context, nothing. I was curious as to who people would name, what biases would come through, which authors would start debates. And I figured I could get a ...
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Two Month Review #7.7: Radiant Terminus (Chapters 20-26)
Chad and Brian go it alone through Kronauer's "night of amok" as he attempt to murder Solovyei for his myriad crimes. Then they enter into part four of the book, "Taiga," which is a collection of "narracts" set some seven hundred (or a thousand?) years in the future. Hannko is recreating the feminist post-exotic texts from ...
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Three Percent BONUS EPISODE: Interview with Nick During of NYRB
To supplement NYRB month on Three Percent, Chad and Anthony talked to Nick During, publicist for New York Review Books, about the marketing of Anniversaries by Uwe Johnson, the struggles to get attention for reprints, Henry Green's eternal rediscovery, and much more. (Including Nick's ratings of the impact of various ...
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NYRB Classics: Some Stats [Strategies for Publishers]
This month, I'm going to switch things up a bit. Initially, I was going to leave Canada behind and focus on one single book: Uwe Johnson's Anniversaries. But, well, this is 1,600 pages long, and I have to proof a couple things this month, and reread some books for my class, and go to AWP, and catch up on Deadly ...
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Jakov Lind [Open Letter Author of the Month]
The selection of Jakov Lind as our "Author of the Month" will make even more sense after Monday's post, but after telling my class about Landscape in Concrete on Tuesday, I really wanted to revisit his books—and wanted to convince all of you to join in! As always, for all this month, you can get 30% off of both of his ...
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“The Faerie Devouring” by Catherine Lalond [Quebec Literature from P.T. Smith]
Before starting this month's focus on Quebec literature, I asked P.T. Smith to recommend a few books for me to read, since he's one of the few Americans I know who has read a lot of Quebec literature. But rather than hoard these recommendations or write silly things about them, we decided it would be best if P.T. wrote weekly ...
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Two Month Review #7.6: Radiant Terminus (Chapters 17-19)
With just Chad and Brian on this week's episode, the show turns almost full superhero. We get Chad's weirdly specific—and unnerving—Volodine-influenced dream. We get to see Samiya Schmidt transform into a raging version of Captain Marvel/Banshee. We get to see Kronauer assume his role as the one chosen to take down ...
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Books That Would Make My BTBA 2019 Shortlist If Only They Qualified [BTBA 2019]
Today's Best Translated Book Award post is from Caitlin Baker of Island Books in Seattle/Mercer Island. She's also a frequent Two Month Review guest, and prolific Book Twitterer. As I get closer to narrowing down the stacks of books I’ve read this past year and finalizing my BTBA 2019 longlist, there are two books ...
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Coach House Books & Marie-Claire Blais [2018 Redux]
I've really, really enjoyed Quebec Month here at Three Percent. I had the chance to read the Catherine Leroux book I've been wanting to read, encountered some other really great books and presses I probably would've missed if I hadn't forced this on myself, and got to run a few really cool interviews and excerpts. On top of ...
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“The Employee” by Guillermo Saccomanno [Excerpt]
You have three days left to take advantage of Guillermo Saccomanno's status as "Open Letter Author of the Month." Through Thursday night, you can get 30% off both of his books via the Open Letter website by using the code SACCOMANNO at checkout. With so many positive comments coming in about 77, I thought I'd give you a ...
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“Next Episode” by Hubert Aquin [Quebec Literature from P.T. Smith]
Before starting this month's focus on Quebec literature, I asked P.T. Smith to recommend a few books for me to read, since he's one of the few Americans I know who has read a lot of Quebec literature. But rather than hoard these recommendations or write silly things about them, we decided it would be best if P.T. wrote weekly ...
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Two Month Review #7.5: Radiant Terminus (Chapters 14-16)
Tobias Carroll (Transitory, Reel) joins Chad and Brian to talk about the latest installment of Radiant Terminus. These three chapters get wild, as Schulhoff (who mysteriously disappeared shortly after his marriage to Hannko, Solovyei's daughter) returns and tries to get Ilyushenko to kill him. And then the never-ending ...
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“Aphelia” by Mikella Nicol [Excerpt]
Following on this morning's interview with Dimitri Nasrallah, below you'll find an excerpt from Aphelia by Mikella Nicol, translated from the French by Lesley Trites, and forthcoming from Véhicule Press/Esplanade Books. The night I met Mia, I was drinking with Louis at the bar. We were joking with the ...
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Interview with Dimitri Nasrallah of Esplanade Books
Continuing our month-long series of Quebec literature, below you'll find an interview with Dimitri Nasrallah, writer, translator, and editor of Esplanade Books, the fiction imprint of Véhicule Press. Later this afternoon we'll be running an excerpt from one of their forthcoming titles. Chad W. Post: I want to ask you ...
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Three Percent #154: Celebrity Translators
After an update about Chad's computer files and subscriptions, Tom talks about Amazon leaving NYC and they both get into a long discussion about translator Molly Ringwald (who you might also recognize from Riverdale). Chad tries to order a book from IndieBound (where do these books process from?) and then they talk a bit ...
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Véhicule Press/Esplanade Fiction & BookThug/Book*Hug [P.T. Smith Redux]
This really is the P. T. Smith-inspired post. As you likely know, Patrick has been writing weekly posts for Three Percent this month about some of his favorite works of Quebec literature. (See this post and this one.) He's one of the few Americans I know (maybe the only one?) who is deep into Quebec lit, so deep in fact that ...
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Books of the Future [BTBA 2019]
Today's Best Translated Book Award post is from George Carroll, life-long Sounders fan, newly converted Tottenham fan.. This is my third rodeo with The Best Translated Book Award. The first year the book that I wanted to win, Seibo There Below, did. But then there was the next year. Not even close, but you have to be a ...
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“77” by Guillermo Saccomanno [Excerpt]
To celebrate Guillermo Saccomanno being out "Author of the Month" (get 30% off his books by using SACCOMANNO at checkout) and the release of 77, we thought we'd run this excerpt from his new book. There was nothing magical about how I ended up in Lutz’s hole-in-the-wall. I’ll try to explain bit by bit. I was ...
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New Release! 77 by Guillermo Saccomanno
We're a few days late announcing this here, but Tuesday, February 12th was the official pub date for Guillermo Saccomanno's 77, translated from the Spanish by Andrea G. Labinger. And today, it was featured in Vanity Fair as one of "6 Must-Read Books from Around the World." Here's the full press release that Anthony put ...
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The Bones [BTBA 2019]
Today's BTBA post is from Sofia Samatar, author of A Stranger in Olondria and Assistant Professor at James Madison University. Reading for an award jury is a special type of reading: very alert and very fast. I’m finding that the accelerated pace, combined with a certain sharpness in my eye, which has to read and ...
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Kamouraska by Anne Hébert [Quebec Literature from P.T.]
Before starting this month's focus on Quebec literature, I asked P.T. Smith to recommend a few books for me to read, since he's one of the few Americans I know who has read a lot of Quebec literature. But rather than hoard these recommendations or write silly things about them, we decided it would be best if P.T. wrote weekly ...
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Two Month Review #7.4: Radiant Terminus (Chapters 9-13)
Rhett McNeil joins Chad Post and pinch-hitter Kaija Straumanis to talk about the first half of part two of Radiant Terminus, "Ode to the Camps." From recounting Chad's latest Volodine-inflected dream to a discussion of the ways various ideologies (fairy tales, anarcho-capitalism, Marxism-Leninism) play out in the novel, to ...
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Biblioasis [Catherine Leroux Redux]
Last December, when I was working on this post about Quebec fiction, I came up with the idea of having themed months running throughout 2019. Which is why January was all about Spain, February about Quebec, and March about Uwe Johnson's Anniversaries. (Which might kill me and/or lead me into an insane rabbit-hole of ...
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“Gesell Dome” by Guillermo Saccomanno [Excerpt]
As we posted about last week, Guillermo Saccomanno is our featured author of the month. Throughout February, you can get 30% off both of his books by using the code SACCOMANNO at checkout. To entice you, below you'll find a excerpt from the first Saccomanno book we published, Gesell Dome. Like True Detective through ...
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“Go Figure” by Réjean Ducharme [Quebec Literature from P.T.]
Before starting this month's focus on Quebec literature, I asked P.T. Smith to recommend a few books for me to read, since he's one of the few Americans I know who has read a lot of Quebec literature. But rather than hoard these recommendations or write silly things about this, we decided it would be best if P.T. wrote a ...
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Two Month Review #7.3: Radiant Terminus (Chapters 4-8)
This week, former TMR guest Rachel Cardasco returns to talk about speculative fiction in translation, various allegories for Radiant Terminus (current political climate, The Tempest, The Bible), who dreams the dreamer, the patriarchy and Maria Kwoll's feminist post-exotic texts, steampunk technology, spider dreams, and ...
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Prague by Madue Veilleux [Excerpt]
I wanted to learn how to live alone. I’d never done it. I’d always taken elaborate care to avoid solitude. I’d been single for two months over ten years. Almost never slept alone. I’d built relationships just to have someone, and I’d had sex for the same reason. At that point, I thought I had to choose between my ...
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Interview with Peter McCambridge of QC Fiction
Following up on Monday's post, here's an interview with the founder of QC Fiction, Peter McCambridge. Since he goes into most of his bio below, I'm not going to preface this all that much, except to congratulate him on being a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Translation and the Giller Prize for Songs for the ...
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Three Percent #153: Winter Beats and Breaks
At the top of this episode, Tom explains why he and Chad fell off the biweekly schedule for a bit, but then they come back strong, talking about Winter Institute, the Independent Publishers Caucus, minimum wage, this wild New Yorker article that doesn't quite do enough, but makes Chad angry, and Hanif Abdurraqib's Go Ahead ...
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QC Fiction [Canada Redux]
I think I might have mentioned this in an earlier post, but now that we’ve put Spain to bed with a week dedicated to each of the four major languages—Castilian, Catalan, Galician, and Basque—we’re turning our attention to the North. As in the Great White. Canada: home of poutine, reasonable political leaders (now that ...
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Guillermo Saccomanno [Open Letter Author of the Month]
In celebration of the release of 77 on Tuesday, February 12, we’ve decided to make Guillermo Saccomanno this month’s featured author. Like what we did for Volodine last month, we’re offering 30% all orders for Gesell Dome and 77 (use SACCOMANNO at checkout), and will be running a series of excerpts from his books. ...
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Interview with Amaia Gabantxo
To finish off this month of Spanish literature, I talked to Amaia Gabantxo, translator of Twist and Blade of Light by Harkaitz Cano along with a half-dozen other Basque authors, including Bernardo Atxaga, Unai Elorriaga, and Kirmen Uribe, among others. She also moonlights as a flamenco singer and recently released an ...
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The Translation Database Has Moved!
As you can read about in this Publishers Weekly article, the Translation Database is no longer being updated on this site. I hope to upload spreadsheets compiling all the data from time to time, but for now, this is where you can get the most up-to-date data about which titles are being published in translation for the ...
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Why Are Patreon [Time for a Basque Rundown]
I promise I’ll be back on schedule soon—this computer situation is really taking it’s toll . . . I’m currently writing on my iPad, using a Bluetooth keyboard and feeling like a gross millennial working out of a third-wave coffee shop, saying NO! to Large Computer, and proving that Jobs is Genius and that 2019 is about ...
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Two Month Review #7.2: Radiant Terminus (Chapters 1-3)
From Tarkovsky to Jessica Jones, this week's episode covers a lot of ground. Anthony and Chad are joined by Hailey Dezort to walk through the first three chapters of Antoine Volodine's Radiant Terminus. There's a lot to unpack, from the plant names, to the nature of men, to horrible fathers, to the humor found in Gramma ...
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New Poetry Editor at Open Letter and Call for Poetry Submissions!
Open Letter’s new Poetry Editor, Anastasia Nikolis, interviewed herself so that you wouldn’t have to. These are the questions she thinks might help you learn about the new person reading the poetry submissions at Open Letter Books. Tell us a little bit about yourself. What else do you do when you aren’t ...
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Two Month Review #7.1: Radiant Terminus (Introduction)
We’re back! . . . And a few days late. Chad explains why on the podcast itself, but suffice it to say that last week was a bit, um, stressful. But Brian and Chad finally got together to talk about Antoine Volodine in general, post-exoticism, Brian Evenson’s introduction to Radiant Terminus, similarities between ...
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Three Percent BONUS EPISODE: Interview with Jonathan Dunne
As part of this month's ongoing series of posts about literature from Spain, I talked to author, translator, and publisher Jonathan Dunne, whose Small Stations Press has produced more translations of Galician literature into English than anyone else. On this bonus episode of the Three Percent Podcast, we talk about how to ...
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Why Are Preview Lists [Galician Literature + Positivity]
I've been trying sooooooo hard to be positive in 2019. So hard. Stay optimistic in light of distribution issues. Don't worry about sales too much, because I'm 250% certain Anthony is going to take us to the next level. Ignore the fact that Lit Hub listed Night School as one of the best reviewed "nonfiction" books of the ...
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“Tell Them of Battles, Kings, & Elephants” by Mathias Énard
Tell Them of Battles, Kings, & Elephants Translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell 144 pgs. | pb |9780811227049 | $19.95 New Directions Publishing Reviewed by Grant Barber Énard is a Very Important Author indeed. He belongs on the stage with Pamuk, T Morrison, Morante, Okri, Delillo, J. Marías, ...
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“Eleven Sooty Dreams” by Manuela Draeger [Excerpt]
As we posted about last week, in honor of Radiant Terminus being the next featured Two Month Review title, Antoine Volodine is our "Author of the Month." So, if you want to buy any of his books, you can get 30% off by using the code VOLODINE at checkout. (And yes, that applies to print AND ebooks.) Last friday we ...
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“Radiant Terminus” Two Month Review Reading Schedule
It's almost time for the next season of the Two Month Review—our seventh season. (That's a solid number.) This season we're returning to do an Open Letter title, Antoine Volodine's Radiant Terminus, translated from the French by Jeffrey Zuckerman. The most patently sci-fi work of Antoine Volodine’s to be ...
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Three Percent #152: Seven (Or So) Insights
Getting back on schedule for the new year, Chad and Tom convene to talk about two articles: "7 Publishing Insights Revealed by Last Year's Top 100 Bestselling Books," and "Virginia Woolf? Snob! Richard Wright? Sexist! Dostoyevsky? Anti-Semite!" They also talk a bit about YA books and the precipitous decline in reading as ...
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SCBWI Opens Work in Progress Grants to Translators of Children’s Literature
For the first time, the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) has opened its Work in Progress (WIP) grants to translators of children's literature. Beginning this year, translators can follow the instructions here and here to submit to the WIP Translation category. Submissions will be ...
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“Gustave and Maxime in Egypt (Or: The Metaphysics of Happening)” by Zsófia Bán
“. . . but an enormous part of our lives is taken up with everything that doesn’t happen.” —Péter Nádas Gustave and Maxime are traveling. “Et le petit chat,” dit Hélène, “partira-t-il aussi?” Maxime is taking pictures and Gustave is reading. Maxime is running around and Gustave is sitting ...
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Radiant Terminus [Excerpt]
In support of Antoine Volodine as our featured "Author of the Month," throughout the day we'll be posting excerpts from the three books of his Open Letter has already published. (Next week we'll run excerpts from forthcoming ones . . . ) The last excerpt for today is from Radiant Terminus, translated from the French by ...
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Bardo or Not Bardo [Excerpt]
In support of Antoine Volodine as our featured "Author of the Month," throughout the day we'll be posting excerpts from the three books of his Open Letter has already published. (Next week we'll run excerpts from forthcoming ones . . . ) Next up is Bardo or Not Bardo, translated from the French by J.T. ...
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Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven [Excerpt]
In support of Antoine Volodine as our featured "Author of the Month," throughout the day we'll be posting excerpts from the three books of his Open Letter has already published. (Next week we'll run excerpts from forthcoming ones . . . ) First up is Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven, translated from the ...
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Antoine Volodine [Open Letter Author of the Month]
In addition to the monthly themes, another new series for 2019 is a monthly featured author from the Open Letter backlist. Each month we'll choose someone else from our backlist, write a number of posts about them and their work, and offer up a 30% on all purchases made during that month. And for January we've decided to ...
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Landmarks [BTBA 2019]
This week's Best Translated Book Award post is from Tara Cheesman of Reader at Large and BookRiot. This is my second year as a BTBA fiction judge and (please don’t @ me) the pages are all starting to run together. I’ve discovered that when reading books in rapid succession it helps to identify landmarks on the ...
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“Four by Four” by Sara Mesa
Below is an excerpt from Four by Four by Sara Mesa, translated by Katie Whittemore. To give you a bit of context, I'm including the synopsis that Katie sent us with her original sample: The novel is composed of three sections, each written in a distinct narrative voice and style. In Part One, we are introduced to ...
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Why Are Meritocracy [Two Castilian Books]
I have two books that I want to talk about this week, and one related publishing/cultural issue, but before I get into all of that, I thought it would be interesting to dig a bit into some of the data from last week's "Spain By the Numbers" post. As I mentioned in that same post, over the course of this month, I'm going to ...
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“Seventeen” by Hideo Yokoyama
Seventeen by Hideo Yokoyama Translated from Japanese by Louise Heal Kawai 368 pgs. | hc | 9780374261245 | $28.00 MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux Review by Maggie Myers Seventeen is a thrilling mixture of truth and fiction by Hideo Yokoyama, acclaimed author of Six Four (which has also been translated into ...
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Interview with Katie Whittemore
We're starting out this month's focus on Spanish literature with a look at a couple Castilian authors, especially Sara Mesa, whose works Open Letter will be publishing in 2020. Because I'm a bit impatient, I thought I'd introduce her to you now, via a sample of Four by Four (available on 1/9), a short piece on her ...
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Books from Spain [By the Numbers]
I alluded to this in an earlier post (or two?), but one of the things I'd like to do on Three Percent this year is highlight a different group of books every month. It could be a particular country—like this month—or a set of publishers, or a single publisher, or single author. Regardless of the specifics of a particular ...
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9 x 9 x 9: Everything Comes to an End
The other day I saw someone on Twitter asking haters of "best of" lists what changes they would institute to make these things more palatable. I thought about this for longer than I'd like to admit because a) circa-2001, I used to love year-end recaps. This was the era of "Best Week Ever" and other clip shows that were ...
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I Wrote Some Stuff in 2018
In some ways, this is long overdue, but just in time for the final post of the year, here's the complete collection of "articles" that I wrote this year for Three Percent. The initial plan was to do one a week, using a new translation as a launching pad to talk about international literature, publishing, and book culture, ...
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Two Month Review #6.11: The Book of Disquiet (sections 394-END)
It's all over! After eleven weeks of Pessoa, Chad and Brian have finished The Book of Disquiet. And to celebrate, they each wrote some jacket copy and blurbs and went hard at trying to get BINGO for someone. They also preview the next season of TMR and come up with a very marketable Pessoa-themed product idea . . . As ...
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Three Percent #151: A Time for Gifting
After a long conversation about a rather strange Rochester gathering of arts organizations, Chad and Tom get down to business: recommending their favorite books of 2018. Except, rather than just make a list, they decide which of their friends or relatives should receive each of these titles. Then they talk about a couple ...
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All the Cameras in Japan
As December rolled around and I started plotting out the end of this year-long series, I had a bunch of ideas for what the final few posts could be about. Knowing that 2019 will bring about some changes to Three Percent (has it ever really remained the same? over eleven-plus years, the one thing that's remained constant is my ...
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Maybe These Days Will Be Over, Over Soon
Man, Three Percent is on a Canadian kick as of late. We podcasted with Kevin Williams of Talonbooks. We ran a review of Mama's Boy by David Goudreault. And now this post. It's as if I were 25% Canadian or something! (Fun fact: I actually am.) Oh, Canada. That country Americans remember exists every time we elect a ...
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Two Month Review #6.10: The Book of Disquiet (sections 359-393)
Probably the most controversial Two Month Review to date, so buckle up! Are there unhinged rants? You bet! Questions regarding the marketing and "completeness" of the New Directions edition? Yep! A long discussion about the differences in voice between the both excellent Margaret Jull Costa and Richard Zenith translations? ...
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Adam’s Sexy Post [BTBA 2019]
This week's Best Translated Book Post is from Adam Hetherington, a reader from Tulsa who also served on last year's jury. “Do you want to do it again?” he asks. Shit. He is my friend, P.T. Smith. We were both BTBA judges last year; this year he’s invented some sort of easy supervisory role for himself, and invited ...
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“Quo Vadis, Baby?” by Grazia Verasani
Quo Vadis, Baby? by Grazia Verasani Translated from the Italian by Taylor Corse and Juliann Vitullo 180 pgs. | pb | 9781599103662 | $15.00 Italica Press Review by Jeanne Bonner The last time I wrote about Grazia Verasani’s Quo Vadis, Baby? (Mondadori, 2007) I was researching an article for Literary Hub ...
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Two Month Review #6.9: The Book of Disquiet (sections 316-358)
This week David Smith—former Open Letter intern and current grad student at the University of Iowa—joins Chad and Brian to debate poetry vs. prose, separating the p.o.v. of Pessoa's heteronyms from his own personal viewpoint, Soares's morality and metaphysics, how to judge the quality of a translation, and much more. As a ...
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Three Percent #150: Canadian Publishing
This week, Kevin Williams of Talonbooks out of Vancouver, British Columbia joins Tom and Chad to talk about the state of publishing in Canada. He recaps his career in the book business—as a bookseller, distributor, agent, and publisher—and provides a lot of insight into the Canadian funding structures, the not-so-great ...
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The Fault in Our Numbers
the cigarette consumed itself inside her body, her extraordinary body, 70 percent water, 30 percent smoke, and I could not understand it —The Nocilla Lab (Sales(S) x List Price(P)) x Readership® – Fixed Operating Expenses(FOE) – Printing(PR) – Author Payment(AP) – Translator Payment(TP) – Marketing Costs(MC) = ...
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Women in Translation [BTBA 2019]
This week's Best Translated Book Award post is from Pierce Alquist of Book Riot. After a record-breakingly frigid Thanksgiving here in the northeast, I’m dreaming wistfully of August. BBQs, beaches, and bikinis are all good but I mostly just miss being able to go outside without wrapping multiple scarves around my face. ...
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In the Borderlands [BTBA 2019]
Today's BTBA post is from Sofia Samatar, author of A Stranger in Olondria and Assistant Professor at James Madison University. We agreed to spend several months in the borderlands. Every few weeks, each of us would send off a dispatch describing our experiences there, a report that might take any form we liked, we were ...
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Two Month Review #6.8: The Book of Disquiet (sections 274-315)
Chad and Brian fly solo this week, filling in dozens of TMR Bingo squares, and trying to come up with "rules for writers" based on this particular section of The Book of Disquiet. It's a pretty imprecise set of rules, but whatever, in the words of Pessoa, "perfection is inhuman." They also talk a bit about a "Mount Rushmore ...
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Three Percent #149: I Have Some Advice
LIVE PODCAST! Well, sort of. Tom was in Rochester, so he and Chad recorded a spontaneous podcast while being in the same room as one another. (And with eight-month-old Aleks, who makes an appearance.) They talk about bookstores Tom visited on this trip, the National Book Awards, and J Franz's now infamous "rules for writers." ...
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So Many Books [BTBA 2019]
Today's BTBA post is from Keaton Patterson of Brazos Bookstore. As a first-time judge for the BTBA or any literary award for that matter, the question that pops into my mind as the books come flooding in is this—where to start? I’ve been the buyer for an Brazos for over six year now. I’m no stranger to sifting ...
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Long Books and Quick Hits [BTBA 2019]
This week's Best Translated Book Award post is from Elijah Watson. If you're a publisher and haven't submitted your titles for BTBA consideration, there's still time! All the info can be found here. I’m between working at bookstores right now, having left the great A Room of One’s Own in Madison, Wisconsin only a ...
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My Struggle, Part II: The 60% Post
Over the past two weeks I've been in NYC for the Words Without Borders gala (THANK YOU AGAIN FOR THE OTTAWAY!), then to LA for the PEN Gala (amazing time with Jessica St. Clair and Dan O'Brien and you too, Ross, I suppose), to Seattle (Amazon Spheres are a thing!), and Minneapolis (sales conference isn't sales conference ...
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Two Month Review #6.7: The Book of Disquiet (sections 222-273)
This week's special guest is Portuguese author and translator João Reis who knows a lot about Pessoa and the writings of his various heteronyms. He also talks about his forthcoming novel, The Translator's Bride, and his work as a translator. There's some of the usual banter as well, including a solid rundown of everyone's ...
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Three Percent #148: The Hottest Trend
Sticking more or less to their biweekly schedule, Chad and Tom reconvene to talk about a couple recent articles, the challenges of being a literary nonprofit, interesting books they're reading, humblebrags about the Words Without Borders and PEN galas, and more. Surprising lack of sports talk this week, although there is a ...
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Two Month Review #6.6: The Book of Disquiet (sections 174-221)
This week's podcast goes off the rails pretty quickly, and includes a hungover dismissal of this version of The Book of Disquiet, the phrase "reclaim some of the douchery" is spoken, there is a lot of laughter, a discussion about the tensions between trying to read this as poetry vs. the expectations that come from trying to ...
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Holiday BTBA Overview [BTBA 2019]
It's Best Translated Book Award build-up time, which lasts, like four months . . . Anyway, here's Kasia Bartoszynska's overview of a number of exciting titles vying for the BTBA 2019! The holiday season is not yet upon us, but for us judges, there’s an exciting new gift in the mail almost daily, in the form of packages ...
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Two Month Review #6.5: The Book of Disquiet (sections 131-173)
This week Chad and Brian come to some conclusions about the Vicente Guedes part of The Book of Disquiet and get very excited about the more "mature, sophisticated" writings of Bernardo Soares. They both love this new voice and dig into what separates the heteronyms and their philosophies on life. And without a guest, Chad ...
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Three Percent #147: Helping Listeners One Translation Heuristic at a Time
This week's episode is mostly inspired by an email from a listener about evaluating translations, and although Tom and Chad don't provide the hardest and fastest rules, they do have an interesting conversation about how they read and judge translated books. They also follow up on a few different threads from earlier episodes ...
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“Mamma’s Boy” by David Goudreault
Mamma's Boy by David Goudreault Translated from the French by JC Sutcliffe 192 pgs. | pb | 9781771663823 | $20.00 Book*hug Review by Rafael Sanchez Montes This incredibly fun novel is a first-person account and confession by the unnamed protagonist, who offers his side of the story to what he ...
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Johnson O’Connor Research Foundation Study of Translators
This is a special request from former University of Rochester student and Open Letter intern Will Eells. He's working on an interesting study of translators and thought some of Three Percent's readers would be interested in participating. Hello Three Percent readers! The Johnson O’Connor Research Foundation is looking ...
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Two Month Review #6.4: The Book of Disquiet (sections 82-130)
BINGO! That's the theme of today's episode, which includes a Twin Peaks reference, awkward introduction, LitHub reference, and many other squares on the recently released Two Month Review bingo cards. It's explained in full at that post and on the podcast, but every week, the first person to email Chad with "bingo" in the ...
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A Rat, a Labyrinth, “Ah Library TNT”?
What makes an Oulipian book Oulipian? Because my outline for this Deep Vellum post is approximate 17,000 words long, I'm going to condense my planned opening into eight bullet points. If you're not familiar with the Oulipo or their literary program, here's a quick-hitting introduction: Read this book by Warren ...
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Two Month Review Bingo
It may have started as a joke, but now we're deadly serious about Two Month Review Bingo. Starting tomorrow (Wednesday, October 24th), the first person each week to listen to the podcast and send a photo of their completed Bingo card will get 30% off any order at openletterbooks.org (excluding subscriptions). New to ...
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My Struggle, Part I: Confusion and Value
As part of my "Deep Vellum Month" experiment, I decided to move from the toponymy—and topography—of Iceland to geography. Or rather, "geography," as in the Geography of Rebels by Maria Gabriela Llansol. Like with most of the books I've been reading of late, I knew basically nothing about this book before picking it ...
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Two Month Review #6.3: The Book of Disquiet (sections 40-81)
Jerónimo Pizzaro—editor of the "complete edition" of The Book of Disquiet published by New Directions—is the special guest on this week's Two Month Review. He discusses his history with Pessoa, how this volume came to be, the next three volumes in the New Directions project, how to approach The Book of Disquiet and ...
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The Icelandic Connection
If you're a long time reader of Three Percent and/or literature in translation, I'm sure you've heard of Deep Vellum, and probably know most of their history. But to kick off my series of posts about their September/October books—and to put the numbers below in context—it's probably worth a quick recap. Back in the ...
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Two Month Review #6.2: The Book of Disquiet (sections 1-39)
This is one of the most Two Month Review podcasts yet. Chad, Brian, and Tom Flynn (Volumes Books in Chicago) come together to discuss the first forty-six pages (sections 1-39) of the complete version of Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet. In addition to breaking down the philosophy and literary style representing ...
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It’s the Postseason! [Welcome to October]
It's been too long since I last posted a comprehensive update of where we are with translations this year. Which is why I spent most of today updating the Translation Database. There are probably still a number of books to be added before the year is out, but we're getting close to having a pretty stable—and pretty ...
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“Odd Jobs” by Tony Duvert
Odd Jobs by Tony Duvert Translated from the French by S. C. Delaney & Agnés Potier 56 pgs. | pb | 9781939663290 | $11.95 Wakefield Press Review by Kaija Straumanis I've long been a fan of Wakefield Press, ever since I first read Pataphysical Essays by René Daumal, though I don't get to read nearly as ...
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Two Month Review #6.1: “The Book of Disquiet” with Declan Spring
The Two Month Review is back! This season we'll be reading the New Directions publication of The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa, translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa, one of the greatest works of literature (or poetry?) from the past century. To kick things off Declan Spring joined Brian Wood and a ...
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Three Percent #145: Lobbying for No Celebrities
In response to a listener email, Tom expands on his comments from last podcast about the American Booksellers Association. Chad shares some data about genre works in translation and wonders about adding this to the Translation Database. He also has some curious info about Icelandic books in translation and then promotes one ...
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A Frozen Imagination
Over the course of the eleven years that Three Percent has existed, we've published approximately 300 posts about Iceland. We even held a special "Icelandic Week" when Iceland was Guest of Honor at the 2011 Frankfurt Book Fair. In addition to highlighting a ton of authors and musicians, we tried to record a Brennivín ...
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Two Month Review: #5.10: Bonus Episode with Dubravka Ugresic!
Dubravka Ugresic is in Rochester for Open Letter's tenth anniversary celebration, so she got together with Chad and Brian to talk about how she wrote Fox, Melania-related tourism, the two story points that launched the book, her writing process, and more! As always, Fox (and all the previous Two Month Review titles) is ...
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Missed Opportunities (Here’s the NBA Translation Post I Promised)
Per usual when I'm writing these posts, I'm standing in front of my TV with the St. Louis Cardinals game on in the background, dwelling on what this season could've been. Sure, as I type, they have a .5 game lead for the final wild-card slot, but their odds of making the playoffs are only at 68.1%—far from a ...
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Three Percent #144: The Perfect Publishing Award
Were the National Book Award longlists announced last week? Do Chad and Tom have opinions? YES AND YES. That conversation leads into talking about Penguin Random House, the "perfect publishing house," and then into a frank discussion about the future of small press publishing and the challenges of having a career in nonprofit ...
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Publishing Strategies of Rediscovery
A few years ago, New Directions reissued three Clarice Lispector books (and one never-before translated one) with covers that combined into one giant portrait. Although it was preceded by the publication of a new translation of The Hour of the Star—by Ben Moser, who had recently written an all-encompassing biography of ...
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“The Great Passage” by Shion Miura
The Great Passage by Shion Miura translated from the Japanese by Juliet Winters Carpenter 222 pgs. | pb |9781477823071 | $14.95 AmazonCrossing Reviewed by Talia Franks Shion Miura’s The Great Passage chronicles the construction of a dictionary also called The Great Passage, which is a comprehensive catalog ...
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Two Month Review: #5.09: FOX by Dubravka Ugresic (“The Fox’s Widow”)
Ryan Chapman (Conversation Sparks, Riots I Have Known) came on this week to talk about the final section of Dubravka Ugresic's Fox. They discuss "business class vs. economy class" writers, authenticity and performing in the role of a writer, Franzen, the overall genius of Ugresic's writing, and much more. It's a very ...
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Three Percent #143: The Cocky Pod
This week, Chad and Tom return to basics--more book talk than industry talk, a promise to release a new episode every other Wednesday--but start off with something that's very, very Three Percent: #Cockygate. Although the #Cockygate lawsuit is interesting in its own right, it's the breakdown of the seedy underworld of gaming ...
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The Simple Pleasures of Reading
My initial plan for this post was to do a huge data dump for Women in Translation Month, but Meytal Radzinski already went and totally crushed it. She has all the best graphs, pie charts, breakdowns, overviews, recommendations, and more. Go click on that link and spend a day reading everything she has to say. I looked over ...
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Two Month Review: #5.08: FOX by Dubravka Ugresic (“Little Miss Footnote”)
Caitlin Luce Baker from University Bookstore in Seattle joined Chad and Brian to talk about the "Little Miss Footnote" section of Dubravka Ugresic's Fox. They touch on Dorothy Leuthold, Vladimir Nabokov, and much more, including a very subtle weaving of references that you'll definitely want to tune in to learn ...
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BTBA 2019: Juries, Dates, Request for Your Books
Earlier this week, Patrick Smith sent out the email below to as many publishers as possible, letting them know about this year's Best Translated Book Award juries. In case you didn't get this--or, if you're a translator or author who wants to make sure your book is submitted--I'm reposting it all here. (And, we will have a ...
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“The Bottom of the Jar” by Abdellatif Laâbi
The Bottom of the Jar by Abdellatif Laâbi translated from the French by André Naffis-Sahely 220 pgs. | pb |9781935744603 | $17.00 Archipelago Books Reviewed by Brendan Riley For English language readers, like this reviewer, whose literary sense of North Africa is delimited by periodic forays into the ...
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Two Month Review: #5.07: FOX by Dubravka Ugresic (“The Theocritus Adventure”)
This episode, Chad and Brian are joined by the newest Open Letter employee--Anthony Blake! He joins in on a really fun episode about Russian avant-garde literature, connections between the fourth part of Fox and the very earliest sections of the book, footnotes, invented novels, how to smuggle like a fox, and more. This ...
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Three Percent #142: The Great American Podcast
Back from their respective vacations, Chad and Tom talk about PBS's "Great American Read," the NEA's "Big Read," building a sustainable publishing model that puts readers first, the attempt to address the direct-to-consumer discount problem, books that they've recently read, and ones Tom refuses to stock. Tom also discloses ...
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Two Month Review: #5.06: FOX by Dubravka Ugresic (“The Devil’s Garden”)
Pete Mitchell—who wrote this great review of Fox for Asymptote—joined Chad and Brian this week to talk about the heartbreaking (and semi-profane) ending to "The Devil's Garden," the third part of Dubrakva Ugresic's latest novel. From the idea of a small ping singling one's eventual crack-up to peeing on the side of the ...
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August 2018 Newsletter
Celebrate Women in Translation Month with 40% Off All Open Letter Books Written by Women OR Translated by Women Women in Translation Month is always an exciting time to discover, read, discuss, and celebrate books by women from around the world. It was created by Meytal Radzinski back in 2014, and has since spawned ...
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The Very Pleasant Post
Usually I try and make the first post of the month one that's based around some sort of statistical analysis of what's going on with literature in translation. Since this is Women in Translation Month (#WIT2018), it would make a great deal of sense to run a bunch of data about women writers in translation, women translators, ...
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Two Month Review: #5.05: FOX by Dubravka Ugresic (“The Devil’s Garden”)
In this week's Two Month Review, Brian drops some excellent knowledge about why this chapter is called "The Devil's Garden," opening a window into Ugresic's genius, guest George Carroll talks about his time in Kolkata, and Chad says a bunch of mildly entertaining things about camping and landmines. The most stunning moment ...
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A Balance of Plot and Place (Two Month Review: #5.03-5.04: FOX by Dubravka Ugresic – Blog Post)
Last week, Chad and Brian were joined by Ellen Elias-Bursác, one of the Fox translators, for an incredible discussion on the second half of “A Balancing Art.” Ellen was enamored with the dynamics between the Widow and Ugresic’s narrator, the former finding success managing the works of her late husband and the latter ...
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Two Month Review: #5.04: FOX by Ugresic (“A Balancing Art”)
After a two week hiatus due to technical difficulties trying to record from Dublin, the Two Month Review is back! Chad and Brian are joined by translator Ellen Elias-Bursać to talk about her favorite section of the novel--"A Balancing Art." They discuss the various viewpoints presented in this chapter--especially that of the ...
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A Whole Lot of Blather
I'm back from Ireland! I was there for the past two weeks as part of a University of Rochester Travel Club trip for which I served as the "academic host" and gave four different lectures--two on Ulysses, one on Irish humor, and one on the relationship between contemporary Irish literature and language. I think they all went ...
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The Best Female Chinese Novelist You’ve Never Heard Of
To say that Xiao Hong's life was rough is a serious understatement. She was born in 1911, during one of China's most turbulent periods, all leading up to the Second Sino-Japanese War. In addition to the cultural turmoil, Xiao's mother passed away when she was nine, leaving her to be raised by an abusive father whom ...
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“Katalin Street” by Magda Szabó
Katalin Street by Magda Szabó translated from the Hungarian by Len Rix 248 pgs. | pb | 9781681371528 | $15.95 NYRB Classics Reviewed by Jason Newport What is a woman, or her ghost, to do for herself? This is the question that haunts Hungarian author Magda Szabó in her three novels ...
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Selection Bias, Best Translations, and Where Are the Women in Translation From?
A couple weeks ago, Boyd Tonkin, the excellent critic and founder of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize--the inspiration for the Best Translated Book Award, and now the Man Booker International--released a rather unattractive looking book called The 100 Best Novels in Translation. It's pretty obvious what's ...
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Two Month Review: #5.03: FOX by Ugresic (“A Balancing Art”)
Tom Flynn from Volumes is back, surprising Brian, who mostly prepared for the podcast by Googling Croatian Fun Facts. World Cup banter and good natured ribbing aside, Chad, Brian, and Tom dig in to the first half or "A Balancing Art," talking about immigration vs. tourism, literary conferences and celebrity, one of the best ...
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Is this All Fox-y Enough? (Two Month Review: #5.02: FOX by Dubravka Ugresic – Blog Post)
Last week, Chad, Brian, and returning special guest Tom Flynn of Volumes Bookcafe broke down some of the bigger elements of the introductory section of Dubravka Ugresic’s Fox, including the all-important question: is Ugresic’s fox metaphor fox-y enough? We’ll take our own look at some segments of this opening section ...
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Videocast of Two Month Review Season 5, Episode 2
The podcast version of this week's Two Month Review will go live on Thursday morning, and will likely correct some of the crazy shit that happened last night during the live recording. Although my inability to pronounce names will remain, as will the various minor harassments suffered by all three participants. This was a ...
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Three Percent #141: Reimagining the Podcast (AKA Everything Stays the Same)
This week, Chad and Tom talk about the "newly reimagined" BookExpo, the New York Rights Fair, the Albertine Prize (congrats to Emma Ramadan, Anne Garreta, and Deep Vellum!), the BTBA (congrats to Will Vanderhyden and Rodrigo Fresán!), likely shortlisted titles for next year's award, and more. Totally lacking in sports talk ...
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9 Books Likely to Win the 2019 Best Translated Book Award
I'm just back from a poetry reading that's part of Rochester's The Ladder literary conference . . . actually, it was a poetry reading PLUS short stories (which are the poetry of novel writing), which is neither here nor there, except that a few of us played a sort of drinking game? Actually, we just straight up played a ...
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Two Month Review: #5.01: An Introduction to Dubravka Ugresic
The new season is here! For the next two months, Chad and Brian will be talking about Dubravka Ugresic's Fox with a wide range of guests. To kick things off this week, Chad talks about Ugresic's writing career and his history of publishing her, and Brian comes up with a great challenge for our listeners and a running gag ...
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New Two Month Review Season Starts 6/11!
After a bit of a hiatus, we're back! Starting tonight (Monday, June 11th) at 9pm, Brian and I are going to tackle Dubravka Ugresic's latest novel--Fox. Here's what Kirkus Reviews had to say about it in their STARRED review: Another tricky treasure from an internationally renowned author. Ugresic has been in exile from ...
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9 Comp Authors for Dag Solstad, Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace the Listicle
So much has happened over the past two weeks! Given all that I want to say about Dag Solstad's books and the people who review them, I'm going to rush through a few general comments about recent publishing events. First off: the New York Rights Fair and BookExpo. This year marked the first ever NYRF and the "newly ...
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The Crime in the Data
A couple weeks ago, writer Kári Tulinius asked me for some information on how prevalent crime novels are in what gets translated. As with most statistics related to literature in translation (and/or the book industry in general), the correct answer was, "uh . . . no idea. Maybe a lot? Sure seems like it . . . So, yeah." I ...
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“Snatching Bodies” by Rodrigo Fresán [New Fiction]
To celebrate the release of The Bottom of the Sky (which happens to be Open Letter's 100th title!), we wanted to share this "bonus track" to the novel. He initially wrote this story as a sort of explanation for one paragraph in The Bottom of the Sky, and then had it anthologized in collection of “dysfunctional family” ...
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“Paraguayan Sea” by Wilson Bueno [Why This Book Should Win]
And with this post, we're done! All the longlisted titles have been featured in the Why This Book Should Win series. Thanks to everyone who contributed, and for this particular post, thanks to Raluca Albu from BOMB. Paraguayan Sea by Wilson Bueno, translated from the Portunhol and Guarani by Erin Moure ...
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May Is a Month of Grading
The Best Translated Book Award Finalists were announced earlier this week, and following up on my earlier post looking at the representation of various languages on the BTBA longlists, I thought I'd take a second to highlight the publishing houses (#NameThePublisher) that have historically done the best on the BTBA ...
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Three Percent #140: Save All the Nobels
Chad and Tom reunite after a few weeks of travel and hot takes to talk about the Best Translated Book Award shortlists, the Nobel Prize controversy, why we should (or shouldn't? or who cares?) save Barnes & Noble, and the awesomeness that is Jean-Patrick Manchette. This week's music is "Every 1's a Winner" by Ty ...
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“The Last Bell” by Johannes Urzidil [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series (almost done!) is from Abe Nemon who writes essays and reviews of old and out-of-print books at OldBookAppreciator.com, as well as daily bios of obscure authors on their birthdays on Twitter at the handle @bookappreciator. The Last Bell by Johannes Urzidil, translated ...
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“The Magician of Vienna” by Sergio Pitol [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series is from P.T. Smith. A full-time writer of WTBSW entries. The Magician of Vienna by Sergio Pitol, translated from the Spanish by George Henson (Mexico, Deep Vellum) Books that are part of a series have a tough time getting the recognition they deserve, in general and ...
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“August” by Romina Paula [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series is from BTBA judge and University Bookstore bookseller Caitlin Baker. August by Romina Paula, translated from the Spanish by Jennifer Croft (Argentina, Feminist Press) I initially picked up August because of its beautiful cover and then I read the first ...
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“I Am the Brother of XX” by Fleur Jaeggy [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series is from BTBA judge, reader, and reviewer P.T. Smith. I Am the Brother of XX by Fleur Jaeggy, translated from the Italian by Gini Alhadeff (Switzerland, New Directions) Instant love is well and good. Confident and rejection is the same, if you’re the one doing the ...
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What if Writers Were Treated Like Soccer Players?
Told you I'd be back soon to catch up on these weekly posts! Next week I'll put together a recap linking to all of the posts in the series so far, and including a line or two about what they cover. And then, in addition to writing about one (or two) new books, next week I'll also post a May overview with some more data, a ...
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“Bergeners” by Tomas Espedal [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This book Should Win series is from BTBA judge Patrick Smith, who is scrambling to finish covering all the books in this series. If you want to write about one of the remaining few, please get in touch! Bergeners by Tomas Espedal, translated from the Norwegian by James Anderson (Norway, Seagull ...
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“Iron Moon: An Anthology of Chinese Worker Poetry” [Why This Book Should Win]
This Why This Book Should Win entry is from Raluca Albu, BTBA judge, and editor at both BOMB and Guernica. Iron Moon: An Anthology of Chinese Worker Poetry, translated from the Chinese by Eleanor Goodman (China, White Pine Press) “Iron Moon” is an anthology of Chinese migrant worker poetry that transports ...
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“Ghachar Ghochar” by Vivek Shanbhag [Why This Book Should Win]
The final Why This Book Should Win entry for today is from Katarzyna (Kasia) Bartoszyńska, an English professor at Monmouth College, a translator (from Polish to English), most recently of Zygmunt Bauman’s and Stanisław Obirek’s Of God and Man (Polity), and a former bookseller at the Seminary Co-op Bookstore in ...
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“Incest” by Christine Angot [Why This Book Should Win]
Today's second Why This Book Should Win post is from Bradley Schmidt, a translator of contemporary German literature, most recently of Philipp Winkler’s Hooligan (Arcade), who also teaches writing and translation at Leipzig University. More at bradley-schmidt.com. Incest by Christine Angot, translated from the ...
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Poetry Presses and Radical Idea #1
Thanks to a different writing deadline, the revamping of this website (still a bit of a work in progress), and trips to Chicago, Houston, and New York (with another NY trip later this week), I've fallen slightly behind with my weekly missives, so expect a bunch of these to drop over the next week or so. First up, I want to ...
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“Fever Dream” by Samanta Schweblin [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series is from former BTBA judge and founder of the Literary License blog, Gwendolyn Dawson, who lives in Houston, TX and is a practicing lawyer. She is a longtime supporter of literature in translation and all literary arts. Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin, translated from ...
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“The Iliac Crest” by Cristina Rivera Garza [Why This Book Should Win]
First Why This Book Should Win entry for today is from Tim Horvath. Tim Horvath is the author of Understories (Bellevue Literary Press) and Circulation (sunnyoutside), as well as fiction in Conjunctions, AGNI, Harvard Review, and elsewhere. He teaches in the Creative Writing BFA/MFA programs at the New Hampshire ...
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“Third-Millennium Heart” by Ursula Andkjær Olsen [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series is from poet, translator, editor, and BTBA judge, Aditi Machado. Third-Millennium Heart by Ursula Andkjær Olsen, translated from the Danish by Katrine Øgaard Jensen (Denmark, Broken Dimanche Press/Action Books) What’s a translated book got to do to ...
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“Old Rendering Plant” by Wolfgang Hilbig [Why This Book Should Win]
Now that the new website is up and working, we can start catching up on the Why This Book Should Win series. (And I can go back to writing my unhinged weekly missives about literature in translation.) Today's first post is from Joseph Schreiber, writer, editor at 3:AM Magazine, maintains literary blog, ...
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“Compass” by Mathias Énard [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series is from former BTBA judge and founder of the Literary License blog, Gwendolyn Dawson, who lives in Houston, TX and is a practicing lawyer. She is a longtime supporter of literature in translation and all literary arts. Compass by Mathias Énard, translated from the ...
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“For Isabel: A Mandala” by Antonio Tabucchi [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series is from BTBA judge Jeremy Keng. For Isabel: A Mandala by Antonio Tabucchi, translated from the Italian by Elizabeth Harris (Italy, Archipelago Books) The photographer shifted positions and lit another cigarette in his long ivory holder. He seemed uneasy. Silent, he ...
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“Chasing the King of Hearts” by Hanna Krall [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series is from Ruchama Johnston-Bloom, who writes about modern Jewish thought and Orientalism. She has a PhD in the History of Judaism from the University of Chicago and is the Associate Director of Academic Affairs at the London center of CAPA: The Global Education ...
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“Ebola 76” by Amir Tag Elsir [Why This Book Should Win]
Today’s first entry into the Why This Book Should Win series is from Riffraff co-owner, Three Percent podcast co-host, and French translator, Tom Roberge. Ebola 76 by Amir Tag Elsir, translated from the Arabic by Chris Bredin and Emily Danby (Sudan, Darf Publishers) Sudanese writer (and doctor) Amir Tag Elsir’s ...
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“Directions for Use” by Ana Ristović [Why This Book Should Win]
Today’s poetry entry into the Why This Book Should Win series is from BTBA judge—and Riffraff co-owner—Emma Ramadan. Directions for Use by Ana Ristović, translated from the Serbian by Steven Teref and Maja Teref (Serbia, Zephyr Press) Very occasionally, reading a book in translation can feel like I’m ...
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Spanish Literature Is Our Favorite Scene
Last week, the 2018 longlists for the Best Translated Book Award were released and were loaded with books translated from the Spanish. Eight works of fiction and one poetry collection. Nine titles total out of the thirty-seven on the combined longlists. That’s just a smidge under 25%. Twenty-five percent! One-quarter of the ...
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“Affections” by Rodrigo Hasbún [Why This Book Should Win]
Mark Haber of the BTBA jury and Brazos Bookstore has today’s fiction entry in the “Why This Book Should Win” series. Affections by Rodrigo Hasbún, translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes (Bolivia, Simon & Schuster) There is a lot to be said for subtlety, the quiet ability to tackle the heavy ...
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“Things That Happen” by Bhaskar Chakrabart [Why This Book Should Win]
Today’s entry from the BTBA poetry longlist is from writer and translator Tess Lewis, who also has a title longlisted on the fiction side of things. Things That Happen by Bhaskar Chakrabart, translated from Bengali by Arunava Sinha (India, Seagull Books) I love ordinariness. Rejected, pedestrian conversations and ...
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The End (Part VIII, IX, Epilogue, Pgs 237-281)
Last week, Chad and Brian (welded at the hip) were joined by “Stiliana Milkova”:https://www.oberlin.edu/stiliana-milkova of Oberlin College’s department of comparative literature to discuss the final moments of Georgi Gospodinov’s The Physics of Sorrow. While we learned that Chad doesn’t like Elena Ferrante, and ...
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“Remains of Life” by Wu He [Why This Book Should Win]
This afternoon’s entry in the “Why This Book Should Win” series is from BTBA judge Adam Hetherington. Remains of Life by Wu He, translated from the Chinese by Michael Berry (China, Columbia University Press) I’m not sure how to define historical fiction. How true does regular fiction need to be to become ...
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“Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller” by Guðbergur Bergsson [Why This Book Should Win]
This afternoon’s entry in the “Why This Book Should Win” series is from writer and Russian translator, Andrea Gregovich. She also interviews literary translators about their new books for the Fiction Advocate blog. Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller by Guðbergur Bergsson, translated from Icelandic by Lytton Smith ...
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“The Invented Part” by Rodrigo Fresán [Why This Book Should Win]
Between now and the announcement of the BTBA finalists on May 15th, we’ll be highlighting all 37 longlisted books in a series we call “Why This Book Should Win.” The first post is from BTBA judge and Ebenezer Books bookseller P.T. Smith. The Invented Part by Rodrigo Fresán, translated from the Spanish by Will ...
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Two Month Review: #4.09: The Physics of Sorrow (Part VIII: “An Elementary Physics of Sorrow”)
This week, Chad and Brian are joined by Stiliana Milkova from Oberlin College to talk about the final sections of The Physics of Sorrow: “An Elementary Physics of Sorrow,” “Endings,” and “Epilogue.” They talk about the structure of the novel as a whole, about Chad’s favorite page in the book, about aging and ...
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Three Percent #139: The Local Scene
Chad and Tom reconvene to talk about self-published titles that stay local, the Best Translated Book Award longlists, the elitism of the industry, and how you should vote for Emma Ramadan’s translation of Not One Day for this year’s Albertine Prize. This week’s music is a snippet from the 13+ minute long Beach ...
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A Quantum Spiral by Another Name (Part VII, Pgs 201-236)
Last week, Chad and Brian were joined by Rachel S. Cordasco of Speculative Fiction in Translation as they discussed Part VII, “Global Autumn,” of Georgi Gospodinov’s Physics of Sorrow. This section hits us from too many angles, from the relatable hilarity of having a phobia of being asked “how are you?” to trying ...
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Best Translated Book Award 2018: The Longlists!
April 10, 2018—Celebrating its eleventh consecutive year of honoring literature in translation, the Best Translated Book Awards is pleased to announce the 2018 longlists for both fiction and poetry. Announced at The Millions, the lists include a diverse range of authors, languages, countries, and publishers. On the ...
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Translation Database
Three Percent was named after the oft-cited statistic (first established by Bowker) that only 3% of books published in the U.S. are translations. We suspected that 3% number was a little high, but we had no way of confirming our suspicions--there were no real records of the number of translations published from year to ...
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Catching up on Season Four of the Two Month Review
As you hopefully noticed, earlier this morning the eighth episode of the current season of the Two Month Review went live. This was the seventh straight week of talking about Georgi Gospodinov’s incredible novel, The Physics of Sorrow, which was translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel. And the eighth write-up by ...
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Two Month Review: #4.08: The Physics of Sorrow (Part VII: “Global Autumn”)
This week, Rachel Cordasco from Speculative Fiction in Translation and the Wisconsin Historical Society Press joined Chad and Brian for a fun conversation about part VII of Georgi Gospodinov’s The Physics of Sorrow. They talked about how this book invokes a variety of memories, hotel rooms, Eastern European self-deprecating ...
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The Return of Gospodinov, the Curator (Part VI, Pgs 179-200)
This week for the Two Month Review of Georgi Gospodinov’s The Physics of Sorrow we’re looking at section six, “The Story Buyer,” which greets us with an up-front discussion of Gospodinov’s writing process along with more beautiful prose throughout a series of the darkest and most human stories in this collection ...
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Scary Fiction [BTBA 2018]
This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is from Katarzyna (Kasia) Bartoszyńska, an English professor at Monmouth College, a translator (from Polish to English), most recently of Zygmunt Bauman’s and Stanisław Obirek’s _Of God and Man (Polity), and a former bookseller at the Seminary Co-op Bookstore in ...
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A Myth with a Twist (Part V, Pgs 151-178)
Last week, Chad, Brian, and special guest Tom Flynn had a particularly boisterous discussion of Part V of The Physics of Sorrow that was as insightful towards the literature at hand as much as it was to learn sick burns for your friends with weak March Madness brackets. But between the trash talk and discussion of oysters, ...
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This Headline’ll Make You MAD, MAD!
It’s fitting that I’m writing this post about a book called Trick as Stormy Daniels is on 60 Minutes? This is one of the daily reminders that life is not books, and that books aren’t as important as I make them out to be in my mind. Nothing matters, nothing makes sense. Guns and corruption are way more important than ...
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Two Month Review: #4.06: The Physics of Sorrow (Part V: “The Green House”)
In addition to ripping on Chad and the poor showing by the Michigan State Spartans in the NCAA Tournament, Brian Wood and Tom Flynn (from Volumes Bookcafe) discuss the morality of animals, how this section of The Physics of Sorrow focuses more on the “animal” side of the minotaur, the mixture of lightness and sorrow in ...
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Ties that Confine [BTBA 2018]
This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is from Lori Feathers, co-owner of Interabang Books in Dallas, TX. She’s also a freelance book critic and member of the National Book Critics Circle. Her recent reviews can be found at Words Without Borders, Full Stop, World Literature Today, Three Percent, Rain Taxi, and on ...
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Gospodinov, the Curator; “The Physics of Sorrow,” the Time Capsule (Part IV, Pgs 119-150)
Last week, Chad, Brian, special guest Patrick Smith, and an insightful YouTube commentator discussed part IV of Georgi Gospodinov’s The Physics of Sorrow. This section, in many ways, brought us full circle to the nature of Gospodinov’s work by introducing us to the cultural phenomena of the time capsule, and the ...
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9 Moments That Make “Tomb Song” the Frontrunner for the National Book Award in Translation
Tomb Song by Julián Herbert, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney (Graywolf Press) Moment Number One “Technique, my boy,” says a voice in my head. “Shuffle the technique.” To hell with it: in her youth, Mamá was a beautiful half-breed Indian who had five husbands: a fabled pimp, a ...
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Two Month Review: #4.05: The Physics of Sorrow (Part IV, Pgs 119-150)
This week, Patrick Smith joined Chad and Brian to talk about time capsules and their potential danger, nostalgia and the urge to collect, aliens, Chernobyl, and more. It was a very fun part of the book to discuss, and the three of them made the most of it, really digging into how The Physics of Sorrow is constructed, while ...
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Pathways to Discovering the Obscure?
The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter by Matei Calinescu, translated from the Romanian by Adriana Calinescu and Breon Mitchell (New York Review Books) When I first started reading The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter by Matei Calinescu, translated from the Romanian by Adriana Calinescu and Breon ...
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Obsessive Empathetic-Somatic Syndrome and You (Part III)
On this week’s Two Month Review blog post, we’re exploring Part III: “The Yellow House” from Georgi Gospodinov’s The Physics of Sorrow. As was unanimous from the conversation between Chad, Brian, and Nick last week, this is where the magic of the book and the skill of Gospodinov as a writer truly start to shine. And ...
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Two Month Review: #4.04: The Physics of Sorrow (Part III, Pgs 73-118)
To up the Bay Area sports content, we invited Nick Buzanski of Book Culture to come on and talk about one of his favorite sections of Georgi Gospodinov’s The Physics of Sorrow. They talk about community and storytelling, seeing movies in person, Gospodinov’s humor and beautiful writing, Gaustine’s wild ideas, sexy books ...
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Context Is Everything
Given the length of yesterday’s post, I’m just going to jump right into things, starting with this handmade Excel spreadsheet showing the three-year rolling average of the total number of translations published in the first quarter (January-March) of every year since 2008. That’s not the most illuminating ...
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We are Minotaur, or: Eat your Darlings (Part II)
This week we’re following up from Chad, Brian, special guest Caitlin Baker (University Book Store in Seattle), and their discussion of Part II of Georgi Gospodinov’s The Physics of Sorrow, “Against an Abandonment: The Case of M.” Here, Gospodinov throws us for another loop, as we move from the halls of memory ...
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Everyone Needs an Editor
Before I get into the meat of this post—which is basically just a bunch of quotes and a handful of observations—I wanted to check back in on something from an earlier essay. Back in January, I wrote about Leïla Slimani’s The Perfect Nanny and basically assumed that it would be a best-seller. (There was also a lot of ...
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Two Month Review: #4.03: The Physics of Sorrow (Part II, Pgs 59-72)
Caitlin Baker of the University Book Store in Seattle joined Chad and Brian to talk about this very short section of Georgi Gospodinov’s The Physics of Sorrow. Mostly they talk about the constant conflicts between kids and their parent in myths. And eating children. But it’s not as gruesome as all that! Mostly they have a ...
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Sorrow-Maker Gospodinov (Part 1, Pgs 1-58)
This week we will be looking at the opening section of Georgi Gospodinov’s The Physics of Sorrow. If you didn’t already, you can catch the conversation between Chad Post, Tom Roberge, and Brian Wood on this section of the book at Three Percent or on YouTube for the unedited, behind the scenes full audio-visual experience ...
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Less Than Deadly Serious
Every spring, I teach a class on “World Literature & Translation” in which we read ~10 new translations, talk to as many of the translators as possible, and then the students have to choose one of the books to win their imaginary “Best Translated Book Award.” It’s a great exercise—trying to explain why they ...
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Two Month Review: #4.02: The Physics of Sorrow (Part I, Pgs 1-58)
Chad and Brian are joined by Tom Roberge of Riffraff (and the Three Percent Podcast) to discuss the first section of Georgi Gospodinov’s The Physics of Sorrow. They talk about the book’s general conceit, the minotaur myth, Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, Eastern European history, fascism and communism, and much ...
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Georgi Gospodinov and The Physics of Sorrow (Introduction)
Throughout this season of the Two Month Review, Santiago Morrice will be writing weekly pieces about the section of the book discussed on the previous week’s podcast. These will likely go a bit more in depth into the style and content of the novel itself, nicely complementing the podcasts. On last week’s podcast, Chad ...
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Noble Expectations
When I first decided to undertake this project of writing about one 2018 translation a week, I knew that there would come a week in which I didn’t finish the book that I had planned to write about. This might be due to time constraints, or simply because I didn’t feel like finishing the book in question. Well, it took ...
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Making the List [BTBA 2018]
This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is from Tara Cheesman, a freelance book critic and National Book Critics Circle member whose recent reviews can be found at The Rumpus, Book Riot, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Quarterly Conversation. Since 2009 she’s written the blog Reader At Large (formerly BookSexy ...
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Two Month Review: #4.01: The Physics of Sorrow (Introduction)
The new season of the Two Month Review kicks off now with a general overview Georgi Gospodinov’s The Physics of Sorrow, one of the most beloved books Open Letter has ever published. Brian’s on the lam, or in witness protection, or something, so Open Letter senior editor Kaija Straumanis stepped in to talk about one of the ...
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Three Percent #138: This Is the Most This Podcast Ever
Alex Shepard from The New Republic joins Chad and Tom to discuss the state of book journalism, the new National Book Award for Translation, Chad’s annoying whining about BookMarks, Winter Institute, and more. It’s a fun episode that goes deep into some contemporary book publishing issues—and the disparity between the ...
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An Imaginary Sabermetrics for Publishing
Empty Set by Verónica Gerber Bicecci, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney (Coffee House) Although five books is most definitely a small sample size of throwaway proportions, out of the books that I’ve written about for this weekly “column,” Empty Set by Verónica Gerber Bicecci and ...
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Love Is Colder than Death [BTBA 2018]
This week’s BTBA post is from Jeremy Kang, an avid reader, writer, artist, and photographer and freelance reviewer. He is interested in film, languages, culture, and history. Bergeners by Tomas Espedal, Translated from the Norwegian by James Anderson (Seagull Books) “The Ballad of Denmark Square” A car ...
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Interview with Madame Nielsen
The following is an excerpt from an interview that was conducted by David Damrosch and Delia Ungureanu—both of Harvard University—with Madame Nielsen in Copenhagen this past July. If you would like to see the entire piece, email me at chad.post [at] rochester.edu David Damrosch: Across your career, your several ...
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Three Percent #137: The Fire & the Fury Over No Amazon in Rochester
After a few weeks away from podcast, Chad and Tom reunite to talk about sales of Fire and Fury and its lasting impact, Milo’s edits, the TA First Translation Prize Shortlist, Rochester’s failure to land the new Amazon HQ, Wormwood, and more. For those keeping track as you listen, here’s the baffling video ...
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The Translation Industry Is Frozen
Before getting into the February translations, data on what’s being published (or not being published), and all the random stuff, I wanted to point out a few modifications to the Translation Database at Publishers Weekly that were recently implemented. First off, when you’re entering a title, you can now ...
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Never Fact-Check a Listicle
Back when I kicked off my 2018 Translations series I chose to include Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi as the fourth book from January I would read and review. And why not? It won the 2014 International Prize for Arabic Fiction1 and came with pretty high praise. “A haunting allegory of man’s savagery against man ...
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Season 4 of the Two Month Review: The Physics of Sorrow
After a bit of a break for the holidays and whatnot, we’re BACK! Or about to be. Starting on February 15th, there will be all new episodes of the Two Month Review, this time focuses on The Physics of Sorrow by Georgi Gospodinov. Probably the Open Letter title that Tom Roberge likes the best, The Physics of ...
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Romain Gary's "The Kites" [BTBA 2018]
This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is from Mark Haber of Brazos Bookstore, an upstanding young citizen whose novel will be published by Coffee House next year. The Kites by Romain Gary, translated from the French by Miranda Richmond Mouillot (New Directions) Romain Gary’s final book (and my ...
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The Best Sports Novels Match Sport and Style
On some old episode of NPR’s All Songs Considered, Robin Hilton and Bob Boilen talked about their unique irresistible song elements. Those bits in songs that aren’t the main hook, or even an integral part of the song itself, but, when they appear, automatically make you like a particular song. Like, for me, if ...
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“Joyce y las gallinas” by Anna Ballbona
Joyce y las gallinas by Anna Ballbona 200 pgs. | pb | 9788433937261 | €17.90 Anagrama Reviewed by Brendan Riley This review was originally published as a report on the book at New Spanish Books, and has been reprinted here with permission of the reviewer. The book was originally published in the Catalan ...
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A Best-seller Should Be Divisive
When I came up with my plan of reading (and writing about) a new translation every week, I wanted to try and force myself to read books that I would normally just skip over. There are definitely going to be months filled with books by New Directions, Coffee House, Dalkey Archive, etc., but to write about just those titles ...
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In Favor of Translator Afterwords
As dumb as the content might be, there’s something to be said for hot takes in the sports world. Or maybe not the takes themselves—again, always dumb, always misguided, always loaded with bad suppositions and overly confident writing—but rather the situation in which you get to dissect and dismantle a hot take. It’s ...
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Tabucchi in Portugal: On Tabucchi’s “Viaggi e altri viaggi” [an essay by Jeanne Bonner]
Jeanne Bonner is a writer, editor and journalist, and translator from the Italian now based in Connecticut. In the fall, she began teaching Italian at the University of Connecticut where she is also working on several translation projects. You can find out more about Jeanne and her work at her website here. It’s a travel ...
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Why Continue [BTBA 2018]
“Why am I reading this?” I ask myself this almost constantly. Sometimes the answer is obvious: when the book is a masterpiece, when the pleasure is so deep or constant that there’s little else I want. I treasure those books, but if it was the only reason I read a book, I wouldn’t read much. There are novels where the ...
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It’s 2018 and Where Have the Translations Gone?
Now that the Translation Database is over at Publishers Weekly, and in a format that makes it both possible to update in real time1 and much easier to query, I want to use it as the basis of a couple new regular columns here at Three Percent. First off, I want to get back to running monthly previews of translations. But, ...
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I Don’t Know If Hilbig Actually Uses the Word “Pace” Anywhere in His Novel Old Rendering Plant [BTBA 2018]
This week’s BTBA post is from Adam Hetherington. He lives and works in Tulsa, Oklahoma and is the author of the forthcoming novel Ontogeny Is Beautiful. My clever idea was to very briefly quote him in the title of this blog, then claim that any extended quotation does him a disservice. I was going to tell you ...
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Two Month Review #3.10: Death in Spring (pgs. 119-150)
Here it is, the infamous live recording at McNally Jackson! There was a great turnout to hear Brian, María Christina, and I work our way through our thoughts about Death in Spring, Rodoreda’s overall stature, the banning of the color yellow, and much more. We had a great time doing this, and thanks again to McNally ...
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“Lost in Translation: An Illustrated Compendium of Untranslatable Words from Around the World” by Ella Frances Sanders
Lost in Translation: An Illustrated Compendium of Untranslatable Words from Around the World by Ella Frances Sanders 112 pgs. | hc | 9781607747109 | $14.99 Ten Speed Press Reviewed by Kaija Straumanis Hello and greetings in the 2017 holiday season! For those of you still looking for something to gift a ...
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The Size of the World
The Size of the World by Branko Anđić translated from the Serbian by Elizabeth Salmore 208 pages | pb | 9788661452154 | $10.99 Reviewed by Jaimie Lau Three generations of men—a storyteller, his father and his son—encompass this book’s world. . . . it is a world of historical confusion, illusion, ...
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BTBA Gift Guide [BTBA 2018]
This post was compiled by BTBA judge P.T. Smith. From now until the announcement of the long list, we’ll be running one post a week from a BTBA judge, cycling through the nine of us. To launch those posts, just in time for the holidays (just in time, yes), here’s a gift guide. These are books that have stood out to ...
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Two Month Review #3.9: Death in Spring (pgs. 69-118)
Mara Faye Lethem joins us this week to talk about Catalonia’s scatological obsession, the challenges of the current political situation, Max Besora’s wild novel, and Rodoreda’s triumphant return to the best-seller list. Then they get into a more autobiographical reading of this section of Death in Spring, a section ...
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Breaking Things and Growing Up [Two Month Review]
This post should’ve gone up last Tuesday, December 12th, which happened to be the same day as our recording in front of a live audience at McNally Jackson. Although I did get some work done on the train ride to NYC, the Amtrak WiFi is garbage and crushed my hopes of writing this then. And Wednesday’s train ride ...
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Three Percent #136: The Riffraff Is Upon Us
Back at last! Chad and Tom reunite after a month in which Tom finished building an entire bookstore and bar, which is now open! In addition to talking about Riffraff’s first week of business, they talk about the NCIBA statement against publishers selling direct to consumers and institutions, about Tyrant Books tweeting ...
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Two Month Review #3.8: Death in Spring (pgs. 28-68)
This week, fresh off a publication in the Boston Review, Jess Fenn (JR Fenn) joins Chad, Brian, and Best Translated Book Award judge Patrick Smith (P.T. Smith) to talk about the second part of Death in Spring. They trace a few motifs, talk about dystopias and literary world-building, and much more. Another very informative ...
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Two Month Review #3.7: Death in Spring (pgs. 1-27)
Welcome to one of the strangest villages in all of fiction! Now that Chad and Brian have gone through the stories, they turn their attention to Rodoreda’s Death in Spring, which was published posthumously in 1986. They’re joined by Catalan researcher and translator Meg Berkobien and Anastasia Nikolis, who you ...
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Two Month Review LIVE at McNally Jackson Next Tuesday (12/12/17)
For our final episode of the Rodoreda season, Brian and I will be taking the early morning train to NYC (seriously, it leaves at 5:41am, which is a time that exists) so that we can talk about Death in Spring in front of a live audience. At 7pm at McNally Jackson (52 Prince St.) we’ll be joined by María Cristina ...
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Myths, Rituals, Fears in Death in Spring [Two Month Review]
Coming up on this Thursday’s Two Month Review podcast I join Brian Wood, Meg Berkobien, and Anastasia Nikolis to talk about the opening section of Death in Spring, the first Rodoreda novel that Open Letter ever published. To preface that conversation (which is a lot of gushing over her prose and ideas, along with some ...
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Two Month Review #3.6: Selected Stories (pgs. 208-255)
After yelling at Skype a bunch, Chad, Brian, and special guest Tom Flynn of Volumes Bookcafe discuss the merits of some of Rodoreda’s final stories, especially “The Thousand Franc Bill,” “Paralysis,” and “The Salamander.” Then they manage to slightly diss groups upon groups of ...
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All the Posts and Podcasts for “The Invented Part” Two Month Review
I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, and here it is: A single Word document collecting all the posts about The Invented Part along with all of the Two Month Review podcasts. What I did was list every single essay with a link to the corresponding podcast, followed by the complete interview that Will Vanderhyden did ...
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Everybody Loves a List [Two Month Review]
Coming up on this Thursday’s Two Month Review podcast I join Brian Wood and Tom Flynn to talk about the last six stories in Rodoreda’s Selected Stories. (And mildly insult a bunch of different people. As you do.) I’m not prefacing that conversation at all in the post below. As always, you can get ...
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Two Month Review #3.5: Selected Stories (pgs. 144-207)
After doing a bit of a deeper dive into the situation in Catalonia—and discussing the LIVE recording that will take place on December 12th at the new McNally Jackson—Chad and Brian are joined by George Carroll to talk about this batch of Rodoreda’s stories. Although a couple of the stories discussed in this ...
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Looking at Some Rodoreda Criticism [Two Month Review]
Coming up on this Thursday’s Two Month Review podcast I join Brian Wood and George Carroll to talk about some of the stranger, more war influenced, Rodoreda stories. Specifically, we talk about “Before I Die,” “Ada Liz,” “On a Dark Night,” “Night and Fog,” and ...
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Two Month Review #3.4: Selected Stories (pgs. 103-143)
Things are a bit rough for Chad the morning after the Open Letter gala, but he powers through and talks about this new phase of Rodoreda’s stories. He and Brian break down some of the more challenging of her stories, including “Noctural” and “The Bath,” and talk about what does and doesn’t ...
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Two Events in Toronto!
If you listen to either of our podcasts, you probably know that I’ve been traveling a whole lot this fall. Spain, Poland, Minneapolis (twice!), and Brazil. All of these trips have been fantastic, and you can expect some posts about Poland and Brazil in the near future, but in the meantime, I wanted to tell you about my ...
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Trying to Understand "Nocturnal" [Two Month Review]
Coming up on this Thursday’s Two Month Review podcast Brian and I go it alone and talk about six Rodoreda stories: “The Beginning,” “Nocturnal,” “The Red Blouse,” “The Fate of Lisa Sperling,” “The Bath,” and “On the Train.” On that podcast, we ...
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Two Month Review #3.3: Selected Stories (pgs. 51-102)
This week, Mark Haber of Brazos Bookstore and the Best Translated Book Award committee joins Chad and Brian to talk about the next seven stories in Mercè Rodoreda’s collection. Although they touch on a number of them, a lot of time is spent focusing on “Carnival” and the literary antecedents to Rodoreda. ...
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2018 International Dublin Literary Award Longlist
We talked (and joked) about this on the podcast we recorded this morning, but the International Dublin Literary Award longlist was announced earlier today. A mere 150 titles (?!), this is a daunting array of books. It’s always a bit overwhelming, and the website always leaves a bit to be desired, but we are proud to ...
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Tracing Rodoreda's Motifs in "Carnival" [Two Month Review]
Coming up on this Thursday’s Two Month Review podcast Brian and I talk about the next seven stories in Selected Stories by Mercè Rodoreda (with special guest Mark Haber!): “Afternoon at the Cinema,” “Ice Cream,” “Carnival,” “Engaged,” “In a Whisper,” ...
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Two Month Review #3.2: Selected Stories (pgs. 1-50)
This week, Chad and Brian dive into the first six stories in Mercè Rodoreda’s Selected Stories and call up Quim Monzó, arguably the most important contemporary Catalan author, to talk about the precision and emotionality in her work. They also talk about Catalan literature as a whole, A Thousand Morons, Catalan ...
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Three Observations and One Story [Two Month Review]
Coming up on this Thursday’s Two Month Review podcast Brian and I talk about the first six stories in Mercè Rodoreda’s Selected Stories : “Blood,” “Threaded Needle,” “Summer,” “Guinea Fowls,” “The Mirror,” and “Happiness.” Which is only the ...
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"A Working Woman" Happy Hour with the CAT
Have a drink on us and learn about the newest release from Two Lines Press. Join us for happy hour at the CAT and Two Lines offices to celebrate the release of A Working Woman. Stop by after work for wine and tapas and hear readings from the book by Two Lines staff. A Working Woman by Elvira Navarro, translated by ...
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Two Month Review #3.1: Reunited! (Intro to Mercè Rodoreda)
Brian Wood is BACK. Complete with a poem he wrote in his time away from the Two Month Review . . . In the introduction to season three, Chad and Brian talk about Catalan literature (briefly), Mercè Rodoreda’s career and comps, possible approaches to discussing Rodoreda’s stories, and more. As noted ...
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“I Am a Season That Does Not Exist in the World” by Kim Kyung-Ju
I Am a Season That Does Not Exist in the World by Kim Kyung-Ju translated from the Korean by Jake Levine 144 pgs. | pb |9781939568144 | $14.95 Black Ocean Reviewed by Jacob Rogers Kim Kyung Ju’s I Am a Season That Does Not Exist in the World, translated from the Korean by Jake Levine, is a wonderful ...
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Introducing Mercè Rodoreda [Two Month Review]
If you prefer, you can also download this post as a PDF document. As you hopefully already know, the third season of the Two Month Review podcast will be dedicated to Mercè Rodoreda. Since most of her books are relatively slim (a.k.a., of readable length unlike the beasts that we’ve worked through in seasons one and ...
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Dominique Fabre & David Ulin in Conversation
The Last Bookstore is pleased to present French writer Dominique Fabre, author of Guys Like Me and The Waitress Was New, in conversation with noted book critic and author David Ulin. Join us to hear Ulin and Fabre talk about Paris lonelier than you’ve ever experienced it, and to hear Fabre read from his latest ...
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Children’s Literature in Translation: Celebrating Elsewhere Editions with Roger Mello and Daniel Hahn
Translated by children’s literature guru Daniel Hahn, You Can’t Be Too Careful! explores an idea that author and illustrator Mello had as a child: that one small action can have marvelous consequences. Through wordplay, dreamlike images, and a playful lightness of touch, You Can’t Be Too Careful! expresses serious ...
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Three Percent #134: The Books We Read and Why We Read Them
After an impassioned pitch for why you should support Open Letter’s annual campaign, Chad and Tom talk about ALTA, about how best to promote international literature to common readers, about the moral argument for reading translations, about Tim Parks and this article on Han Kang’s Human Acts, and about how ...
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Help Support Open Letter!
If you’re friends with us on Facebook (either me personally, or the press itself), or visit the Twitter on a regular basis, you’re hopefully aware that Open Letter just launched an annual fundraising campaign to support our 10-year anniversary. And if you’re not already familiar with this, that’s ...
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Two Month Review #2.10: 17, composition book (Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller, Pages 361-411)
Here it is—the infamous LIVE recording of the Two Month Review! Chad and Lytton travelled all the way to Brooklyn to record this episode as part of the “Taste of Iceland Festivities.” As a result, they recap the book as a whole and reflect on the speech from Iceland’s First Lady that prefaced the ...
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Two Month Review #2.9: fourteen, fifteenth book, 16. notebook (Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller, Pages 306-360)
Icelandic novelist and poet Kári Tulinius joins Chad and Lytton this week to talk about three of the darkest sections of Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller and the history of this novel’s reception in Iceland. They also talk about the recent scandal that brought down the Icelandic government—and how it ties into Tómas ...
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Three Percent #133: From Catalonia to South Korea
After a bit of a hiatus, Chad and Tom are back to talk about Riffraff’s new location, break down Catalonian politics and the recent editorial gathering the Ramon Llull Institute put on in Barcelona, and somewhat pick apart this article about Deborah Smith’s translation of The Vegetarian. This week’s music is Day I ...
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Wojciech Nowicki Tour!
This evening, at Volumes Bookcafe in Chicago, Wojciech Nowicki’s U.S. tour for Salki kicks off. A four-city tour spanning the next ten days, this is your one opportunity in 2017 to meet the author of the book about which Andrzej Stasiuk said, “Your skin will crawl with pleasure from ...
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Two Month Review #2.8: this is the eleventh book, my 12th composition book, book 13 (Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller, Pages 282-305)
CORRECTION: Throughout this podcast, we joke about having recorded the final episode of the season live at Spoonbill & Sugartown last weekend. This is a lie! The live event will take place THIS SATURDAY (September 30, 2017) as part of the Taste of Iceland events. Eliza Reid, Iceland’s First Lady, will start things ...
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Two Month Review #2.7: tenth composition book (Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller, Pages 238-281)
This week Patrick Smith (Best Translated Book Award judge, The Scofield) joins Chad and Lytton to talk about this incredibly powerful section of the book, which raises all sorts of topical ideas about adhering to national myths and the problems of masculinity. This is also the section where Hitler shows up, and where a ...
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Two Month Review #2.6: IX. class A, tenth composition book (Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller, Pages 200-238)
This week Norwegian translator and ALTA Fellowship recipient David Smith joins Chad and Lytton to talk about the next forty pages of Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller. The two sections covered this week are wildly different from one another, opening with a much more fragmented, poetic bit then transitioning through a hilarious, yet ...
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Two Month Review LIVE!!!
Over the next couple weeks, you’re going to hear me mess up this announcement on podcast after podcast, but on Saturday, September 30th at 3:30pm Lytton and I will be recording the final episode of the second season of the Two Month Review LIVE at Spoonbill & Sugartown in Brooklyn. This will be part of the ...
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“Kingdom Cons” by Yuri Herrera
Kingdom Cons by Yuri Herrera translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman 220 pgs. | pb | 9781908276926 | $13.95 And Other Stories Reviewed by Sarah Booker Yuri Herrera is overwhelming in the way that he sucks readers into his worlds, transporting them to a borderland that is at once mythical in its ...
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Two Month Review #2.5: tómas's seventh composition book, 8. (Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller, Pages 140-199)
This week author and translator Idra Novey joins Chad and Lytton to talk about one of the most challenging sections of the book so far. Not only is there a proliferation of children whose voices constantly interrupt Tómas’s thoughts, but there are a few more unsettling bits that raise questions about what we should ...
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Publisher Profile: Nordisk Books
Summer intern David M. Smith, translator from the Norwegian, 2017 ALTA Fellow, future guest on the Two Month Review, conducted this interview with Duncan Lewis of Nordisk Books. Proving there’s more to Scandinavia than macabre crime fiction (not that there’s anything wrong with that) and—hygge (always hygge), ...
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Another take on “The Invented Part” by Rodrigo Fresán
The Invented Part by Rodrigo Fresán translated from the Spanish by Will Vanderhyden 552 pgs. | pb | 9781940953564 | $18.95 Open Letter Books Reviewed by Tiffany Nichols Imagine reading a work that suddenly and very accurately calls out you, the reader, for not providing your full attention to the act of ...
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Two Month Review #2.4: fifth composition book, VI. (Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller, Pages 69-139)
This week, Jacob Rogers—translator from the Galician and bookseller at Malaprop’s in Asheville, North Carolina—joins Chad and Lytton to talk about Tómas Jónsson’s next two “composition books.” Included in these sections are a long bit about the “board” and the general ...
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Perceived Humiliations, The Board, and the Dangers of Desire [Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller]
On this week’s Two Month Review podcast, we’ll be discussing the fifth composition book and VI (pages 69-139) from Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller. As a bit of preparation, below you’ll find some initial thoughts, observations, and quotes. You can also download this post as a PDF document. As always, ...
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Best Translated Book Awards 2018: Judges, Dates, and More!
It’s that time again! Listed below are all the details for this year’s Best Translated Book Award juries! Award Dates In terms of dates, this is subject to change, but currently we’re planning on announcing the longlists for fiction and poetry on Tuesday, April 10th, the finalists on Tuesday, May ...
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Two Month Review #2.3: IV composition book (Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller, Pages 32-68)
In this episode—covering Tómas Jónsson’s fourth composition book—a number of the themes of the overall novel are put on display: Tómas’s relationship to his body, the way he tries to create a narrative for himself, possible injustices he’s suffered during his life, the way his lodgers are like ...
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The Body, Biographies, and Workplace Injustice! [Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller]
On this week’s Two Month Review podcast, we’ll be discussing the IV composition book (pages 32-68) from Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller. As a bit of preparation, below you’ll find some initial thoughts, observations, and quotes. You can also download this post as a PDF document. As always, you can get ...
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Women in Translation Month [Throwback No.2]
As many of you may have noticed already, August is widely considered Women in Translation Month (look for the #WITMonth hashtag basically anywhere). Since Open Letter has published its fair share of baller women authors over the past ten years, we thought we’d take a few posts to highlight a handful of our all-time favorite ...
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Two Month Review #2.2: Biography through Third Composition Book (Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller, Pages 1-31)
This week, Ph.D. candidate Anastasia Nikolis joins Chad and Lytton to talk about the real meat of Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller—chamber pot usage! They also discuss the way our grumpy narrator’s mind works, the way he finds beauty in ambiguity, how Lytton translated a very specific word game, and a couple cues to ...
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The Biggest Update to the Translation Databases Ever (And Some More Women in Translation Data)
OK, I’m supposed to be packing for my summer vacation right now, so this is going to be a lot shorter than it otherwise would be. But! I just updated the Translation Databases! Not just the spreadsheets for 2016 and 2017, but every spreadsheet I’ve ever run. There’s up to date info on 2008-2018 AND new ...
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Interview with Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès
To celebrate the official pub date for Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès’s Island of Point Nemo, you’ll find an interview below between the translator, Hannah Chute (who received a Banff Translation Fellowship to work on this book) and the author himself. You can get the book now either through our website, or from ...
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Women in Translation Month [Throwback No.1]
As many of you may have noticed already, August is widely considered Women in Translation Month (look for the #WITMonth hashtag basically anywhere). Since Open Letter has published its fair share of baller women authors over the past ten years, we thought we’d take a few posts to highlight a handful of our all-time ...
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Where (and When) Are We? [Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller]
On this week’s Two Month Review podcast, we’ll be discussing the Biography, first composition book, second book, and third composition book (pages 1-31) from Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller. As a bit of preparation, below you’ll find some initial thoughts, observations, and quotes. You can also download this ...
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Two Month Review #2.1: Introduction to Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller
And with this episode, we launch the second season of the Two Month Review! Over a ten-week period, we will be breaking down Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller by Guðbergur Bergsson, helping explain and explore what makes this book (often referred to as “Iceland’s Ulysses”) so influential and interesting. This ...
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Three Percent #132: Women in Translation Month, Genres, Co-opting a Style, and Garbage Plates
On this episode of the Three Percent Podcast, Chad and Tom talk about Peter Straub’s 2010 article about genre, the existence (or not) of translation as a genre, Hudson Bookstore’s attempt to co-op the indie bookstore “ethos,” and this stupid infographic. They also touch on Women in Translation month ...
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Women in Translation Month 2017
I just finished entering in all the data for the Translation Database (super huge mega astonishing absolute extreme update to come), I thought I’d run a few quick reports for Women in Translation Month. First off, the big one: For the data I’ve collected between 2008-20181 only 28.7% of the translations in the ...
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"Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller" Reading Schedule [Two Month Review]
The first episode in the new season of the Two Month Review will release on Thursday, and in case you haven’t already heard, for the next ten weeks we’ll be discussing Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller by Guðbergur Bergsson. We have a Goodreads group set up to talk about about this, so feel free to join in and ...
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New Jacket Copy for "The Invented Part" from Chad and Brian
As you probably heard on the most recent episode of the Two Month Review, Chad and Brian used a “guide to writing and publishing” to create new, focus-group approved, jacket copy for Fresán’s The Invented Part. In case it was hard to follow on the audio amid all the laughter, here are their respective ...
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The Little Buddhist Monk & The Proof
Aira continues to surprise and delight in his latest release from New Directions, which collects two novellas: the first, The Little Buddhist Monk, a fairly recent work from 2005, and The Proof, an earlier work from 1989. There are a number of similarities to be sure—they both revolve around the sudden but intense ...
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Two Month Review #12: The Author Himself!
As a special bonus episode, both Rodrigo Fresán and Will Vanderhyden joined Chad and Brian to talk about The Invented Part as a whole, the first season of the Two Month Review, what’s next in the trilogy, technology’s revenge on Rodrigo, David Lynch, and, how to write jacket copy. Feel free to comment on ...
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Agnes
The narrator of Peter Stamm’s first novel, Agnes, originally published in 1998 and now available in the U.S. in an able translation by Michael Hofmann, is a young Swiss writer who has come to Chicago to research a book on American luxury trains. In the reading room of the Public Library he meets Agnes, a graduate student in ...
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Two Month Review #11: "The Imaginary Person" (The Invented Part, Pages 441-552)
We did it! After two months, eleven episodes, and a half dozen different guests, Brian and Chad finished their discussion of Rodrigo Fresán’s The Invented Part! Joining them this week to wrap things up is Valerie Miles, translator, publisher, co-founder of Granta en Español, and editor of A Thousand Forests in One ...
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Interview with Rodrigo Fresán (Part V)
If you’d rather read this podcast in one document, just dowload this PDF. Otherwise, click here to find all four of the earlier pieces along with a bunch of other Two Month Review posts about The Invented Part. Special thanks to Will Vanderhyden for conducting—and translating—this ...
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Class
The thing about Class is that I don’t know what the hell to think about it, yet I can’t stop thinking about it. I’ll begin by dispensing with the usual info that one may want to know when considering adding the book to their “to read” list. Written by Francesco Pacifico. Translated by Francesco Pacifico. Published ...
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Airplanes, Hyphellipses, and What's Next? [The Invented Part]
On this week’s Two Month Review podcast, we’ll be discussing the seventh, and final, part of The Invented Part (“The Imaginary Person,” pages 441-552). As a bit of preparation, below you’ll find some initial thoughts, observations, and quotes. You can also download this post as a PDF ...
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Two Month Review #10: "Meanwhile, Once Again, Beside the Museum Stairway, Under a Big Sky" (The Invented Part, Pages 405-440)
It’s another 2MR review with just Chad and Brian! Similar to the last guest-less podcast, this one goes a bit off the rails . . . Although this time around it gets a lot darker, as they talk about Chekov, Girl, Night, Swimming Pool, Etc., a scream descending from the skies, John Cheever’s writing prompt, and much ...
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I See You [The Invented Part]
On this week’s Two Month Review podcast, we’ll be discussing the sixth part of The Invented Part (“Meanwhile, Once Again, Beside the Museum Stairway, Under a Big Day,” pages 405-440). As a bit of preparation, below you’ll find some initial thoughts, observations, and quotes. You can also ...
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Two Month Review #9: "Life After People, or Notes For a Brief History of Progressive Rock and Science Fiction" (The Invented Part, Pages 361-404)
On this week’s Two Month Review, Tom Roberge from Riffraff and the Three Percent Podcast joins Chad and Brian talk about 2001: A Space Odyssey, Pink Floyd, potential errors and non-errors, cultural touchstones that serve to define friendships, the overall structure of this chapter of The Invented Part, and Tom’s ...
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Interview with Rodrigo Fresán (Part IV)
This is the fourth of a five-part interview with Rodrigo Fresán. Earlier parts are all avialble on the Three Percent website (I, II, and III), as are all other Two Month Review posts. Special thanks to Will Vanderhyden for conducting—and translating—this interview. Will Vanderhyden: The narrator of ...
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"Tomás Jónsson, Bestseller" Release Day!
Fans of challenging, cerebral, modernist epics, rejoice! Today marks the official release date of Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller by Guðbergur Bergsson, a masterpiece of twentieth-century Icelandic literature, the fifth Icelandic work Open Letter has published to date. This is a book that is sure to launch a thousand ...
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Structure, Time, Memory, and the Sadness of a Disillusioned Writer [The Invented Part]
On this week’s Two Month Review podcast, we’ll be discussing the fifth part of The Invented Part (“Life After People, or Notes for a Brief History of Progressive Rock and Science Fiction,” pages 361-404). As a bit of preparation, below you’ll find some initial thoughts, observations, and ...
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Two Month Review #8: "Many Fêtes, or Study for a Group Portrait with Broken Decalogues" (The Invented Part, Pages 301-360)
On this week’s Two Month Review, Chad and Brian talk about F. Scott Fitzgerald and Tender Is the Night, puzzles, how to properly introduce the show, the Modern Library list of top 100 novels of the twentieth century, Booth Tarkington, and much more more. Feel free to comment on this episode—or on the book in ...
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The Inverted Part [Two Month Review: The Invented Part]
On this week’s Two Month Review podcast, we’ll be discussing the fourth part of The Invented Part (“Many Fêtes, or Study for a Group Portrait with Broken Decalogues,” pagest 301-360). As a bit of preparation, below you’ll find some initial thoughts, observations, and quotes. You can also ...
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Open Letter Pop-Up at Hart's Grocery!
For the first time ever, this Saturday (July 1st), Open Letter Books will have a pop-up shop in Downtown Rochester. From 12-2 and from 4-6, we’ll be outside of Hart’s Local Grocers displaying a wide selection of our books. We’ve never done anything like this before, but since it’s the weekend of ...
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Portraits of Rage and Mortality [Two Month Review: The Invented Part]
On this week’s Two Month Review podcast, we’ll be discussing the third part (“A Few Things You Happen to Think About When All You Want Is to Think About Nothing”) of The Invented Part . As a bit of preparation, below you’ll find some initial thoughts, observations, and quotes. You can also ...
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Two Month Review #6: "The Place Where the Sea Ends So the Forest Can Begin: Part 3" (The Invented Part, Pages 208-230)
This week, Speculative Fiction in Translation founder and Best Translated Book Award judge Rachel Cordasco joins Chad and Brian to talk about the nature of time, deals with the devil, conflagrations, and writerly desires, or, in other words, the third part of “The Place Where the Sea Ends So the Forest Can Begin” ...
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Interview with Rodrigo Fresán (Part III)
You can read the first part of this interview here, the second here, and you can click here for all Two Month Review posts. Special thanks to Will Vanderhyden for conducting—and translating—this interview. Will Vanderhyden: Your fiction wears its influences on its sleeve, but not only do you fully ...
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Who Wants to Be a Writer? [Two Month Review: The Invented Part]
On this week’s Two Month Review podcast, we’ll be discussing the third chapter of the second part (“The Place Where the Sea Ends So the Forest Can Begin”) of The Invented Part . As a bit of preparation, below you’ll find some initial thoughts, observations, and quotes. You can also download ...
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Can Xue in the New Yorker!
In case you missed it, last week Can Xue was profiled in the New Yorker. This is so well-deserved—Can Xue is a treasure—and proof positive that the New Yorker has good literary taste. (Especially on the Page Turner blog.) The only other thing I want to say is that the author of this piece, Evan James, ...
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Win a Copy of "Island of Point Nemo" from Goodreads!
Coming out in August, Island of Point Nemo, Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès latest book, is an incredible trip. It’s made up of two story lines: one about the crazy (and semi-evil) workers at a ebook manufacturing plant, the other a Sherlock Holmes-style globetrotting story built out of references and allusions to all sorts ...
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Two Month Review #5: "The Place Where the Sea Ends So the Forest Can Begin: Part 2" (The Invented Part, Pages 99-207)
This week’s episode is all about Penelope and her experiences with the Karmas. (And a Big Green Cow.) A lot of the Odyssey, Wuthering Heights, and William Burroughs are in this section, which is hilariously dissected by Brian, Chad, and their guest, Tom Flynn, the manager of Volumes Bookcafe in Chicago. One of the ...
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Three Percent #130: French Fun and BookExpo
Delayed for a couple weeks due to travel and work schedules, Chad and Tom are back to talk about the inaugural Albertine Prize (won by Antoine Volodine’s Bardo or Not Bardo, translated by J. T. Mahany), Houellebecq’s no show, and BookExpo and the forthcoming New York Rights Fair. They also talk a bit about the Two ...
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Let's Get Weird [Two Month Review: The Invented Part]
On last Thursday’s Two Month Review podcast we covered the opening to the second section of The Invented Part, and coming up later this week we’ll be covering pages 99-207—the second section of “The Place Where the Sea Ends So the Forest Can Begin.” As a bit of preparation, below you’ll ...
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Two Month Review #4: "The Place Where the Sea Ends So the Forest Can Begin: Part 1" (The Invented Part, Pages 46-98)
This week, author and journalist Mark Binelli joins Chad and Brian to discuss the first part of the second section of Rodrigo Fresán’s The Invented Part. In “The Place Where the Seas Ends So the Forest Can Begin,” we meet The Young Man and The Young Woman, who are making a movie about The Writer after his ...
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Interview with Rodrigo Fresán (Part II)
You can read the first part of this interview here, and you can click here for all Two Month Review posts. Special thanks to Will Vanderhyden for conducting—and translating—this interview. Will Vanderhyden: Now, this is a question that, in a way, the book takes as its point of departure—so it might make ...
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Reflections and Mirrors [Two Month Review: The Invented Part]
On last Thursday’s Two Month Review podcast we covered the first forty-five pages of The Invented Part, and coming up later this week we’ll be covering pages 46-98—the first section of “The Place Where the Sea Ends So the Forest Can Begin.” As a bit of preparation, below you’ll find some ...
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Two Month Review #3: "The Real Character" (The Invented Part, Pages 1-45)
This week, Jeremy Garber from Powells Books joins Chad and Brian to discuss the first section of Rodrigo Fresán’s The Invented Part. This section, entitled “The Real Character,” introduces us to the main character of the book—known here as The Boy, and later as The Writer—as well as some of the ...
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Interview with Rodrigo Fresán (Part I)
As you hopefully already know, for the next two months we’ll be producing a weekly podcast and a series of posts all about Rodrigo Fresán’s The Invented Part. All grouped under the title “Two Month Review,” this initiative is part book club, part exercise in slow reading, and part opportunity to ...
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Some Notes on "The Real Character" [Two Month Review: The Invented Part]
The first Two Month Review podcast went up just over a week ago, and the next one—covering the first section of the book, “The Real Character” (pages 1-45)—will be posted next Thursday, June 1st. Prior to each week’s podcast, we hope to have at least some sort of overview post that offers some ...
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“The Invented Part” by Rodrigo Fresán
The Invented Part by Rodrigo Fresán translated from the Spanish by Will Vanderhyden 552 pgs. | pb | 9781940953564 | $18.95 Open Letter Books Reviewed by Chad W. Post Given all the Two Month Review posts and everything else, hopefully you’ll have heard of Rodrigo Fresán’s The Invented Part by now. But ...
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Two Month Review #2: Introducing Rodrigo Fresán's "The Invented Part"
Translator Will Vanderhyden joins Chad and Brian to provide an overview of Rodrigo Fresán’s work—especially The Invented Part. They discuss some of his earlier works (including Kensington Gardens, which is available in an English translation), different pop culture touchstones running throughout his oeuvre, ...
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Win a Copy of "Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller" by Gudbergur Bergsson from GoodReads!
As you may already know, Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller, translated by Lytton Smith, is going to be the second Two Month Review title. This “season” will take place in August and September, but you can get a head start by winning a copy of the book through GoodReads. If you’re a GoodReads user, all you have to ...
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Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson on their BTBA Win
I asked the winners of this year’s Best Translated Book Award to send in some comments—or a video—about the prize, their project, etc. The first to arrive is the following from Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson about their translation of Lúcio Cardoso’s Chronicle of the Murdered House. We ...
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"Bardo or Not Bardo" Wins the Inaugural Albertine Prize!
Antoine Volodine’s Bardo or Not Bardo, translated by J. T. Mahany has won the first ever Albertine Prize—a reader’s choice award celebrating contemporary French fiction. The book had to go through two rounds of public voting, moving from a longlist of ten titles, to a three title shortlist before eventually ...
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Two Voices Salon: Translator Simon Wickhamsmith on Mongolian Poet Tseveendorjin Oidov
Join us for a conversation with Mongolian translator Simon Wickhamsmith and Scott Esposito about Wickhamsmith’s translation of Tseveendorjin Oidov’s The End of the Dark Era. Wickhamsmith was awarded a PEN/Heim Translation grant for his work on the book, and he’ll talk about how he became interested in Mongolian ...
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Auto-Fiction @ PEN World Voices
Each of these three authors has written work that falls on the spectrum of memoir – some is more fictionalized, and some stays truer to their authors’ lives and experiences. Each author will be reading from and speaking about their work. With Bae Suah, Marcelino Truong, and Oddný Eir. For more information on this ...
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"Chronicle of the Murdered House" and "Extracting the Stone of Madness" Win the 2017 BTBA!
The tenth annual Best Translated Book Awards were announced this evening at The Folly in New York City, and at The Millions with Lúcio Cardoso’s Chronicle of the Murdered House, translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson, winning for fiction, and Alejandra Pizarnik’s Extracting the Stone of ...
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Three Percent #129: Two Missteps from Disaster
In this week’s episode, following an unintentional s***storm started on social media, Chad and Tom talk about the obligations of publishers and freelance translators, the cascade of things that can go wrong in the publication process, the necessary sales needed for translations to break even (and how likely that ...
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2017 BTBA Celebration Party TONIGHT!!
The winners of this year’s Best Translated Book Awards will be announced at 7pm tonight, both on The Millions and live at The Folly (92 W. Houston, NYC). Tom Roberge will be emcee, a number of judges will be there to make the announcements and celebrate the two winning titles. In case you need to be reminded of ...
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Two Month Review #1: General Introduction
Punctuated by toddler Isak’s comments about Barney, Chad Post, Brian Wood, and Lytton Smith discuss the main motivations behind the upcoming “Two Month Review” podcasts, which will be released weekly starting in later this month, and will focus on a single book for a eight or nine week period. As noted ...
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Three Percent Podcast Launches "Two Month Review"
After six years and almost one hundred and thirty episodes, the Three Percent Podcast is expanding to include new weekly “Two Month Review” mini-episodes. Each “season” of the Two Month Review podcasts will highlight a different Open Letter book, reading it slowly over the course of eight to nine episodes. ...
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Three Percent #128: Remembering, Rereading, Rewatching
In this week’s episode, Chad and Tom talk about their first ever episode, the new Granta list of Best Young American Novelists,, and books they’re looking forward to reading this summer. They also introduce the “Two Month Review”—a new series of weekly mini-episodes launching on ...
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Chad's Very Unscientific BTBA Odds [BTBA 2017]
When I started posting the “Why This Book Should Win”: entries for this year’s longlisted BTBA titles, I decided to include mostly random, totally unscientific odds for each book both to be shortlisted and to win the whole award. Taken in the aggregate, these odds made no sense. Combined, the ten fiction ...
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Bae Suah @ Princeton University
Bae Suah will be at Princeton University and together with Professor Steven Chung host a reading and discussion about Suah’s books “Recitation” and “A Greater ...
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Why These Poetry Finalists Should Win [BTBA 2017]
Following on yesterday’s post on the fiction finalists, here are links to the “Why This Book Should Win” posts for the five poetry finalists along with short blurbs about what makes each book so good. And once again, if you want to weigh in with your own thoughts, feel free to post to the BTBA Facebook ...
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Why These Fiction Finalists Should Win [BTBA 2017]
We’re just over a week away from the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award winners1, so it’s a good time to start ramping up the speculation. Tomorrow I’ll post about the poetry finalists, and give updated odds on the entire shortlist on Thursday, but for today, I thought it would be worthwhile to ...
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A Greater Music
A Greater Music is the first in a line of steady and much-anticipated releases by Bae Suah from key indie presses (this one published by Open Letter). Building off of the interest of 2016 Best Translated Book Award longlist nominee Nowhere to Be Found, Bae Suah is back, this time with Deborah Smith, translator of the Man ...
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Win a Copy of "Salki" by Wojiech Nowicki from GoodReads!
As you can see below, we’re giving away 15 copies of Nowicki’s Salki via GoodReads. Translated by University of Rochester graduate Jan Pytalksi, Nowicki’s book has been praised by the likes of such literary luminaries as Andrzej Stasiuk, who said, “It all blends here unexpectedly: that past and memory ...
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Three Percent #127: The 2017 Best Translated Book Award Finalists
Riffraff co-owner and BTBA poetry judge Emma Ramadan joins Chad and Tom to talk about the fifteen finalists for this year’s Best Translated Book Awards. After breaking down the poetry and fiction lists, the three talk about the new New York Times Match Book column and the value of booksellers and librarians. This ...
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“A Spare Life” by Lidija Dimkovska [Why This Book Should Win]
Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...
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“Extracting the Stone of Madness” by Alejandra Pizarnik [Why This Book Should Win]
Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...
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“tasks” by Víctor Rodríguez Núñez [Why This Book Should Win]
Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...
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“War and Turpentine” by Stefan Hertmans [Why This Book Should Win]
Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...
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Two Lost Souls: on "Revulsion" and "Cabo De Gata"
The dislocation of individuals from the countries of their birth has long been a common theme in contemporary literature. These two short novels recently translated into English appear firmly rooted in this tradition of ex-pat literature, but their authors eschew the romanticism found in earlier works. In Revulsion, Eguardo ...
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“Moshi Moshi” by Banana Yoshimoto [Why This Book Should Win]
Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...
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Toward Horizontal Thought: An Interview with László Földényi
Following yesterday’s book review on László Földényi’s Melancholy , reviewer Jason Newport was able to supplement his reading and review by getting a hold of the author himself, to delve a bit further into the process of the book and how melancholy is perceived. Jason Newport is currently a Fulbright ...
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“Doomi Golo: The Hidden Notebooks” by Boubacar Boris Diop [Why This Book Should Win]
Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...
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“Eve Out of Her Ruins” by Ananda Devi [Why This Book Should Win]
Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...
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Reading the World Conversation Series with Bae Suah
On May 1st, South Korean author Bae Suah (Recitation, A Greater Music, Nowhere to Be Found, and the forthcoming North Station) will be in Rochester, NY for TWO Reading the World Conversation Series events. The first will take place in the Humanities Center at Rush Rhees Library on the University of Rochester’s ...
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Melancholy
In Melancholy, Hungarian author, critic, and art theorist László Földényi presents a panorama of more than two thousand years of Western historical and cultural perspectives on the human condition known as melancholia. In nine chapters, Földényi contrasts the hero worship and mystery cults of the ancient Greeks, the ...
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“Zama” by Antonio Di Benedetto [Why This Book Should Win]
Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...
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“The Young Bride” by Alessandro Baricco [Why This Book Should Win]
Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...
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“Oblivion” by Sergi Lebedev [Why This Book Should Win]
Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...
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“Angel of Oblivion” by Maja Haderlap [Why This Book Should Win]
Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...
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“In Praise of Defeat” by Abdellatif Laâbi [Why This Book Should Win]
Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...
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Three Quotes from "A Contrived World" by Jung Young Moon
A Contrived World by Jung Young Moon, translated from the Korean by Mah Eunji and Jeffrey Karvonen (Dalkey Archive Press) I’ve been reading Jung Young Moon’s A Contrived World in preparation for an upcoming class (we’ll be talking about his Vaseline Buddha) and god damn do I love this book. Why, you ...
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Some Recent Open Letter Publicity
We don’t post these updates near as frequently as we should, but here’s a rundown of some interesting recent publicity pieces for our books. Frontier by Can Xue, translated from the Chinese by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping Interview between Can Xue and Porochista Khakpour (Words Without ...
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“Why This Book Should Win” So Far . . .
Unless someone surprises me with a new write-up, we don’t have any Why This Book Should Win posts for today. That leaves fifteen books to be covered next week, leading us right into the April 18th announcement of the BTBA fiction and poetry finalists. But for today, I thought I’d just post links to all twenty of the ...
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“Thus Bad Begins” by Javier Marías [Why This Book Should Win]
Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...
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“Berlin-Hamlet” by Szilárd Borbély [Why This Book Should Win]
Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...
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“The Thief of Talant” by Pierre Reverdy [Why This Book Should Win]
Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...
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“Among Strange Victims” by Daniel Saldaña París [Why This Book Should Win]
Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...
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“Night Prayers” by Santiago Gamboa [Why This Book Should Win]
Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...
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“On the Edge” by Rafael Chirbes [Why This Book Should Win]
Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...
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“In the Café of Lost Youth” by Patrick Modiano [Why This Book Should Win]
Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...
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“Last Wolf and Herman” by László Krasznahorkai [Why This Book Should Win]
Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...
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“Of Things” by Michael Donhauser [Why This Book Should Win]
Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...
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“Instructions Within” by Ashraf Fayadh [Why This Book Should Win]
Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...
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“Umami” by Laia Jufresa [Why This Book Should Win]
Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...
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“Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was” by Sjón [Why This Book Should Win]
Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...
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“The Queue” by Basma Abdel Aziz [Why This Book Should Win]
Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...
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“Super Extra Grande” by Yoss [Why This Book Should Win]
Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...
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“Chronicle of the Murdered House” by Lúcio Cardoso [Why This Book Should Win]
Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...
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“Memoirs of a Polar Bear” by Yoko Tawada [Why This Book Should Win]
Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...
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“Ladivine” by Marie NDiaye [Why This Book Should Win]
Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...
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“My Marriage” by Jakob Wassermann [Why This Book Should Win]
Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...
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“Vampire in Love” by Enrique Vila-Matas [Why This Book Should Win]
Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...
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“Wicked Weeds” by Pedro Cabiya [Why This Book Should Win]
Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...
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Three Percent #125: 2017 Best Translated Book Award Longlists
In this podcast, Tom and Chad go over all thirty-five longlisted titles on this year’s Best Translated Book Award longlists. They offer up some uninformed opinions (and a couple informed ones), make their guesses as to which titles will move on, and talk generally about the plethora of Spanish titles on the two lists. ...
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BTBA Final Clues [Days 4 & 5, I Guess]
OK, so these clues are as late as possible, but I did promise a week of BTBA hints, and technically, I have twelve more hours until the longlists are unveiled . . . It’s gotten more and more difficult to come up with these as the days have gone along. I mostly just can’t wait until we can get to talking about the ...
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The Hatred of Music
Pascal Quignard’s __The Hatred of Music_ is the densest, most arcane, most complex book I’ve read in ages. It’s also a book that covers a topic so basic, so universal—almost primordial—that just about any reader will be perversely thrilled by the intersections Quignard unearths between the mind and the world of ...
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Two Voices Salon: Publisher Chad Post on Chinese Author Can Xue
The Center’s Scott Esposito will talk with publisher Chad Post via Skype about the latest book in translation from Chinese writer Can Xue, Frontier, “one of the most raved-about works of translated fiction this year.” Light snacks and drinks will be provided. Come prepared to join the conversation! When: 6 p.m. ...
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The BTBA Poetry Longlist [Day Three of Clues]
I know I promised five days of clues about the BTBA fiction longlist, but given that I just got the poetry one in my email this morning, I’d rather spend time on that. So as to not be a liar, and to give you a huge clue, I will say that the two presses that published the most translations in 2016 have exactly zero books ...
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BTBA 2017 Fiction Longlist Clues [Day One]
Next Tuesday, March 28th, over at The Millions, this year’s Best Translated Book Award longlists will finally be unveiled. So let the countdown begin! This really is a great time of year for international fiction—the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize Man Booker International Longlist was released last week, as ...
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Fragile Travelers
In Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Flaubert attempted to highlight the ordinary, tired, and often crass nature of common expressions by italicising them within the text. When Charles, Emma Bovary’s mediocre husband, expresses himself in a manner akin to that of a million other colourless men before him, Flaubert uses ...
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Three Percent #124: Amazon Gets Physical
This week, Tom and Chad talk about the Cubs and their “Zen way,” the largest publishers in the U.S., this If there were Oscars for Books! “article,” and, most importantly, the new Amazon bookstore, which Tom visited and brought back some pictures. This week’s music is ...
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Short Novels that Pack a Punch [BTBA 2017]
This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is by reader, writer, and BTBA judge Rachel Cordasco. For more information on the BTBA, “like” our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter. And check back here each week for a new post by one of the judges. Every once in a while, you come across a slim novel ...
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Likes of the Future Are Shaped by Likes of the Past
As in past weeks here’s a PDF version of this post, which might be a lot easier to read. Two years ago, Yale University Press released The Dirty Dust, Alan Titley’s translation of Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s Cré na Cille, a supposedly “untranslatable” masterpiece of Irish literature. This past ...
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Translation Lab 2017
Attached below is all the necessary information and details for for anyone interested in applying for the Translation Lab at Writers Omi at Ledig House. A couple of our translators have participated in this in the past, and they absolutely loved it. So if you’re at all interested, you should definitely ...
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BTBA 2017, This Issue: The Body
This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is by Lori Feathers, an Assistant Managing Editor at Asymptote, freelance book critic and member of the National Book Critics Circle. Follow her online @LoriFeathers. For more information on the BTBA, “like” our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter. And check back here ...
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“Frontier” Receives a Starred Review in Kirkus!
It’s always fun to share really positive reviews of our books, such as this starred review from Kirkus for Frontier by Can Xue: Things are strange out there on the fringes, as the always adventurous Xue’s latest novel illustrates. There is magical realism aplenty in the pages of Xue’s beguiling story, but magical ...
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Tim Parks, Style, and Europanto
As in past weeks, here’s a PDF version of this post, which might be a lot easier to read. For a few years now, on the first day of my “Translation & World Literature” class, I give my students an impossible task—translating the first few paragraphs of Diego Marani’s Las Adventures des ...
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Translating Cuban Literature in the Twenty-first Century [BTBA 2017]
George Henson is a translator of contemporary Latin American and Spanish prose, a contributing editor for World Literature Today and Asymptote, and a lecturer at the University of Oklahoma. For more information on the BTBA, “like” our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter. And check back here each week for a ...
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The Structural Inequality of Comp Titles
Although not as long as “last week’s post,” I would recommend downloading the PDF version. Besides, it just looks prettier in that format. Although the main point of this post is pretty general and obvious—the rich get richer by already being rich—it was inspired by some publishing-specific, ...
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Banff International Literary Translation Centre and ITEF 2017
Joining the Gutekunst Prize in calls for applications this season are both the Banff International Literary Translation Centre residency, and the Istanbul Tanpinar Literature Festival (ITEF) fellowship. About Banff: Inspired by the network of international literary translation centres in Europe, the Banff ...
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Three Percent #122: Music We Listened to in 2016
As in years past, the entire Open Letter crew (Chad, Nate, Kaija) got together to talk about some of the music they listened to over the past year. (That and Bud Light ads.) You can listen to all the songs featured on this podcast on this Spotify playlist: Also, just a reminder, since we changed our podcast ...
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Reader Selection and Market Acceleration: Are We Living in a Backward World?
Given the insane length of this post, I would recommend downloading the PDF version. Besides, it’s easier to read the footnotes that way. Some of which are pretty fun, I think. Much in the same way it’s impossible for me to choose a single part of Franco Moretti’s Distant Reading that I like the best, I ...
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Recent Open Letter Publicity [Justine, Gessel Dome, Ugresic, and More]
I don’t post on social media all that often—unless I’ve been drinking—but do generally try and share all of the reviews and publicity pieces that come up about Open Letter. And as with anything else, this tends to come in waves, including the onslaught of pieces from the past few days that I’ve ...
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World Literature and Translation (Spring 2017)
I know I’ve mentioned this on the blog (and podcast) a million times, but every spring I teach a class on “World Literature and Translation” that features somewhere between eight and ten recently published translations. Although the individual arrangement of ideas and books shifts every year, the overall ...
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Amazing New Interview with Dubrakva Ugresic
The only preface I have for this interview Dubravka Ugresic did with Verbivoracious Press is that you really need to read the entire thing, and then you need to buy all of her books. VP Editors: Can you start by telling me a little about your interest in literary activism, and what revelations sprang from the Kolkata ...
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Open Letter in 2016
Sure, the start of a new year is a good time to look to the future, make resolutions you’ll definitely break, and all of that, but it’s also a nice moment to reflect on the past twelve months. Rather than include all the things that happened with Open Letter last year—from the success of our 2nd Annual ...
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Three Percent #121: The Summer Following
Caroline Casey from Coffee House Press joined Chad and Tom on this podcast to talk about 2016 movies, TV shows, and podcasts. Before they got into a long discussion about the royal family, Luke Cage, Crimetown, Midnight Special, and more, they touched on a number of things that are both intriguing and a little bit ...
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Chronicle of the Murdered House by Lucio Cardoso [Biographical Note]
The pub date for Chronicle of the Murdered House by Lúcio Cardoso, which is translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson, with a biographical note from Ben Moser officially came out on Tuesday, December 13th. To celebrate the release of this Brazilian masterpiece, we’ll be running a series ...
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Chronicle of the Murdered House by Lucio Cardoso [Interview]
The pub date for Chronicle of the Murdered House by Lúcio Cardoso, which is translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson, with a biographical note from Ben Moser officially came out on Tuesday, December 13th. To celebrate the release of this Brazilian masterpiece, we’ll be running a series ...
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Chronicle of the Murdered House by Lucio Cardoso [Early Reviews]
The pub date for Chronicle of the Murdered House by Lúcio Cardoso, which is translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson, with a biographical note from Ben Moser officially came out on Tuesday, December 13th. To celebrate the release of this Brazilian masterpiece, we’ll be running a ...
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Chronicle of the Murdered House by Lucio Cardoso [Excerpt]
The pub date for Chronicle of the Murdered House by Lúcio Cardoso, which is translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson, with a biographical note from Ben Moser officially came out on Tuesday, December 13th. To celebrate the release of this Brazilian masterpiece, we’ll be running a series ...
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Chronicle of the Murdered House by Lucio Cardoso [Press Release]
The pub date for Chronicle of the Murdered House by Lúcio Cardoso, which is translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson, with a biographical note from Ben Moser officially came out on Tuesday, December 13th. To celebrate the release of this Brazilian masterpiece, we’ll be running a series ...
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Polar Bears and Cyborg Turtles: Some Non-Human Narrative Perspectives [BTBA 2017]
This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is by reader, writer, and BTBA judge Rachel Cordasco. For more information on the BTBA, “like” our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter. And check back here each week for a new post by one of the judges. I’ve only come across two books this year that ...
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Two Voices Salon with translator Chris Andrews
Presented by the Center for the Art of Translation Chris Andrews joins us to talk about his newest translation, Ema, the Captive, from the prolific Argentine writer César Aira. This event is free and open to the public. When: December 8, 2016; doors open at 5:30, event starts at 6:00 Where: Center for the Art of ...
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An Education in World Literature [BTBA 2017]
This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is by Steph Opitz, who reviews books for _Marie Claire, while also working with the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP), Kirkus Reviews, the Brooklyn Book Festival, and the Twin Cities Book Festival. For more information on the BTBA, “like” our ...
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Keeping the Foreign in Translated Literature: a Dispatch from the Oklahoma Prairie George Henson
George Henson is a translator of contemporary Latin American and Spanish prose, a contributing editor for World Literature Today and Asymptote, and a lecturer at the University of Oklahoma. For more information on the BTBA, “like” our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter. And check back here each week for a ...
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Three Percent #120: Crime and Concept Stores
It’s been a few weeks since the last podcast, but Chad and Tom are back with a over-stuffed episode that starts with a recap of recent events before turning to Barnes & Noble’s plans for their concept stores followed by a lengthy discussion about international crime authors. Here’s a complete list of ...
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Thus Bad Begins [BTBA 2017]
This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is by Mark Haber of Brazos Bookstore. For more information on the BTBA, “like” our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter. And check back here each week for a new post by one of the judges. Thus Bad Begins by Javier Marias, translated from the Spanish by ...
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Handicapping Margaret Jull Costa's Odds at Winning the BTBA [BTBA 2017]
This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is by Jeremy Garber, events coordinator for Powells and freelance reviewer. For more information on the BTBA, “like” our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter. And check back here each week for a new post by one of the judges. Esteemed translator Margaret Jull ...
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The Architecture of Time, Space and Imagination by Monica Carter
Monica Carter is a freelance critic whose nonfiction has appeared in publications including Black Clock, World Literature Today, and Foreword Reviews. She curates Salonica World Lit, which is a virtual journal dedicated to international literature and culture. For more information on the BTBA, “like” our ...
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The Subsidiary
The Subsidiary by Matías Celedón translated from the French by Samuel Rutter 208 pgs. | pb | 9781612195445 | $21.95 Mellville House Publishing Reviewed by Vincent Francone The biggest issues with books like The Subsidiary often have to do with their underpinnings—when we learn that Georges Perec wrote La ...
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“Thus Bad Begins” by Javier Marías
Thus Bad Begins by Javier Marías translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa 464 pgs. | pb |9781101911914 | $16.95 Knopf Reviewed by Kristel Thornell Following The Infatuations, Javier Marías’s latest novel seems, like those that have preceded it, an experiment to test fiction’s ...
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Three Percent #119: We Are Being Trolled
This week’s podcast starts with the biggest, most surprising news of recent memory—Bob Dylan winning the Nobel Prize in Literature. Then Chad and Tom talk about the National Book Foundation’s study of translation, the unmasking of Elena Ferrante (and the backlash to that unmasking, and the backlash to the ...
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Bae Suah @ Volumes Bookcafe
Volumes is thrilled to announce have Bae Suah, one of the most lauded contemporary South Korean writers, along with her translator, Deborah Smith, in conversation about Bae Suah’s newly translated book, A Greater Music. Deborah Smith most recently translated the 2015 Man Booker Winning novel, The Vegetarian, by Han ...
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Early Gems in the Hunt for the Best Translated Fiction of 2016! [BTBA 2017]
This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is by Lori Feathers, anAssistant Managing Editor at Asymptote, freelance book critic and member of the National Book Critics Circle. Follow her online @LoriFeathers. For more information on the BTBA, “like” our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter. And check back ...
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"Books that Make Demands of the Reader" w/ Can Xue
“Books that Make Demands of the Reader” Best Translated Book Award winner Can Xue (The Last Lover, Vertical Motion, Frontier) writes books that blend elements of the Western literary translation with those from Eastern philosophy. As a result, her books are less about the things that happen and more about the ...
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Bae Suah @ Green Apple Books on the Park
Join translator Deborah Smith in conversation with South Korean writer Bae Suah about her novel, A Greater Music. More information is available here. The event is free and open to the public. When: Friday, October 7, 2016 @ 7:30pm Where: Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Avenue, SF CA ...
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Literary Death Match feat. Bae Suah
Join Bae Suah and more for a special Translators Edition of Literary Death Match on Thursday, October 6th, at 7 p.m. at the Shadow Ultra Lounge in Oakland, CA! Literary Death Match, co-created by Adrian Todd Zuniga, marries the literary and performative aspects of Def Poetry Jam, rapier-witted quips of American Idol’s ...
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39th ALTA Conference @ Oakland
The prefix “trans” reminds us that the concept of crossing is fixed at the heart of translation. Thinking about translation in this way—as a crossing, a kind of movement—suggests a rich intersection of questions about the nature of the translator’s work. Translation & Crossing asks us to think about physical ...
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Three Percent #118: Our Titles Are No Better
This week’s podcast kicks off with a list of corrections from episode 117, from a mix-up of Sophies to an explanation of which Basque Country soccer team only fields Basque players. Then Chad and Tom move on to talk about the recent NEIBA conference and some fall titles they left out of their mini-previews before ...
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GoodReads Giveaways for "The Brother" and "A Greater Music"
It’s been some months since I posted about GoodReads Giveaways here on Three Percent, but since I recently scheduled ones for all of our forthcoming winter titles, I thought I’d invite everyone to enter into these drawings. Both of these giveaways—for The Brother and for A Greater Music—run from ...
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"One of Us Is Sleeping" by Josefine Klougart [An Open Letter Book to Read]
This is the third entry in a series that will eventually feature all of the titles Open Letter has published to date. Catch up on past entries by clicking here. Last week’s entry was a pretty solid Chad rant involving the incredible Maidenhair by Mikhail Shishkin. Definitely check that one out. By contrast, this ...
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Josefine Klougart @ Powell's Books
Join Danish author Josefine Klougart and Powell’s books for a conversation and reading about her first novel to be translated into English, One of Us Is Sleeping. The event is free and open to the public. When: Thursday, September 29 @ 7:30 PM Where: Powell’s Books, 3723 SE Hawthorne Blvd, Portland, OR ...
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Maidenhair by Mikhail Shishkin [An Open Letter Book to Read]
This is the second entry in a series that will eventually feature all of the titles Open Letter has published to date. Catch up on past entries by clicking here. Last week’s entry was about Gesell Dome by Guillermo Saccomanno. Maidenhair by Mikhail Shishkin, translated from the Russian by Marian ...
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Read Local: Supporting Rochester Presses and Making Events Fun Again
Although we referenced Read Local in the write up of Josefine Klougart’s tour, I haven’t really explained what it is here, or why I think it could be a really exciting thing for Rochester. Just to as not to bury the lede, the first Read Local event is Friday, September 23rd at 6pm at Nox Cocktail Lounge. ...
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Interview with Rein Raud
Officially pubbing last Tuesday, The Brother by Rein Raud, translated from the Estonian by Adam Cullen, is a spaghetti western and “philosophical gem” (West Camel). It’s also Raud’s first novel to appear in English, following an appearance in the Best European Fiction 2015 anthology. The book has ...
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“Death by Water” by Kenzaburo Oe
Death by Water by Kenzaburu Oe translated from the Japanese by Deborah Boliver Boehm 432 pgs. | pb | 9781101911914 | $16.00 Grove Atlantic Reviewed by Will Eells Death by Water, Kenzaburo Oe’s latest novel to be translated into English, practically begs you to read it as autobiography. Like The ...
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It's a Great Year for Speculative Fiction [BTBA 2017]
This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is by reader, writer, and BTBA judge Rachel Cordasco. For more information on the BTBA, “like” our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter. And check back here each week for a new post by one of the judges. Admittedly, I only started keeping track of speculative ...
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Gesell Dome by Guillermo Saccomanno [An Open Letter Book to Read]
This is a new, hopefully weekly, feature highlighting a different book from our catalog in each post. Even though this book is pretty recent (official pub date just a few weeks ago August), I plan on going deep into our backlist in the near future. Gesell Dome by Guillermo Saccomanno, translated from the Spanish by ...
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Bae Suah and Deborah Smith on Tour!
This fall, two Open Letter authors will be on tour: Josefine Klougart (whose tour we announced a few weeks ago) will be going cross-country starting next week to promote One of Us Is Sleeping. And then, just as her tour is wrapping up, Bae Suah will be arriving in San Francisco (along with her translator, Man Booker Prize ...
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Three Percent #117: Angola Is Not Angola
In this week’s podcast, tom and Chad preview some forthcoming books they’re excited about. Having done no solid research, Chad’s contributions are questionable at best, especially when he talks about Panthers in the Hole in relation to the COUNTRY of Angola instead of the prison that goes by the same ...
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Introducing: Open Letter After Dark Series [Back to School Edition!]
A few years ago, Open Letter approached and joined up with a handful of foreign publishers to bring together what we’ve named the Open Letter After Dark series. Sounds kind of sexy, doesn’t it? This series—which is an ebook only series—was put together with the intent to do something a little more to ...
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“Twenty-One Cardinals” by Jocelyne Saucier
Twenty-One Cardinals by Jocelyne Saucier translated from the French by Rhonda Mullins 176 pgs. | pb |9781552453070 | $19.95 Coach House Books Reviewed by Natalya Tausanovitch Jocelyne Saucier’s Twenty-One Cardinals is about the type of unique, indestructible, and often tragic loyalty only found in ...
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Latest Review: "Twenty-One Cardinals" by Jocelyne Saucier
The latest addition to our Reviews section is a piece by Natalya Tausanovitch on Twenty-One Cardinals by Jocelyne Saucier, published by Coach House Books. Natalya was a student of Chad’s last school year, and is in her final year of studies at the university. This summer, she did an internship with the press and ...
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Best Translated Book Award 2017: The Judges
Running a little bit late with the BTBA announcments for this year, but over the next week, expect to see the official page updated and an updated to the translation database. In the meantime, this post will give publishers, translators, and interested readers all the necessary information about who’s on the committee ...
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Latest Review: "One of Us Is Sleeping" by Josefine Klougart
The latest addition to our Reviews section is a piece by Jeremy Garber on Josefine Klougart’s One of Us Is Sleeping, out from Open Letter last month. What can be said about a book like this? It’s one of those books that can make you feel like you’re reading it for the first time in the middle of winter, ...
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Bye Bye Blondie
Many of Virginie Despentes’s books revolve around the same central idea: “To be born a woman [is] the worst fate in practically every society.” But this message is nearly always packaged in easy-to-read books that fill you with the pleasure of a trashy popular novel. The writing is straightforward, not overly literary, ...
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Latest Review: "Bye Bye Blondie" by Virginie Despentes
The latest addition to our Reviews section is a by Emma Ramadan on Virginie Despentes’s Bye Bye Blondie, published by The Feminist Press. In addition to being a translator from the French (you may recognize her name from Anne F. Garréta’s Sphinx), Emma is one of two co-founders (along with Tom Roberge) of the ...
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Three Percent #116: Why Is Tom in Providence?
After an extended hiatus, Chad and Tom are back to discuss a slew of things that happened over the past couple months. These include Book Marks, what’s going to happen to B&N, and Tim Parks’s article on The Vegetarian. They also talk about some books they’ve read recently—including Zero K, which ...
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BTBA Winner Angélica Freitas Reads from "Rilke Shake"
This video has been out for a couple of months, but just came to my attention recently. It’s of Angélica Freitas reading from Rilke Shake, translated from the Portuguese by Hilary Kaplan and published by Phoneme Media. It also won this year’s Best Translated Book Award. (Speaking of which, it’s about time ...
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La Superba
Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer’s La Superba is appropriately titled after the Italian city of Genoa, where, after escaping the pressures of fame in his own country, the semi-autobiographical narrator finds himself cataloguing the experiences of its mesmerizing inhabitants with the intention of writing a novel himself. Written in ...
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Latest Review: "La Superba" by Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer
The latest addition to our Reviews section is a piece by Anna Alden on La Superba by Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer, published this March by Deep Vellum Publishing. Summer is in full hazy swing here in Rochester, but luckily we have a handful of great interns at Open Letter/Three Percent this summer, who are going to be helping ...
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CLMP Firecracker Awards Announced [Spolier: We Won!]
Last Thursday, May 19th, CLMP held the (new) 2nd Annual Firecracker Awards. Presented by the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) with the American Booksellers Association, the Firecracker Awards for independently and self-published literature are a revitalized iteration of the Firecracker Alternative Book Award ...
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All Days Are Night
As presaged by its title, contradiction is the theme of Peter Stamm’s novel, All Days Are Night. Gillian, a well-known television personality, remains unknowable to herself. And Hubert, a frustrated artist and Gillian’s lover, creates art through the process of destruction. Gillian’s and Hubert’s struggles to ...
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Latest Review: "All Days Are Night" by Peter Stamm
The latest addition to our Reviews section is a piece by Lori Feathers on Peter Stamm’s All Days are Night, published last year by Other Press. Here’s the beginning of Lori’s review: As presaged by its title, contradiction is the theme of Peter Stamm’s novel, All Days Are Night. Gillian, a ...
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Three Percent #115: From the BTBAs to the Soccer Pitch
This week’s podcast opens with Chad and Tom discussing the 2016 Best Translated Book Award winners and their thoughts on how to evaluate books for the prize. Then, in a separately recorded podcast, Chad and visiting guest George Carroll talk with Juan Villoro about his new book on soccer, God Is Round. Also, due to ...
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Three Percent #114: BTBA Shortlists, The Vegetarian, Diorama
In this week’s podcast Tom and Chad talk about the recently released Best Translated Book Award shortlists, before moving on to discussion of the two Reading the World Conversation Series books for April: The Vegetarian by Han Kang and Diorama by Rocío Cerón. Additional articles and books discussed include, ...
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2016 Best Translated Book Award Fiction Finalists
As announced “earlier this morning at The Millions,”: these are the ten fiction finalists for this year’s Best Translated Book Award: A General Theory of Oblivion by José Eduardo Agualusa, translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn (Angola, Archipelago Books) Arvida by Samuel Archibald, ...
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“The Four Books” by Yan Lianke [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series, is by Monica Carter, former BTBA judge and writer whose fiction has appeared in The Rattling Wall, Black Clock, Writers Tribe Review, and other publications. She is a freelance critic whose work has appeared in World Literature Today, Black Clock and Foreword Reviews. She is ...
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“The Body Where I Was Born” by Guadalupe Nettel [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series is by Charlotte Whittle, translator, and editor at Cardboard House Press. We will be running two (or more!) of these posts every business day leading up to the announcement of the finalists. The Body Where I Was Born by Guadalupe Nettel, translated from the ...
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“Load Poems Like Guns,” compiled and translated by Farzana Marie [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series is by Deborah Smith, BTBA judge, translator from the Korean, and founder of Tilted Axis Press. We will be running two (or more!) of these posts every business day leading up to the announcement of the finalists. Load Poems Like Guns: Women’s Poetry from Herat, ...
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“The Things We Don’t Do” by Andrés Neuman [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series is by Tiffany Nichols, who will start her Ph.D. studies this upcoming fall and is a contributor at to Three Percent. We will be running two (or more!) of these posts every business day leading up to the announcement of the finalists. The Things We Don’t Do by ...
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“The Story of My Teeth” by Valeria Luiselli [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series is by Amanda Bullock, BTBA judge and director of public programs at Literary Arts, Portland. We will be running two (or more!) of these posts every business day leading up to the announcement of the finalists. The Story of My Teeth by Valeria Luiselli, translated ...
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“A General Theory of Oblivion” by Jose Eduardo Agualusa [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series is by George Carroll, former BTBA judge, sales rep, and international literature editor for Shelf Awareness. We will be running two (or more!) of these posts every business day leading up to the announcement of the finalists. A General Theory of Oblivion by José ...
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“One Out of Two” by Daniel Sada [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series is by Lucina Schell, editor of Reading in Translation. We will be running two (or more!) of these posts every business day leading up to the announcement of the finalists. One Out of Two by Daniel Sada, translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver (Mexico, ...
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The Seven Good Years
It’s a rare and wonderful book that begins and ends with violence and humor. At the start of Etgar Keret’s The Seven Good Years, Keret is in a hospital waiting for the birth of his first child while nurses, in what seems a blasé manner, talk about how much they hate terrorist attacks. “They put a damper on ...
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Latest Review: "The Seven Good Years" by Etgar Keret
The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Vincent Francone on The Seven Good Years by Etgar Kerert, on the edition published by Granta Books. Here’s the beginning of Vince’s review: It’s a rare and wonderful book that begins and ends with violence and humor. At the start of Etgar Keret’s The ...
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“Sphinx” by Anne Garréta [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series is by Joseph Schreiber, who runs the website Rough Ghosts, and is a contributor at Numéro Cinq. We will be running two (or more!) of these posts every business day leading up to the announcement of the finalists. Sphinx by Anne Garréta, translated from the ...
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“I Refuse” by Per Petterson [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series is by Joseph Schreiber, who runs the website Rough Ghosts, and is a contributor at Numéro Cinq. We will be running two (or more!) of these posts every business day leading up to the announcement of the finalists. I Refuse by Per Petterson, translated from the ...
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“Nowhere to Be Found” by Bae Suah [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series, is by Tony Malone, founder of Tony’s Reading List. We will be running two (or more!) of these posts every business day leading up to the announcement of the finalists. Nowhere to Be Found by Bae Suah, translated from the Korean by Sora Kim-Russell (South Korea, ...
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“The Meursault Investigation” by Kamel Daoud [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series, is by Gwen Dawson, founder of Literary License. We will be running two (or more!) of these posts every business day leading up to the announcement of the finalists. The Meursault Investigation by Kamel Daoud, translated from the French by John Cullen (Algeria, ...
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“Beauty Is a Wound” by Eka Kurniawan [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series, is by Kevin Elliott, BTBA judge and bookseller at 57th Street Books. We will be running two (or more!) of these posts every business day leading up to the announcement of the finalists. Beauty Is a Wound by Eka Kurniawan, translated from the Indonesian by Annie ...
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“The Story of the Lost Child” by Elena Ferrante [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series, is by Betty Scott from Books & Whatnot. We will be running two (or more!) of these posts every business day leading up to the announcement of the finalists. The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein (Italy, ...
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“Wild Words: Four Tamil Poets” edited by Lakshmi Holmström [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series, is by Deborah Smith, BTBA judge, translator from the Korean, and founder of Tilted Axis Press. We will be running two (or more!) of these posts every business day leading up to the announcement of the finalists. Wild Words: Four Tamil Poets, edited and translated ...
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“The Complete Stories” by Clarice Lispector [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series, is by Amanda Nelson, BTBA judge and managing editor of Book Riot. We will be running two of these posts every business day leading up to the announcement of the finalists. The Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector, translated from the Portuguese by Katrina Dodson ...
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“Berlin” by Aleš Šteger [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series, is by P.T. Smith, BTBA judge, writer, and reader. We will be running two of these posts every business day leading up to the announcement of the finalists. Berlin by Aleš Šteger, translated from the Slovene by Brian Henry, Forrest Gander, and Aljaž Kovac ...
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Three Percent #113: 2016 Best Translated Book Award Longlists
In this week’s podcast, Chad and Tom read through all thirty-five titles on the two Best Translated Book Award longlists making comments about the books they’ve read and the ones that interest them. Then Chad tries his hand at guessing which ten fiction titles will make the shortlist. (Spoiler: He ends up picking ...
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"Arvida" by Samuel Archibald [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series, is by Heather Cleary, BTBA judge, writer, translator, and co-founder of the Buenos Aires Review. We will be running two of these posts every business day leading up to the announcement of the finalists. Arvida by Samuel Archibald, translated from the French by Donald ...
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“Mirages of the Mind” by Mushtaq Ahmed Yousufi [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series, is by Jason Grunebaum, BTBA judge, writer, and translator. We will be running two of these posts every business day leading up to the announcement of the finalists. Mirages of the Mind by Mushtaq Ahmed Yousufi, translated from the Urdu by Matt Reeck and Aftab ...
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“War, So Much War” by Mercè Rodoreda [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series, is by Mark Haber, BTBA judge and bookseller at Brazos Bookstore. We will be running two of these posts every business day leading up to the announcement of the finalists. War, So Much War by Mercè Rodoreda, translated from the Catalan by Maruxa Relaño and ...
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Human Acts
Last year, Han Kang’s The Vegetarian was an unexpected critical hit. Now, it’s just been published in the U.S. and has already received a great deal of positive critical attention. The Vegetarian was a bold book to attempt as an author’s first translation into English, yet Han’s surreal story and the skillful ...
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Latest Review: "Human Acts" by Han Kang
The latest addition to our Reviews section is a piece by J. C. Sutcliffe on Han Kang’s Human Acts, published by Portobello Books. Here’s the beginning of the review: Last year, Han Kang’s The Vegetarian was an unexpected critical hit. Now, it’s just been published in the U.S. and has already received a ...
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“Murder Most Serene” by Gabriell Wittkop [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series, is by Ben Carter Olcott, who is a writer, editor of the KGB Bar Lit Magazine, and a bookseller at 192 Books. We will be running two of these posts every business day leading up to the announcement of the finalists. Murder Most Serene by Gabrielle Wittkop, ...
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“Moods” by Yoel Hoffmann [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series, is by Kate Garber, BTBA judge and bookseller at 192 Books. We will be running two of these posts every business day leading up to the announcement of the finalists. Moods by Yoel Hoffmann, translated from the Hebrew by Peter Cole (Israel, New Directions) Moods ...
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2016 BTBA Longlist Announcement!
This entry is the general press release about this year’s awards. If you want to skip ahead, you can find the poetry list here, and the fiction one here. Check back in later today—we’ll be kicking off the “Why This Book Should Win” series in the afternoon. March 29, 2016—Clarice ...
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Three Percent #112: An Old School Ranty Podcast
This week’s podcast feels like one straight out of 2011, with Chad getting angry about all sorts of things and just letting loose. The starting point for their discussion is the three-part series Tim Parks wrote for the New York Review of Books (part one, part two, part three), but they go on to talk about JellyBooks ...
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"Unshaven and Often Drunk" [BTBA]
I know the BTBA announcements will be taking place tomorrow morning, but we have one last preview post for you. This is from judge Mark Haber, who works at Brazos Bookstore in Houston—one of the best stores in the country. Enjoy and tune in tomorrow to find out what made the longlists! If you’ve ever had your ...
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Latest Review: "Nowhere to Be Found" by Bae Suah
The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Pierce Alquist on Nowhere to Be Found by Bae Suah, published in 2014 by AmazonCrossing. Just a side note, that if you’ve been itching for more from Bae Suah since this one came out, there are THREE more forthcoming titles of hers making their way into English: A Greater ...
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Two Weeks to the BTBA Longlists!
In just a couple of weeks—on Tuesday, March 29th at 10am to be precise—we’re going to announce the longlist for this year’s Best Translated Book Awards for fiction and poetry. Between now and then, I want to put up a few posts about the award, the titles that might make the list, other trends, etc. But ...
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Three Percent #111: One the Edge and Monospace
This week, Tom and Chad discuss the two Reading the World Book Club books for February: On the Edge by Rafael Chirbes, translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa (New Directions), and Monospace by Anne Parian, translated from the French by Emma Ramadan (La Presse). Admittedly, neither of them know much about ...
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Thank You, Katy Derbyshire, For Not Finger-Wagging
Many of you will have read or seen Katy Derbyshire’s recent article in the Guardian on women in translation. I braced myself for paragraphs of commentary on how publishers of literature in translation could “be better” than they are, and was already feeling that defensive twinge build up in my jaw. BUT, Katy ...
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La paz de los vencidos
Jorge Eduardo Benavides’ novel La paz de los vencidos (The Peace of the Defeated) takes the form of a diary written by a nameless Peruvian thirty-something intellectual slumming it in Santa Cruz de Tenerife in Spain’s Canary Islands. Recently relocated to Santa Cruz from La Laguna, our lonely diarist supports his frugal ...
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Preparing to Read "Diorama" by Rocío Cerón [RTWBC]
Yesterday I wrote a long preview of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, the Reading the World Book Club fiction book for March. Today, I’m switching over to our poetry selection—Diorama by Rocío Cerón, translated from the Spanish by Anna Rosenwong (Phoneme Media.) As always, you can post your thoughts and ...
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Introducing "The Vegetarian" by Han Kang [RTWBC]
As previously announced, the fiction book we’re reading for this month’s Reading the World Book Club is The Vegetarian by Han Kang, translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith. Since I already read this one—taught it in my class last year, more on that below—I thought I’d start out this ...
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"The Vegetarian" by Han Kang and "Diorama" by Rocío Cerón [RTWBC]
Yesterday afternoon, Tom and I recorded a new podcast about the February Reading the World Book Club books—On the Edge by Rafael Chirbes, translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa, and Monospace by Anne Parian, translated from the French by Emma Ramadan. Since we didn’t get that many comments or questions ...
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Share Your Thoughts on "On the Edge" by Chirbes and "Monospace" by Parian [RTWBC]
Sure, February is officially over, but next week Tom and I will be discussing last month’s Reading the Book Book Club selections: On the Edge by Rafael Chirbes and Monospace by Anne Parian. We’d love to include comments and questions and topics from everyone else, so if you have any thoughts or reactions, you ...
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Lina Wolff in Rochester [Spring 2016 RTWCS]
Next Wednesday, March 2nd, at 6:30 pm, the amazing and local Rochester restaurant ButaPub will be hosting the first Reading the World Conversation Series (RTWCS) event for Spring 2016. This first RTWCS of 2016 welcomes Swedish author Lina Wolff to discuss her new novel, Bret Easton Ellis and The Other Dogs, with Brian ...
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Souffles-Anfas: A Critical Anthology
Anyone with any interest at all in contemporary Moroccan writing must start with Souffles. A cultural and political journal, Souffles (the French word for “breaths”) was founded in 1966 by Abdellatif Laâbi and Mostafa Nissabouri. Run by a group of artists and intellectuals, Souffles was a written fight for democratic ...
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Latest Review: "Souffles-Anfas: A Critical Anthology from the Moroccan Journal of Culture and Politics" ed. by Olivia C. Harrison and Teresa Villa-Ignacio
The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Emma Ramadan on Souffles-Anfas: A Critical Anthology from the Moroccan Journal of Culture and Politics, ed. by Olivia C. Harrison and Teresa Villa-Ignacio. Emma herself is a literary translator from French. She has a BA in Comparative Literature and Literary Translation from ...
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Alvaro Enrigue @ Green Apple Books
An event with Mexican author Alvaro Enrigue, whose novel Sudden Death (his first in English, translated by Natasha Wimmer), was just released by Riverhead Books. Enrigue will talk about the book with Two Lines’ Scott Esposito at Green Apple Books on the Park. When: Friday, February 19, 2016 Where: Green Apple Books ...
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Emma Ramadan on "Monospace": Part II [RTWBC]
Here’s the follow-up to the earlier post featuring Emma Ramadan’s essay on Anne Parian’s Monospace. Her piece prompted me to ask a few questions, which she was kind enough to reply to. Hopefully this will inspire all of you to pick up a copy of the book! As always, anyone interested in participating in the ...
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Emma Ramadan on "Monospace": Part I [RTWBC]
Since I admittedly know very little about contemporary poetry, I asked translator Emma Ramadan if she would be willing to write something about this month’s Reading the World Book Club poetry title, Monospace by Anne Parian. What she sent back is posted below. It’s thoughtful, extremely helpful in approaching the ...
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Three Percent #110: The Weight of Things
Adrian Nathan West joined this week’s podcast to talk about Marianne Fritz and his translation of The Weight of Things, the first novel in the recently launched Reading the World Book Clubs. Additionally, we talked about Twelve Stations by Tomasz Różycki (the RTWBC poetry selection this month), the ABA Winter ...
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Introducing "Monospace" by Anne Parian [RTWBC]
The other day I posted some information about Rafael Chirbes and On the Edge, the prose book we’ll be reading this month in the Reading the World Book Clubs. On the poetry side of things, this month we’ll be talking about Monospace by Anne Parian, translated from the French by Emma Ramadan, and since my copy ...
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Introducing Rafael Chirbes [RTWBC]
For anyone who missed this in my earlier posts, the fiction book for February’s Reading the World Book Club is On the Edge by Rafael Chirbes, which is translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa and published by New Directions. As a way of introducing Chirbes, I thought I’d post this bio and interview ...
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Variations on a Theme: Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s "Tram 83" [BTBA 2016]
This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is from Heather Cleary, translator of Sergio Chejfec, Oliverio Girondo, professor at Sarah Lawrence, and co-founder of the Buenos Aires Review. For more information on the BTBA, “like” our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter. And check back here each week for a ...
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2016 PEN Translation Prize Shortlists!
Since the New York Times didn’t reference PEN’s two translation prizes AT ALL in their official announcement this morning (grrrrr!), I thought I’d list all the finalists here, if for no other reason than that this info exists on the Internet somewhere outside of PEN’s site. PEN Translation Prize ...
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Updated 2014, 2015, & 2016 Translation Databases
I just uploaded new versions of 2014, 2015, and 2016 translation databases to our master translation database part of the website. There are two big updates worth noting here, before getting into some of the breakdowns: 1) I added over 150 titles to the 2016 database, so this is starting to look a little bit more robust ...
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Send Us Your Comments on "The Weight of Things" and "Twelve Stations"! [RTWBC]
Despite all of my New Year Best Intentions, I fell off last week with posting about the two Reading the World Book Club books for January: The Weight of Things by Marianne Fritz and Twelve Stations by Tomasz Różycki. I did read (and enjoyed!) both books and will be talking about both books tomorrow on a podcast with Tom ...
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Literature on Location: Part III [BTBA 2016]
This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is from Stacey Knecht and is basically a follow-up to her earlier posts. For more information on the BTBA, “like” our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter. And check back here each week for a new post by one of the judges. I was four, not five, as I’d always ...
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Three Percent #109: Making Reading Private
In a sort of role-reversal, Tom does most of the ranting in this podcast, partially inspired by this article entitled “Damn, You’re Not Reading Any Books by White Men This Year? That’s So Freakin Brave and Cool.” They also discuss some women in translation stats, Philip Pullman’s decision to pull ...
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On Spoiling "The Weight of Things" [RTWBC]
I’m struggling with what to write about The Weight of Things for this week. Initially, I thought we’d have an interview with the translator ready by this point, but I suck at time management . . . Besides, what could I possible add after this interview between Adrian Nathan West and Kate Zambreno? BLVR: ...
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Latvian Rap, Porziņģis, Translations [& What Deadspin Was Apparently Too Good For]
Back in July 2015, Deadspin posted an article on a rap song by the Latvian group Transleiteris about Latvian-born, New York Knicks player Kristaps Porziņģis. After the initial ripple of interest across the Internet, and because sometimes I don’t sleep at night and have hours of free time as a result, it ...
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Why Are We Ignoring "Apocalypse Baby"'s Most Important Twist? [BTBA 2016]
This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is by Kate Garber, bookseller at 192 Books. For more information on the BTBA, “like” our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter. And check back here each week for a new post by one of the judges. I have yet to find a review of Apocalypse Baby by Virginie ...
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"Loquela" Is the Book You Should Be Reading
This is another one of those posts. One in which I wrote a long-ass essay/diatribe that I decided to delete so as to “focus on the positive.” In this case, I was on a roll about how sick I am of the literary field anointing four-five international authors a year and writing endless articles/listicles about ...
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A Quote from "Twelve Stations" [RTWBC]
I was hoping to send Bill Johnston a bunch of questions about Tomasz Różycki’s Twelve Stations over the weekend, but the general exhaustion from MLA, Greyhound bus rides, and doing three events in three days won out. With a little luck I’ll have something from him to post next Thursday. In the meantime, I ...
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Berlin
Randall Jarrell once argued a point that I will now paraphrase and, in doing so, over-simplify: As a culture, we need book criticism, not book reviews. I sort of agree, but let’s not get into all of that. Having finished Berlin by Aleš Šteger, I am reminded of Jarrell’s idea because I am supposed to be writing a review ...
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Latest Review: "Berlin" by Aleš Šteger
The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Vincent Francone on Berlin by Aleš Šteger, translated by Brian Henry, Forrest Gander & Aljaž Kovac and published by Counterpath Press. Vince has brought up a lot of interesting points in this “review,” and questions the relationship of the reader’s ...
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Danielle Dutton on "The Weight of Things" [RTWBC]
As you probably know, this month’s Reading the World Book Club prose selection is The Weight of Things by Marianne Fritz, which is translated from the German by Adrian Nathan West and published by Dorothy. Danielle Dutton—a highly regarded author and founder of Dorothy, a publishing project—offered to ...
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Kaija Straumanis Wins the AATSEEL Award for "Best Literary Translation into English"
Last month we got the news that Kaija Straumanis—our editor and graduate of the University of Rochester’s MA in literary translation program—had won the AATSEEL1 Award for the Best Literary Translation into English for her translation of Inga Ābele’s High Tide. As part of their annual conference, ...
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One Pleasure Books [BTBA 2016]
This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is by reader, writer, and BTBA judge P. T. Smith. For more information on the BTBA, “like” our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter. And check back here each week for a new post by one of the judges. There have been books throughout the year that stand out ...
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Book Club Intro for "Twelve Stations" by Tomasz Różycki [RTWBC]
Before getting into the poetry side of our Reading the World Book Clubs, I just want to remind everyone that you can share your thoughts and comments about these books/posts in three different ways: in the comments section below, on the Reading the World Book Club Facebook Group, and by using #RTWBC on Twitter. For this ...
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The Gun
Like any good potboiler worth its salt, Fuminori Nakamura’s The Gun wastes no time setting up its premise: “Last night, I found a gun. Or you could say I stole it, I’m not really sure. I’ve never seen something so beautiful, or that feels so right in my hand. I didn’t have much interest in guns ...
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Latest Review: "The Gun" by Fuminori Nakamura
The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Will Eells on The Gun by Fuminori Nakamura, translated by Allison Markin Powell and out from Soho Crime. Here’s the beginning of Will’s review: Like any good potboiler worth its salt, Fuminori Nakamura’s The Gun wastes no time setting up its premise: ...
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Book Club Breakdown for "The Weight of Things" [RTWBC]
Before getting to the main part of this post—which is admittedly a bit silly, but hopefully a good way to kick things off—I have a few quick notes. I’ve been thinking a lot about how to make it easy for people to share their thoughts and opinions about these books—to make this really a book club and ...
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Announcing the Reading the World Book Clubs!
I floated the idea of starting some sort of monthly book club in my year-end poetry list[1], and after Tom and I talked about it on the latest podcast, I convinced myself that this would be a fun and interesting idea to try and implement. My general idea is that every month we would feature two Reading the World Book Club ...
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Carlos Labbé on Tour!
If you happened to read Laird Hunt’s “great review of Carlos Labbe’s Loquela in the LA Times”:http://www.latimes.com/books/la-ca-jc-carlos-labbe-20151220-story.html you’ll probably be interested in meeting the man behind this wild and wonderful book. Well, if you live in Dallas, Portland, ...
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Three Percent #108: Lists and Lists and Lists and Lists
This week Chad and Tom talk about this Guardian article about how indie presses are doing the work discovering new authors for the big commercial houses. Then, they talk about all the year-end lists Chad’s been creating for Three Percent and end by raving about champagne bottle sizes and ranting about book cover ...
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Seven Books by Women in Translation [My Year in Lists]
Rather than devolve into posting clickbait featuring cats, penguins, hedgehogs, corgis, and books, like other BuzzHole sites, I’m going hard for the rest of the week, starting with seven books by women in translation. The gender disparity in terms of women in translation has been fairly well documented—see the ...
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Six University Press Books [My Year in Lists]
I was hoping to have more time to write about the books on this list today, but after having technical problems recording the podcast, I’m going to have to rush through this so that I have enough time at the end of the day to mail out Loquela to all of our subscribers. Considering how many translations are coming out ...
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The Best Poetry Books from 2015 I Should Read [My Year in Lists]
Before getting into today’s list, I want to point out a new trend in the Great Listicle Explosion of Book List-Making of 2015™: the “overlooked list.” This has probably been going on for as long as people could count to ten (a prerequisite for list-making), but I had overlooked it (yes, groan) until I ...
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Three Funny Books [My Year in Lists]
Before getting into today’s lists, I want to draw your attention to Largehearted Boy’s List of ‘Best of 2015’ Book Lists.. This is just absurd—and it doesn’t even include all of these lists! Even if you eliminate all the entries on here that include Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant ...
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Not a Sophomore Slump if You Were Never Great [3 Books]
I’ve been waiting all week to write this post of three things that I’m loving, can’t wait to read, and hate. It’s rare that I know which books I want to include so far in advance, but immediately after posting last week’s edition, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. Since the lists I’ve ...
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25 Reasons to Read Lispector's Complete Stories [BTBA 2016]
Today’s Best Translated Book Award post is by Mark Haber of Brazos Bookstore. For more information on the BTBA, “like” our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter. And check back here each week for a new post by one of the judges. Before encountering the massive, indispensable Complete Stories of Clarice ...
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This Place Holds No Fear
Heiner Resseck, the protagonist in Monika Held’s thought-provoking, first novel, This Place Holds No Fear, intentionally re-lives his past every hour of every day. His memories are his treasures, more dear than the present or future. What wonderful past eclipses holding your newborn for the first time or meeting the woman ...
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Latest Review: "This Place Holds No Fear" by Monika Held
The latest addition to our Reviews section is a piece by Lori Feathers on Monika Held’s This Place Holds No Fear, translated by Anne Posten and published by Haus Publishing. Lori Feathers is a freelance book critic. Follow her on Twitter @LoriFeathers. (And Anne, if you’re reading this, THIS is why I gave you a ...
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Four Books From Underrepresented Countries [My Year in Lists]
Yesterday I posted a bit of a screed against lists, followed immediately by a list of the six translations everyone’s talking about. My hope is to produce a bunch of lists featuring literature in translation from 2015, all organized by various rubrics that can allow you to find a handful of recommendations with a ...
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The Six Water-Cooler Fiction Translations of 2015 [My Year in Lists]
Following on my last post, here’s the first entry in my manic series of year-end lists. To kick this off, I thought I’d start with the list of the six books in translation that were the most talked about this year. I did some really heady numerical analysis to determine this—searching Facebook mentions, ...
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World Literature Today's "75 Notable Translations of 2015"
Yesterday, to celebrate #TranslationTuesday (which is only slightly less popular than #TacoTuesday and #2DayIsCatDayEveryDayIsCatDay), World Literature Today announced their fourth annual list of 75 Notable Translations. I’m not going to reprint the whole list here—click above to see the full list—but I ...
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The Room
If you’ve ever worked in a corporate office, you’ve likely heard the phrase, “Perception is reality.” To Björn, the office worker who narrates Jonas Karlsson’s novel The Room, the reality is simple: there’s a door near the bathroom that leads to a tidy little room with a desk. Inside this room, he feels a ...
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Latest Review: "The Room" by Jonas Karlsson
The latest addition to our Reviews section is a piece by Peter Biello on The Room by Jonas Karlsson, translated by Neil Smith and out from Hogarth. Peter Biello is the host of All Things Considered at New Hampshire Public Radio. He has served as a producer/announcer/host of Weekend Edition Saturday at Vermont Public Radio ...
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This Was Going to Be a Hater’s Guide [3 Books]
After reading this excellent Hater’s Guide to the Williams-Sonoma Catalog yesterday (for a typical highlight, scroll down the “cookie press”) I really wished we could do something this for publishing. Like, make ignorant, funny jokes about the finalists for the National Book Awards. Or the Hater’s Guide to Literary ...
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Bit of Love for Paper Republic
I’ve written about Paper Republic in the past, praising all the resources they’ve collected to promote Chinese literature. It really is a great site, as I was reminded recently when Nicky Harman drew my attention to their 2015 round up of Chinese literature and the Read Paper Republic feature. The first page ...
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Thérèse and Isabelle
I recently listened to Three Percent Podcast #99, which had guest speaker Julia Berner-Tobin from Feminist Press. In addition to the usual amusement of finally hearing both sides of the podcast (normally I just hear parts of Chad’s side of the conversation through my office door, and never know what Tom’s ...
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Latest Review: "Thérèse and Isabelle" by Violette Leduc
The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Kaija Straumanis on Thérèse and Isabelle by Violette Leduc, translated by Sophie Lewis and published by Feminist Press. Here’s the beginning of the review: I recently listened to Three Percent Podcast #99, which had guest speaker Julia Berner-Tobin from Feminist ...
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PEN Translation Prizes
This morning, PEN America released the longlist for their two annual translation prizes—the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation and the PEN Translation Prize (for prose.) I’m going to start by listing the PEN Translation Prize longlist, which includes an Open Letter title! This has never happened before, so ...
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Kaija Straumanis Wins the AATSEEL 2015 Best Translation into English Award!
Kaija Straumanis (our editor!) has won the 2015 AATSEEL award for the Best Translation into English for her translation from the Latvian of High Tide by Inga Ābele! This isn’t on the AATSEEL website yet, but it was shared on the listserv, so I’m deciding that it’s public knowledge. I’ll say more ...
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"A Raskolnikoff" by Emmanuel Bove [BTBA 2016]
This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is from Jason Grunebaum, senior lecturer at the University of Chicago, and translator from the Hindi. For more information on the BTBA, “like” our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter. And check back here each week for a new post by one of the judges. When ...
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NEA Awards More Than $27.6 Million in Grants, Including $30K to Open Letter [Yay!]
Somehow I convinced myself that the official release date for info on this year’s National Endowment for the Arts Awards was on Thursday instead of yesterday, otherwise this would’ve been online earlier. Anyway, here’s the official press release with my comments below: National Endowment for the Arts ...
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Translation Database Updates: AmazonCrossing Is the Story
The other day, I posted about the Translation Databases, pointing out that the 2014, 2015, and 2016 databases have all be substantially updated. That post was a bit bleak, talking about a 15% reduction in the number of works of fiction and poetry published in 2015 when compared to 2014.1 Since that went live, a lot of ...
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Three Percent #107: The Lost Episode
A couple weeks ago, Chad and Tom recorded a podcast about a slew of recent events, including ALTA 38, the Albertine Festival, the “New Literature from Europe Festival, Wordstock, and the Texas Book Festival. Unfortunately, that podcast—one of the best ever recorded—had to be tossed because of technical ...
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Submission [BTBA 2016]
This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is from Tom Roberge from New Directions, Albertine Books, and the Three Percent Podcast. He’s not actually a BTBA judge, but since he’s helping run the whole process, he thought he’d weigh in and post as well. For more information on the BTBA, ...
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Cold Weather Whodunits [BTBA 2016]
This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is from Amanda Nelson, managing editor of Book Riot. For more information on the BTBA, “like” our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter. And check back here each week for a new post by one of the judges. I once heard a theory that the American South (where I ...
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Three Percent #106: Some Women in Translation Stats
Chad’s done a bit more number crunching since this was recorded (see the posts on his Twitter account, which is @chadwpost), but this is a good introduction to the ongoing conversation about women in translation. A lot of this discussion is based on this post from Three Percent. This week’s music is Detachable ...
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Rambling Jack
“Rambling Jack—what’s that?” “A novel. Novella, I guess.” “Yeah, it looks short. What is it, a hundred pages?” “Sorta. It’s a duel language book, so really, only about… 50 pages total.” “50 pages?” “Including illustrations.” “And this—what is it… Dalkey Archive—they want 14 bucks ...
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Latest Review: "Rambling Jack" by Micheál Ó Conghaile
The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Vincent Francone on Rambling Jack by Micheál Ó Conghaile, translated by Katherine Duffy, and published by Dalkey Archive Press. Vince went for a non-standard review format for this bilingual edition, favoring a flowing dialogue-style, and it’s pretty awesome. ...
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Border Crossings and a Third Language [BTBA 2016]
This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is from Heather Cleary, translator of Sergio Chejfec, Oliverio Girondo, professor at Sarah Lawrence, and co-founder of the Buenos Aires Review. For more information on the BTBA, “like” our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter. And check back here each week for a ...
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Help Open Letter By Buying the Books for My Spring Class
As you probably know already, Open Letter Books is a non-profit publishing house. Which means that a) I go out of my way to help the field of translation/publishing as a whole (see: Best Translated Book Award, this blog, the translation database, and a dozen other things that don’t benefit us financially, but which I ...
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Notes on Elena Ferrante from a Bookseller Who Hasn’t Read Her [BTBA 2016]
This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is by Kate Garber, bookseller at 192 Books. For more information on the BTBA, “like” our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter. And check back here each week for a new post by one of the judges. While many people assume that booksellers base their ...
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Three Percent #105: Alexievich, Amazon, and Rights
This week’s podcast features a discussion of Nobel Prize-winner Svetlana Alexievich (who Chad helped publish at Dalkey Archive), Amazon’s recent announcement about investing $10 million into translations, and how rights work. There’s a minor rant about Chase Utley (“worst human being on earth”) ...
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Dubravka Ugresic Wins the Neustadt Prize!
Huge congratulations to Dubravka Ugresic for winning the “2016 Neustadt International Prize for Literature!” From the press release: World Literature Today, the University of Oklahoma’s award-winning magazine of international literature and culture, announced late Friday evening that novelist and essayist ...
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Another Really "Important" Book We Publish: Guillermo Saccomanno's "Gesell Dome"
Last night I got a bunch of people excited on Twitter (my feed is a bit more . . . schizoid than the official Open Letter feed, although you should follow that one too!) about Guillermo Saccomanno’s Gesell Dome, so I thought I’d share a bit more about this book. We signed this on a while back, shortly after ...
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We May Not Be Good Enough for "Important" Books, but Whatever, We're in Harper's!
I really, really want to air my massive grievances with Actes Sud and the French Publishers Agency over how poorly—and, in my opinion, unprofessionally—they handled the sales of U.S. rights to Mathias Ènard’s latest novel. In fact, I just deleted a huge long post describing how I know it’s equally ...
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Poets & Writers Roundtable on Publishing Translations
A few months ago, Jeremiah Chamberlain invited me to participate in an indie-press roundtable on publishing translations with Barbara Epler from New Directions, Michael Reynolds of Europa Editions, Jill Schoolman of Archipelago Press, and CJ Evans of Two Lines. This ended up being a long, sprawling email conversation, that ...
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2015 Translation Database Update
I just updated the 2015 Translation Database.. If you want to compare this to past years, you can find info on all translations from 2008-2015 here. This is one of the free services Three Percent provides as a nonprofit organization, and which I work on in my spare time because I care about the field of literature. I know ...
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Quebecois Translations [BTBA 2016]
This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is by reader, writer, and BTBA judge P. T. Smith. For more information on the BTBA, “like” our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter. And check back here each week for a new post by one of the judges. For my first BTBA post, I wrote about sci-fi in translation, ...
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AmazonCrossing Commits $10 Million to Translating Books
A press release about this came out yesterday, and at least a few people have written about it or at least mentioned it on social media, but AmazonCrossing announced “a $10 million commitment over the next five years to increase the number and diversity of its books in translation.” There’s not a lot of ...
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Reminder: Our First Gala is Only Ten Days Away
Next Friday (October 23rd), we’ll be hosting our first annual Celebration of Open Letter and Rochester. It’s our one and only fundraising event of the year, and is centered around _Rochester Knockings: A Novel of the Fox Sisters by Hubert Haddad and translated from the French by Jennifer Grotz. The gala will ...
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Private Life
In Josep Maria de Sagarra’s Private Life, a man harangues his friend about literature while walking through Barcelona at night: When a novel states a fact that ties into another fact and another and another, as the chain goes on the events begin to seem more and more extraordinary, and the characters take on a ...
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Svetlana Alexievich for the Nobel!
For the past few years, every time the Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded, a certain number of journalists contact me about the winner, asking for information since, for the most part, they’ve never read or heard of these authors. Patrick Modiano. Herta Mueller. Mo Yan. Surprisingly, or maybe not so, I knew a ...
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Dinner
César Aira dishes up an imaginative parable on how identity shapes our sense of belonging with Dinner, his latest release in English. Aira’s narrator (who, appropriately, remains nameless) is a self-pitying, bitter man—in his late fifties, living again with his mother in his childhood home, in debt, jobless, never ...
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Latest Review: "Dinner" by César Aira
The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Lori Feathers on Dinner by César Aira, translated by Katherine Silver and out from New Directions. The first time I read César Aira was four years ago: Ghosts and The Literary Conference. At the time I had my opinions about both, but in retrospect—and this surprises ...
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Women in Translation, Part I: Fourteen Countries
Over the past few months, with the help of two fantastic interns, I’ve updated the Translation Database to include the sex of every author and translator in there.1 It was a brutal task, hunting down information about all of these people, scanning bios for gendered pronouns and then entering all of this into the ...
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Still Hating on DraftKings [3 Books]
Rather than reinvent the ranting wheel (I don’t know what that is, but it sounds fun), I’m going to preface this preview of three new books with a couple of updates from last week’s post. First off, DraftKings. I spend way too much of my mental time hating all over this stupid company. I should just stop. ...
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We're Not Here to Disappear
Originally published in French in 2007, We’re Not Here to Disappear (On n’est pas là pour disparaître) won the Prix Wepler-Fondation La Poste and the Prix Pierre Simon Ethique et Réflexion. The work has been recently translated by Béatrice Mousli and comes out from Otis Books/Seismicity Editions next week. John ...
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"One of Us Is Sleeping" by Josefine Klougart [Short Teaser]
I started reading Martin Aitken’s translation from the Danish of Josefine Klougart’s One of Us Is Sleeping yesterday and came across this passage that I wanted to share. I know I need to post a more comprehensive overview of our forthcoming books—both for the winter and next spring—but for now, ...
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Three Percent #104: Banned Books Week
This week Chad and Tom discuss Oyster shutting down, whether or not Serial Box makes any sense as a way to consume books, and this list of the top 10 most frequently challenged books. Additionally, they talk about My Struggle: Volume 2 by Karl Ove Knausgaard and Tram 83 by Fiston Mwanza Mujila. This week’s music is ...
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The Queen's Caprice
Even though the latest from Jean Echenoz is only a thin volume containing seven of what he calls “little literary objects,” it is packed with surprises. In these pieces, things happen below the surface, sometimes both literally and figuratively. As a result, his characters, as well as his readers, are faced with the ...
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Latest Review: "The Queen's Caprice" by Jean Echenoz
The latest addition to our Reviews section is a piece by Christopher Iacono on The Queen’s Caprice by Jean Echenoz, translated by Linda Coverdale and published by The New Press. What I particularly liked about this review is the last paragraph. I’m one of those people who has a lot of peeves over readers ...
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The Lasting Impact of Bolaño's Quotes [3 Books]
After a couple weeks of touring and hosting events, I finally have time to get back to my “weekly” write-ups of new and forthcoming books. Last time I talked about a couple Indonesian titles one of which, Home by Leila Chudori, I’m greatly enjoying. I also complained about school starting before Labor Day, ...
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Literature on Location: Part II [BTBA 2016]
This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is from Stacey Knecht and is basically a follow-up to her first post. For more information on the BTBA, “like” our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter. And check back here each week for a new post by one of the judges. I translate Hrabal. We work as a team. We ...
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Help Us Win the "Best of Rochester"!
OK, so about a month ago, the City Paper opened the first round of the voting for this year’s “Best of Rochester” feature. I posted on Facebook about how I wanted to get some Open Letter love this year. I suggested voting for a bunch of categories (Three Percent Podcast for “Best Local Podcast,” ...
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Open Letter Review Roundup!
Over the past few weeks, our books have received a bunch of great reviews. Each time this happens, I plan on posting about it on the blog, then I start answering emails, or teaching a class, or doing some mundane publishing related task (sales reports! metadata!) and don’t get around to it. So, here’s a huge ...
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Brooklyn Book Festival: The New Latin American Literature: A View from Within
A very special, freewheeling conversation among some of the leading lights of a new generation of Latin American writers—many of them both peers and friends—as they talk about how their work intersects, inspires, and speaks to each other across borders. Authors include Mexican writers Valeria Luiselli, Guadalupe Nettel, ...
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Anne Garréta and William Burroughs [BTBA 2016]
This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is from Tom Roberge from New Directions, Albertine Books, and the Three Percent Podcast. He’s not actually a BTBA judge, but since he’s helping run the whole process, he thought he’d weigh in and post as well. For more information on the BTBA, ...
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Three Percent #103: Back from Vacation to Rip on Jacket Copy
So after a month away, Chad and Tom are back, discussing the books they read over the summer and breaking down jacket copy for a number of recent books. They’re both astounded by how many meaningless phrases they come across (and references to how a book is “necessary”), and also talk about when and how to ...
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French Concession
Who is this woman? This is the question that opens Xiao Bai’s French Concession, a novel of colonial-era Shanghai’s spies and revolutionaries, police and smugglers, who scoot between doorways, walk nonchalantly down avenues, smoke cigars in police bureaus, and lounge in expensive European hotels. The woman is Therese ...
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Places I’ve Never Visited [3 Books and a Rant]
So for the past few months I’ve been too busy to actually write the really long monthly translation previews that I’ve been doing for the past year or two. I really do like writing those though, and highlighting upcoming books, but what with school starting up again, our first ever gala looming on the horizon, and all the ...
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2015 Goncourt Longlist As Described by Google Translate
The longlist for this year’s prix Goncourt was announced today, and includes the latest book by Open Letter author Mathias Énard. (We’re having someone read Boussole for us right now. Hopefully I’ll have more info about that in the near future.) Here’s the complete list of finalists, which also ...
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Three Articles on Three Great Indie Presses: Graywolf, Coffee House, Europa
Yesterday I posted a little summary on two great translators, so it’s only appropriate that today I post about three great pieces that have come out about three of my favorite presses over the past few days. First up was this Vulture piece by Three Percent favorite Boris Kachka (BORIS!!) on Graywolf Press. ...
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Complete Brooklyn Book Fair Schedule
I mentioned a few Brooklyn Book Fair Events in my post about all forthcoming Open Letter events (which I just updated), but the full schedule went up yesterday and, damn. If I were going, and if these were all taking place at different times, here are the panels I would attend: Twisted Fables. Fiction has come a long way ...
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Anna Karenina
For the past 140 years, Anna Karenina has been loved by millions of readers all over the world. It’s easy to see why: the novel’s two main plots revolve around characters who are just trying to find happiness through love. Even though it’s a very Russian novel that occasionally addresses problems in that country during ...
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Latest Review: "Anna Karenina" by Leo Tolstoy
The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Christopher Iacono on one of the great Russian classics, Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, translated by Marian Schwartz and published by Yale University Press. I recently had a brief correspondence with Marian about [epic] classic literature and the mediums in which one can ...
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Two Great Translators: K. E. Semmel & Amanda DeMarco
I guess both of these articles are a couple of weeks old now—but do things really count if they happen in August while all of Europe is on vacation?—but I still want to share them since both are really interesting and feature two great translators and friends. First up, Asymptote has a nice profile of Danish ...
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All Open Letter Fall Events
Although I already miss the lazy days of summer, this fall is going to be amazing. First off, the St. Louis Cardinals will be in the playoffs, again, which guarantees me at least a couple weeks of emotional rollercoasting and eventual disappointment. In terms of books, there are a ton of great things coming out this ...
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The Cold Song
Linn Ullmann’s The Cold Song, her fifth novel, is built much like the house about which its story orbits: Mailund, a stately white mansion set in the Norwegian countryside a few hours drive from Oslo. The house, nestled into the forest and cloaked in mist, belongs to the past; it has been the summer home of the Brodal ...
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Latest Review: "The Cold Song" by Linn Ullmann
The latest addition to our Reviews section is a piece by David Richardson on The Cold Song by Linn Ullmann, translated by Barbara J. Haveland and published by Other Press. David Richardson is a writer, editor, and teacher based in New York. Here’s the beginning of his review: Linn Ullmann’s The Cold Song, her ...
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This Life
Karel Schoeman’s Afrikaans novel, This Life, translated by Else Silke, falls into a genre maybe only noticed by the type of reader who tends toward Wittgenstein-type family resemblances. The essential resemblance is an elderly narrator, usually alone—or with one other unnamed, usually voiceless, person—recollecting ...
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Latest Review: "This Life" by Karel Schoeman
The latest addition to our Reviews section is by P. T. Smith on Karel Schoeman’s This Life, translated by Else Silke, and out from Archipelago Books. Here’s the beginning of Patrick’s review: Karel Schoeman’s Afrikaans novel, This Life, translated by Else Silke, falls into a genre maybe only noticed ...
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First Annual Celebration of Open Letter Books & Rochester
This has been in the works for a number of months now, but we’re finally ready to unveil some of the details about the first annual celebration of Open Letter and Rochester, including how you can buy tickets and support all of our programs. (Spoiler alert: Buy the tickets here.) The celebration is set to take place at ...
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Translations and the Hugo Awards
I don’t want to get into the Sad Puppies controversy surrounding the Hugo Awards (mostly because, well, fuck “sad puppies” and their stupid name), but I do want to point out that sci-fi in translation did really well at last night’s award ceremony. In fact, two of the top prizes that were awarded (if ...
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On Universality: Childhood Confusion and Displacement in Literature [BTBA 2016]
This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is Kate Garber, bookseller at 192 Books. For more information on the BTBA, “like” our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter. And check back here each week for a new post by one of the judges. We know there are many connections to be made in themes and characters ...
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On Yoel Hoffmann’s "Moods" [BTBA 2016]
This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is by translator and co-founder of the Buenos Aires Review, Heather Cleary. For more information on the BTBA, “like” our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter. And check back here each week for a new post by one of the judges. Earlier this week, I returned home ...
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Three Percent #102: Beach Books for the Jaded and Depressed
This week’s episode starts with a question from a listener about how translation trends come about, then morphs into a discussion of which books Chad and Tom are bringing on their respective vacations and what makes a “beach book.” Rants are raves are random as always. This week’s music is Girl, You ...
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On Juan Villoro's "The Guilty" [BTBA 2016]
This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is by Mark Haber of Brazos Bookstore. For more information on the BTBA, “like” our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter. And check back here each week for a new post by one of the judges. In the last few years I’ve read a lot of literature in translation, ...
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Walker on Water
There are books that can only wisely be recommended to specific types of readers, where it is easy to know who the respective book won’t appeal to, and Kristiina Ehin’s Walker on Water is one these. What makes this neither a criticism, nor the identification of a flaw is that Walker on Water is an unusual book that pushes ...
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Latest Review: "Walker on Water" by Kristiina Ehin
The latest addition to our Reviews section is by P. T. Smith on Kristiina Ehin’s Walker on Water, translated by lmar Lehtpere and out from Unnamed Press. Here’s the beginning of Patrick’s review: There are books that can only wisely be recommended to specific types of readers, where it is easy to know ...
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Science Fiction in Translation [BTBA 2016]
This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is by reader, writer, and BTBA judge P. T. Smith. For more information on the BTBA, “like” our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter. And check back here each week for a new post by one of the judges. Up until college, I didn’t put much, if any, thought into ...
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Moser, Mizumura, and Murakami [BTBA]
This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is from judge Kevin Elliott, bookseller at 57th Street Books in Chicago. As a reminder, you can stay up to date with all BTBA goings on by liking our Facebook page and by following us on Twitter. And by checking in regularly here at Three Percent. Recently, Benjamin Moser, ...
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The Nightwatches of Bonaventura
Imagine the most baroque excesses of Goethe, Shakespeare, and Poe, blended together and poured into a single book: That is The Nightwatches of Bonaventura. Ophelia and Hamlet fall in love in a madhouse, suicidal young men deliver mournful and heartfelt soliloquies in miasmic graveyards, a pregnant nun is entombed alive for ...
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Pavane for a Dead Princess
In 1899, Maurice Ravel wrote “Pavane pour une infante défunte” (“Pavane for a Dead Princess”) for solo piano (a decade later, he published an orchestral version). The piece wasn’t written for a particular person; Ravel simply wanted to compose a pavane (a slow procession) that a princess would have danced to in the ...
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Latest Review: "Pavane for a Dead Princess" by Park Min-Gyu
The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Christopher Iacono on Pavane for a Dead Princess by Park Min-Gyu, translated by Amber Hyun Jung Kim, and published by Dalkey Archive Press. Here’s the beginning of Chris’s review: In 1899, Maurice Ravel wrote “Pavane pour une infante défunte” (“Pavane ...
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A Brilliant Review of Georgi Gospodinov's "The Physics of Sorrow"
We already did one post about Asymptote today, but this review by Pete Mitchell of Georgi Gospodinov’s The Physics of Sorrow is so wonderfully complete and serious that I just have to share it. I’ll start by giving you the money shot from the review (at least in my opinion): But Gospodinov is playing for ...
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Asymptote Summer 2015 Issue
This post is from current intern, soon to be Literary Translation grad student, Daniel Stächelin. From Mexican poet José Eugenio Sánchez and Danish poet Naja Marie Aidt, to Albanian author Ismail Kadare, among others, Asymptote’s Summer 2015 issue features some mind-bendingly vivid nuggets of literary and existential ...
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The National Translation Award Prose Longlist Is FILTHY With Open Letter Titles
I really can’t be happier about this little bit of news from ALTA today . . . The National Translation Award Longlists were announced today, and of the twelve titles that made the prose longlist, Open Letter published four of them! Hot damn! Street of Thieves by Mathias Énard, translated from the French by ...
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Literature on Location: Part I [BTBA 2016]
As with past years, every week one of the Best Translated Book Award judges will be posting their thoughts and observations on some of the books that they’re reading for this year’s award. Stacey Knecht agreed to kick things off today with this post. Yes, I live in the Netherlands. No, I don’t live in ...
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Antoine Volodine in the Paris Review
It’s been a nice couple of months for Antoine Volodine, publicity-wise. First, he had this long essay appear in The New Inquiry. Then Music & Literature honored the publication of Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven with a week of Volodine-related content. And now, the Paris Review has an interview with ...
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Three Percent #101: Awards for Authors versus Awards for Books
This week Tom and Chad discuss the merging of the Man Booker International Prize with the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the waning interest in Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook Book Club, and the Women’s World Cup of Literature. There are also rants about Sevenevens, praise for the Minions movie, and more soccer ...
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Canada vs. Germany [Women's World Cup of Literature: CHAMPIONSHIP]
OK, here we are, at the final match of the first ever Women’s World Cup of Literature. If you missed any of the earlier games, or just want to read about all the incredible books that were included in this tournament, just click here. The Championship pits two very different books against one another. On one side ...
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4 Dangerous & Immigrant Books: A Fundraising Party
Carlos Labbé, author of the excellent novels Navidad & Matanza (available now) and Loquela (forthcoming), sent me this information about a fundraising event he’s putting on this Saturday for Sangría Legibilities, a nonprofit publisher that he helped found. Since Sangría is the sort of press a lot of Three Percent ...
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Twenty-One Days of a Neurasthenic
Twenty-One Days of a Neurasthenic is not a novel in the traditional sense. Rather, it is a collection of vignettes recorded by journalist Georges Vasseur in his diary during a month spent in the Pyrenées Mountains to treat his nervous condition. Vasseur’s friends and acquaintances provide the material for his journal ...
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Mexico vs. Colombia [Women's World Cup of Literature: Second Round]
This match was judged by Hilary Plum—you can learn more about her writing and editing at her website or on Twitter at @ClockrootBooks. For more information on the Women’s World Cup of Literature, click here or here. Also, be sure to follow our Twitter account and like our Facebook page. And check back here ...
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Spain vs. Costa Rica [Women's World Cup of Literature: Second Round]
This match was judged by Katrine Øgaard Jensen, blog editor at Asymptote. You can follow her on Twitter at @kojensen. For more information on the Women’s World Cup of Literature, click here or here. Also, be sure to follow our Twitter account and like our Facebook page. And check back here daily! This match ...
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Three Percent #100: We Appreciate You
So, we actually made it to our 100th episode! To celebrate, this week Tom and Chad took questions from all our listeners, leading to discussions about how many books we each read (and how many are in translation), what one thing all translators should know, how censorship plays into our publishing decision, and much more. Of ...
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Nigeria vs. Australia [Women's World Cup of Literature: Second Round]
This match was judged by Meytal Radzinski whose writings you can find at Biblibo and on Twitter @biblibio. For more information on the Women’s World Cup of Literature, click here or here. Also, be sure to follow our Twitter account and like our Facebook page. And check back here daily! The game looks mismatched ...
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Ecuador vs. Cameroon [Women's World Cup of Literature: Second Round]
This match was judged by Margaret Carson, who co-chairs the PEN America Translation Committee and crunches numbers for Women in Translation (WiT). For more information on the Women’s World Cup of Literature, click here or here. Also, be sure to follow our Twitter account and like our Facebook page. And check back ...
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Japan vs. Ecuador [Women's World Cup of Literature: First Round]
This match was judged by M. Lynx Qualey, who runs the Arabic Literature website, and can be found on Twitter at @arablit. For more information on the Women’s World Cup of Literature, click here or here. Also, be sure to follow our Twitter account and like our Facebook page. And check back here daily! Yoko ...
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South Korea vs. Spain [Women's World Cup of Literature: First Round]
This match was judged by Mythili Rao, producer for The Takeaway at WNYC. For more information on the Women’s World Cup of Literature, click here or here. Also, be sure to follow our Twitter account and like our Facebook page. And check back here daily! What a brutal match. These two novels hold nothing back. Read ...
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Sphinx
Founded in 1960 by such creative pioneers as George Perec, Raymond Queneau and Italo Calvino, the Oulipo, shorthand for Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, came about in when a group of writers and mathematicians sought constraints to find new structures and patterns on their own writing. Anne Garréta’s visionary debut ...
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USA vs. Nigeria [Women's World Cup of Literature: First Round]
This match was judged by Sal Robinson, a graduate student in library science and co-founder of the Bridge Series. For more information on the Women’s World Cup of Literature, click here or here. Also, be sure to follow our Twitter account and like our Facebook page. And check back here daily! It seems hardly fair ...
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Brazil vs. Costa Rica [Women's World Cup of Literature: First Round]
This match was judged by Meredith Miller, a Foreign Rights Agent at Trident Media Group. You can follow her on Twitter at @merofthemillers. For more information on the Women’s World Cup of Literature, click here or here. Also, be sure to follow our Twitter account and like our Facebook page. And check back here ...
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England vs. Colombia [Women's World Cup of Literature: First Round]
This match was judged by Rhea Lyons, a scout at Franklin & Seigal. For more information on the Women’s World Cup of Literature, click here or here. Also, be sure to follow our Twitter account and like our Facebook page. And check back here daily! Judging this match up between Life After Life and Delirium was ...
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Canada vs. Netherlands [Women's World Cup of Literature: First Round]
This match was judged by Hannah Chute, recent recipient of her MA in literary translation from the University of Rochester. For more information on the Women’s World Cup of Literature, click here or here. Also, be sure to follow our Twitter account and like our Facebook page. And check back here daily! Oryx & ...
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Australia vs. Sweden [Women's World Cup of Literature: First Round]
This match was judged by Rachel Crawford, graduate of the University of Rochester and former Open Letter intern. You can follow her rants online at @loveyourrac. For more information on the Women’s World Cup of Literature, click here or here. Also, be sure to follow our Twitter account and like our Facebook page. ...
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Excerpt from "Volatile Texts" by Zsuzsanna Gahse
The following excerpt is one if the student works I had the privelage to assist in workshoping at the 5th Biannual Graduate Student Translation Conference, held this May 8-9 in Ann Arbor, MI. Before finding out who the author really was, I read this excerpt, translated from the German by Chenxin Jiang, and thought I was ...
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Energize Your Happy [Or: Why It's Important for Literary Translators to Go Do Stuff]
This is a bit of a risk, posting something among all the commotion surrounding the Women’s World Cup of Literature, but I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately and wanted to finally write about it. I’m writing this post from Venstpils, Latvia, where I’ve had the pleasure to spend these first two ...
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China vs. New Zealand [Women's World Cup of Literature: First Round]
This match was judged by Florian Duijsens, a senior editor at Asymptote, fiction editor at SAND Journal, and teacher at Bard College Berlin. You can follow him on Twitter at @neonres. For more information on the Women’s World Cup of Literature, click here or here. Also, be sure to follow our Twitter account and ...
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My Best BEA Moment [Some June Translations]
Every May, 20,000 or so publishing professionals gather at BookExpo America to a) try and create buzz for their fall books, b) court booksellers and librarians, c) attend panels of minimal import, and d) bitch and moan. Mostly it’s just d, to be honest. Publishing people love to complain about everything. The Javitz ...
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France vs. Mexico [Women's World Cup of Literature: First Round]
This match, the first of the tournament, was judged by P.T. Smith, a freelance critic. You can follow him on Twitter at @PTSmith_Vt. For more information on the Women’s World Cup of Literature, click here or here. Also, be sure to follow our Twitter account and like our Facebook page. And check back here ...
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Switzerland vs. Cameroon [Women's World Cup of Literature: First Round]
This match, the first of the tournament, was judged by Lori Feathers, a freelance critic and Vice President of the Board of Deep Vellum Publishing. You can follow her on Twitter at @LoriFeathers. For more information on the Women’s World Cup of Literature, click here or here. Also, be sure to follow our Twitter ...
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Translation Breadloaf and My Copyright Talk
As if three trips to New York and one to Torino weren’t enough, I just a few minutes ago arrived in Ripton, VT, where I have the honor of being able to participate in (and generally witness) the first ever Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference. (A.K.A. Translation Loaf.) Since this was organized by Jen ...
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BEA Translation "Buzz" Panels: Crime Fiction
Following on my earlier post about the “buzz” panel on general fiction in translation, here’s some info about the one that Tom Roberge will be moderating on Friday morning, which will be featuring all crime novels. BEA Selects Crime Fiction in Translation Fricay, May 28th, 10:30am Eastside ...
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BEA Translation "Buzz" Panels: Adult Fiction
So, this year, for the first time ever, BookExpo America is sponsoring two panels highlighting forthcoming works of fiction: one featuring general fiction, the other focusing on crime and thrillers. (Naturally, I’m moderating the first one and Tom Roberge is doing the other.) The one on general adult fiction will ...
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BTBA Festivities!
This is just a reminder for any and everyone in the New York area—especially those of you who are attending BookExpo America. The official announcement of this year’s Best Translated Book Award winners will take place tomorrow, Wednesday, May 27th, at 2:30pm at the Eastside Stage in the Jacob Javitz Center. ...
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Three Percent #99: Endless Cycle of Misery
This week’s podcast is the latest in the ongoing Three Percent Book Club. Julia Berner-Tobin of Feminist Press joins Tom and Chad to talk about Virginie Despentes’s fantastic Apocalypse Baby. (And to rant about Franzen, because, of course.) And a reminder: Don’t forget to send us your own questions, rants, ...
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Morse, My Deaf Friend
There’s little to say about a series of prose poems that willfully refuse to identify pronoun antecedents. Or perhaps there are a million things. The poems in Morse, My Deaf Friend— the chapbook by Miloš Djurdjević published by Ugly Duckling Presse as part of their Eastern European Poets Series— will be confounding to ...
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Latest Review: "Morse, My Deaf Friend" by Miloš Djurdjević
The latest addition to our Reviews section is a piece by Vincent Francone on Miloš Djurdjević’s Morse, My Deaf Friend, translated by the author and published by Ugly Duckling Presse. The chapbook itself is short—clocking in at 32 pages—and is yet another beautiful work of print done by Ugly Duckling. ...
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László Krasznahorkai Wins the Man Booker International Prize!
Yesterday afternoon, as we were recording Three Percent podcast #99, it was announced that László Krasznahorkai had won the 2015 Man Book International Prize, becoming the only the sixth winner of the biennial award, and the first winner since Ismail Kadare in 2005 who doesn’t write in English. From the ...
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The Crimson Thread of Abandon
The Crimson Thread of Abandon is the first collection of short fiction available in English by the prolific Japanese writer and all-around avant-garde trickster Terayama Shūji, who died in 1983 at the age of 47. This collection would be important even if it wasn’t as good as it is: an introduction to the work of a creative ...
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Latest Review: "The Crimson Thread of Abandon" by Terayama Shūji
The latest addition to our Reviews section is a piece by Robert Anthony Siegel on Terayama Shūji’s The Crimson Thread of Abandon, translated by Elizabeth L. Armstrong and published by the University of Hawai’i Press. Robert Anthony Siegel is the author of two novels, All Will Be Revealed and All the Money in ...
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"Chasing Lost Time" and "The Man Between" at Albertine
This Thursday, May 21st at 7pm, I’ll be moderating a conversation at Albertine Book Store (972 Fifth Ave., NYC) with Jean Findlay and Esther Allen about the life and work of two celebrated translators: C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Michael Henry Heim. You should come! While C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s work has shaped ...
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Three Percent #98: The 2015 BTBA Finalists!
For this week’s podcast, we invited Best Translated Book Award Fiction Chair Monica Carter on to talk about the finalists for this year’s awards. Monica graciously gave us some insight into the voting process, revealed which of the final ten was a “personal pick” of one of the judges, and managed to ...
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What Makes a Reader Good at Reading? [Some May Translations]
In a couple weeks, the IDPF Digital Book Conference will take place in New York under the theme of “Putting Readers First.” As part of this Ed Nawokta (Publishing Perspectives founder and international publishing guru of sorts), Boris Kachka (Hothouse author and former BEA frond-waver [sorry, inside joke]), Andrew ...
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Life Embitters
Last year, NYRB Classics introduced English-language readers to Catalan writer Josep Pla with Peter Bush’s translation of The Gray Notebook. In that book, Pla wrote about life in Spain during an influenza outbreak soon after World War I, when he was a young law student and aspiring writer. Readers got to meet many of the ...
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Latest Review: "Life Embitters" by Josep Pla
The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Christopher Iacono on Life Embitters by Josep Pla, translated by Peter Bush and published by Archipelago Books. Here’s the beginning of Chris’s review: Last year, NYRB Classics introduced English-language readers to Catalan writer Josep Pla with Peter ...
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The Physics of Sorrow
“Your bile is stagnant, you see sorrow in everything, you are drenched in melancholy,” my friend the doctor said. bq. “Isn’t melancholy something from previous centuries? Isn’t some vaccine against it yet, hasn’t medicine taken care of it yet?” I ask. Georgi Gospodinov’s The Physics of Sorrow was an ...
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Vano and Niko
What to make of Vano and Niko, the English translation of Erlom Akhvlediani’s work of the same name, as well as the two other short books that comprise a sort of trilogy? Quick searches will inform the curious reader that these short pieces (what contemporary writers would call flash fiction) resemble fables and that ...
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Latest Review: "Vano and Niko" by Erlom Akhvlediani
The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Vincent Francone on Vano and Niko by Erlom Akhvlediani, translated by Mikheil Kakabadze and published by Dalkey Archive earlier this year. I know everyone is still reeling from not being able to correctly guess all the finalists for the 2015 BTBA fiction and poetry shortlists ...
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2015 Best Translated Book Award Poetry Finalists
Here it is, the first of the two announcements about this year’s Best Translated Book Award finalists! Listed below are the six poetry titles that are in the running for this year’s award. The two winning books (for poetry and fiction) will be announced at BookExpo America at 2:30pm on Wednesday, May 27th, at ...
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Why This Book Should Win – Granma Nineteen and the Soviet's Secret by BTBA Judge Monica Carter
Monica Carter is a writer whose fiction has appeared in Writers Tribe Review, The Rattling Wall, Black Clock, and is a freelance critic. Granma Nineteen and the Soviet’s Secret – Ondjaki, Translated from the Portuguese by Stephen Hennighan, Angola Biblioasis At thirty-six years old, Ondjaki is one of the most ...
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2015 Best Translated Book Award Finalists: Some Clues!
It’s basically impossible to guess all 25 books on the Best Translated Book Award longlist, no matter how many odd clues I post. Which is why, when we play that game, I offer a lifetime subscription to anyone able to naming all of the books. (I really hope that some year someone actually does pull this off. It would be ...
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Why This Book Should Win – "Paris" by Guest Critic Chad W. Post
Paris – Marcos Giralt Torrente, Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa, Spain, Hispabooks 1. Marcos Giralt Torrente is a literary descendent of Javier Marías. Similar to a Marías novel, the plot of Paris advances by one step forward, two steps sideways. The prose is interior, probing, less concerned ...
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Why This Book Should Win – Snow and Shadow by Guest Critic Christine Palau
Christine Zoe Palau is the speechwriter at the Korean Consulate in Los Angeles. She plays accordion, writes theatre reviews for the Noho Arts District, and has recently completed her first novel. Snow and Shadow – Dorothy Tse, Translated from the Chinese by Nicky Harman, Hong Kong Muse Magazine Project Dorothy ...
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Why This Book Should Win – Baboon by Guest Critic Lori Feathers
Lori Feathers is a freelance critic and Vice President of the Board of Deep Vellum Publishing. Baboon – Naja Marie Aidt, translated from the Danish by Denise Newman, Denmark Two Lines Press Baboon should win this year’s Best Translated Book Award because page-for-page it offers more surprises and excitement ...
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Three Percent #97: Rustling up New Books for the Peanut Gallery
This week, Tom and Chad talk about some of the new translations that they’ve read (or are looking forward to reading) and are most excited about. Along the way are the expected digressions (including an explanation of how editing and rights work when a U.S. publisher and a U.K. publisher separately publish the same ...
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Why This Book Should Win – Winter Mythologies and Abbotts by BTBA Judge James Crossley
James Crossley is a bookseller at Island Books. He writes regularly for the store’s Message in a Bottle blog and for the website of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association. Winter Mythologies and Abbotts – Pierre Michon, Translated from the French by Ann Jefferson, France Yale University ...
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Why This Book Should Win – Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by BTBA Judge Monica Carter
Monica Carter is a writer whose fiction has appeared in Writers Tribe Review, The Rattling Wall, Black Clock, and is a freelance critic. Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay – Elena Ferrante, Translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein, Italy Europa Editions Elena Ferrante is everywhere now. Yet, I remember when ...
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Why This Book Should Win – La Grande by BTBA Judge Scott Esposito
This post is courtesy of BTBA judge, Scott Esposito. Scott Esposito blogs at Conversational Reading and you can find his tweets here. La Grande – Juan Jose Saer, translated by from the Spanish by Steve Dolph, Argentina, Open Letter Books Juan Jose Saer was a towering figure in Argentine literature. Over the ...
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Why This Book Should Win – Faces in the Crowd by Guest Critic Tom Roberge
Tom Roberge is the Deputy Director of Albertine Books and Bookstore Liaison for New Directions. Faces in the Crowd – Valeria Luiselli, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney, Mexico Coffee House Press Early in Valeria Luiselli’s Faces in the Crowd, she offers an explanation — of sorts — for ...
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Latest Review: "The Indian" by Jón Gnarr
The latest addition to our Reviews section is a piece by P. T. Smith on Jón Gnarr’s The Indian, translated by Lytton Smith and out this month from Deep Vellum. Jón Gnarr is an actor, punk rocker, comedian, and author who created the satirical “Best Party” in Iceland and, against all odds, rose to become major of ...
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The Indian
The opening of Jón Gnarr’s novel/memoir The Indian is a playful bit of extravagant ego, telling the traditional story of creation, where the “Let there be light!” moment is also the moment of his birth on January 2nd, 1967. Then comes sly awareness of the flow from preconsciousness to consciousness, “Murmuring ...
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Why This Book Should Win – Our Lady of the Nile by Guest Critic Nick DiMartino
Nick DiMartino, Nick’s Picks, University Book Store, Seattle, Wash. Our Lady of the Nile – Scholastique Mukasonga, Translated from the French by Melanie Mauthner, Rwanda Archipelago Books Scholastique Mukasonga’s entertaining first novel about a girls’ school in Rwanda in 1993-1994 is far more than just ...
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Why This Book Should Win – Talking to Ourselves by BTBA Judge Jeremy Garber
Jeremy Garber is the events coordinator for Powell’s Books and also a freelance reviewer. Talking to Ourselves – Andrés Neuman, Translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia, Argentina Farrar, Straus and Giroux Perhaps the question shouldn’t be why Andrés Neuman’s Talking to Ourselves ...
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Latest Review: "Mother of 1084," "Old Women," and "Breast Stories" by Mahasweta Devi
The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Christopher Iacono on three works by Mahasweta Devi, and published by Seagull Books: Mother of 1084 (trans. by Samik Bandyopadhyay), Old Women (trans. by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak), and Breast Stories (trans. by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak). Is everyone back on two feet after ...
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Mother of 1084; Old Women; Breast Stories
Mahasweta Devi is not only one of the most prolific Bengali authors, but she’s also an important activist. In fact, for Devi, the two seem to go together. As you can probably tell from the titles, she writes about women and their place in Indian society. Some of the characters in her stories are old women living in poverty, ...
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Why This Book Should Win – Pushkin Hills by BTBA Judge James Crossley
James Crossley is a bookseller at Island Books. He writes regularly for the store’s Message in a Bottle blog and for the website of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association. Pushkin Hills – Sergei Dovlatov, Translated from the Russian by Katherine Dovlatov, Russia Counterpoint Press Pushkin Hills is ...
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Why This Book Should Win – 1914 by BTBA Judge Monica Carter
Monica Carter is a writer and freelance critic. 1914 – Jean Echenoz, translated from the French by Linda Coverdale, (France) The New Press Jean Echenoz’s novel, 1914, delivers the punch of a heavyweight yet moves with the speed of a flyweight. In fewer than 120 pages, Echenoz gives us the exhausting thirteen ...
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Why This Book Should Win – Adam Buenosayres by BTBA Judge Michael Orthofer
Michael Orthofer runs the Complete Review – a book review site with a focus on international fiction – and its Literary Saloon weblog. Adam Buenosayres – Leopoldo Marechal, Translated from the Spanish by Norman Cheadle and Sheila Ethier McGill-Queen’s University Press Leopoldo Marechal’s Adam ...
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2015 PEN Literary Awards Shortlists
A month or so after the longlists were announced, PEN has announced the finalists for all of their literary prizes, including two translation-specific ones. * First up is the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, which has a killer shortlist: Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream by Kim Hyesoon, translated from the Korean by ...
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Why This Book Should Win – The Woman Who Borrowed Memories by BTBA Judge Katrine Øgaard Jensen
Katrine Øgaard Jensen is an editor-at-large for Asymptote and the editor-in-chief for Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art. The Woman Who Borrowed Memories: Selected Stories – Translated by Thomas Teal and Silvester Mazzarella NYRB Classics When growing up in Northern Europe, you come to expect a certain ...
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Why This Book Should Win – Monastery by BTBA Judge Jeremy Garber
Jeremy Garber is the events coordinator for Powell’s Books and also a freelance reviewer. Monastery – Eduardo Halfon, translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman and Daniel Hahn Bellevue Literary Press One of three titles on this year’s Best Translated Book Award longlist to feature more than one translator ...
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Why This Book Should Win – Works by BTBA Judge Scott Esposito
This post is courtesy of BTBA judge, Scott Esposito. Scott Esposito blogs at Conversational Reading and you can find his tweets here. Works – Edouard Levé, Translated byJan Steyn Dalkeyy Archive Press You really have to be impressed with the fact that Edouard Levé has had three books translated into English, ...
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Why This Book Should Win – Two Hrabals by BTBA Judges George Carroll and James Crossley
George Carroll is the World Literature Editor of Shelf Awareness and an independent publishers’ representative based in the Pacific Northwest. James Crossley is a bookseller at Island Books. He writes regularly for the store’s Message in a Bottle blog and for the website of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers ...
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Three Percent #96: The 2015 BTBA Fiction Longlist
On the heels of this week’s big announcement of the 2015 Best Translated Book Award fiction longlist and poetry longlist, Chad and Tom run through the books that made the cut and talk about their favorites, which books are on their reading lists, who they predict will make the shortlist next month, and try their ...
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Why This Book Should Win – Last Words from Montmartre by BTBA Judge Monica Carter
Monica Carter is a writer and freelance critic. Last Words from Montmartre – By Qiu Miaojin, Translated by Ari Larissa Heinrich NYRB Last Words from Montmartre is a loaded piece of work before you ever begin reading it. Qiu Miaojin, the young Taiwanese lesbian writer, committed suicide at the age of twenty-six ...
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The Books I Thought Would Make the BTBA Longlist . . . But Didn't
Over the past week, I’ve given you a bunch of clues about the fiction and poetry longlists and received a few guesses from readers. I think the closest anyone came was 13 right out of 25, which, to be fair, isn’t that bad. Well, since the announcements will be here tomorrow—the poetry list will be ...
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Three Percent #95: Is Book Advertising a Waste of Money?
Inspired by all the stupid Buick ads (and disturbing Volkswagon ones) playing throughout the NCAA Tournament, we decided to dedicate this week’s episode to talking about advertising for books: whether it’s worthwhile, how much it costs, why are book trailers a thing, who buys books because of ads on a subway, and ...
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Best Translated Book Award 2015: Clues to the Fiction Longlist [Part Five]
As I explained on Monday, to start building the hype for this year’s Best Translated Book Award longlists, I’m going to be dropping a series of clues over the course of this week, and, if you’re able to guess one complete list (25 titles for fiction, 10 for poetry) on your first try, you’ll receive a ...
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Transcript of Three Percent #91: "Translators, Rates, Money, and Unions"
A couple months back, for the 91st Three Percent podcast, Tom and I invited Alex Zucker (translator, co-chairman of the PEN Translation Committee) on to talk about the idea of a translators guild, PEN’s model translation contract, how much translators get paid, etc. It’s one of our most listened to podcasts ...
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Antoine Volodine at "The New Inquiry"
Over at The New Inquiry, there’s an extensive, amazing essay about “post-exotic novels” by Antoine Volodine, man of a few pseudonyms, author of Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven, winner of the Prix Médicis (for another book that Open Letter will be publishing), and creator of one of the most ...
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April is Open Letter Month at Quail Ridge Books!
Way back in the last millennium, I worked for a time at Quail Ridge Books, the best independent bookstore in Raleigh and, at that time at least, probably the whole Triangle. I started as a general bookseller, worked in receiving, and designed the “International Fiction” section before leaving for Dalkey Archive ...
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I Am a Sore Loser [Some April Translations]
Back when I was in junior high, my best friend and I would spend hours and hours playing Double Dribble on his Nintendo. (Fun fact! This game was called “Exciting Basket” in Japan.) I might be 100% wrong, but I’m pretty sure this was the first basketball game for the Nintendo. And man, was it ever low rent. ...
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Best Translated Book Award 2015: Clues to the Fiction Longlist [Part Two]
As I explained yesterday, to start building the hype for this year’s Best Translated Book Award longlists, I’m going to be dropping a series of clues over the course of this week, and, if you’re able to guess one complete list (25 titles for fiction, 10 for poetry) on your first try, you’ll receive a ...
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"The Man Between" Event in Rochester on Thursday, April 2nd
If you happen to live in Rochester, or would like to visit and check our Open Letter and/or the University of Rochester’s Literary Translation Programs, I HIGHLY encourage you to come out this Thursday for one of the most star-studded translation events we’ve ever put together. In honor of The Man Between: ...
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Best Translated Book Award 2015: Clues to the Fiction Longlist [Part One]
On Tuesday, April 7th, one week from tomorrow, we’ll be announcing this year’s Best Translated Book Award longlists for both Fiction and Poetry. I’m going to unveil the poetry longlist at 10am, and the fiction one precisely at noon. (Eastern time. Because as much as I dislike East Coast Bias, our time zone ...
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Who's Publishing What Spanish-Language Books from Where?
A couple weeks ago, Valerie Miles organized a special one-day conference on “Publishing Spanish Writers in English.” It featured a series of interesting, well-designed panels: one with Barbara Epler from New Directions and Jonathan Galassi from FSG talking about editing Spanish-language lit; one on magazines ...
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ALTA 2015 Travel Fellowships
OK, now that we have the ALTA 2015 location set (Tucson), the dates (October 28-31), hotel (Marriott University Park), and keynote speakers (Stephen Snyder and Jerome Rothenberg), it’s time to send out the call for Travel Fellowships. Each year, between four and six $1,000 fellowships are awarded to emerging ...
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The History of Silence
Pedro Zarraluki’s The History of Silence (trans. Nick Caistor and Lorenza García) begins with the narrator and his wife, Irene, setting out to write a book about silence, itself called The History of Silence: “This is the story of how a book that should have been called The History of Silence never came to be written. ...
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Latest Review: "The History of Silence" by Pedro Zarraluki
The latest addition to our Reviews section is by P. T. Smith on The History of Silence by Pedro Zarraluki, translated by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia, and published by Hispabooks Publishing. Here’s the beginning of Patrick’s review: Pedro Zarraluki’s The History of Silence (trans. Nick Caistor and ...
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PEN's Book Awards
So, every year, PEN Awards a bunch of books with a bunch of money in a bunch of different categories. Some of these categories are dedicated solely to works in translation (like the PEN Translation Prize, PEN Award for Poetry in Translation), and other longlists just happen to include translated books. Since we cover ...
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Iraqi Nights
In a culture that privileges prose, reviewing poetry is fairly pointless. And I’ve long since stopped caring about what the world reads and dropped the crusade to get Americans to read more poems. Part of the fault, as I’ve suggested in past reviews, rests with poets who seem hell-bent on insulating their art from the ...
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Latest Review: "Iraqi Nights" by Dunya Mikhail
The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Vincent Francone on Iraqi Nights by Dunya Mikhail, translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid and published by New Directions. Here’s the beginning of Vince’s review: In a culture that privileges prose, reviewing poetry is fairly pointless. And I’ve long since ...
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Three-Light Years
I would like to pose the argument that it is rare for one to ever come across a truly passive protagonist in a novel. The protagonist (perhaps) of Three Light-Years, Claudio Viberti, is just that—a shy internist who lives in an apartment above his mother and below his ex-wife, and religiously eats boiled vegetables every ...
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Latest Review: "Three-Light Years" by Andrea Canobbio
The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Tiffany Nichols on Andrea Cannobio’s Three Light-Years, translated by Anne Milano Appel and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Friday the 13th! Go catch some black cats before the weekend! Here’s the beginning of Tiffany’s review: I would like to ...
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The Fringe Elements by BTBA Judge Monica Carter
Monica Carter is a freelance critic. Discerning how one should approach a written work for translation is a challenging task. The approach of some publishers is to accept the writer’s work as is, with no editorial input, which means the translation is as close to the original text as it can be, disregarding cultural, ...
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Three Percent #94: The Mad and the Bad
This week’s podcast is a special “book club” one in which Tom and Chad talk about Jean-Patrick Manchette’s The Mad and the Bad, a violent little book by the author of Fatale. They also talk about the Spanish branch of Penguin Random House cutting translator rates and this incredible video: This ...
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Things I'm Over, Things That Are Interesting [Some March Translations]
For the handful of people who read these posts every month (I hope there are at least three of you), unfortunately, this one is going to be pretty short. I’m really strapped for time right now, with four trips (to New York, Bennington, Toronto, Seattle-Portland) and at least seven different events scheduled for the next ...
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Three Percent #93: Always a Work in Progress
In this episode, Chad and Tom discuss the recent Festival Neue Literatur, a NYC-based festival promoting German-language literature, and spend a lot of time talking about the ins and outs of editing literature in translation. Additionally, they breakdown this Buzzfeed article about ebook data mining and what this means for ...
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Q&A with Howard Curtis and Dominique Fabre
With the recent publication of French author Dominique Fabre’s Guys Like Me and the recent review thereof, we thought, why not get author and translator to chat quickly about the book, Fabre’s writing, and a bit more? Both were happy to do so, and translator Howard Curtis was kind enough to both prepare the ...
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The Little Horse
The last five days of the eleventh-century Icelandic politician, writer of sagas, and famous murder victim Snorri Sturleleson (the Norwegian spelling, Snorre, is preserved in the book) make up Thorvald Steen’s most recently translated historical fiction, The Little Horse. Murdered on his own property for overdue political ...
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Best Translated Book Award Winners to Be Announced at BookExpo America
So, this has been percolating for some time, but yesterday BookExpo America sent out the official press release (copied below) about how this year’s Best Translated Book Award winners will be announced on Wednesday, May 27 at 2:30 as part of BEA’s programming: Norwalk, CT, February 25, 2015: BookExpo America ...
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Bookselling in Carolina [Some February Translations]
Last week, the tenth version of the American Booksellers Association’s Winter Institute took place in Asheville, NC, at a resort straight out of The Shining. I know! You should’ve seen the main lobby with it’s 40’ ceilings, giant fireplaces, and hidden passages. It was like something out of ...
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Guys Like Me
We all know Paris, or at least we think we know it. The Eiffel Tower. The Latin Quarter. The Champs-Élysées. The touristy stuff. In Dominique Fabre’s novel, Guys Like Me, we’re shown a different side of Paris: a gray, decaying side that reflects, more than anything else, the emotional state of the storyteller, an ...
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Latest Review: "Guys Like Me" by Dominique Fabre
The latest addition to our Reviews section is a piece by Peter Biello on Guys Like Me by Dominique Fabre, translated by Howard Curtis and out from New Vessel Press. Here’s the beginning of Peter’s review: We all know Paris, or at least we think we know it. The Eiffel Tower. The Latin Quarter. The ...
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Festival Neue Literatur 2015
This year’s edition of the Festival Neue Literatur, which features new writing from Austria, Germany, Switzerland, and the U.S., will take place this upcoming weekend (February 19-22) and is loaded with interesting events. Here’s a video overview of the festival itself: You can find the complete schedule ...
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Q&A with Hannah Johnson
This month, Wilkins Farago is publishing the translation of an award-winning children’s book, One Red Shoe by Karin Gruss with illustrations by Tobias Krejtschi, in the US (the book can be purchased both at the publisher’s website, and at Amazon.com). The story is a look at the impact of conflict on children who ...
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The Frontrunners, Part Two by BTBA Judge Jeremy Garber
Jeremy Garber is the events coordinator for Powell’s Books and also a freelance reviewer. Monastery (Bellevue Literary Press) Eduardo Halfon, translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman and Daniel Hahn Like a companion volume or literary reverberation, Eduardo Halfon’s Monastery continues the itinerant ...
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The Frontrunners, Part One by BTBA Judge Jeremy Garber
Jeremy Garber is the events coordinator for Powell’s Books and also a freelance reviewer. With the start of spring (for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, that is) less than six weeks away, the BTBA longlist announcement draws ever closer (early April!) – and, as such, we judges continue our evaluation of the ...
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Three Percent #91: Translators, Rates, Money, and Unions
Today’s podcast is a special one, featuring PEN Translation Committee co-chair (and talented Czech translator) Alex Zucker to talk about what translators do and should get paid, and to break down where all the money goes in publishing a work of international literature. In comparison to some other Three Percent ...
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Ann Morgan and "The World Between Two Covers"
I mentioned Ann Morgan’s The World Between Two Covers in my earlier post, and it just so happens that a trailer for this came out. So, if you’re not already familiar with it, here’s a bit more information about her ...
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Yawning vs. Not Reading: Americans and Translations a Decade Apart
This morning, the Daily Beast ran a piece by Bill Morris entitled Why Americans Don’t Read Foreign Fiction. It starts with Morris admitting his ignorance of Patrick Modiano’s work prior to his winning the Nobel Prize, then goes into a reading of Modiano’s Suspected Sentences, before veering into the ...
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Birth of a Bridge
One hundred pages into Birth of a Bridge, the prize-winning novel from French writer Maylis de Kerangal, the narrator describes how starting in November, birds come to nest in the wetlands of the fictional city of Coca, California, for three weeks. While this may seem insignificant in a novel about the construction of a ...
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Latest Review: "Birth of a Bridge" by Maylis de Kerangal
The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Christopher Iacono on Birth of a Bridge by Maylis de Kerangal, translated by Jessica Moore and published by Talonbooks. Snow day! We’re still recovering, mentally as much as with street parking. Hope everyone’s staying warm. Here’s the beginning of ...
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Three Percent #90: That Song Should Be Named "Andre Reed Jersey"
It’s time for our annual music podcast in which Chad, Nate, and Kaija all share songs from their favorite albums of 2014. Although we only talk about four songs each on this podcast, we put together a Spotify playlist featuring 86 songs and running almost six hours. Enjoy! Next week we’ll be back to normally ...
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THE BOOKS I HAVEN’T FORGOTTEN, OR IN LIEU OF A PLOT by Madeleine LaRue
Madeleine LaRue is Associate Editor and Director of Publicity of Music & Literature. I have an embarrassing inability to remember plots. It took me three readings of The Brothers Karamazov just to be able to remember beyond a few weeks who had actually killed Fyodor Pavlovich — and The Brothers Karamazov is one of my ...
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Latest Review: "Faces in the Crowd" by Valeria Luiselli
The latest addition to our Reviews section is a by Valerie Miles on Faces in the Crowd by Valeria Luiselli, translated by Christina MacSweeney and published by Coffee House Press. (For those who don’t remember, Faces in the Crowd was the runner-up to the 2014 World Cup of Literature Championship Game, beat out only by ...
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Faces in the Crowd
At 30, the Mexican writer Valeria Luiselli is already gathering her rosebuds. Faces in the Crowd, her poised debut novel, was published by Coffee House Press, along with her Brodsky-infused essay collection, Sidewalks. The essays stand as a theoretical map for this conceptually complex work of fiction, which comes in a ...
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Three Percent #89: Don't Laugh So Loud
This week’s podcast is all about Denis Johnson’s The Laughing Monsters, which came out last year and is “a high-suspense tale of kaleidoscoping loyalties in the post-9/11 world that shows one of our great novelists at the top of his game.” Writer, critic, and Johnson fan Patrick Smith (here’s a ...
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Fantomas Versus the Multinational Vampires: An Attainable Utopia
Fantomas Versus the Multinational Vampires: An Attainable Utopia (narrated by Julio Cortázar) is, not disappointingly, as wild a book as its title suggests. It is a half-novella half-graphic novel story about . . . what, exactly? A European tribunal, Latin American literary figures, a comic book superhero, international ...
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Latest Review: "Fantomas Versus the Multinational Vampires: An Attainable Utopia"
The latest addition to our Reviews section is a piece by Cameron Rowe on Julio Cortázar’s Fantomas Versus the Multinational Vampires: An Attainable Utopia, translated by David Kurnick and published by Semiotext(e). Cameron (some of you may have met her at ALTA last fall) is a current student in the MA in Literary ...
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ALTA 2015: Traffic & Translation [Call for Proposals]
We’re just about prepared to announce the official dates of this year’s American Literary Translators Conference (I can say that it will be the weekend of Halloween and will be in Tucson, AZ), but in the meantime, listed below is the official call for proposals. You have some time—the deadline isn’t ...
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Deadline Extended for PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grants
For all of the translators out there rushing to get their Heim Translation Grant applications finished on time . . . pause. Relax. You have another two weeks. The official deadline for submissions is now January 30th. And if you need the details on how to apply, click here or read below: The PEN/Heim Translation Fund ...
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Self-Portrait in Green
Marie NDiaye has created a tiny, psychological masterpiece with her Self-Portrait in Green. In it she explores how our private fears and insecurities can distort what we believe to be real and can cause us to sabotage our intimate relationships. In particular, NDiaye conveys a powerful message about the unconscious ...
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Latest Review: "Self-Portrait in Green" by Marie NDiaye
The latest addition to our Reviews section is a piece by Lori Feathers on Marie NDiaye’s Self-Portrait in Green, translated by Jordan Stump, and out from Two Lines Press. Lori is an attorney who lives in Dallas, Texas, and is a member of the Board of Deep Vellum Publishing in Dallas. Hope everyone is having a great ...
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Three Percent #88: A Shinier Version of Craigslist
In this week’s episode, Chad and Tom discuss some of the books they read in 2014 and make specific “reading resolutions” for 2015. They also talk about Mark Zuckerberg’s book club and Tom’s alma mater playing for the National Championship. Next week, they’ll be discussing Denis ...
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The Translation Databases Have Been Updated
If you want to download all new, up to date version of the Translation Databases, you can do it here. These include all books that I’ve logged on through this morning, although, as always, if there’s anything missing, just email me. I have a day or two of Edelweiss catalogs to search through before the 2015 ...
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Prize Winners by BTBA Judge Michael Orthofer
Michael Orthofer runs the Complete Review – a book review site with a focus on international fiction – and its Literary Saloon weblog. Some five-hundred-odd translated titles are in contention – well, at least get considered – for a book prize, the Best Translated Book Award. Not surprisingly, a number of them have ...
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Let Me Watch Crap! [Some January 2015 Translations]
This past weekend, my kids and I finally watched The Incredible Hulk—the final Marvel Cinematic Universe movie that we had to see to be all caught up before Avengers 2 comes out in May. After the ultimately disappointing Hulk ended, my son wanted to binge on the new season of Doctor Who, which is available through ...
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Chad vs. Skype/Moneybookers
Admittedly, this has absolutely nothing to do with international fiction, but since it is related to this week’s podcast and is incredibly hilarious, I feel like I have to share. Here’s the setup: Back in 2008, I bought credit on Skype to call some people in India for an article I was writing. After doing the ...
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Three Percent #87: Where is Namsan Tower?
On this week’s podcast, Chad and Tom dish about the idea of a Translators Union, Dalkey’s Korean literature series, and the Melville House edition of the “Torture Report,” as well as a mini-rant about the Serial podcast, and a mini-rave about a dear friend who’s passed. This week’s music ...
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Thousand Times Broken: A Conversation with Translator Gillian Conoley [Part II]
The writer Henri Michaux had two great missions in life: to explore the darkest parts of human consciousness, and record what he found in those explorations in the clearest possible way. That’s according to Gillian Conoley, who recently published the first English translations of three of Michaux’s books. Thousand Times ...
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Thousand Times Broken: A Conversation with Translator Gillian Conoley [Part I]
The writer Henri Michaux had two great missions in life: to explore the darkest parts of human consciousness, and record what he found in those explorations in the clearest possible way. That’s according to Gillian Conoley, a poet, the founding editor of Volt, and a translator who teaches at Sonoma State University. She’s ...
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50/50: Fifty Books in Translation from Fifty Presses [Our 2014 Year-End Book List]
Last week I wrote a post that, among other things, included a brief rant on year-end book lists (one of our favorite things to rant about here). Already before the post’s draft stage, I had been scheming up the foundation to a more translation-inclusive year-end list than the other lists out there this year, and soon ...
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The Four Corners of Palermo
The Sicilian Mafia has always been a rich subject for sensational crime fiction. The Godfather, Goodfellas, and The Sopranos worked the mob’s bloody corpses and family feuds to both entertainment and artistic value. Giuseppe di Piazza’s debut novel attempts this, though with less success. The Four Corners of Palermo is ...
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In Translation But Off the List by BTBA Judge Jeremy Garber
Jeremy Garber is the events coordinator for Powell’s Books and also a freelance reviewer. As the calendar draws to a close, annual lists of the year’s best books begin to proliferate. However subjective these literary lineups may be, it should come as no surprise to readers of translated fiction that titles originating ...
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New Literature from Europe 2014 [Weekend Work Getaways and then Some]
This past weekend, I had the pleasure of heading down to NYC for the 2014 New Literature from Europe festival, which primarily took place at the slightly Escherian, but beautiful Austrian Cultural Forum NY building. Even if you don’t read beyond this point, let me just say that this was a great festival, short and ...
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Notes on Some Noteable Danes – BTBA Judge Katrine Øgaard Jensen
Katrine Øgaard Jensen is an editor-at-large for Asymptote and the editor-in-chief for Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art. It’s December. I still have a shit-ton of books left to read for the BTBA, and the very thought of writing a blogpost about my favorite contenders is giving me mild anxiety. But, as a Chuang ...
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Cheesy Thanksgiving Post [Some December Translations]
I don’t think this particular monthly write-up needs any real explanation—it really is a “cheesy Thanksgiving post,” complete with holiday cheer and unwanted gifts—so let’s just get into it. (Also, I think it’s going to be really long.) Texas: The Great Theft by Carmen Boullosa, ...
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Jeff Waxman's Rep Nights, Kramerbooks, and the Necessity of Face-to-Face Meetings
I’ve been incredibly discouraged over the past few weeks about the place of Open Letter in book culture. Part of this discouragement comes from traveling for twenty of the past twenty-four days (to Sharjah, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, L.A., and DC), but also, Open Letter didn’t get a single book on this Flavorwire ...
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Acorns in Texas
For those of you in the Austin and Dallas, Texas, areas, you’re in for a literary treat this week. Valerie Miles will be in Austin tonight (Tuesday), November 18th, at Malvern Books, and in Dallas tomorrow (Wednesday), November 29th, at The Wild Detectives to chat about A Thousand Forests in One Acorn. More ...
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Slim Pickings? by BTBA Judge Michael Orthofer
Michael Orthofer runs the Complete Review – a book review site with a focus on international fiction – and its Literary Saloon weblog. The size of a book shouldn’t really matter, not when judging whether or not it’s Best Translated Book Award-worthy, but one of the things that has struck me about this year’s batch ...
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Bigger than the Burj Khalifa [Some November Translations]
This post is being written under extreme jet lag. Last Saturday I flew out to attend the Sharjah International Book Fair (the slogan for which is “A Book for Every Person,” which is not to be confused with Dubai’s Film Festival slogan, “A Movie for Every Person”) and then, yesterday, flew for ...
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FEAR OF THE LONGLIST by George Carroll
George Carroll is the World Literature Editor of Shelf Awareness and an independent publishers’ representative based in the Pacific Northwest. None of the San Francisco Giants spoke with pitcher Madison Bumgartner in the dugout before he took the mound in the ninth inning of the seventh game of the World Series except for ...
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Writers
Antoine Volodine’s vast project (40 plus novels) of what he calls the post-exotic remains mostly untranslated, so for many of us, understanding it remains touched with mystery, whispers from those “who know,” and guesswork. That’s not to say that, were one to read every book by Volodine and his pseudonyms, his driving ...
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Three Percent #85: Whatever
This week’s podcast covers four major topics: Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano, Michael Henry Heim and The Man Between, the upcoming ALTA Conference, and Atavist Books. And we barely talk about sports at all! But Tom does have a “rave” that includes a reference to this cover: This week’s music ...
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My Brilliant Friend
It hasn’t quite neared the pitch of the waiting-in-line-at-midnight Harry Potter days, but in small bookstores and reading circles of New York City, an aura has attended the novelist Elena Ferrante and her works. One part curiosity (Who is she?), one part eager devotion (Where is she, I want to be her best friend!), ...
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Latest Review: "My Brilliant Friend" by Elena Ferrante
The latest addition to our Reviews section is a piece by Acacia O’Connor on Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, translated by Ann Goldstein and published by Europa Editions. This book was published in English in 2012, but considering the attention Ferrante has been getting for her work since then, this is a ...
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DANIEL MEDIN’S BTBA FAVORITES: FALL 2014
Daniel Medin teaches at the American University of Paris, where he helps direct the Center for Writers and Translators and is Associate Series Editor of The Cahiers Series. Can Xue: The Last Lover, trans. from Chinese by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen, Yale/Margellos The strangest and by far most original work I read this ...
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Stealth
From the late 1940s to the early 1950s, Egypt was going through a period of transition. The country’s people were growing unhappy with the corruption of power in the government, which had been under British rule for decades. The Egyptians’ performance at the 1948 Summer Olympics didn’t help bolster nationalism: of the ...
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Latest Review: "Stealth" by Sonallah Ibrahim
The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Christopher Iacono on Stealth by Sonallah Ibrahim, translated by Hosam Aboul-Ela and published by New Directions. Chris is a regular reviewer for Three Percent, and happens to be taking the next month off to participate in NaNoWriMo. We wish him endurance and good writing ...
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The Best to Come
James Crossley is a bookseller at Island Books. He writes regularly for the store’s Message in a Bottle blog and for the website of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association. By now you may be asking which BTBA-eligible books I’m most looking forward to reading. Probably not, but let’s pretend. ...
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The Best Translated Books So Far
James Crossley is a bookseller at Island Books. He writes regularly for the store’s Message in a Bottle blog and for the website of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association. Having talked about books that I think other people will probably like, it seems like I should talk at least a bit about the ones I ...
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Translator-Publisher Speed Dating at ALTA
I have lots of jokes to make about my one experience with actual “speed dating,” like about the female minister who was there because she wanted to “sleep outside of her tribe” and the car salesman who was there for his fifth consecutive time . . . It was all sorts of amusing, but, to be honest, all ...
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A Corner of the World: Interview with Author Mylene Fernández Pintado [Part II]
Yesterday we ran Part I of an interview between author Mylene Fernández Pintado and translator Dick Cluster. Part I left off with Mylene going over a little background information on their work together on A Corner of the World to be. This here is Part II of that interview. Mylene Fernández Pintado has been writing and ...
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New BTBA Judge James Crossley Highlights His Picks for Bestsellers
James Crossley is a bookseller at Island Books. He writes regularly for the store’s Message in a Bottle blog and for the website of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association. By this point several judges have had an opportunity to share their thoughts about participating in the BTBA process, and it’s hard ...
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A Corner of the World: Interview with Author Mylene Fernández Pintado [Part I]
Mylene Fernández Pintado has been writing and publishing in Cuba, winning prizes and readers, since 1994. Her latest novel, La esquina del mundo, has just been published by City Lights as A Corner of the World, translated by Dick Cluster. Cluster’s other new Cuban translation is Pedro de Jesús’s Vital Signs, released ...
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Milen Ruskov Wins the European Union Prize for Literature
Last week, during the Frankfurt Book Fair, the winners of this year’s European Union Prize for Literature were announced, and among the winners was Bulgaria’s Milen Ruskov, who also happens to be published by Open Letter. (Not terribly surprising, since we’ve cornered the market on Bulgarian literature in ...
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40% Reading Comprehension, and Dropping Fast! [Some October Translations]
A couple weeks ago I had a dream that I was dropping my daughter off at a “Reading Tutor” to study for some sort of standardized “Reading Comprehension” test for fifth graders. When I got to the shopping mall for tutors (dream!), I found out that, not only had her tutor quit, but that “Reading ...
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Three Percent #84: The Belated Bolaño Book Club Podcast
Finally, after weeks of putting this off, here is the long anticipated podcast about Roberto Bolaño’s Little Lumpen Novelita. The reason it took so long to get to this was because of Tom’s new job as the Deputy Director at Albertine, the most beautiful Franco-centric bookstore in New York (and/or the whole ...
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Judge Jeremy Garber Shares Two of His Favorites So Far of BTBA 2015
Jeremy Garber is the events coordinator for Powell’s Books and also a freelance reviewer. With so much reading left to do (as submissions continue to fill our mailboxes daily), a handful of books already stand out as some of the year’s finest original translations. Although it remains to be seen whether any of the ...
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Judge Jeremy Garber Sums Up His Thoughts for BTBA 2015
Jeremy Garber is the events coordinator for Powell’s Books and also a freelance reviewer. It is quite an honor (to say nothing of a responsibility) to be invited to adjudicate the creative output of others. In merely thinking of the myriad ways one might go about arbitrating the many facets that comprise a finished work ...
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Judging Books by Their Covers – BTBA Judge Katrine Øgaard Jensen
Katrine Øgaard Jensen is an editor-at-large for Asymptote and the editor-in-chief for Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art. Since I am the youngest, the least knowledgeable, and by far the most superficial judge in the BTBA, it’s only appropriate that I make my first blog post about something sexy. As a judge in the ...
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My Books and How They Got There
Madeleine LaRue is Associate Editor and Director of Publicity of Music & Literature. I live in Berlin, in a neighborhood with a chronically understaffed post office, so books on their way to me from the United States are usually in for an adventure. A package from Archipelago Books, example, arrived dripping wet, ...
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Abilio Estévez and His Exile from Cuba [Month of a Thousand Forests]
Abilio Estévez is next up in the Month of a Thousand Forests series. Arcade brought out a couple of his books a decade ago, but the piece he chose as his “aesthetic highpoint” (excerpted below) has never appeared in English translation. Just a reminder, you can buy A Thousand Forests in One Acorn for only $15 ...
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Alfredo Bryce Echenique and a Microcosm of Peru [Month of a Thousand Forests]
Up next in the Month of a Thousand Forests series is Alfredo Bryce Echenique, whose entry in A Thousand Forests includes a bit from his novel A World for Julius and a previously untranslated story, “Manzanas.” One of the most intriguing things about Echenique’s life is the plagiarism case that he was ...
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Alberto Ruy Sánchez and Roland Barthes [Month of a Thousand Forests]
Alberto Ruy Sánchez, the next entry in the Month of a Thousand Forests series, has a couple books available in English: Names of the Air and The Secret Gardens of Mogador: Voices of the Earth. He also studied with Roland Barthes, which is why I included that bit from his interview. Just a reminder, you can buy A ...
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Cristina Fernández Cubas and "Hijacking Stories" [Month of a Thousand Forests]
Cristina Fernaández Cubas is today’s first entry in the ongoing Month of a Thousand Forests series. Below you’ll find a bit from one of her novels, her explanation for why she included it, and a bit about what Julio Cortázar called “stories against the clock.” Through the end of the month you can ...
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Mario Vargas Llosa Injecting Imagination and Novelty into Democratic Life [Month of a Thousand Forests]
First up today in the Month of a Thousand Forests series is Mario Vargas Llosa, who you might know from such books as Conversation in the Cathedral or Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, neither of which he chose to include as his “best piece of writing.” Instead he turned to a couple of his more recent books: The ...
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Evelio Rosero, the Youngest Inclusion [Month of a Thousand Forests]
The second author featured today in the Month of a Thousand Forests series is Evelio Rosero, the youngest author to be included in the anthology. Rosero has a couple novels available in English translation from New Directions. What he chose to include isn’t from either of those novels though. It’s from one of ...
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Edgardo Cozarinsky and December 2008 [Month of a Thousand Forests]
I very much fell off pace with the Month of a Thousand Forests series, but by covering two authors a day, we’ll have highlighted everyone by the 30th. The first author for today is Edgardo Cozarinsky, who was first recommended to me by Horacio Castellanos Moya when he came to Rochester. FSG and Vintage did a couple ...
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Kafka dreaming: Two contemporary fabulists
Madeleine LaRue is Associate Editor and Director of Publicity of Music & Literature. My strategy for BTBA reading is very simple and very biased: I read the books by women first, and if there are no books by women, then I read the shortest ones first. I start with the women because there are fewer of them, and with ...
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Dear Publisher, I Love You, Part Two by Monica Carter
Monica Carter is a freelance critic. As I continue on keyboard jacking the BTBA blog this week, I continue also to give praise to some of the publishers who started roughly around the time the award began and have grown right along side us. After A for Archipelago comes E for Europa Editions – the sleek and suave playboy ...
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Simply Put, Marian Schwartz Is Bad Ass
Our love for Marian Schwartz—translator from the Russian of Mikhail Shishkin’s Maidenhair along with Mikhail Bulgakov’s The White Guard and all the Andrei Gelasimov books that AmazonCrossing has been bringing out, and dozens of other works—runs deep, which is why we’re all really excited that she ...
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Aurora Venturini, Then and Now [Month of a Thousand Forests]
So, we have 18 authors left to cover in the Month of a Thousand Forests series, and you have 15 days left at which to get the collection for only $15. (Just enter FORESTS at checkout.) First up today is Aurora Venturini, who kicks off the whole anthology, and who published her first book in 1942 and her most recent book in ...
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I Called Him Necktie
While looking back at an episode in his life, twenty-year-old Taguchi Hiro remembers what his friend Kumamoto Akira said about poetry. Its perfection arises precisely from its imperfection . . . . I have an image in my head. I see it clearly before me. Its colors are glaring and harsh in their brightness. But as soon as ...
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Latest Review: "I Called Him Necktie" by Milena Michiko Flašar
The latest addition to our Reviews section is a by Christopher Iacono on Milena Michiko Flašar’s I Called Him Necktie, translated by Sheila Dickie and published by New Vessel Press. Here’s the beginning of Chris’s review: While looking back at an episode in his life, twenty-year-old Taguchi Hiro ...
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Dear Publisher, I Love You by Monica Carter
Monica Carter is a freelance critic. This week as I takeover the BTBA blog and I finally get the opportunity to do something I have been longing to do – highlight some of the incredible publishers the are committed to producing quality literature in translation. Each day, I will tip my hat to a small press that has grown ...
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Horacio Castellanos Moya and the Permanent Influence of Faulkner [Month of a Thousand Forests]
As a weekend send-off, I thought I’d round off this week’s entries in the Month of a Thousand Forests with a bit from one of my favorite books of recent times — Senselessness by Horacio Castellanos Moya. You hopefully know this by now, but if you order A Thousand Forests in One Acorn from the Open Letter ...
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Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio and His Precise Prose [Month of a Thousand Forests]
The first author in today’s Month of a Thousand Forests entry is Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio, who has a couple books available already in English, both translated by superstar Margaret Jull Costa. What’s most interesting about his work—at least to me—is his obsession with words, grammar, precise ...
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Return to Killybegs
The central concern of Sorj Chalandon’s novel Return to Killybegs appears to be explaining how a person of staunch political activism can be lead to betray his cause, his country, his people. Truth be told, the real theme of the book is the importance and artifice of myths and legends. In this sense, the novel’s plot, ...
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Latest Review: "Return to Killybegs" by Sorj Chalandon
The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Vincent Francone on Return to Killybegs by Sorj Chalandon, translated by Ursula Meany Scott and published by The Lilliput Press. All I have to say before we get to Vince’s review is that “Killybegs” sounds like something one might yell after a pint too many ...
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Esther Tusquets and Social Criticism [Month of a Thousand Forests]
Up next in our ongoing Month of a Thousand Forests series. is Esther Tusquets, author of Stranded, The Same Sea as Every Summer, and Love Is a Solitary Game, to name a few of her titles that are available in English translation. Below you’ll find an excerpt from the interview with her, and a bit from her story, ...
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Scott Cheshire on Plotless Novels
Electric Literature has a lengthy piece by Scott Cheshire on “plotless novels” that a lot of Three Percent readers would probably appreciate. Especially Max Frisch fans. The article is worth reading in its entirety, and excerpting it doesn’t do it justice, but here are a few paragraphs to draw you ...
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Carlos Fuentes and Nationalist Writing [A Month of a Thousand Forests]
I’m going to start off today’s Month of a Thousand Forests entries with Carlos Fuentes—one of the greatest writers of all time. When I was at Dalkey Archive, we reprinted a few of his novels, including Where the Air Is Clear and Terra Nostra, which is excerpted below. I don’t love all of ...
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Eduardo Mendoza and Barcelona Mysteries [A Month of a Thousand Forests]
The second author up today in the Month of a Thousand Forests series is Eduardo Mendoza. Rather than quote from his interview, I’m just running part of the bio that Valerie Miles wrote for him along with a bit from The Truth about the Savolta Case. As with all the other posts in this series, if you order A Thousand ...
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Rafael Chirbes's "Crematorium" [A Month of a Thousand Forests]
I’m going to have to double up on these for a while in order to catch up and make sure we cover everyone before the end of September, so expect a lot of “Forests” over the next week or so. Rafael Chirbes is up first today. I’ve been interested in his works for a while, and just today gave his newest ...
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The Last Days
Spoiler alert: acclaimed writer Stefan Zweig and his wife Lotte kill themselves at the end of Lauren Seksik’s 2010 novel, The Last Days. It’s hard to avoid spoiling this mystery. Zweig’s suicide actually happened, in Brazil in 1942, and since then his fans have wondered what life must have been like for him in his ...
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Three Percent #83: "Johnny Appledrone"
This week’s podcast is mostly about this BBC article on Hieroglyph, a collaborative project between scientists and science-fiction writers that was inspired by the Neal Stephenson article Innovation Starvation. Basically, this is a call to create fewer dystopian novels, and more positive sci-fi ideas that can help ...
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South Asian Translations, and the Lack of Them
Over the past few weeks, Mahmud Rahman/Asymptote has been publishing a four-part series “On the Dearth of South Asian Translations in the U.S.” The whole series is worth reading, and below are a few key bits to whet your appetite . . . First off, from Part I: A small percentage of literary books published ...
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Juan Marsé and French Women [A Month of a Thousand Forests]
Today’s entry in the Month of a Thousand Forests series is Juan Marsé, who has a few book available in English translation: Golden Girl, Lizard Tails, and Shanghai Nights. In this excerpt he talks a bit about this background and his time in Paris, which led to Últimas tardes con Teresa. __All this month, if you ...
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BTBA Blog Returns with Judge Michael Orthofer
Michael Orthofer runs the Complete Review – a book review site with a focus on international fiction – and its Literary Saloon weblog. Getting started There’s no real official start date for the judging of the Best Translated Book Award – though maybe the announcement finalizing who the judges actually are is a ...
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Ana María Matute and the Shadow Children [A Month of a Thousand Forests]
Next up in our Month of a Thousand Forests series is Ana María Matute who has one book already available in English—School of the Sun, which was translated by Elaine Kerrigan and published by Columbia University Press. The piece that’s excerpted below is from Olvidado Rey Gudú which is “the book I wanted ...
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"De Potter's Grand Tour" by Joanna Scott [Weekend Reading]
Usually, I try and feature a work of translation as part of the “weekend reading” series, but I’m making an exception this week in order to highlight Joanna Scott’s new novel, which just came out this week. Aside from being an outstanding novelist and short story writer (Arrogance and The Manikin ...
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José María Merino and Heidi [A Month of a Thousand Forests]
The second author to be featured in our overview of the new collection A Thousand Forests in One Acorn is Jose María Merino, a Spanish master of microfictions. Merino is one of the authors in this volume whose work is appearing in English for the first time. You can read other excerpts from Thousand Forests by clicking ...
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Letter from an Unknown Woman and Other Stories
After a mysterious woman confesses to an author simply known as “R” that she has loved him since she was a teenager, she offers the following explanation: “There is nothing on earth like the love of a child that passes unnoticed in the dark because she has no hope: her love is submissive, so much a servant’s love, ...
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Javier Marias and Moral Doubts [A Month of a Thousand Forests]
Following on yesterday’s interview with Valerie Miles I thought we’d feature the Javier Marías section from A Thousand Forests in One Acorn, mainly because I like the bit about translation and find his reasoning for choosing this bit of Dark Back of Time incredibly interesting. This is going to follow the ...
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Valerie Miles Gets Things Going [A Month of a Thousand Forests]
As promised at various points in the past, all this month we’re going to be running excerpts from our latest book, A Thousand Forests in One Acorn by Valerie Miles. This anthology—which is so much more than an anthology—features twenty-eight great writers from the past century, each of whom picked out the ...
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Colorless Tsukuru and His Years of Pilgrimage
Floating around the internet amid the hoopla of a new Haruki Murakami release, you may have come across a certain Murakami Bingo courtesy of Grant Snider. It is exactly what it sounds like, and it’s funny because it’s true, to a certain extent: Murakami, for better or worse, has a particular style, and with it come the ...
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Latest Review: "Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage" by Haruki Murakami
The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Will Eells on Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami, translated by Philip Gabriel and published by Knopf. While I can’t claim to know whether I may be the editor Will refers to in the opening to his review (which: HAHA OH SO FUNNY WILL ...
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The End of Half-Day Fridays [Some September Translations]
And just like that, school’s back in session. Having students back on campus brings up so many complicated feelings. Annoyance being the first and more obvious. It’s super irritating that from one day to the next it becomes infinitely more difficult to find a parking place for you bike, that you have to wait in ...
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Three Percent #82: Why We Need [SOLUTION TK] More Than Ever
In this podcast, Chad and Tom discuss Tom’s recent article in Publishing Perspectives (which he wrote in response to Amazon’s infamous letter to readers), along with some thoughts on why we shop at bookstores, and Julian Gough’s Litcoin project. Also, as mentioned at the end of the podcast, Chad and Tom ...
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The Matiushin Case
The publisher’s blurb for Oleg Pavlov’s The Matiushin Case promises the prospective reader “a Crime and Punishment for today,” the sort of comparison that is almost always guaranteed to do a disservice to both the legendary dead and the ambitious living. Predictably enough, The Matiushin Case is nothing like Crime and ...
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Asymptote Interview with Translator Steve Dolph
Earlier today, Asymptote published an interview between Jeremie Davies, senior editor at Dalkey Archive Press, and Spanish-language translator Steve Dolph. Over the course of the summer, the two corresponded in a great discussion about the great Argentine author Juan José Saer. Here, Part I of the interview, Steve talks ...
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Fear: A Novel of World War I
One hundred years have passed since the start of World War I and it is difficult to believe that there are still novels, considered classics in their own countries, that have never been published in English. Perhaps it was the overwhelming number of novels in English in the years following the war that prevented their ...
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Latest Review: "Fear: A Novel of World War I" by Gabriel Chevallier
The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Paul Doyle on Gabriel Chevallier’s Fear: A Novel on World War I, translated by Malcolm Imrie, and published by New York Review Books. Here’s the beginning of Paul’s review: One hundred years have passed since the start of World War I and it is ...
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Three Percent #81: Duck and Cover
With Tom on vacation, Chad recorded a special episode of the podcast with Heather Cleary and Jason Grunebaum, both of whom have a book on the National Translation Award longlist. They talk about Sergio Chejfec’s The Dark, Uday Prakash’s The Girl with the Golden Parasol, air shows, the future of the American ...
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Little Grey Lies
In the London of Hédi Kaddour’s Little Grey Lies, translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan, peace has settled, but the tensions, fears, and anger of the Great War remain, even if tucked away behind stories and lies. Directly ahead, as those leftovers of the war simmer to a boil, is World War II. Little Grey Lies is a war novel ...
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Latest Review: "Little Grey Lies" by Hédi Kaddour
The latest addition to our Reviews section is a piece by P. T. Smith on Little Grey Lies by Hédi Kaddour, translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan, and published by Seagull Books. Here’s the beginning of Patrick’s review: In the London of Hédi Kaddour’s Little Grey Lies, translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan, ...
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Work for the NEA! [The NEA Rocks, Part III]
In a different time in my life, I would’ve jumped on the chance to apply for this job at the NEA: As the Grants Management Specialist (Literature), you will be responsible for the following tasks: Review, organize, and process organizational grant applications from the Literature field, and follow these ...
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"The Art of Empathy: Celebrating Literature in Translation" [The NEA Rocks, Part II]
Also announced today is the NEA’s publication of The Art of Empathy: Celebrating Literature in Translation, a free book comprised of nineteen pieces on translation from a host of translators, publishers, advocates, professors, and readers. Here’s a bit about the collection from NEA Director of Literature, Amy ...
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2015 Literature Translation Fellows [The NEA Rocks, Part I]
Bunch of interesting stuff from the National Endowment for the Arts today, starting with the announcement of the FY 2015 NEA Literature Translation Fellowship Recipients. You can read the whole announcement and descriptions of all the projects here, but below is the list of the winners and a few projects that caught my ...
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A 14-Hour Zen Koan Shoved Though My Soul [Some August Translations]
Another month, another preview that’s late. This month caught me a bit by surprise though—how is it possible that the new academic year starts in three weeks? It just doesn’t seem right. So in the spirit of “How I Spent My Summer Vacation” essays, I thought I’d kick off this ...
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Buenos Aires Review #2
The new issue of the Buenos Aires Review is now online, and features the following: BAR#2 features new fiction by Liliana Colanzi (Bolivia) and Thibault de Montaigu (France), as well as poetry by PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award-winning Ishion Hutchinson (Jamaica). Reviews and essays by Sam Rutter, Ernesto Hernández Busto and ...
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Translation Loaf
The Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference (which should’ve been named “Translation Loaf”) is a great new initiative that was conceived of and implemented by Jennifer Grotz, poet, translator, assistant director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Open Letter’s poetry editor, and one that ...
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A Few Good Reviews
Over the past few days, a few great reviews for Open Letter authors popped up online, all of which are worth sharing and reading. First up is P.T. Smith’s review for Full Stop of Sölvi Björn Sigurðsson’s The Last Days of My Mother, translated from the Icelandic by Helga Soffía Einarsdóttir: As a ...
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Autobiography of a Corpse
One of the greatest services—or disservices, depending on your viewpoint—Bertrand Russell ever performed for popular philosophy was humanizing its biggest thinkers in his History. No longer were they Platonic ideals, the clean-shaven exemplars of the kind of homely truisms that might’ve been found in commonplace books: ...
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Latest Review: "Autobiography of a Corpse" by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky
The latest addition to our Reviews section is a piece by Simon Collinson on Autobiography of a Corpse by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, translated by Joanne Turnbull and Nikolai Formozov), and published by New York Review Books. Simon is a bookseller and freelance reviewer based in Adelaide, Australia, and has written reviews ...
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On Repackaging Italo Calvino's Oeuvre
Over at the New Yorker, there’s a really interesting interview with cover designer Peter Mendelsund, whose new book, What We See When We Read, sounds amazing: A gorgeously unique, fully illustrated exploration into the phenomenology of reading—how we visualize images from reading works of literature, from one of ...
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A Musical Hell
The best way to review Alejandra Pizarnik’s slim collection, A Musical Hell, published by New Directions as part of their Poetry Pamphlet series, is to begin by stating that it is poetry with a capital P: serious, dense, and, some might say, difficult. Take from that what you will, but I’m going to follow an idea from ...
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Three Percent #80: My Struggle's DNA Is 92% Introspective
This week’s podcast focuses on two main things: This article by Tim Parks about the sales of Knausgaard’s books, and the sale of BookLamp to Apple for an obscene amount of money. This week’s music is MTLOV from the new A Sunny Day in Glasgow album. ...
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Amazon on Hachette Controvery and Pricing
A lot of people are going to have a lot to say about this, but for anyone interested in the inner workings of publishing, ebooks, and pricing, it’s worth checking out this open letter from Amazon about their ongoing dispute with Hachette. Just to recap: Hachette and Amazon are currently negotiating over terms, a ...
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Elvio Gandolfo's "The Moment of Impact" at Ninth Letter
In a few weeks, we’ll be releasing A Thousand Forests in One Acorn, one of the most impressive—and beautiful—books that we’ve ever published. It’s a 715-page beast that was put together by Valerie Miles (one of the people behind Granta’s “Best of Young Spanish-language ...
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Astragal
Upon completing Albertine Sarrazin’s Astragal I was left to wonder why it ever fell from print. Aside from the location, Astragal could pass as the great American novel. Its edginess and rawness capture the angst and desires we all had in our 20s, while still bearing a literary feel that is more thought provoking than The ...
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Latest Review: "Astragal" by Albertine Sarrazin
The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Tiffany Nichols on Astragal by Albertine Sarrazin, translated by Patsy Southgate, published by New Directions. There’s some kind of summer flu-plague bug going around at the office here, so we’re short on humor and personal anecdotes. Also, Rochester is a city of ...
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Live Bait
When my eyes first crossed the back cover of Fabio Genovesi’s novel Live Bait, I was caught by a blurb nestled between accolades, a few words from a reviewer for La Repubblica stating that the novel was, however magically, “[b]eyond any cliché.” Generally, I’m a suspicious reader; big claims scare me off. Having ...
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July Newsletter (With Special Subscription Offer!)
If you don’t already subscribe to our (sporadic, but in good times, bi-weekly) newsletter, you can do so by clicking here. And if you missed the one that went out earlier this week, you can see the prettified version here, or just read it all below. The Last Days of My Mother “Pick of the Week” in Publishers ...
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Translation, A Reciprocal Process [Interview with Kareem James Abu-Zeid on "Nothing More to Lose" by Najwan Darwish]
It’s always interesting to read a translator’s commentary on his or her translation process. For me personally, hearing how other translators think and work only adds to my personal work and experience, alternately showing me approaches or tactics that don’t work for me and showing me approaches and tactics ...
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The Skin
“I preferred the war to the plague,” writes Curzio Malaparte in his 1949 novel, The Skin. He speaks of World War II and the destruction it has wrought on Italy, the city of Naples in particular. But the plague he refers to is elusive. “It was a kind of moral plague, against which it seemed that there was no ...
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Latest Review: "The Skin" by Curzio Malaparte
The latest addition to our Reviews section is a piece by Peter Biello on The Skin by Curzio Malaparte, translated by David Moore and out last year from New York Review Books. If you’re looking for some post-WWII-themed, summer reading with disturbing imagery that would blow Jane Yolen and her time-traveling YA hit out ...
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Le Translation Preview [Some July Translations]
Now that the World Cup of Literature is officially over, with Roberto Bolaño’s By Night in Chile taking home the prize, it’s time to get back to writing normal blog posts, starting with this much overdue “preview” of forthcoming July translations. My initial plan with this post was to write it ...
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Conversations
In Conversations, we find ourselves again in the protagonist’s conscious and subconscious, which is mostly likely that of Mr. César Aira and consistent with prototypical Aira style. This style never fails because each time Aira is able to develop a uniquely bogus set of facts that feels as realistic as waking up each ...
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Latest Review: "Conversations" by César Aira
The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Tiffany Nichols on César Aira’s Conversations, translated by Katherine Silver and out from New Directions. After a wild World Cup of Literature ride, what better way to wind down or frustrations or victorious cries than to talk about them (or bite each other over ...
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Chile vs. Mexico [World Cup of Literature: CHAMPIONSHIP]
Our thirty-first match of the first ever World Cup of Literature features two amazing books written in Spanish: one by a revered, now dead author, the other by a young upstart; one by a man, one by a woman; one from Chile, the other from Mexico; one focused on a singular narrative voice, the other featuring a few ...
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Mexico vs. USA [World Cup of Literature: Semifinals]
Yesterday’s semifinal—which saw Roberto Bolaño secure a place in the WCL Championship with By Night in Chile —is a tough one to top, but I think we did it. Today’s match features upstart Valeria Luiselli from Mexico, whose first novel, Faces in the Crowd, is up against David Foster Wallace and his ...
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Chile vs. Germany [World Cup of Literature: Semifinals]
After 28 matches we’ve finally made it to the World Cup of Literature semifinals, and are only a few days away from crowning the first ever WCL Champion. (If only we had a giant papier-mâché trophy for the winner . . .) Before that though, we have two semifinal matches that are as intriguing as anything to date, ...
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Three Percent #79: Barely Surpassing Lorem Ipsum
On this week’s podcast, Chad and Tom preview the semifinals of the World Cup of Literature (both suspect Chile will meet the US in the Championship), and then discuss The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair and this New Yorker piece about its limited U.S. success. Also, the Penguin Cup is stupid. In relation to the ...
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All Set for the Semifinals [World Cup of Literature]
And with Germany’s defeat of BiH the semifinals for the World Cup of Literature are all set. You can download a PDF version here. Here’s a bit of a breakdown on these two match ups: Chile By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolaño, translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews Originally published in ...
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Bosnia vs. Germany [World Cup of Literature: Quarterfinals]
In the last of the four quarterfinal match ups, BiH, represented by Saša Stanišić’s How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, goes up against one of the World Cup of Literature favorites, Germany and W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz. Stanišic made it here first by bribing a judge and beating Iran’s ...
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France vs. USA [World Cup of Literature: Quarterfinals]
After two exciting quarterfinal match ups yesterday—with Chile and Mexico moving on to the semifinals—we’re back today with two “impossible to call” matches. First up is Michel Houellebecq and the pride of France facing off against America’s David Foster Wallace as The Map and the ...
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Mexico vs. Uruguay [World Cup of Literature: Quarterfinals]
The second quarterfinal matchup today features Mexican author Valeria Luiselli’s Faces in the Crowd up against Uruguay stalwart Mario Benedetti and his The Rest Is Jungle. Luiselli got to this match by sliding past the Croatian representative Dubravka Ugresic and her Baba Yaga Laid an Egg 3-2 and then running ...
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USA vs. Belgium [World Cup of Literature: Second Round]
This match was judged by Lori Feathers. For more info on the World Cup of Literature, read this, and download the updated bracket. Conventional wisdom pronounced that Team USA would face a quick death in this year’s World Cup: drawing into the “group of death”; no superstar players; Coach Klinsmann’s ...
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Argentina vs. France [World Cup of Literature: Second Round]
This match was judged by Tom Roberge. For more info on the World Cup of Literature, read this, and download the updated bracket. I genuinely love the World Cup. And yet every four years I’m reminded why I haven’t picked an English Premier League team to support, why in the end I’m glad it’s over, why I have no ...
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Ivory Coast vs. Uruguay [World Cup of Literature: Second Round]
This match was judged by Elianna Kan. For more info on the World Cup of Literature, read this, and download the updated bracket. Costa Rica. Colombia. Ecuador. Greece. These teams have amazed us in this year’s World Cup for having made it as far as they have. They’re teams that have played consistently well over ...
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Mexico vs. Australia [World Cup of Literature: Second Round]
This match was judged by Chad W. Post. For more info on the World Cup of Literature, read this, and download the updated bracket. First off, let it be said that Barley Patch doesn’t even deserve to be playing in this match. Sure, Mauro had his reasons for choosing Gerald Murnane’s self-conscious masterpiece over ...
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Germany vs. Algeria [World Cup of Literature: Second Round]
This match was judged by Florian Duijsens. For more info on the World Cup of Literature, read this, and download the updated bracket. To pitch anyone against W. G. Sebald is a cruel exercise, even within the high-stakes tournament that is the World Cup of Literature. More so even than Bolaño, whose fame in the ...
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Honduras vs. Bosnia & Herzegovina [World Cup of Literature: Second Round]
This match was judged by Stephen Sparks. For more info on the World Cup of Literature, read this, and download the updated bracket. The battle between Honduras and Bosnia and Herzegovina is a contrast in style. This is obvious as the two teams line up for pre-match ceremonies: on one side, Horacio Castellanos Moya’s ...
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Japan vs. Italy [World Cup of Literature: Second Round]
This match was judged by Rhea Lyons. For more info on the World Cup of Literature, read this, and download the updated bracket. One of the first games of the second round finds Elena Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment pitted against the Japanese juggernaut 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami. Ferrante’s Days of ...
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Brazil vs. Chile [World Cup of Literature: Second Round]
This match was judged by Jeff Waxman. For more info on the World Cup of Literature, read this, and download the updated bracket. It’s hard watching the first round, shoulder to shoulder with other sweating fans at wobbling tables that would sacrifice the first inch of your beer if you ever set it down. It’s ...
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First Round Complete! [World Cup of Literature]
The first round of the inaugural World Cup of Literature is complete! Over the past two weeks, we’ve seen sixteen books eliminated from the competition for a variety of reasons. (Click here to read all of the pieces from the first round.) The second round starts—and finishes—next week, so for those of you ...
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Germany vs. Ghana [World Cup of Literature: First Round]
This match was judged by James Crossley. For more info on the World Cup of Literature, read this, and download the bracket. It’s an alliterative pair of nations facing off in the final match of the first round, as Ghana takes on Germany. On grass this is a bit of a mismatch, with the European squad ranked second in ...
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Uruguay vs. Costa Rica [World Cup of Literature: First Round]
This match was judged by Kaija Straumanis. For more info on the World Cup of Literature, read this, and download the bracket. One of my personal concerns going into the World Cup of Literature was ending up with a book I had already read—something that quickly became not an issue at all, since out of the 32 ...
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Latest Review: "The Pendragon Legend" by Antal Szerb
The latest addition to our Reviews section is by P.T. Smith on The Pendragon Legend by Antal Szerb, translated by Len Rix, and published by Pushkin Press. If there’s one thing you should know immediately about Pushkin Press, it’s that their latest Pushkin Series covers are some of the coolest things I’ve ...
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The Pendragon Legend
Literature in translation often comes with a certain pedigree. In this little corner of the world, with so few books making it into this comforting nook, it is often those of the highest quality that cross through, and attention is paid to these books. Put out by presses more focused on quality than profit, it is a definition ...
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Belgium vs. South Korea [World Cup of Literature: First Round]
This match was judged by Scott Esposito. For more info on the World Cup of Literature, read this, and download the bracket. Everybody knows you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover, and I’m trying damn hard to resist doing just that, but the fact remains that the cover of the St. Martin’s edition of The ...
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Bosnia & Herzegovina vs. Iran [World Cup of Literature: First Round]
This match was judged by Hal Hlavinka. For more info on the World Cup of Literature, read this, and download the bracket. “Welcome on this glorious summer evening to another match in the 2014 World Cup of Literature! We’re here in beautiful Brazil, where Bosnia and Herzegovina faces off against Iran. I’m Chaz ...
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Mr. Gwyn
Alessandro Baricco’s Mr. Gwyn is a set of two loosely interlinked novellas that play with narrative and the construction of character. Ably translated by Ann Goldstein, Mr. Gwyn plays some subtle metafictional games as Baricco delves into what it means not just to write, but to create representations of ourselves. Is ...
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Latest Review: "Mr. Gwyn" by Alessandro Baricco
The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Paul Doyle on Mr. Gwyn, translated by Ann Goldstein, out next month from McSweeny’s. Paul Doyle is a writer, teacher, and web developer based in Seattle. In addition to writing reviews for Three Percent, he also writes about literature and film—especially Spanish and ...
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Chile vs. Netherlands [World Cup of Literature: First Round]
This match was judged by Shaun Randol. For more info on the World Cup of Literature, read this, and download the bracket. The record for the fastest goal ever scored in a World Cup match belongs to Hakan Sukur of Turkey. Eleven seconds into the 2002 match against South Korea, Sukur capitalized on a mistake in the ...
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Three Percent #78: "I Believe in Guns and Weed"
On this week’s podcast, Chad and Tom review the opening round of the World Cup of Literature and make some predictions, talk about the Amazon-Hachette kerfuffle, and discuss the awfulness of The American Outlaws and the awesomeness of a couple Wikipedia pages. (You have to listen to find out which ones.) Because it ...
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Portugal vs. USA [World Cup of Literature: First Round]
This match was judged by Will Evans. For more info on the World Cup of Literature, read this, and download the bracket. The result came to me as a shock, more of a shock to me even than to you: the US pulled out a 3-2 stunner of a victory over Portugal in the 2014 World Cup of Literature: David Foster Wallace’s final, ...
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Mexico vs. Croatia [World Cup of Literature: First Round]
This match was judged by Katrine Øgaard Jensen. For more info on the World Cup of Literature, read this, and download the bracket. Mexico vs. Croatia A few years back, during a drunken Christmas party at a Danish newspaper, I asked a colleague how she developed her opinions as a movie critic. She did not have an ...
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Bombay Stories
I must admit upfront that I went into reading Saadat Hasan Manto’s Bombay Stories almost entirely blind. I have not read Salman Rushdie. I have read, perhaps, two short stories by Jhumpa Lahiri. I might shamefully add that I really only remember the barest details of Gandhi’s life and deeds. I can say, in the ...
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Latest Review: "Bombay Stories" by Saadat Hasan Manto
The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Will Eells on Bombay Stories, translated by Matt Reeck and Aftab Ahmad, and out from Vintage International. For those of you who are regulars, you may remember Will’s name—he’s a former student of Chad’s at the University of Rochester, budding translator ...
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Argentina vs. Nigeria [World Cup of Literature: First Round]
This match was judged by Lance Edmonds. For more info on the World Cup of Literature, read this, and download the bracket. This is where it ends: 1-0 because in the end Argentina scores and Nigeria plays very very well. That one doesn’t work. It happens like this: I find myself underlining and rereading and ...
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Switzerland vs. Honduras [World Cup of Literature: First Round]
This match was judged by Hannah Chute. For more info on the World Cup of Literature, read this, and download the bracket. I hear that soccer/football fans are pretty excited about Switzerland these days. (Sorry everyone, I haven’t been keeping up with the world of FIFA.) In a literary match-up against Honduras, though, ...
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Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize Winner Announced
The winner of the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize 2014 is Susan Wicks for her translation of Valérie Rouzeau’s Talking Vrouz (Arc publications). From the judges: “Talking Vrouz is a wonderfully inventive and yet faithful translation of poems which are already at an oblique angle to their own language ...
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Spain vs. Australia [World Cup of Literature: First Round]
This match was judged by Mauro Javier Cardenas. For more info on the World Cup of Literature, read this, and download the bracket. In the year 2010, seventeen years after I stopped watching soccer, I wrote a paean to Your Face Tomorrow, claiming that “here’s the wonderfully parenthetical operations of a human mind in ...
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Russia vs. Algeria [World Cup of Literature: First Round]
This match was judged by Chris Schaefer. For more info on the World Cup of Literature, read this, and download the bracket. This first-round match pits a futuristic fantasy of reborn Russian czardom against a present-day fantasy of repressed Algerian Islamism in Paris. Male author against female. Slav against Arab. ...
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England vs. Italy [World Cup of Literature: First Round]
This match was judged by Trevor Berrett. For more info on the World Cup of Literature, read this, and download the bracket. When we arrived at the stadium, there was a good vibe in the air. England fans were tentatively confident. After all, they have a mighty tradition, and the stars of their current team—Smith, ...
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Brazil vs. Cameroon [World Cup of Literature: First Round]
This match was judged by Jeffrey Zuckerman. For more info on the World Cup of Literature, read this, and download the bracket. The last time I watched a soccer game was in the last World Cup, in July of 2010. I had just graduated and moved off campus with my roommate from college. Down the block, a bar was packed with ...
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Latest Review: "The Gray Notebook" by Joseph Pla
The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Christopher Iacono on The Gray Notebook translated by Peter Bush, and out from New York Review Books. This is another 600+ page book that screams to be read—Pla’s tome describes life and observations in Barcelona, entries written by his twenty-year-old self in the ...
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The Gray Notebook
Throughout his work The Gray Notebook, Josep Pla mentions many different authors, some of whom have inspired him to pick up a pen. One of them is Marcel Proust. Even though Pla normally prefers nonfiction, he lauds the French novelist as “the greatest realist writer of all time.” Proust resolves the childish ...
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World Cup of Literature: The Books, The Judges, The Match Schedule
With the Real World Cup (RWC) kicking off Thursday afternoon, it’s time to announce the participants in this year’s World Cup of Literature (WCL). This post is pretty long, but is also packed with information: all 32 competing titles, the names of the 24 judges, a bit of info on the methodology, and the official ...
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Three Percent #77: Books to Read Between World Cup Matches [UPDATED]
In this week’s podcast we talk about the forthcoming World Cup of Literature and about some of the summer books that we’re both looking forward to reading. Almost all are translations; a few are authors you may have already heard of (Knausgaard); and others will be new to a lot of listeners. In our “Rants ...
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Baltic Adventures [Some June 2014 Translations]
June started a few days ago, which means that my rambling monthly overview of forthcoming translations is overdue. It also means that World Cup 2014 is about to start, which means that for the next month my brain will be as filled with soccer tactics and outcomes as literary ideas . . . But sticking with the now: For the ...
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Austrian Cultural Forum Relaunches Translation Prize
Earlier today amid the 2014 BEA fray, Deputy Director Christian J. Ebner of the Austrian Culture Fund of New York took the East Side/Translation Stage with translator Damion Searls to announce the grand relaunch of its Translation Prize, as well as a call for applications to the 2015 prize. Searls, who was the recipient of ...
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Latest Review: "I am the Beggar of the World: Landays from Contemporary Afghanistan"
The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Grant Barber on I am the Beggar of the World: Landays from Contemporary Afghanistan translated by Eliza Griswold, and out last month from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Because I don’t know much about the tradition of Afghan landays, though I do find it both fascinating ...
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2014 World Cup of Literature: The Details
A number of months ago, I alluded to the idea of having Three Percent host a “World Cup of Literature” pitting all of the World Cup qualifying countries (see below) against one another in a battle for world literature supremacy. (At least until the next World Cup.) Anyway, the time for that is now!, and so here ...
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Translation Database Update, Including 442 Titles Coming in 2014
Thanks to our new access to Edelweiss and Aaron Westerman’s incredibly valuable spreadsheet, I was finally able to update the 2014 Translation Database and post it online.. And unlike years past when the spring update has a couple hundred books and seems remarkably incomplete, I’ve already identified 442 works of ...
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2014 ALTA Travel Fellowships
If you’re an emerging literary translator and want to attend the 2014 American Literary Translators Association conference in Milwaukee but are short on cash, then you should definitely apply for this year’s travel fellowships. From the ALTA website: Each year, between four and six $1,000 fellowships are ...
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Latest Review: "The Guest Cat" by Takashi Hiraide
The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Robyn Kaufman on The Guest Cat by Takashi Hiraide, translated by Eric Selland, out earlier this year from New Directions. Robyn was one of Chad’s interns this past semester, and helped us out greatly in terms of proofing and editing texts, as well as evaluating ...
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Latest Review: "The Oasis of Now: Selected Poems" by Sohrab Sepehri
The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Heath Mayhew on The Oasis of Now: Selected Poems by Sohrab Sepehri, translated by Kazim Ali and Mohammad Jafar Mahallati, published by BOA Editions. Heath is not only a loyal Open Letter subscriber, but has also previously reviewed for Three Percent. And to tote Open Letter ...
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The Oasis of Now: Selected Poems
I have wanted to read Persian poetry ever since having heard so many good things about it from my Palestinian friend. Sohrab Sepehri’s collection, The Oasis of Now: Selected Poems, however, sounded quite new-agey—as if the poetry was canned lyricism awash in love, peace, and overly sensual descriptions of nature—and ...
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Three Percent #75: The Camel Jumping Podcast
As a bonus for dedicated Three Percent listeners (both of you!), this podcast features the two Fulbright students studying in the translation program this past year: Ayoub Al-Ahmadi from Yemen and Jan Pytalski from Poland. We talk about their individual projects—both of which are likely to be published by Open Letter in ...
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The Official Launch of Deep Vellum
Two summers ago, Will Evans (aka Bromance Will) came to Rochester for the summer to learn about how to launch his own press dedicated to international literature. Although he did help out at Open Letter by reading a bunch of manuscripts, editing High Tide, doing some marketing and publicity, and arranging a bunch of Frankfurt ...
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Retranslations in 2064 [Some May 2014 Translations]
Welcome back to my monthly ramble about forthcoming works of literature in translations, which, as always, is punctuated by jokes, rants, and whatever else comes to mind. Even more so than usual, I’m really excited about this month’s offerings—and I actually have some things to say about the books ...
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Shiki Nagaoka: A Nose for Fiction
“I am honored to have ushered Mario Bellatin’s biography of the great Shiki Nagaoka, a writer and artist almost entirely unknown to English-language readers, into English for the first time, and it is my hope that this new translation begins to redress his under-acknowledgement as a major influence on contemporary ...
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Latest Review: "Shiki Nagaoka: A Nose For Fiction" by Mario Bellatin
The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Christopher Iacono on Shiki Nagaoka: A Nose for Fiction by Mario Bellatin, translated by David Shook, and out from Phoneme Media. Most people can appreciate high-quality writing with a good (literary) prank, and most people can appreciate a finely cultivated mustache. And ...
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Masters and Servants
We have all observed and appreciated art. However, when we experience art, it is generally in a bubble of our own experiences and preferences. More often than not, we may know the artist only in name and that he or she is noteworthy leading to the required appreciation. It is rare that we have knowledge of how the ...
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Jason Grunebaum and Uday Prakash: A Bilingual Reading of Stories @ Northwestern University
Join the folk at Northwestern University for a bilingual reading of stories by eminent Hindi author Uday Prakash of his 2104 collection The Walls of Delhi (Seven Stories Press), translated by Jason Grunebaum. The reading will be followed by a discussion, moderated by Laura Brueck, engaging both author and translator in a ...
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2014 BTBA Fiction Winner: "Seiobo There Below" by László Krasznahorkai
As you already know, the winner of this year’s BTBA for fiction is Seiobo There Below by László Krasznahorkai, and translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet. Below is a short piece by the BTBA fiction jury explaining the reasons behind their selection and pointing out two runners-up. We are very pleased ...
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2014 BTBA Poetry Winner: "The Guest in the Wood" by Elisa Biagini
As you already know, the winner of this year’s BTBA for poetry is The Guest in the Wood by Elisa Biagnini, translated from the Italian by Diana Thow, Sarah Stickney, and Eugene Ostashevsky, and published by Chelsea Editions. Below is a statement from the judges about the collection, along with some notes about the two ...
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Towards the One & Only Metaphor
It is an unusual thing to see a press specifically focus on a single author, but that is what Contra Mundum Press has done with Hungarian author Miklós Szentkuthy, and if Towards the One & Only Metaphor is any basis to judge the rest of his work, the decision is one to be celebrated. Though one of those novels (this term ...
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"The Oasis of Now" by Sorab Sepehri [Why This Book Should Win]
We’re only hours away from announcing the two winners of this year’s BTBA awards, but it’s never too late to promote one of the finalists. The piece below was written by BTBA poetry judge, Bill Martin. The Oasis of Now by Sorab Sepehri, translated from the Persian by Kazim Ali and Mohammad Jafar ...
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Nominations for the 2014 Ottaway Award for the Promotion of International Literature
The deadline to nominate people for this year’s Ottaway Award for the Promotion of International Literature (run by Words Without Borders) is coming up fast . . . If you want to nominate someone, you have to fill out the form below and email it to Karen Phillips (karen [at] wordswithoutborders.org) before Friday, May ...
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BTBA 2014 Celebrations: In Paris, In New York
Less than one week from today—at 2pm East Coast time on Monday, April 28th to be exact—we’ll be announcing the winners of this year’s Best Translated Book Award. Over the next few days, I’ll be posting write-ups on the Poetry Finalists, along with uninformed speculation and other fun and ...
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The Antiquarian
Gustavo Faverón Patriau’s The Antiquarian, translated by Joseph Mulligan, is a genre-blending novel, a complete immersion that delves into a lesser-used niche of genre: horror, gothic, the weird. There are visual horrors, psychological ones, and dark corners with threats lurking. When what hides in those corners is ...
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Latest Review: "The Antiquarian" by Gustavo Faverón Patriau
The latest addition to our Reviews section is by P.T. Smith on The Antiquarian by Gustavo Faverón Patriau, forthcoming from Black Cat/Grove Press in June of this year. All I can think about after reading this review is all the books that, to me, are scary enough that I get the thrill I want out of them—but aren’t ...
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Three Percent #73: The David Peace Episode
In this week’s podcast, Tom and Chad talk about the works of British writer David Peace. Peace was part of the 2003 version of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists (along with Toby Litt, Nicola Baker, David Mitchell, Adam Thirlwell—really solid list), and is the author of nine novels, including the ...
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Why This Book Should Win: The 10 Fiction Finalists
Now that the ten finalists for the 2014 BTBA in Fiction have been announced, it’s worth taking a look back at the reasons “why these books should win” according to the judges and other readers. Below is a list of all ten finalists, with links to their individual write ups along with a key quote from each. ...
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“Blinding” by Mircea Cărtărescu [Why This Book Should Win]
And here’s the final post in the “Why This Book Should Win” series for the 2014 BTBA fiction longlist. I’ll post a handy guide to all of these posts later this afternoon, but for now just enjoy Bromance Will (aka Will Evans, the founder and director of Deep Vellum) wax enthusiastic for his favorite book from the past ...
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Elsewhere
What a wonderful, idiosyncratic book Weinberger has written. I say book, but the closest comparison I could make to other works being published right now are from Sylph Edition’s “Cahiers Series“—short pamphlet-like meditations by notable writers such as Ann Carson, Elfriede Jelinek, and László Krasznahorkai ...
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"In the Night of Time" by Antonio Muñoz Molina [Why This Book Should Win]
Twenty-four hours from now the 2014 BTBA finalists will be announced—will In the Night of Time be on the list? Below are my reasons why it should be. In the Night of Time by Antonio Muñoz Molina, translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) In the Night of Time is a huge book. ...
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"The Whispering Muse" by Sjón [Why This Book Should Win]
We’re down to the last three longlisted titles, so we’re going to have to cram these in before Tuesday morning’s announcement of the fiction and poetry finalists. I’ll be writing the first two, Bromance Will will bring it home tomorrow evening. The Whispering Muse by Sjón, translated from the ...
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Textile by Orly Castel-Bloom, Trans. by Dalya Bilu – Why This Book Should Win
P.T. Smith is a writer and critic living in Vermont. He has written for Three Percent, BOMB, Quarterly Conversation, and most recently Bookslut. There are books on long lists that are obvious contenders—the long ones, the challengingly complex ones, the ones that have been talked about all year (here’s looking at you ...
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The Devil’s Workshop by Jáchym Topol trans. By Alex Zucker – Why This Book Should Win
Michael Stein is a writer and journalist in the Czech Republic and runs a blog on Central European writing called literalab. He is an editor at B O D Y. Reading The Devil’s Workshop you come up against a remarkable and frightening historical reality: that the memory of the mass killings of World War II is most flawed, ...
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The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly
Early in Sun-mi Hwang’s novel The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly, the main character, a hen named Sprout, learns about sacrifice. After refusing to lay any more eggs for the farmer who owns her, she becomes “culled” and released from her chicken coop. However, she soon discovers that her new freedom comes with a loss of ...
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Latest Review: "The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly" by Sun-mi Hwang
The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Chris Iacono on Sun-mi Hwang’s The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly, translated by Chi-Young Kim, and out last fall from Penguin. This is a review I’ve been sitting on a while and I apologize for that—but after a quick trip to NYC for a fantastic evening with Bulgarian ...
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City of Angels: Or, the Overcoat of Dr. Freud by Christa Wolf, Trans. by Damion Searls – Why This Book Should Win
Sarah Gerard’s novel Binary Star is forthcoming from Two Dollar Radio in January 2015. Her essay chapbook, Things I Told My Mother, was published by Von Zos this past fall. Other fiction, criticism and personal essays have appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, Bookforum, the Paris Review Daily, the Los ...
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An Evening of Bulgarian Fiction @ 192 Books
Join 192 Books Tuesday, April 8th at 7 P.M. with Kaija Straumanis, the Editorial Director of Open Letter Books, for a discussion about contemporary Bulgarian fiction with Virginia Zahrieva and Olga Nikolova. Two of Bulgaria’s most important and celebrated contemporary authors, Albena Stambolova (Everything Happens as It ...
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Sankya
When Sankya was published in Russia in 2006, it became a sensation. It won the Yasnaya Polyana Award (bestowed by direct descendants of Leo Tolstoy) and was shortlisted for the Russian Booker and the National Bestseller Award. Every member of the cultural elite had an opinion on it. There was even a hatchet job by the ...
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Bulgarian Literature Live! [All the Events, Part III]
And, following on the posts about Amanda Michalopoulou’s tour and the announcement of the Reading the World Conversation Series events, here are some details about a few upcoming Bulgarian literature events that might interest you. Bulgarian Fiction Night at 192 Books Tuesday, April 8th, 7pm Albena Stambolova ...
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Spring 2014 Reading the World Conversation Series [All the Events, Part II]
Following on the post about Amanda Michalopoulou’s upcoming events, here’s a list of all three Reading the World Conversation Series events taking place this month. Women in Translation Thursday, April 10th, 6pm Welles-Brown Room Rush Rhees Library University of Rochester Rochester, NY 14627 A ...
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Amanda Michalopoulou's Reading Tour [All the April Events, Part I]
Amanda Michalopoulou’s second novel to appear in English, the brilliantly titled Why I Killed My Best Friend, doesn’t officially come out until May 20th, but we released it a couple months early for her cross-country tour. The book details the lifelong ups-and-downs of two best friends who meet in grade ...
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How to Become a Pessimist [Some April 2014 Translations]
Every semester I tell my publishing students about the time I was walking around BEA with Jerome Kramer and he pointed out how the whole fair was “filled with failure.” Mostly I want to shock and break them—every good professor needs to upend his/her student’s expectations and their latent belief that ...
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A True Novel by Minae Mizumura, Trans. by Juliet Winters Carpenter -Why This Book Should Win
Ariel Starling is a writer and student of literature in Paris. Written largely as a story-within-a-story-within-a-story, the obvious image at hand for A True Novel’s structure is that of the Russian matryoshka doll. But perhaps a better metaphor would be an origami crane, for reasons as aesthetic as cultural. ...
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Stalin is Dead
Stalin is Dead by Rachel Shihor has been repeatedly described as kafkaesque, which strikes a chord in many individuals, causing them to run to the bookstore in the middle of the night to be consumed by surreal situations that no one really experiences in their day-to-day life. After reading Stalin is Dead, I was troubled by ...
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Paradises
Paradises by cult Argentinian author Iosi Havilio is the continuation of his earlier novel, Open Door, and tells the story of our narrator, a young, unnamed Argentinian woman. The very first sentence in Paradises echoes the opening of Camus’s The Outsider and prepares us for the struggles and alienation that are to ...
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A Showcase of Literary Translation
THIS IS NOT AN APRIL FOOL’S JOKE. If you’re in the greater Rochester area tonight, come on by to the University of Rochester Rush Rees Library at 5 P.M. in the Welles-Brown room for a literary translation death-match throwdown extravaganza! So not really that last bit, but come hear the 2013-2014 MA in ...
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The African Shore by Rodrigo Rey Rosa, Trans. by Jeffrey Gray – Why This Book Should Win
Christopher Schaefer’s reviews and interviews have appeared in World Literature Today and The Quarterly Conversation. He lives in Paris. Like many American readers, I stumbled upon Rodrigo Rey Rosa thanks to Bolaño. How could you not be willing to check out a previously unheard-of Guatemalan author after encountering ...
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The End of Love by Marcos Giralt Torrente, Trans. by Katherin Silver – Why This Book Should Win
This post is courtesy of BTBA judge, Scott Esposito. Scott Esposito blogs at Conversational Reading and you can find his tweets here. “The End of Love“: by Spanish author Marcos Giralt Torrente may not be the most gargantuan, epic, enormous, humungoid book on the BTBA longlist, but it may very well be the ...
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The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante, Trans. by Ann Goldstein – Why This Book Should Win
Monica Carter curates Salonica World Lit. She is a writer and reviewer. Her most recent critical piece appeared in World Literature Today (September 2013). She is also a reader for Tin House Magazine. There is something about Elena Ferrante as a writer that is difficult to ignore. She never misses a beat. Her novels, ...
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Contribute to the "Why This Book Should Win" Series
Hopefully you’ve been enjoying the “Why This Book Should Win the BTBA” series that’s been running the past few weeks. It’s a great way to find out about all twenty-five titles on the fiction longlist (and the poetry shortlist, when we get there), and gives each book a bit more exposure. We ...
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Her Not All Her by Elfriede Jelinek, Trans. by Damion Searls – Why This Book Should Win
B.A. Rice is a poet from Texas who lives in Los Angeles. The impossibilities of translation are seldom as overtly formalized as they are in Damion Searls’s version of Elfriede Jelinek’s 1998 play er nicht als her, and for good reason — the play is a monologue built from the sentences of two writers, Jelinek and ...
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Two Crocodiles
This pearl from New Directions contains one short story from Russian literary master Fyodor Dostoevsky (translated by Constance Garnett) and one short story from Uruguayan forefather of magical realism Felisberto Hernández (translated by Esther Allen). Both pieces are entitled “The Crocodile,” hence Two Crocodiles. The ...
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Red Grass by Boris Vian, Trans. by Paul Knobloch – Why This Book Should Win
Sarah Gerard’s novel Binary Star is forthcoming from Two Dollar Radio in January 2015. Her essay chapbook, Things I Told My Mother, was published by Von Zos this past fall. Other fiction, criticism and personal essays have appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, Bookforum, the Paris Review Daily, the Los ...
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Three Percent #72: We've Gone Madness—March Madness!
In this bonus mini-podcast, Chad and Tom talk about the NCAA tournament, making many definitely wrong predications in over-confident tones. Of course, depending on your level of knowledge of the NCAA tournament (pro wrestling, I think?), you may have to choose a more sarcastic interpretation of the word “bonus.” ...
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Navidad & Matanza
I’m talking about pathological individuals; six twisted people taking part in an unpredictable game. Carlos Labbé’s Navidad & Matanza is the story of two missing children and the journalist trying to find them. Actually. it’s the story of a group of scientists who are working on a top-secret project, and pass the ...
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Latest Review: "Navidad & Matanza" by Carlos Labbé
The latest addition to our Reviews section is a piece by J.T. Mahany on Navidad & Matanza by Carlos Labbé, translated by Will Vanderhyden, and out next month from Open Letter. Carlos Labbé was one of Granta’s The Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists, and has quickly become a Name to Know in the world ...
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Why This Book Should Win: Leg Over Leg Vol. 1, Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, translated by Humphrey Davies
Michael Orthofer runs the Complete Review – a book review site with a focus on international fiction – and its Literary Saloon weblog. Why should Humphrey Davies’ translation of Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq Leg Over Leg (Vol. 1) win this year’s Best Translated Book Award? Well, simply put: because it is ...
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BTBA 2014 Translators [Because We're Not *Always Forever* Treated Like Lepers]
All “translator recognition” issues and talk aside (as a translator myself, but also as someone working in publishing, I have my own particular set of views on how this issue should be approached), our friends over at Typographical Era have put together a five-part list highlighting (with photo proof) that the ...
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Zbinden's Progress
For Lukas Zbinden, walking is a way of life. At eighty-seven, he is still an avid walker and insists on going for walks outside as often as possible, rain or snow or shine. Now that he lives in an assisted living home, he needs to convince a caretaker to walk with him, and some are more willing than others. When we join him, ...
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Sleet By Stig Dagerman – Why This Book Should Win
Elizabeth Harris’s translations from Italian include Mario Rigoni Stern’s novel Giacomo’s Seasons (Autumn Hill Books) and Giulio Mozzi’s story collection, This Is the Garden (Open Letter Books). She has won a 2013 Translation Prize from the Italian Ministry of Foreign Culture (Rome) for Rigoni Stern’s Giacomo’s ...
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Three Percent #71: The 2014 Best Translated Book Awards Fiction Longlist
This week’s podcast is EPIC. With a minimum of digressions, we review every single book on the 2014 Best Translated Book Award Fiction Longlist, providing descriptions, some commentary on its chances of winning, other remarks about the titles we’ve read, etc. This may be a really long episode, but it’s also ...
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My Struggle: Book Two by Karl Ove Knausgaard – Why This Book Should Win
This post is courtesy of BTBA judge, Scott Esposito. Scott Esposito blogs at Conversational Reading and you can find his tweets here. I’ve read three volumes of My Struggle so far, and I’m almost certain that I like Vol 2 the best. I hate comparisons of My Struggle to Proust because they always end up being ...
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The Infatuations – Why This Book Should Win
This post is courtesy of Best Translated Book Award judge, the inimitable George Carroll. Not only is he one hell of a West Coast sales rep for publishing companies large and small, he has an inexhaustible knowledge of translated literature. The Infatuations by Javier Marias rolled into its publication date with more ...
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BTBA 2014 Fiction Longlist: It's Here!
The wait is over. Listed below are the twenty-five titles on this year’s Best Translated Book Award Fiction Longlist. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be highlighting each and every one of these as part of the annual “Why This Book Should Win the BTBA” series. It’s a fun way of learning about ...
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The AWP of Bubbles, Balloons, and Lonely Hipsters [Some March 2014 Translations]
Last weekend, over 14,000 writers, publishers, agents, translators, reviewers, professors, and readers swarmed the Washington State Convention Center in Seattle for the annual Associated Writing Programs conference—four days of heavy drinking, pot-chocolate (it’s legal in Washington!), endless craft panels, a ...
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BTBA 2014 Fiction Longlist: A Few Clues
Earlier this afternoon I received the longlist for the 2014 Best Translated Book Award for Fiction, and just had a chance to break it all down and come up with some interesting tidbits to fuel the speculation as to what made it and what got left off. Just a quick reminder: The full list will go live at exactly 10 am East ...
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BTBA 2014: Fiction Longlist Predictions!
At this moment in time, I have no idea what books are on the Best Translated Book Award longlist. The judges are still conferring—in fact, I’m not even certain that the list of 25 has been finalized . . . Which means that it’s a great time to start spreading rumors about what books are in and which are out. ...
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My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain
Though far from the most convincing reason to read literature in translation, one common side effect is learning of another culture, of its history. Within that, and a stronger motivation to read, is the discovery of stories not possible within your own culture, or that live in a certain parallel universe version of a ...
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Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2014: The Longlist
Next Tuesday we’ll be announcing the 25-title Best Translated Book Award longlist, which makes today’s announcement of the IFFP longlist even that more intriguing . . . Although there are different eligibility rules between the two prizes—and different books published in the UK vs. the U.S.—there often ...
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Finalists for Bookstore of the Year
I was probably asleep at the wheel in years past, but I think it’s really cool that Publishers Weekly announced the names of the five finalists for 2014 Bookstore of the Year. Here’s the list of the finalists with some commentary on why they should win: The Elliott Bay Book Company (Seattle, ...
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Beckett's Influence in Ethiopia?
So, my friend, writer, and fellow critic of this year’s Duke basketball team, Paul Maliszewski, emailed me this morning with a really intriguing story: Here’s an odd thing I overheard yesterday. I went to the rare reading (rare for me) by John Banville, and a woman in the audience asked this question, which was ...
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Stephen Sparks Goes Around the World with BTBA
Stephen Sparks is a buyer at Green Apple Books. He lives in San Francisco and blogs at Invisible Stories. Poorly detailed Google map With the longlist set to be announced in a matter of days—just this morning the judges received the (top secret!) results of our initial vote to narrow down all eligible books to a ...
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There Is Reading, and There Is Looking at Letters
One of CLMP head Jeffrey Lependorf’s favorite sayings is that publishing is getting books to readers, without that, you’re just printing. That’s not a perfect analogy for why “Spritz,” an app that’s going to be part of Samsung’s wearable technology, irks me, but it’s a good ...
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Public Letter from Several Russian-language Writers in Kharkov
This morning, after reading my post on Ukrainian literature, the translator/writer/editor Tanya Paperny passed along the following letter, which is signed by twenty-one Russian-language writers living in Kharkov, the second-largest city in Ukraine. I think it’s important that more people have a chance to read this, so ...
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Flowers & Mishima’s Illustrated Biography
Despite cries that literature is dead, dying, and self-replicating in the worst way, once in a while a book comes along to remind readers that there’s still a lot of surprise to be found on the printed page. To be sure, writers such as Cesar Aria and Medbh McGuckian are doing their part to keep literature interesting and ...
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Latest Review: "Flowers & Mishima’s Illustrated Biography" by Mario Bellatin
The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Vincent Francone on Flower & Mishima’s Illustrated Biography by Mario Bellatin, translated by Kolin Jordan, and out from 7Vientos. Since the site is about a week behind in posting reviews, I thought we’d start back in with a short and sweet one by Vince. We were ...
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Ukraine: Everybody's Business
One of the most common clichés about international literature in America states that we, as reader-citizens, only become interested in a country’s literature once we start bombing in. Go to war with Saddam Hussain; publish a ton of Arabic works. It’s sad that this might be true—it feels a bit ...
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Elizabeth Harris Tells Us Why Translation Makes All the Difference
Elizabeth Harris has translated fiction by Mario Rigoni Stern, Fabio Stassi, and Marco Candida, among others. Her translation of Giulio Mozzi’s story collection Questo è il giardino (This Is the Garden) will be published by Open Letter Books in 2014; the individual stories have appeared in The Literary Review, The Missouri ...
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Reading, "True Detective," and Twitter
The other day, a popular site on the Internet posted an article on True Detective and the various theories surrounding the show. I had a very bad reaction to this article, claiming on Twitter (the World’s Most Reliable Opinion Source!) that it was “anti-reading/anti-thought.” People got upset. Very upset. ...
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Three Percent #70: Bookworm, Amazon, and Iowa
As an interlude in our 2013 round-up series—the Nate & Tom Movie Podcast will be coming soon—Tom and I decided to talk about his recent trip to L.A., where he met with Michael Silverblatt of the amazing Bookworm, and about a couple of recent articles that have been making the rounds in social media and ...
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Michael Orthofer's Final Selections
Michael Orthofer runs the Complete Review – a book review site with a focus on international fiction – and its Literary Saloon weblog. Final selections The deadlines approach – well, that one first, big deadline: with the Best Translated Book Award longlist due to be announced March 11 we judges have to decide what ...
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"Why I Killed My Best Friend" by Amanda Michalopoulou [GoodReads Giveaway]
Our latest GoodReads Giveaway is for Amanda Michalopoulou’s Why I Killed My Best Friend, which may well win the prize for the best Open Letter title ever. And, along with Navidad & Matanza, it’s in the running for one of the best blurbs: “Flawlessly translated, Amanda Michalopolou’s WIKMBF uses ...
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Daniel Medin’s BTBA Favorites: Winter Reading
Daniel Medin teaches at the American University of Paris, where he helps direct the Center for Writers and Translators, is an editor of The Cahiers Series ,and co-hosts the podcast entitled That Other Word. He has authored a study of Franz Kafka in the work of three international writers (Northwestern University Press, 2010) ...
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To the Spring, by Night
“I was small. And my village was small, I came to know that in time. But when I was small it was big for me, so big that when I had to cross it from one end to the other, I was afraid. . . . Fears are a bit like fog, as are memories. On the one hand, one dreads to go forward and plunge into a future without end, and on the ...
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Reason #387 Why Publishing Is a Thankless, Frustrating Business
Last year we brought out Tirza by Arnon Grunberg, one of my favorite books of the past few years. (And a title that deserves to at least be shortlisted for this year’s BTBA . . .) At the time I talked to Arnon about doing two of his other books—The Man without Illness and The Asylum Seekers—since we all ...
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Ten White Geese
A few weeks after moving into a farm house in the Welsh countryside, Emilie, an expatriate from the Netherlands, starts to think about her uncle. This uncle tried to drown himself in a pond in front of the hotel where he worked. Even though he stuffed his pockets with heavy objects from the hotel, the pond was too shallow, ...
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Latest Review: "Ten White Geese" by Gerbrand Bakker
The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Christopher Iacono on Ten White Geese by Gerbrand Bakker, translated by David Colmer, and out from Penguin Books. Chris is a writer, copy editor, and proofreader from Methuen, MA; he also runs the Good Coffee Book Blog. Here’s an excerpt from his review: Before ...
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IPAF 2014 Shorlist
Following on last month’s announcement of the longlist for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, the six-title short list was revealed yesterday. This year’s six novels are wide-ranging in both subject matter and style. They include: a prison novel from Morocco; a story about one family’s dispersal around ...
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A Handbook for the Perfect Adventurer
Think back to the last adventure- or action-type book you read. Wasn’t it cool? Didn’t it make you want to do things, like learn to shoot a crossbow, hack complicated information systems, travel to strange worlds, take on knife-wielding thugs, or transport a secret package that turns out to be a member of a royal ...
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Latest Review: "A Handbook for the Perfect Adventurer" by Pierre Mac Orlan
The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Kaija Straumanis on A Handbook for the Perfect Adventurer by Pierre Mac Orlan, translated by Napoleon Jeffries, and out from Wakefield Press. Based on the above paragraph and all the awesome that it contains, this book really shouldn’t need much more introduction: ...
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Room 237 vs. "People Powered Publishing" [Some February Translations]
The other night I finally got around to watching Room 237, which, if you haven’t heard of it already, is a documentary about people obsessed with Kubrick’s The Shining and their various, often wacky, theories about what’s really going on in the movie. It’s absolutely fascinating, and not necessarily ...
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Shantytown
In Aira’s Shantytown, while we’re inside the characters’ heads for a good portion of the story, the voice we read on the page is really that of Aira himself, as he works out the plot of the book he’s writing. (Of course we are reading the words of Chris Andrews. This is his fifth Aira translation; he has perfected a ...
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2013 Albums I Like Listening To [Chad's Picks]
This is usually the section of my Music of the Past Year roundup post where I go on and on about how much easier it is to discover music than it is to discover books. Although I still feel the same way—right now I’m listening to the new El Ten Eleven EP thanks to an email from Spotify I received this morning; ...
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2013 Music! [Kaija's Picks]
Because we at Open Letter value deadlines and all things timely, I’m going to keep this short and sweet1 and over a month late to bring to you my ten Best Of 2013 album/song/music picks. As I mentioned on the podcast, I had a particularly hard time choosing 10 albums as a whole (which I cheat on anyway) because there ...
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2013 Albums That Are the Best in Their Own Ways [Nate's Picks]
Hey, there. We’ve done this annual music podcast thing for a few years now, so let’s be clear on what’s happening here, eh? I’m Nate—the man behind the podcasting curtain. If you’re a regular listener, you’ve almost certainly heard Chad and/or Tom refer to “Nate” on ...
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Three Percent #69: It's Still 2013 Somewhere
This week, we finally continue our series of podcasts summing up the books, music, and movies of 2013. Because summing up 2013 only gets old when we say it does! Anyway, the entire Open Letter office is featured on this podcast, with each of us sharing our favorite albums from last year. To make it easier for you to check ...
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The Mongolian Conspiracy
Noir is not an easy genre to define—or if it once was, that was a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away; as a quick guess, maybe Silver Lake, Los Angeles, 1935. When two books as different as Rafael Bernal’s The Mongolian Conspiracy (Mexico, 1969) and César Aira’s Shantytown (originally published in 2001 in ...
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Latest Review: "The Mongolian Conspiracy" by Rafael Bernal
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Owen Rowe on The Mongolian Conspiracy by Rafael Bernai, translated by Katherine Silver, and out from New Directions. Owen (Matt) Rowe is a writer, editor, and translator (from Portuguese and Italian) based in Port Townsend, Washington. Stay tuned for his upcoming ...
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Slim Little Stories
Sarah Gerard is a writer who used to work at McNally Jackson Books, but recently took a job at BOMB Magazine. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, Bookforum, the Paris Review Daily, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Slice Magazine, and other publications. Her new book, “Things I Told My ...
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The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra
Some time ago I read this phrase: “The page is the only place in the universe God left blank for me.” Pedro Mairal’s short novel The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra is more about these blank spaces than the usual full ones. It’s a novel where the things that are left out are just as important as the ...
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Latest Review: "The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra" by Pedro Mairal
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Katherine Rucker on The Missing Years of Juan Salvatierra by Pedro Mairal, translated by Nick Caistor, from New Vessel Press. Katherine is another of the students in the University of Rochester’s MA in Literary Translation Studies program, whose name you may ...
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Sticking with the Italian Theme . . .
We’ve published two Italian books at Open Letter—Aracoeli by Elsa Morante, translated by William Weaver, and more recently, This Is the Garden by Giulio Mozzi, translated by Elizabeth Harris. Since we’ve already posted about Weaver today, it only seems appropriate that we should write up this interview ...
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Antony Shugaar on William Weaver and Translation in General
Using William Weaver’s passing as a launching point, Italian translator Antony Shugaar wrote a really informative, interesting op-ed on translation issues for Monday’s New York Times. There are a lot of great bits I could quote—like the description of FMR magazine, its espresso and prosciutto orders, the ...
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Talking to Ourselves
If you somehow managed to overlook the 2012 translation of Andrés Neuman’s breathtaking Traveler of the Century (and woe betide all whom continue to do so), you now have two exceptional works of fiction from the young Argentine virtuoso demanding your immediate attention. Accolades aplenty have been piling up for ...
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Win a Copy of "Navidad & Matanza" by Carlos Labbé [GoodReads Giveaway]
Copies of Navidad & Matanza arrived in the office on Friday, so we’re finally able to give away 20 copies via GoodReads. All the information about the contest is below, but first, a bit about about the book itself, starting with the greatest blurb we’ve ever included on the front of one of our ...
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Updated 2013 Translation Database: The First Year to Break 500!
At long last, I just posted an updated 2013 Translation Database, and following the trend of recent years, the number of books has increased—significantly. In fact, this is the first year since we started tracking the publication of never-before translated works of fiction and poetry that we surpassed 500 total books ...
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Relocations: 3 Contemporary Russian Women Poets
Two women dominate the history of Russian poetry: Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva. Both authors transcended the label of “woman poet” and live in the realm of the eternal untouchable legends of Russian poetry. To wit, I remember a Russian professor in college correcting a short essay I wrote on an Akhmatova poem ...
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Why Tech People Make Me Howl and Scream and Laugh
It’s no secret that I’m very anti-techtopian people. Anyone talking about Google Glass and how it’ll “solve all publishing problems ever!” is someone I want to run away from. All the industry focus on new “apps” that will “revamp and disrupt the creation, distribution, and ...
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Passionate Nomads
Passionate Nomads, by Argentinian writer María Rosa Lojo, comes to us from Aliform Publishing in a riveting translation from its Spanish original by Brett Alan Sanders. And before I get into the book’s details, allow me to first make a quick and rather bold statement: if these roughly 250 pages of prose lack anything, ...
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Latest Review: "Passionate Nomads" by María Rosa Lojo
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is by Jan Pytalski on María Rosa Lojo’s Passionate Nomads, translated by Brett Alan Sanders, published by Aliform Publishing. Jan (a.k.a. Janek) is a current student in the MA in Literary Translation Studies at the University of Rochester, and hails from Great Poland (where ...
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Down the Home Stretch
This post is courtesy of BTBA judge, Scott Esposito. Scott Esposito blogs at Conversational Reading and you can find his tweets here. We are just about done reading for the longlist of the Best Translated Book Award. Here are a few last books that I haven’t read yet but will be considering very closely as we come on ...
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American Literature Is "Massively Overrated" [How to Turn a Positive Article into a Rant]
This morning, the Guardian: ran an interesting piece recapping a session on the “global novel” at the Jaipur Festival—a session that got a bit heated when Xiaolu Guo called out, well, contemporary American writing1: “Our reading habit has been stolen and changed” said Guo. “For example ...
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All My Friends
For my first review for Open Letter Books, I was delighted to discover in my letterbox in the French Pyrenees a copy of Marie NDiaye’s All My Friends. Tearing open the package, I savored the look and feel of the jacket covers, as is my habit prior to dipping into a book. It was smooth, rich and velvety to the touch, black ...
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Latest Review: "All My Friends" by Marie NDiaye
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is by Andrea Reece on Marie NDiaye’s All My Friends, translated by Jordan Stump and out from Two Lines Press. Andrea has worked as a professional translator for many years and recently completed an MA in literary translation at the University of Exeter. Here’s a part of ...
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Desperately Seeking Non-Argentine Spanish Literature
This is a special post from Katherine Rucker, a MALTS student here at the University of Rochester who is doing an independent study with me on Latin American literature. As you’ll see below, she’s planning on doing sample translations—and reader’s reports—from a bunch of underrepresented Spanish ...
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The Black Spider
In The Black Spider (Die schwarze Spinne —here newly translated by Susan Bernofsky), Jeremias Gotthelf—the pseudonym of Swiss pastor Albert Bitzius—spins a morality tale of evil in a Swiss hamlet. Originally published in 1842, The Black Spider illustrates with terrifying vividness a village tormented by deadly spiders ...
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Latest Review: "The Black Spider" by Jeremias Gotthelf
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is SUPER EFFING CREEPY, and is by Phillip Koyoumjian on Jeremias Gotthelf’s The Black Spider, newly translated by Susan Bernofsky, who god only knows how didn’t need therapy after translating this, and out from New York Review Books, who will be responsible for my ...
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Obituary: Juan Gelman, 83
It’s always sad to find out that one of your authors has passed away, especially someone as nice as Juan Gelman. As Kaija pointed out upon hearing about his death, the one really great thing is that he was able to finally—after post office issues, bad addresses, and a host of other nineteenth century ...
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Tom's Anti-List Rant
This is Tom Roberge’s contribution to our “Best Books of 2013” podcast. As you can see below, he’s calling bullshit on this whole “best books” thing. Do we mind if I rant a bit? About lists and “Best of” things? I have a theory about “best of” lists, especially for things like ...
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Three Percent #68: A Few Good Books from 2013
Rather than do our normal “favorite books of XXXX” podcast, we decided to focus on four books from last year that we really liked: Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge, Javier Marias’s The Infatuations, Keith Ridgway’s Hawthorn & Child, and Arnon Grunberg’s Tirza. (Chad also snuck in a ...
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Chad's 2013 Books
As I mentioned in an earlier post—or two—I ended up reading 111 books last year. A lot of South Korean titles—as part of my judging their biannual translation contest—and a random assortment of other things, both that Open Letter is publishing, or that I wanted to review/think might be BTBA longlist ...
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Fucking BTBA!
This week’s BTBA post is written by George Carroll, a publishers representative based in Seattle who blogs at North-North-West. He is also the soccer editor for Shelf Awareness and he and Chad frequently spent part of the weekend texting about EPL match-ups and Manchester Fucking United. He’s also helping to organize ...
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On Leave
In 1957, Daniel Anselme published On Leave, a novel about three soldiers on leave from the Algerian War. At that point during the war, only two of its eight years had passed and the full savagery and politically instability that would mark latter years of the conflict had yet to occur. Yet despite the national trauma of the ...
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Latest Review: "On Leave" by Daniel Anselme
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is by Paul Doyle on Daniel Anselme’s On Leave, translated by David Bellos, from Faber & Faber. Here’s the beginning of Paul’s review: In 1957, Daniel Anselme published On Leave, a novel about three soldiers on leave from the Algerian War. At that point ...
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Inga Ābele in World Literature Today
The new issue of World Literature Today is now available, and filled with great stuff (an interview with Anne Carson, feature on Naomi Shihab Nye, profile of 2014 Neustadt International Prize for Literature winner Mia Couto, a feature on Arabic books for teens), but in addition to the magazine, WLT has an outstanding blog and ...
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What Is a Zola?
I’m not entirely sure what a Zola is—an ebook only store! a social network for readers! a discovery engine! something made in Manhattan!—but apparently it’s important enough to acquire (and thankfully dismantle) Bookish. From Publishers Weekly: Bookish, the struggling social network funded by ...
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The Snow Day Edition [Some January Translations]
Along with about, well, everyone else in the northeast, I’m snowed into my apartment today, so instead of answering the phones at Open Letter (HA! no one ever calls us), I’m at home, working on our forthcoming anthology of Spanish literature, A Thousand Forests in One Acorn, and, as a break of sorts, I thought ...
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Latest Review: "The Faint-hearted Bolshevik" by Lorenzo Silva
Because we love books and love to talk about them SO MUCH (and because we fell behind a bit over the holidays AND because we’re all snowed in today after last nights semi-blizzard), here’s another review for all y’all before the weekend hits. This latest addition to our “Reviews”: section in a ...
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The Faint-hearted Bolshevik
Let’s say you’re in a car accident. It’s not a bad one. You rear-end someone on a busy highway where traffic is crawling. And let’s say the person you hit happens to be a wealthy woman who leaps from her vehicle and berates you in language unfit for the ears of small children. What would you do? Javier, the supposed ...
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The Expedition to the Baobab Tree
In the beginning of The Expedition to the Baobab Tree by Afrikaans author Wilma Stockenström, the narrator, a former slave, walks on the path from the hollow trunk of the baobab tree in which she dwells to a water source that she shares with animals. As she collects her water using two “gifts” (a clay pot and an ostrich ...
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Latest Review: "The Expedition to the Baobab Tree" by Wilma Stockenström
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is by Christopher Iacono on Wilma Stockenström’s The Expedition to the Baobab Tree, forthcoming in April from Archipelago Books. Chris is a writer, copy editor, and proofreader from Methuen, MA; he also runs the Good Coffee Book Blog, and has a new coffee mug that aptly ...
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The Hare
“I should say at the outset that there is a lot of absurdity in the whole thing.” As the shaman Mallén prepares to explain to Clarke the legend of the Legibrerian hare, I can’t help but read “the whole thing” as not simply the legend, but indeed the entire novel. At nearly 300 pages, The Hare is a great deal ...
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Latest Review: "The Hare" by César Aira
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is by Emily Davis on César Aira’s The Hare, from New Directions. Emily is a graduate of the University of Rochester’s MA in Literary Translation Studies program, and now lives in India, rubbing elbows with other awesome translators, and is also one of the contributing ...
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Dutch Treats
Michael Orthofer runs the Complete Review – a book review site with a focus on international fiction – and its Literary Saloon weblog. One of the many interesting things about judging the Best Translated Book Award is the sense it gives you of what (and how much) is actually being translated into English (and ...
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Daniel Medin’s BTBA favorites: Autumn reading
Daniel Medin teaches at the American University of Paris, where he helps direct the Center for Writers and Translators, is an editor of The Cahiers Series ,and co-hosts the podcast entitled That Other Word. He has authored a study of Franz Kafka in the work of three international writers (Northwestern University Press, 2010) ...
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Three Percent #67: The Tom Podcast
From the choice of the opening song—“Royals” by Lorde—to the main topic of great midwestern bookstores and Wisconsin’s beer culture, this podcast is All About Tom. And it’s fantastic. Mostly because we get to talk about a lot of great bookstores. Some of the stores mentioned in this ...
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The Bridge of Beyond
“A man’s country may be cramped or vast according to the size of his heart. I’ve never found my country too small, though that isn’t to say my heart is great. And if I could choose it’s here in Guadeloupe that I’d be born again, suffer and die. Yet not long back my ancestors were slaves on this volcanic, ...
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Why Literature in Translation is SUPER SUPER IMPORTANT
Most everyone who reads this blog has a good grasp on the importance of literature in translation. You learn about other cultures, their writing styles, what drives them spiritually and politically, what kinds of house pets they may or may not eat or wear occasionally as clothing, how they really feel about things like ...
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Pixy Stick Infused Candy Canes [Some December Translations]
So, my 9-year-old daughter recently moved to a new school—one that encourages its students to participate in something called Odyssey of the Mind. If you’re not familiar with this, which I totally wasn’t, it’s basically a competition in which teams perform different tasks that highlight ...
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The Big Books of the BTBA
This post is courtesy of BTBA judge, Scott Esposito. Scott Esposito blogs at Conversational Reading and you can find his tweets here. I like the fact that the BTBA has a strong track record for picking not only the massive, monumental doorstoppers that tend to garner the lion’s share of award attention but also the slim, ...
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Words Without Borders: The Oulipo Issue
Aside from every stupid Buzzfeed list ever, the number one link I’ve seen on my social media networks over the past few days has been to the new Words Without Borders issue. On the one hand, this is a testament to the amazingness of WWB; on the other, it illustrates that the vast majority of my friends are book nerds ...
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Paul Klee's Boat
Paul Klee’s Boat, Anzhelina Polonskaya’s newest bilingual collection of poems available in English, is an emotional journey through the bleakest seasons of the human soul, translated with great nuance by Andrew Wachtel. A former professional ice dancer(!), Polonskaya left the world of dancing and moved back home to the ...
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Latest Review: "Paul Klee's Boat" by Anzhelina Polonskaya
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Will Evans on Anzhelina Polonskaya’s Paul Klee’s Boat, Zephyr Press. Formerly an Open Letter apprentice and now his Own Man, Will is the mustache director behind Deep Vellum Publishing, a soon-to-be year-old literature in translation house based in Dallas ...
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Four Titles from the Big Stacks
Sarah Gerard is a writer who used to work at McNally Jackson Books, but recently took a job at BOMB Magazine. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, Bookforum, the Paris Review Daily, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Slice Magazine, and other publications. Her new book, “Things I Told My ...
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Thanksgiving Weekend (and Hanukkah Week) Is a Weekend (Week) for Reading
Thanks to a blown out tire, which forced me to spend most of last Friday riding in a tow truck and sitting in a tire shop, I didn’t have a chance to write my weekly Weekend Reading post.1 So this week, I’m going to triple up on the normal post and write about the three books I hope to spend the next four days ...
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Seiobo There Below
In Seiobo There Below, Lázló Krasznahorkai is able to succeed at a task at which many writers fail: to dedicate an entire novel to a single message, to express an idea over and over again without falling into repetition or didacticism. His novel is an insistence that the rapturous does exist, can be met, and that, although ...
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The First Buenos Aires Review Quarterly Issue
The Buenos Aires Review, which, over the past few months, has been posting really interesting works of fiction and poetry, info about kick-ass bookstores, interviews, translator’s notes, and more, has just released its first quarterly issue entitled “Tongue Ties”: This first quarterly issue of the ...
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Zachary Karabashliev and the Texas Book Festival
Zachary Karabashliev, author of the wildly fun 18% Gray recently participated in the Texas Book Festival in Austin. According to the dozen or so friends I know who attended, it sounded like a real blast. So I thought I’d ask Zach a few questions about his experience, and share some of his photographs. (If you’ve ...
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Arnon Grunberg's "The Quantified Writer" Project
I don’t know much about this Quantified Writer Project, but seeing that it combines two of my favorite things—Arnon Grunberg’s work and neuroscience—I feel like I really should. Here’s the basic description from Arnon’s website: Dutch author Arnon Grunberg and his publishing house, ...
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2013 ALTA Conference Micro-Review: Reading Out Loud
A current MALTS student here at the University of Rochester, Allison M. Charette is also a translator from the French who recently helped launch the Emerging Literary Translators’ Network in America. After attending this year’s American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) conference, she wanted to write up a ...
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Latest Review: "Blood Curse" and "I Will Have Vengeance" by Maurizio de Giovanni
The latest addition to our reviews section is a piece by George Carroll on two Maurizio de Giovanni books that Europa Editions recently released: Blood Curse and I Will Have Vengeance. I’ve been hoping to cover more crime books on the site—mainly because there are so many, lots of people, including Tom Roberge, ...
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Words Without Borders' 10th Anniversary Gala
A couple weeks ago, Words Without Borders celebrated their 10th year with a baller fundraising gala where Drenka Willen received the inaugural James H. Ottaway, Jr. Award for the Promotion of International Literature. (The best write-up about this, and about Drenka in general, is the one Sal Robinson wrote for MobyLives. Sal ...
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Let's Capitalize on the Garth Risk Hallberg Thing for a Post
If you’re into book industry news and whatnot, you’ve probably heard the story about Garth Risk Hallberg’s novel, City on Fire. Just to recap though, before the book had a publisher, Scott Rudin, the movie producer behind Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and No Country ...
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Step Out of Line, The Man Comes . . .
This week’s BTBA post is written by George Carroll, a publishers representative based in Seattle who blogs at North-North-West. He is also the soccer editor for Shelf Awareness and he and Chad frequently spent part of the weekend texting about EPL match-ups and Manchester Fucking United. Paranoia by Victor ...
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Short Stories, STAT!
Monica Carter curates Salonica World Lit. She is a writer and her most recent piece appeared in World Literature Today (September 2013). Being a judge for the Best Translated Book Award is one of the pleasures I have had the opportunity to participate in for the past few years. Not only because I am able to read the ...
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Typographical Era's Translation Award
In response to the incredibly lame GoodReads Choice Awards (and yes, I’m totally voting for Jodi Picoult in the fiction category), Typographical Era launched their own Translation Award: It all started when I asked a simple question on Twitter yesterday. Why in the HELL do the GoodReads Choice Awards not have a ...
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This Is Not Going to Go Over Well (But Will Help Me Teach My Class Today)
So, this morning, Amazon announced something called Amazon Source, a program to sell Kindles through participating independent booksellers. Yes, seriously. No, really, this isn’t one of my weird jokes. We created Amazon Source to empower independent bookstores and other small retailers to sell Kindle e-readers and ...
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Latest Review: Every Good Heart is a Telescope
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is by Tiffany Nichols on Victor Rodríguez Núñez’s Every Heart is a Telescope, from Toad Press. Here’s a bit about Toad Press from their blog site: “The Toad Press International Chapbook Series publishes contemporary, exciting, beautiful, odd, and avant-garde ...
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November 2013 Translations Worth Checking Out: The "ORDNUNG!" Edition
Before getting into this month’s list of recommended translations—which is kind of long, mostly because I couldn’t decide on which titles to cut—I want to follow-up a bit on last month’s post about our trip to the Frankfurt Book Fair. Actually, to be more specific, I want to talk about Germans ...
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Three Percent #66: I Believe You Have My Stapler
On this week’s podcast, Carolyn Kellogg of the Los Angeles Times joined us to discuss Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel, Bleeding Edge. All three of us are Pynchon fans, and all three of us really liked this latest book. Although, as we talk about, the fact that we experienced a lot of the cultural items Pynchon ...
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BCLT Looking for a Director
The British Centre for Literary Translation—located in Norwich at the University of East Anglia—recently launched a search for a new director. You can get all of the information here, but here’s a brief summary of what sounds like one of the coolest translation-related positions ever: Apply now for the ...
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Gushing
Jenn Witte is a bookseller at Skylight Books in Los Angeles I fall in love easily. Books possess me and while reading them I am completely blinded. Is this a terrible quality in a panelist? I wonder, but I’m going to declare that my engagement with these books is fair in that I give them my whole self, one at a time. When ...
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Disgruntled Frankfurt Exhibitors
Last week, Open Letter editor and resident expert in all things Latvian, translated aloud a bit of an article decrying the Latvian stand at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair. I’m paraphrasing here, but the gist of the article was that the stand was lame, boring, the laughing stock of the fair, and not nearly as cool ...
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Weekend Reading: "Viviane" by Julia Deck
Like most people in publishing—or most readers I know—I have approximately a hundred million books on my “to read” shelves. Which in no way stops me from buying more and more books, or, in this case, setting aside everything I “should” be reading to check out a book that won’t be ...
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A Cautionary Tale
Here’s an open letter from Jonathan Wright about some shit that went down with Knopf and Dr. Alaa Al Aswany, the author of The Yacoubian Building. If nothing else, you MUST check out this set of corrections from Al Aswany. It is things. And something I’m using in my classes from now until forever . . . Anyway, the ...
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Gail Hareven in Asymptote
The new issue of the always spectacular Asymptote includes Good Girl, a short story by Gail Hareven. Hareven is an Israeli author who is most well-known for The Confessions of Noa Weber, an absolutely brilliant book that won the Best Translated Book Award in 2009. It was translated by the also brilliant Dalya Bilu and is ...
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Our Lady of the Flowers, Echoic
Our Lady of the Flowers, Echoic is not only a translation, but a transformation. It is a translation of Jean Genet’s novel Notre Dame des Fleurs, transmuted from prose to poetry. Originally written in prison as a masturbatory aid (Sartre in fact called the book “the epic of masturbation”), Chris Tysh has taken Genet’s ...
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Latest Review: "Our Lady of the Flowers, Echoic" by Chris Tysh
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by J.T. Mahany on Chris Tysh’s Our Lady of the Flowers, Echoic, which is available from Les Figues Press. This is a strange book to review, since it’s less a “translation” and more of a “transformation,” but it’s also incredibly ...
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Ineligible Books
Stephen Sparks is a buyer at Green Apple Books. He lives in San Francisco and blogs at Invisible Stories. The fine print attached to the Best Translated Book Award states that in order to be eligible, a work cannot have been previously translated. I don’t disagree with the rule, especially as we already over 350 books to ...
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Three Percent #65: Erudition Isn't the Same as Being Intentionally Esoteric
This week’s podcast is the first one Tom and I have recorded in almost a month. So after a bit of catching up, we talked about David Bellos’s new translation of Simenon’s Pietr the Latvian, the difficulties of translating “I love you” and all the swears into Japanese, and this list of “The ...
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How You Can Help BuzzFeed Take Over the World
Just to make sure the sarcasm of the post title doesn’t slip by, I want to start by saying that BuzzFeed is AWFUL. Sure, thanks to Facebook shares, I’ve clicked on some of their asinine listicles and have rarely (if ever) come away feeling like I learned anything. Even more rarely have I laughed at their jokes. ...
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PEN America Event for Stig Dagerman
A couple weeks ago, a copy of Stig Dagerman’s Sleet (translated by Steven Hartman) arrived at our offices. To be honest, I’d never heard of Dagerman, but the attractive cover (I am a fan of Godine’s new Verba Mundi designs) and a very nice email from the book’s publicist kept this on my desk as a book ...
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CONTENDERS FOR DANIEL MEDIN’S SHORTLIST (SUMMER READS)
Daniel Medin teaches at the American University of Paris, where he helps direct the Center for Writers and Translators, is an editor of The Cahiers Series ,and co-hosts the podcast entitled That Other Word. He has authored a study of Franz Kafka in the work of three international writers (Northwestern University Press, 2010) ...
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October 2013 Translations Worth Checking Out: The "Our Flight to Frankfurt Is Delayed" Edition
As mentioned last month, I decided to start this monthly round-up for two reasons—to highlight a few interesting books in translation that other venues likely won’t, and because I think there’s more to literature that the monthly Flavorwire listicles. (One more Flavorwire thing: It’s totally fine that ...
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Nobel Considerations
BTBA blog post – Michael Orthofer Michael Orthofer runs the Complete Review – a book review site with a focus on international fiction – and its Literary Saloon weblog. This Thursday or next the Swedish Academy will likely announce who will receive the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature – still considered the ultimate ...
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Denmark Recap
With the Frankfurt Book Fair literally around the corner, it seemed appropriate to post something about the most recent trip (don’t worry, Iceland, Chad’s got your back for a recap) we took in the name of bringing great world literature to an international audience. Just over a week ago, Chad and I had the ...
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Elizabeth Harris Talks Translation
Elizabeth Harris has translated fiction by Mario Rigoni Stern, Fabio Stassi, and Marco Candida, among others. Her translation of Giulio Mozzi’s story collection Questo è il giardino (This Is the Garden) will be published by Open Letter Books in 2014; the individual stories have appeared in The Literary Review, The Missouri ...
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Arnon Grunberg in The Believer
Arnon Grunberg—author of a number of books, including Tirza, which is one of my favorite Open Letter titles from 2013—has a really fantastic essay about a trip to Thessaloniki in the new issue of The Believer. You need to read the whole long thing, but here’s a bit to entice you: Until recently, wars ...
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Under This Terrible Sun
Equal parts stoner pulp thriller and psycho-physiological horror story, a pervasive sense of dread mixes with a cloud of weed smoke to seep into every line of the disturbing, complex Under This Terrible Sun. Originally published by illustrious Spanish publishers Editorial Anagrama, Under This Terrible Sun is Argentine ...
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Wigrum
From the start, Daniel Canty’s Wigrum, published by Canadian press Talonbooks, is obviously a novel of form. Known also as a graphic designer in Quebec, Canty takes those skills and puts them towards this “novel of inventory” and creates a framework from which to hang the inventories. We get a table of contents, where ...
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Interview with Can Xue from the Reykjavik International Literary Festival
Last week I had the opportunity to interview Can Xue as part of the Reykjavik International Literary Festival. We ended up writing out our interview ahead of time, so I thought I would share it here. Enjoy! Born in China, where her parents were persecuted as being “ultra-rightists” by the Anti-rightest Movement of ...
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Between Friends
Throughout his career—in fact from his very first book, Where the Jackals Howl (1965)—the renowned Israeli writer Amos Oz has set much of his fiction on the kibbutz, collective communities he portrays as bastions of social cohesion and stultifying conformity in equal measure. In his latest book, which like Where the ...
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Latest Review: "Between Friends" by Amos Oz
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is by Dan Vitale on Amos Oz’s Between Friends, from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and which incidentally comes out today. Dan is a contributing reviewer of ours who is making his first appearance in a while on Three Percent—and with a piece on an author I understand to be one ...
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Sarah Gerard's Three Longlist Contenders
Sarah Gerard is a writer and a bookseller at McNally Jackson Books. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, Bookforum, the Paris Review Daily, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Slice Magazine, and other publications. She holds an MFA from The New School and lives in Brooklyn. I’m only going to talk ...
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2013 Clifford Symposium
Entitled Translation in a Global Community: Theory and Practice, the 2013 Clifford Symposium at Middlebury College kicks off tomorrow, runs through Saturday evening, and features a number of interesting talks and discussions about translation. Here’s the Middlebury summary: You’re translating right now. We all ...
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This Is Sort of a Translation Problem
So, Vitamin Water decided to run a contest in Canada that included random words under the bottle cap—one in English and one in French. Supposedly Coca-Cola reviewed all the words in the contest, but seemed to miss out on a few crucial words that mean one thing in French and another in English . . . From Huffington Post ...
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Three Percent #64: Thanks for Using All the Umlauts
With Tom back from his relaxing vacation, we decided to catch up and talk about the books we read recently, including Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s mystery series, Juan Gabriel Vasquez’s The Sound of Things Falling, and Rafael Bernal’s The Mongolian Conspiracy, among others. We also talk about Amazon’s ...
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Reviews in Translation
This post is courtesy of BTBA judge, Scott Esposito. Scott Esposito blogs at Conversational Reading and tweets. So here are some things that I’ve reviewed, will review, or will do something with in some way at some point that I think are strong contenders for the 2013 BTBA. First up: The Ingenious Gentleman and Poet ...
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GoodReads Giveaway for "This Is the Garden"
This month we’re giving away copies of Giulio Mozzi’s This Is the Garden, translated from the Italian by Elizabeth Harris and pubbing in January. Although Mozzi’s stories have been excerpted in just about every magazine imaginable, this is the first full collection of his to be published in English. This ...
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High Tide for $3.99!
I mentioned this in my September translation overview post, but for those who missed it, we’re currently selling the ebook version of High Tide for $3.99. The book itself—which is amazing, more on that below—officially releases on September 26th. So, this week the ebook is $3.99, next week it’ll be ...
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Americas Latino Festival & Book Awards
One of my favorite editors and agents, Irene Vilar, is helping launch the Americas Latino Festival November 15-19 in Denver, Colorado, and which may be of interest to a lot of Three Percent readers. According to their website: With the help of a steadily growing international, national, and local network of alliances ...
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I Like It Like That
This post is courtesy of Best Translated Book Award judge, the inimitable George Carroll. Not only is he one hell of a West Coast sales rep for publishing companies large and small, he has an inexhaustible knowledge of translated literature. I’ve been skulking around in the shadows with The Best Translated Award ...
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RTWCS Fall 2013
I’m proud to announce that we have two great events lined up for this fall’s iteration of our annual Reading the World Conversation Series, which all of you should fly into Rochester to attend. A Conversation with Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès Tuesday, September 24th, 6:00pm Welles-Brown Room, Rush Rhees ...
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Ten Translations to Check Out in September: Not Really a Listicle
I’ve been wanting to do monthly highlights of books coming out for a while, but thought to myself that, well, Flavorwire already does stuff like this, so why bother. Then I remembered that Flavorwire is the worst, so here we are. High Tide by Inga Ābele. Translated from the Latvian by Kaija Straumanis. ($15.95, ...
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BTBA: What I've Liked So Far
Monica Carter, one of the ten judges for the Best Translated Book Awards and curator of Salonica, gives her thoughts on some of the books she’s read so far this year. School is back in swing, a war with Syria looms and the new iPhone 5s is about to take over the world. Yet, let’s not forget the simple joys in ...
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Starlite Terrace
Every fictional work set in L.A. begins with a slow crawl through its streets in the early hours of the morning right after sunrise. Maybe it’s always done this way to emphasize the vast sprawl of the city and highlight the loneliness of its inhabitants, or maybe it’s intended to emphasize that L.A., like New York, is ...
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Latest Review: "Starlite Terrace" by Patrick Roth
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is from Tiffany Nichols on Patrick Roth’s Starlite Terrace, from Seagull Books. Tiffany also reviews literature in translation for the San Francisco and Sacramento Book Reviews and runs the mouthwatering food porn and book-geeking Tumblr blog tiffany ist. Here’s the ...
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Weekend Reading: "Hothouse" by Boris Kachka
If you’re looking for a book to read this weekend, one worth checking out is Boris Kachka’s Hothouse: The Art of Survival and the Survival of Art at America’s Most Celebrated Publishing House, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Coincidentally, my copy is supposed to arrive today, AND, more relevantly, ...
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Updated Translation Databases!
I just finally posted the updates to both the 2012 and 2013 translation databases to our Translation Database page.1 I don’t have a lot to say, analysis-wise, about this most recent update. At the moment, there are 419 titles included for 2013, compared to 452 for 2012. By year’s end, I suspect these will be ...
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MatchBook is NOT a Dating Service for Readers
Amazon made a couple of announcements yesterday that, as Amazon announcements tend to do, set the book world atwitter. They announced the next version of the Kindle, but the news that really generated the headlines was the announcement of “MatchBook.”1 Amazon has unveiled a new US initiative to bundle print ...
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Gunter Grass Rails on Facebook
This video of Gunter Grass talking about how “Facebook is shit” is amazing. Granted, it’s weird that I found out about this from a friend who found it on Facebook and that I’m probably going to share it on Facebook as well . . . But, I do totally agree with his sentiments and wish I could smash my ...
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The Arabic Sterne?
Thanks to a Three Percent fan who sends me periodic updates on titles I’ve left out of the translation database, I just found out about Humphrey Davies’s first-ever English translation on of Leg over Leg by Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq. Originally published in 1855, this sounds like the sort of crazy, ...
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Loving the Polish: Grzegorz Wróblewski's "Kopenhaga"
Recently I found out that, contrary to my past belief, I’m not 1/4 Polish, but 3/4 Polish (or Prussian, or whatever—most everywhere my family is from has changed hands over and over and over) and have since been on a bit of a Polish pride kick, mostly related to soccer players like Robert Lewandowski ...
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LARB Interview with Brendon O'Kane
Over at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Jeffrey Wasserstrom (author of China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know and co-editor of Chinese Characters: Profiles of Fast-Changing Lives in a Fast-Changing Land) has an interview with Brendan O’Kane, who, well, I’ll let Wasserstrom explain his importance ...
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¡Feliz cumpleaños, Julio Cortázar!
Julio Cortázar, one of the greatest writers ever,1 was born on August 26, 1914, and to celebrate the week of his birthday, Archipelago Books, one of the greatest presses ever, is offering a 25% discount on all three of the Cortázar books that they publish. Just insert “HOPSCOTCH13,” a code based on one of the ...
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Some Thoughts on Quebec's Attempt to Legislate Fixed Book Prices
As you may have read in yesterday’s PW Daily, this past Monday, a Quebec legislative committee opening a couple weeks of hearings on the idea of implementing fixed book prices in the province to benefit and preserve independent bookstores. From the “Montreal Gazette:”: Under the scheme, booksellers, ...
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The Infatuations
“What happened is the least of it. It’s a novel, and once you’ve finished a novel, what happened in it is of little importance and soon forgotten. What matters are the possibilities and ideas that the novel’s imaginary plot communicates to us and infuses us with, a plot that we recall far more ...
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Latest Review: "The Infatuations" by Javier Marías
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece from Jeremy Garber on Javier Marías’s The Infatuations, translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa and available from Knopf. I could take a year off of work just to read, and at the end of that year, my “to read” bookshelves would still be ...
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I Have to Agree
This weekend, David Ulin of the Los Angeles Times joined the chorus of people begging James Franco to “just stop.” Generally speaking, I couldn’t care less about Franco (he was awesome in Spring Breakers), although using Indiegogo in a pretty hypocritical fashion to raise money to film his own short stories ...
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Dark Company
If you open Gert Loschütz’s new novel Dark Company expecting a clear answer as to who the titular dark company are, and why the protagonist’s grandfather warned him against them, you are sadly doomed to disappointment. Indeed, if you want a clear linear plotline neatly laid out, a consistent character set, or a ...
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Three Percent #63: Spermatic Economy
This week’s podcast is a special combo version featuring two separate conversations: one between Chad, Stephen Sparks (BTBA judge, Green Apple bookseller, and excellent reviewers), and George Carroll; and one between Chad and Paul Yamazaki (legendary City Lights bookseller). Topics range from soccer to Karl Pohrt to ...
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Latest Review: "A True Novel" by Minae Mizumura
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is by Hannah Vose on A True Novel by Minae Mizumura, from Other Press. To go against the grain of prologues and intros (more on that from This Hannah in a bit), here’s the beginning of her review: If you’re one of those people who habitually skim the prologue to a ...
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A True Novel
If you’re one of those people who habitually skim the prologue to a book, Minae Mizumura’s _A True Novel_—her third novel and the winner of the Yomiuri Literature Prize in Japan in 2002—might not appear to be for you. That is to say, the prologue takes up at least a third of the first volume of the book, and it’s ...
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Three Percent #62: The Random Podcast
This week’s podcast is a hodgepodge of opinions, rants, and jokes. We talked about summer music—and our mutual dislike of Robin Thicke—Hawthorne & Child, my trip to Brazil, and bike thieves. And nobody talked about J.K. Rowling or her widely-known pseudonym. Enjoy! And this week’s music is a ...
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The Art of Joy
Readers love a good story. But they really love a good author bio. If an author’s life story is interesting, readers get excited. They share a book with friends by first telling them about the writer. Oh, this Bolaño guy—he was a heroin addict and was in a Chilean jail and should’ve been killed but some high school ...
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Latest Review: "The Art of Joy" by Goliarda Sapienza
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is by Vincent Francone on The Art of Joy by Goliarda Sapienza, from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book is by definition and appearances a tome. At just over 700 pages (and hardcover) it’s a doorstop for a doorstop. But I will be one of the first people in line to champion ...
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Preview of Brazilian Literature at Frankfurt
You may have already read this, but last week, Publishing Perspectives ran a piece I wrote about Brazil being the Guest of Honor at the Frankfurt Book Fair this fall. Below is that article in full with extra links to all the books mentioned. (And as a sidenote, in addition to the review of João Almino’s The Book of ...
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OK, So This Is a Bit of a Stretch
But, someone on Facebook mentioned how this ad (yes, it really is an ad—quite possibly the best ad NBC has made ever ever) is all about translation. Which, it really is, especially in terms of cultural translation. More importantly, if you haven’t seen this, you really should. It’s brilliant. ...
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The Book of Emotions
João Almino’s The Book of Emotions is the prototypical Dalkey Archive book. Not that all of Dalkey’s books are the same, but there is a certain set of criteria that a lot of their titles have—and which Almino’s novel has in spades: It’s a book about someone trying to write a book. From Mulligan Stew to At ...
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Latest Review: "The Book of Emotions" by João Almino
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is by Chad W. Post on The Book of Emotions by João Almino, from Dalkey Archive Press. Here’s the beginning of the review: João Almino’s The Book of Emotions is the prototypical Dalkey Archive book. Not that all of Dalkey’s books are the same, but there is a certain ...
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J-Franz Just Irritates Me
It’s no secret to readers of this blog that I’m not a fan of Jonathan Franzen (a.k.a. America’s Next Top Writer). Not that into his books or his public persona. So, when the galley for the new Juan Gabriel Vásquez book—The Sound of Things Falling—arrived complete with an interview between ...
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Amsterdam Stories
Nescio, Koekebakker, J.H.F. Grönloh. Writing only in his spare time, he was known to most of the world as a respectable and prominent businessman, the director of the Holland-Bombay Trading Company: exactly the kind of man whom his early protagonists would scorn, and at whom his later protagonists would smile grimly, knowing ...
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July 2013 Asymptote Journal
The new issue of Asymptote is now available, and GOD DAMN is it loaded. Just read this intro note from the editors: Every translation is a conversation, each translator in dialogue with the original author, each language speaking to another. Asymptote’s Summer issue is full of such conversations, perhaps most ...
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23rd Biennial Neustadt International Prize for Literature Nominees
Earlier this week, the nine nominees for the Neustadt International Prize were announced. Before listing all nine of them, here’s a bit about the prize itself: The Neustadt Prize is the most prestigious international literary award given in the United States, often cited as “the American Nobel,” and is chosen ...
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BEA 2014 Global Market Forum on Translation!
I’ve mentioned this a few times on our recent podcasts, but here’s the official press release from BookExpo America about next year’s Global Market Focus on translation: Books in Translation: Wanderlust for the Written Word BookExpo America has announced a new development for its 2014 Global ...
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Trafalgar
The author of more than twenty works of science fiction—both story collections and novels—Angélica Gorodischer was first introduced to English readers in 2003 with Kalpa Imperial: The Greatest Empire That Never Was, a patchwork novel that uses a variety of writing styles—fairy tales, oral histories, and political ...
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Latest Review: "Trafalgar" by Angélica Gorodischer
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is by Chad W. Post on Trafalgar by Angélica Gorodischer, from Small Beer Press. Here’s the beginning of Chad’s review: The author of more than twenty works of science fiction—both story collections and novels—Angélica Gorodischer was first introduced to ...
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Excerpt from "La Grande" by Juan Jose Saer
Steve Dolph’s translation of Juan Jose Saer’s massive La Grande won’t be available until next spring, but for those of you who can’t wait to sample what may well be his magnum opus, you can check out Two Lines for a long sample: Tomatis continues: Mario Brando considered himself an ...
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LAF Interview with László Krasznahorkai
Over at the Literature Across Frontiers website, there’s a great interview with everyone’s favorite apocalyptic writer, László Krasznahorkai: [. . .] First I wanted to talk to him about another work of his, Animalinside, a beautifully published pamphlet (in The Cahiers Series) of a collaboration between the ...
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2013 Susan Sontag Prize for Translation
The 2013 Susan Sontag Prize for Translation was just announced, with Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody receiving this year’s honors for his translation of Benjamin Fondane’s Ulysse. Not much info up on the Sontag site yet, although I think this literally just went online. (I’ve been refreshing that page like a ...
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Excerpt from "L'Amour" at Guernica
For all of you who are excited about L’Amour, the never-before-translated Marguerite Duras book that we’re publishing this week, you can check out a sizable excerpt over at Guernica. Night. The beach and the sea are in darkness. A dog passes, going toward the sea wall. No one walks on the ...
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Readux Books
Amanda DeMarco—founder of the Readux online literary magazine, occasional correspondent for Publishing Perspectives, member of the Berlin literati, and all around good person—just launched her latest enterprise: Readux Books. Readux Books will individually publish short works of (mostly) translated ...
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Latest Review: "The Goddess Chronicle" by Natsuo Kirino
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is by Hannah Vose on The Goddess Chronicle by Natsuo Kirino, from Grove Atlantic. The interns have been getting marginally scandalous book assignments to review: Hannah had this one, with the nudie woman on the cover, while another of our interns is working on a review of a ...
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The Goddess Chronicle
If you have enough time, I’m going to recommend you sit down and read this one straight through. Natsuo Kirino is best known for her award-winning 1997 novel Out, which brought her fame in Japan and a considerable readership in the wider world as well, and although The Goddess Chronicles is not a mystery story, per se, I ...
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Horrible News
From today’s PW Daily: Karl Pohrt, founder of Shaman Drum Bookshop in Ann Arbor, Mich., died on Wednesday. He was 65. Pohrt was diagnosed with anaplastic thyroid cancer in October 2012 and wrote about his illness on his blog, thereisnogap.com. In 2009, plunging textbook sales and the economy forced Pohrt to ...
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PEN Award Shortlists [Spoiler: One of Our Books is a Finalist!]
PEN just announced the shortlists for a ton of their annual awards, including the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation and the PEN Translation Prize, which, for obvious reasons, are the ones that I’m most interested in. First off, here’s the poetry shortlist, which is the one featuring an Open Letter ...
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Kafka's Hat
Quebecois author Patrice Martin’s first book, translated into English by Chantal Bilodeau as Kafka’s Hat and published by Talon, is strongly influenced by Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, and Paul Auster. I’m putting this up front because it is something Martin really, really wants you to know. These authors are named ...
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Latest Review: "Kafka's Hat" by Patrice Martin
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is by P.T. Smith on Kafka’s Hat by Patrice Martin, from Talon. Patrick is pumping out these book reviews for us, and has much to say about Kafka’s Hat, the title of which, I’ll admit, makes me want to giggle. As does Wigrum. I don’t think I can explain why. ...
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Win a Copy of Marguerite Duras's L'Amour!
This morning the Arts Fuse ran a great review by John Taylor about Marguerite Duras’s L’Amour, which we’ll officially be publishing in just a couple weeks . . . Is L’Amour then a novel? Yes, in the ordinary and hardly helpful sense that there is a story (or rather, several intermingled, fragmentary ...
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I'm Getting Up in 8 Hours, So, Phoning It In [Brazil, Day Today]
I just got back from a 24-hour (or so) happy time on the hotel roof complete with champagne and fish sticks, and, seeing that we need to check out of the hotel at 8:30am tomorrow to leave for FLIP, I think I’m going to beg off my planned photojournal post (we viste a favela today) and just recommend a Brazilian book: ...
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For a Song and a Hundred Songs: A Poet's Journey through a Chinese Prison
With two previous versions confiscated by Chinese authorities before being published in Germany in 2011, and coming now into English with an introduction by 2009 Nobel Prize winner Herta Müller, Liao Yiwu’s memoir of years spent in a human rights–violating Chinese prison comes with immediate political and social ...
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Latest Review: "For a Song and a Hundred Songs: A Poet's Journey through a Chinese Prison"
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is by P. T. Smith on For a Song and a Hundred Songs by Liao Yiwu, from New Harvest. Straying for a moment from fiction and poetry reviews, we asked Patrick to contribute re this translated memoir from poet Liao Yiwu, who—let’s just keep it simple—has been through a hell ...
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I Think I Just Ate My Weight in Meat [Brazil, Days One-ish]
I’m in Rio de Janeiro on the “Brazilian Publishing Experience 2013” trip with a half-dozen wonderful Germans (all familiar with their Kant), and a Spaniard, ready to learn about Brazilian publishing and Brazilian cultural as a whole. About this, I have lots to share. Let’s get the work part of this ...
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2014 Best Translated Book Award . . . The Beginning
Although the announcement of the 2013 Best Translated Book Award winners is only a couple of months old, it’s already time to start thinking about next year’s award. First up—announcing the fiction jury and the deadline for fiction submissions. Easy bit first: As with years previous, to submit a title for ...
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Another Interview: Megan McDowell and Arturo Fontaine
This month, Yale University Press is publishing La Vida Doble by Chilean author Arturo Fontaine, translated by Megan McDowell. Set in the darkest years of the Pinochet dictatorship, La Vida Doble is the story of Lorena, a leftist militant who arrives at a merciless turning point when every choice she confronts is ...
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Eduardo Galeano on Soccer and Brazil
More about this on Friday, but I’m going to be in Rio all next week for the Confederations Cup Final 2013 Brazilian Publishers Experience. As I’m sure you all know, there’s been a bit of unrest in Brazil as of late (one of the protests on Sunday was staged on the beach right in front of the hotel where ...
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Interview with Harold Goldblatt
Last semester, one of my favorite class periods was the one in which we talked with Harold Goldblatt about his translation, especially his translation of Mo Yan’s Pow!. One of the great moments was when I asked him how many books he had translated and he honestly wasn’t sure. “Something around 50-55, I ...
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Three Percent #61: The Cheery Podcast
At the request of one of Tom’s friends, we tried to keep this particular podcast upbeat and cheery . . . and we sort of succeeded. Most of the podcast revolves around this interview from Publishing Perspectives that Amanda DeMarco did with German publisher Michael Krüger about the 40 years he’s spent at Hanser ...
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The Neighborhood
I went into this book expecting the wrong things; I thought I had picked up a novel with, y’know, plot, but the 280 pages of Gonçalo Tavares’ The Neighborhood are filled with vignettes—“chapters” ranging from tiny to small, with concise titles and little-to-no binding between them—sorted by each of six ...
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And the Hippies Came (Llegaron los hippies)
Kids these days. They think they’ve invented everything. The McOndo writers and Crack Generation, who so proudly buck the Magic Realist tendencies of García Márquez, who seek to find a place within Latin American letters sans spirits . . . they’ve got their heads in the right place even if their books aren’t always ...
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One of the Coolest Publishers in the World
I first met Urvashi Butalia at the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair back some years ago, and was immediately wowed. There are few people in the world as intelligent, out-spoken, sharp, and charming as Urvashi. And her publishing house, Zubaan Books, is incredible. Since that time, I’ve hung out with Urvashi in ...
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Traveler of the Century
When I was about two-thirds of the way through Neuman’s very ambitious, very engrossing novel, Bromance Will Evans asked me what I thought the purpose the rapist had in this book. Not who the rapist was—something that’s held in suspense until almost the end of the book—but why he was even in there. ...
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A Second Review of "Traveler of the Century"
I’ve been meaning to read Andrés Neuman’s Traveler of the Century ever since we ran Jeremy Garber’s review back in April 2012. And then it made the Best Translated Book Award longlist, which further peaked my interest. But man, it’s a 500+ page book—something that’s never easy to fit into ...
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"Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons: Lesson Eleven" by Antoine Volodine [A Sample]
As promised, here’s an excerpt from Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons: Lesson Eleven which we’ll be bringing out next year. It’s a pretty amazing text, which, as you’ll see, is filled with intertextuality, literary games, and horrible smells. Enjoy! Lutz Bassmann passed his final days as we all did, ...
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Antoine Volodine & His Self Interview
Next year we’re going to be publishing Antoine Volodine’s Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons: Lesson Eleven, a book that I’m super excited about, and which help explain (somewhat) Volodine’s crazy-awesome project. If you’re a regular listener to the “Three Percent Podcast”: you’ve ...
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New New Books in German
The new issue of New Books in German has been out for a little while, but it’s pretty loaded and deserving of a mention for anyone who might have missed it. I am delighted to introduce issue 33 of New Books in German: spring is finally springing here in London and our bright yellow plumage captures the vernal ...
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Anatomy of a Night
“At night Amarâq is coated with a darkness as viscous as unmixed colors, neither the fjord nor the mountains, valleys, lakes, or the river exist, there is only a black mass, a void that spreads across the landscape sporadically, pressing what’s left but leaving holes that it fills with abstract elements, moving ...
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Three Percent #60: BEA and Sucking
This post-BookExpo America podcast (with special guest, Bromance Will/Will Evans, the man behind Deep Vellum Press) is all about the good and bad of the country’s largest trade show for publishing. Mostly, it’s a series of rants—not necessarily about the show itself, but about the crap that craps it all up. ...
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Les aigles puent
If you’ve been following any of the recent Antoine Volodine talk going around Three Percent—both on the blog or on the podcasts—and have heard his fans wax obsessive over all his alter author-egos, you’re probably starting to feel some Volodine fatigue setting in. One more mention of what his books do to your dreams, ...
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Translation Lab at the Ledig House
Copied below is all the information DW Gibson sent me about applying to participate in the Translation Lab that will be going on at the Ledig House this fall. As you can see below, the Translation Lab is a 10-day residency for four English language translators and the four authors that they’re working on. Which is an ...
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Why Bury the Lede? AmazonCrossing Publishes More Books in Translation than Anyone Else (In 2013. Probably.)
For everyone interested in the state of literature in translation today, I just posted updates to the 2012 Translation Database and the 2013 one. First things first: In 2012, AmazonCrossing published more works of fiction and poetry in translation than any other press except for Dalkey Archive, and is the largest publisher ...
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Polyglossia and Jose Manuel Prieto's "Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia" [Part II]
This article is a transcript of a presentation Esther Allen gave at Boston University on Friday, February 22, 2013. Click here for Part I. For the reader of the original text, the book’s origin in the Spanish-speaking world is evident in its every word and requires no further emphasis. As its translator into English, my ...
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Polyglossia and Jose Manuel Prieto's "Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia" [Part I]
This article is a transcript of a presentation Esther Allen gave at Boston University on Friday, February 22, 2013. Earlier this month I was invited to be on a panel about translation at a Brooklyn bookstore. The announcement promised potential audience members they would “Find out what it takes to make sure the ...
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Pathlight Available through Apple, Amazon
This morning, I talked to a journalist for quite a while about an article she’s writing on publishing Chinese literature in translation. On of the prompts for her article is Pathlight: New Chinese Writing, a magazine that I haven’t mention on here before, but definitely should have. In addition to a general ...
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Red Spectres
Muireann Maguire’s Red Spectres is a stunning and engaging collection of eleven Russian gothic tales written by various authors during the early Soviet Era, all but two stories of which are featured in English for the first time ever. These are not your usual ghost stories, told for cheap thrills around a campfire. Instead, ...
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Latest Review: "El arte de la resurrección" ("The Art of Resurrection")
The latest piece in our Reviews Section comes to us from Jeremy Osner, and is on Hernán Rivera Letelier’s El arte de la resurrección (The Art of Resurrection) from Alfaguara. Jeremy Osner blogs about reading and translation at READIN. He is currently working on a translation of El arte de la resurrecctión (and the ...
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There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories
This slender, uncanny volume—the second, best-selling collection of stories by Russian author Ludmilla Petrushevskaya to appear in the U.S.—has already received considerable, well-deserved praise from many critics and high profile publications. Its seventeen short tales, averaging ten pages each, are grouped into four ...
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New Vessel Press [New Cool Things, Part II]
One of the exciting new trends in publishing is the consolidation of mega-companies to create a totally misbalanced marketplace that mimics the unequal distribution of wealth in America that anyone who loves freedom obviously agrees with. Well, that or the new ways that international titles are finding their way into the ...
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The Buenos Aires Review [New Cool Things, Part I]
I’ve been a bit checked out the past few weeks with event upon event, travels to London and L.A. and New York (twice), final papers to grade, illnesses to overcome, soccer to geek out about, etc., etc. But now that it’s summertime (I only have one grade left to enter), it’s about time to get back into ...
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Basti
The Urdu word basti refers to any space, intimate to worldly, and is often translated as “common place” or “a gathering place.” This book by Intizar Husain, who is widely regarded as one of the most important living Pakistani writers, traverses a number of cities, the connections between them, and the people who live ...
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The Whispering Muse
The Whispering Muse, one of three books by Icelandic writer Sjón just published in North America, is nothing if not inventive. Stories within stories, shifting narration, leaps in time, and characters who transform from men to birds and back again—you’ve seen this sort of thing before in Ovid, Bulgakov, Kafka, and ...
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Clive James's and His Ignorant Comment
Hopefully that headline got your attention. But seriously, check out this bit from the By the Book feature that appeared in the New York Times this weekend: Are you a rereader? What books do you find yourself returning to again and again? I don’t do much rereading anymore because I’ve been ill and feel that ...
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2013 BTBA Winners: Satantango and Wheel with a Single Spoke
If you use the Facebook or the Twitter, you probably already know this, but the 2013 Best Translated Book Awards were handed out on Friday as part of the PEN World Voices/CLMP “Literary Mews” series of events.1 And you probably know that Wheel with a Single Spoke by Nichita Stanescu, translated from the Romanian ...
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Three Percent #58: Richard Nash.
We’re back! With our newest and semi-delayed installment of the Three Percent Podcast. This week is a two-parter. First, Chad and Tom run down the list of fiction and poetry finalists for the 2013 Best Translated Book Awards. Yes, it’s true that these were announced a couple weeks ago, but, as luck would have it, ...
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2013 Best Translated Book Award Ceremony
For whatever reason, PEN World Voices doesn’t have this event listed on their event calendar (at least not clearly), so let this post serve as the official announcement of the event, and a personal invitation from me to all of you to come out, celebrate the winners, and get drunk in the street. First, the specifics: ...
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Mundo Cruel by Luis Negrón
Luis Negrón’s debut collection Mundo Cruel is a journey through Puerto Rico’s gay world. Published in 2010, the book is already in its fifth Spanish edition. Here in the U.S., the collection has been published by Seven Stories Press and translated from the Spanish by Suzanne Jill Levine, winner of the 2012 PEN Center USA ...
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Why This Book Should Win: "Transfer Fat" by Aase Berg [BTBA 2013]
Over the course of this week, we will be highlighting all 6 BTBA Poetry Finalists one by one, building up to next Friday’s announcement of the winners. All of these are written by the BTBA poetry judges under the rubric of “Why This Book Should Win.” You can find the whole series by clicking here. Stay tuned ...
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Why This Book Should Win: "The Invention of Glass" by Emmanuel Hocquard [BTBA 2013]
Over the course of this week, we will be highlighting all 6 BTBA Poetry Finalists one by one, building up to next Friday’s announcement of the winners. All of these are written by the BTBA poetry judges under the rubric of “Why This Book Should Win.” You can find the whole series by clicking here. Stay tuned ...
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Semi-ode to DFW
Today’s post, written by Erik Estep, a librarian at SIU Edwardsville who has contributed to Three Percent in the past, is more or less an ode and reflection on David Foster Wallace and his work, as well as some commentary on the somewhat critically received DFW biography by D.T. Max. Since the majority of us at and ...
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Why This Book Should Win: "Almost 1 Book / Almost 1 Life" by Elfriede Czurda [BTBA 2013]
Over the course of this week, we will be highlighting all 6 BTBA Poetry Finalists one by one, building up to next Friday’s announcement of the winners. All of these are written by the BTBA poetry judges under the rubric of “Why This Book Should Win.” You can find the whole series by clicking here. Stay tuned ...
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Why This Book Should Win: "Notes on the Mosquito" by Xi Chuan [BTBA 2013]
Over the course of this week, we will be highlighting all 6 BTBA Poetry Finalists one by one, building up to next Friday’s announcement of the winners. All of these are written by the BTBA poetry judges under the rubric of “Why This Book Should Win.” You can find the whole series by clicking here. Stay tuned ...
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Why This Book Should Win: "pH Neutral History" by Lidija Dimkovska [BTBA 2013]
Over the course of this week, we will be highlighting all 6 BTBA Poetry Finalists one by one, building up to next Friday’s announcement of the winners. All of these are written by the BTBA poetry judges under the rubric of “Why This Book Should Win.” You can find the whole series by clicking here. Stay tuned ...
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Why This Book Should Win: "Wheel with a Single Spoke" by Nichita Stanescu [BTBA 2013]
Over the course of this week, we will be highlighting all 6 BTBA Poetry Finalists one by one, building up to next Friday’s announcement of the winners. All of these are written by the BTBA poetry judges under the rubric of “Why This Book Should Win.” You can find the whole series by clicking here. Stay tuned ...
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Selected Translations by W. S. Merwin
“South” To have watched from one of your patios the ancient stars from the bank of shadow to have watched the scattered lights my ignorance has learned no names for nor their places in constellations to have heard the ring of water in the secret pool known the scent of jasmine and honeysuckle the silence ...
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Three Percent #57: The Master Unchained [Favorite Movies of 2012]
What is this? The much-delayed “favorite movies of 2012” episode of the Three Percent Podcast? It is! Better late than never, right? Yes, it is. Stop disagreeing, please. This week, Tom is joined by Nate, and they grit their teeth to discuss The Master (P. T. Anderson) and Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino), ...
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2013 Best Translated Book Award: The Poetry Finalists
Over at the Poetry Foundation, the names of the six poetry finalists for this year’s Best Translated Book Awards have been revealed. Before reproducing the list below, I just want to take a second to thank all six judges for this year’s competition: Brandon Holmquest, poet, translator, editor of CALQUE; Jennifer ...
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2013 Best Translated Book Award: The Fiction Finalists
I’m really excited about this year’s list of finalists—it’s a pretty loaded list that includes works from eight different countries, ranging from Russia to Argentina to Djibouti. All ten books have a valid chance of winning the award depending on what criteria you want to emphasize. (Click here to see ...
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Why This Book Should Win: "Transit" by Abdourahman A. Waberi [BTBA 2013]
As in years past, we will be highlighting all 25 titles on the BTBA Fiction Longlist, one by one, building up to the announcement of the 10 finalists on April 10th. A variety of judges, booksellers, and readers will write these, all under the rubric of “Why This Book Should Win. You can find the whole series by clicking ...
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Time for More Speculation
OK, so, tomorrow at 10am sharp (or as sharp as I can make it), we’ll be announcing the 10 fiction finalists for this year’s BTBA, while over at the Poetry Foundation’s blog the 6 poetry finalists will be revealed. As of this moment, I know which books made the poetry list, but have NO IDEA what’s on ...
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Form for Ottaway Nominations
A couple weeks ago we ran an announcement about the new James H. Ottaway Award for the Promotion of International Literature—an awesome award that numerous friends deserve to win. Anyway, I just received a letter from WWB’s Executive Director, Joshua Mandelbaum, with information about nominating people for the ...
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Why This Book Should Win: "The Hunger Angel" by Herta Müller [BTBA 2013]
As in years past, we will be highlighting all 25 titles on the BTBA Fiction Longlist, one by one, building up to the announcement of the 10 finalists on April 10th. A variety of judges, booksellers, and readers will write these, all under the rubric of “Why This Book Should Win. You can find the whole series by clicking ...
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Hi, This Is Conchita and Other Stories
When starting Hi, This Is Conchita and Other Stories, Santiago Roncagliolo’s second work to be translated into English, I was expecting Roncagliolo to explore the line between evil and religion that was front and center in Red April. Admittedly, I could have not been more wrong. Hi, This Is Conchita and Other Stories makes ...
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Latest review: "Hi, This Is Conchita and Other Stories" by Santiago Roncagliolo
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is by Tiffany Nichols on Hi, This Is Conchita and Other Stories by Santiago Roncagliolo, translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman and published by Two Lines Press. Tiffany, who is relatively new to the Three Percent contributors’ club, is an avid reader of literature in ...
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Why This Book Should Win: "Awakening to the Great Sleep War" by Gert Jonke [BTBA 2013]
As in years past, we will be highlighting all 25 titles on the BTBA Fiction Longlist, one by one, building up to the announcement of the 10 finalists on April 10th. A variety of judges, booksellers, and readers will write these, all under the rubric of “Why This Book Should Win. You can find the whole series by clicking ...
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Why This Book Should Win: "Atlas" by Dung Kai-Cheung [BTBA 2013]
As in years past, we will be highlighting all 25 titles on the BTBA Fiction Longlist, one by one, building up to the announcement of the 10 finalists on April 10th. A variety of judges, booksellers, and readers will write these, all under the rubric of “Why This Book Should Win. You can find the whole series by clicking ...
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City of Angels, or, The Overcoat of Dr. Freud
Christa Wolf’s newly-translated City of Angels is a novel of atonement, and in this way the work of art that it resembles most to me is not another book, but the 2003 Sophia Coppola film Lost in Translation. Like that movie, its perched-on-the-shoulder meandering through a foreign city (Los Angeles in Wolf’s case, Tokyo ...
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Latest Review: "City of Angels, or, The Overcoat of Dr. Freud" by Christa Wolf
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is by Josh Billings on City of Angels, or, The Overcoat of Dr. Freud by Christa Wolf, translated from the German by Damion Searls and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Josh Billings has reviewed for The Literary Review in the past, and is also a writer and a translator from ...
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Why This Book Should Win: "Satantango" by László Krasznahorkai [BTBA 2013]
As in years past, we will be highlighting all 25 titles on the BTBA Fiction Longlist, one by one, building up to the announcement of the 10 finalists on April 10th. A variety of judges, booksellers, and readers will write these, all under the rubric of “Why This Book Should Win. You can find the whole series by clicking ...
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Why This Book Should Win: "Kite" by Dominique Eddé [BTBA 2013]
As in years past, we will be highlighting all 25 titles on the BTBA Fiction Longlist, one by one, building up to the announcement of the 10 finalists on April 10th. A variety of judges, booksellers, and readers will write these, all under the rubric of “Why This Book Should Win. You can find the whole series by clicking ...
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Where Tigers Are at Home
French author—philosopher, poet, novelist—de Roblès writes something approaching the Great (Latin) American Novel, about Brazilian characters, one of whom is steeped in the life of the seventeenth century polymath (but almost always erroneous) Jesuit Athanasius Kircher. Eleazard von Wogau, a French journalist lives in a ...
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Latest Review: "Where Tigers Are at Home" by Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Grant Barber on the mammoth Where Tigers Are at Home by Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès, which is translated from the French by Mike Mitchell and published by Other Press. Grant Barber is a regular reviewer for Three Percent, a keen bibliophile, and an Episcopal priest ...
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Why This Book Should Win: "A Breath of Life" by Clarice Lispector [BTBA 2013]
As in years past, we will be highlighting all 25 titles on the BTBA Fiction Longlist, one by one, building up to the announcement of the 10 finalists on April 10th. A variety of judges, booksellers, and readers will write these, all under the rubric of “Why This Book Should Win. You can find the whole series by clicking ...
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Arnon Grunberg on Dubrakva Ugresic
Last week, The Millions ran this excellent piece by Arnon Grunberg on fellow Open Letter author Dubravka Ugresic: The Russian word poshlost, according to a seminal essay by Vladimir Nabokov, has a number of possible definitions — “cheap,” “inferior, “scurvy,” “tawdry” — but is perhaps best grasped by ...
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Why This Book Should Win: "The Island of Second Sight" by Albert Vigoleis Thelen [BTBA 2013]
As in years past, we will be highlighting all 25 titles on the BTBA Fiction Longlist, one by one, building up to the announcement of the 10 finalists on April 10th. A variety of judges, booksellers, and readers will write these, all under the rubric of “Why This Book Should Win. You can find the whole series by clicking ...
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Mikhail Shishkin's April Tour
I think I’ve mentioned this once or twice in recent posts, but although Mikhail Shishkin won’t be attending BookExpo America this year he WILL be touring throughout the U.S. this April, starting in San Francisco and hitting up Austin, Boston, and New York City. Below is a list of all the dates and general ...
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Why This Book Should Win: "Traveler of the Century" by Andrés Neuman [BTBA 2013]
As in years past, we will be highlighting all 25 titles on the BTBA Fiction Longlist, one by one, building up to the announcement of the 10 finalists on April 10th. A variety of judges, booksellers, and readers will write these, all under the rubric of “Why This Book Should Win. You can find the whole series by clicking ...
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Three Percent #56: Apple-azon, Marias, and the Possibility of Love
This week’s podcast is a bit of a hodge-podge: We start out talking about the concept of selling used ebooks, then Tom gets to express his admiration for Javier Marias’s new novel, The Infatuations, and Marias in general, and finally we talk about Houellebecq, which, as can only be expected, is controversial. Oh, ...
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Why This Book Should Win: "My Father's Book" by Urs Widmer [BTBA 2013]
As in years past, we will be highlighting all 25 titles on the BTBA Fiction Longlist, one by one, building up to the announcement of the 10 finalists on April 10th. A variety of judges, booksellers, and readers will write these, all under the rubric of “Why This Book Should Win. You can find the whole series by clicking ...
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Why This Book Should Win: "Maidenhair" by Mikhail Shishkin [BTBA 2013]
As in years past, we will be highlighting all 25 titles on the BTBA Fiction Longlist, one by one, building up to the announcement of the 10 finalists on April 10th. A variety of judges, booksellers, and readers will write these, all under the rubric of “Why This Book Should Win. You can find the whole series by clicking ...
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Why This Book Should Win: "Mama Leone" by Miljenko Jergović [BTBA 2013]
As in years past, we will be highlighting all 25 titles on the BTBA Fiction Longlist, one by one, building up to the announcement of the 10 finalists on April 10th. A variety of judges, booksellers, and readers will write these, all under the rubric of “Why This Book Should Win. You can find the whole series by clicking ...
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Shishkin's Rejection and Gender Priviledge
This is a guest post from Tanya Paperny, a writer, translator, event planner, and adjunct professor of journalist and composition. Her translations of Andrei Krasnyashykh have recently appeared in The Massachusetts Review and _The Literary Review. You can read more of her writing at Culturally Progressive, her personal ...
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Why This Book Should Win: "The Map and the Territory" by Michel Houellebecq [BTBA 2013]
As in years past, we will be highlighting all 25 titles on the BTBA Fiction Longlist, one by one, building up to the announcement of the 10 finalists on April 10th. A variety of judges, booksellers, and readers will write these, all under the rubric of “Why This Book Should Win. You can find the whole series by clicking ...
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The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira
Maybe I’ve been watching too much Doctor Who lately, and I’m therefore liable to see everything through science-fiction-colored glasses. But when the pages of The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira refer to “the totality of the present and of eternity” and the narrator drops phrases like “all possible ...
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Latest Review: "The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira" by César Aira
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Emily Davis on The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira, the most recent Aira book to come out from New Directions, and which is translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver. Emily is a graduate of the University of Rochester’s Master of Arts in Literary Translation, ...
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Why This Book Should Win: "The Planets" by Sergio Chejfec [BTBA 2013]
As in years past, we will be highlighting all 25 titles on the BTBA Fiction Longlist, one by one, building up to the announcement of the 10 finalists on April 10th. A variety of judges, booksellers, and readers will write these, all under the rubric of “Why This Book Should Win. You can find the whole series by clicking ...
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Why This Book Should Win: "My Struggle: Book One" by Karl Ove Knausgaard [BTBA 2013]
As in years past, we will be highlighting all 25 titles on the BTBA Fiction Longlist, one by one, building up to the announcement of the 10 finalists on April 10th. A variety of judges, booksellers, and readers will write these, all under the rubric of “Why This Book Should Win. You can find the whole series by clicking ...
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Why This Book Should Win: "Prehistoric Times" by Eric Chevillard [BTBA 2013]
As in years past, we will be highlighting all 25 titles on the BTBA Fiction Longlist, one by one, building up to the announcement of the 10 finalists on April 10th. A variety of judges, booksellers, and readers will write these, all under the rubric of “Why This Book Should Win. You can find the whole series by clicking ...
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Why This Book Should Win: "Autoportrait" by Edouard Levé [BTBA 2013]
As in years past, we will be highlighting all 25 titles on the BTBA Fiction Longlist, one by one, building up to the announcement of the 10 finalists on April 10th. A variety of judges, booksellers, and readers will write these, all under the rubric of “Why This Book Should Win. You can find the whole series by clicking ...
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"Where State Television Has Become a Prostitute" [Mikhail Shishkin & the Russian Government]
So, our author Mikhail Shishkin (whose Maidenhair is the most important book I’ve ever published) cause a bit of a stir over the weekend, when he decided against participating in the Read Russia delegation to BookExpo America this summer. Here’s the complete text of his letter declining the invitation, as ...
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Three Percent #55: Twenty-Five Books to Add to Your List
This week’s podcast is a look at the 25 titles on the Best Translated Book Awards Fiction Longlist. Tom and I discuss each title, talking about which books we’ve read (or want to), and which ones we think will make the list of 10 Finalists. For those of you who aren’t that familiar with all of these ...
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It's No Good
To call Kirill Medvedev a poet is to focus on only one aspect of his work: Medvedev is a committed socialist political activist, essayist, leftist publisher, and literary critic who lives in Moscow and who uses the medium of poetry as his artistic base for a broader discussion of art and politics, and the artist’s place ...
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Latest Review: "It's No Good" by Kirill Medvedev
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Will Evans (aka Bromance Will) on Kirill Medvedev’s It’s No Good, which is translated from the Russian by Keith Gessen, Mark Krotov, Corry Merrill, and Bela Shayevich and published by n+1/Ugly Duckling Presse. By now, most of you know who Bromance Will is, ...
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What DID Make the Best Translated Book Award longlist?
Over the past few weeks, I’ve dropped a couple of clues as to what did make the BTBA longlist, which will be announced tomorrow morning at 10am, but nothing all that specific. I told you that two of the finalists for the French-American Translation Prize made it; I mentioned that three of the IFFP longlist are also on ...
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BTBA 2013: "Pow!" [The Books that DIDN'T Make It]
I’m pretty bummed about this one. And my secret hope of hopes is that Mo Yan’s Pow! didn’t make the list because everyone is so enamored with Sandalwood Death, which we officially decided to make eligible for the 2014 BTBA. I reviewed this novel a couple months back, and will be using it in my ...
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BTBA 2013: "Necropolis" [The Books that DIDN'T Make It]
Santiago Gamboa’s Necropolis, which won the La Otra Orilla Literary Award in 2009, is frustratingly good, inventive, and obsessed with story telling. The premise is simple: An author much like Santiago Gamboa himself, is invited to participate in a literary conference about biography—one that will also be attended ...
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Win a Copy of "A Short Tale of Shame"
Over at GoodReads, we’re giving away 20 copies of Angel Igov’s A Short Tale of Shame, co-winner of the 2012 Contemporary Bulgarian Writers Contest. After deciding to take a semester off their studies to think about future plans, long-time friends Maya, Sirma, and Spartacus decide to hitchhike to the sea. ...
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BTBA 2013: "The Canvas" [The Books that DIDN'T Make It]
This one is a bitter pill to swallow . . . Way back in July of 2010, I wrote a post about “The Next German Book I Want to See Translated” featuring this video: Well, two-plus years later, on my birthday, Open Letter brought out Benjamin Stein’s The Canvas, a unique, very readable book about three main ...
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A Vote for Pynchon Is a Vote for Ryan Chapman, Is a Vote Against Riverhead
Ryan Chapman (who totally rocked this podcast about the Pynchon ebooks and whatnot) just emailed me about “The Davids,” an annual competition among Penguin imprints to win a small plastic trophy . . . Here, I’ll let them explain: Every year Penguin selects the best book videos for The Davids, named ...
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BTBA 2013: "Almost Never" [The Books that DIDN'T Make It]
When I first read Almost Never by Daniel Sada, I thought it was a lock to be a finalist for the 2013 BTBA. It’s a strange book that’s basically 328 pages of foreplay ending with three pages of ...
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Mama Leone
Like Scotts or High Elvish, childhood is simultaneously both a real language and a totally made-up one. We all spoke it once, but in the time since we spoke it last we’ve forgotten enough that our own memories can seem, if not incomprehensible, then at least significantly garbled. Being adults—meaning, being creatures ...
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Latest Review: "Mama Leone" by Miljenko Jergović
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Josh Billings on Miljenko Jergović’s Mama Leone, translated from the Croatian by David Williams and published by Archipelago Books. Josh Billings has reviewed for The Literary Review in the past, and is also a writer and a translator from Russian. His two ...
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BTBA 2013: "The Obscene Madame D" [The Books that DIDN'T Make It]
Next Tuesday, March 5th, at 10 am(ish), we will be unveiling this year’s BTBA Fiction Longlist. This year’s judges—click here for the complete list—did a spectacular job selecting the 25 best works of fiction in translation published last year. In contrast to years past, this time I recommended that ...
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Three Percent #54: Selling Swing Sets and Books to Costco Is for Closers
This week, Chad talks with special guest George Carroll about the enchanted lives of literary sales reps, Seagull Books, the Seagull School of Publishing, László Krasznahorkai’s forthcoming books, and . . . the UEFA Champions League. This week’s music is the bouncy, thumping, chanting Melody off the new K-X-P ...
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The New Gerbrand Bakker Novel [Weekend Reading]
I hate to admit it, but a few years ago, when Archipelago first sent me a copy of Gerbrand Bakker’s The Twin, I assumed that it was a book that I was probably never going to read. I mean, it’s a book about a farmer. A quiet book about a farmer. An introspective aging farmer taking care of his invalid father. ...
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Three Percent #53: Are the NBCCs the Greatest American Book Awards?
On this week’s podcast, we welcome National Book Critics Circle board member Carolyn Kellogg to talk about the NBCC awards, the changes to the National Book Award (which set me off on a bit of a paranoid rant), Bookish and its suckishness, and a variety of other literary topics. I also want to add a bit of an update. ...
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Blindly
A few pages into Claudio Magris’s Blindly, the reader begins to ask the same question posed by the book’s jacket: “Who is the mysterious narrator of Blindly?” Who indeed. At times the narrator is Tore, an inmate in a mental health facility. Other times, the narration is handled by Jorgen Jorgenson, king of Iceland, ...
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Latest Review: "Blindly" by Claudio Magris
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Vincent Francone on Claudio Magris’s Blindly, which is translated from the Italian by Anne Milano Appel and published by Yale University Press as part of their Margellos World Republic of Letters Series. Yale’s World Republic of Letters Series deserves a ...
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. . . Things to Support
Just received this message from Erica Mena, one of the forces behind Anomalous Press, which is looking to take their virtual goods physical. Anomalous Press is joining the physical world with a kick (start). [CWP Note: GROAN] We have six new books that are ready to be made flesh, well, paper. Two of these books ...
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. . . Things to Buy . . .
Calling all Krashnahorkai fans (of which there are legion): The next issue of Music & Literature, which is available for preorder now, will feature a bunch of interesting works by and about your favorite Laszlo. Music & Literature_’s second issue, now available for pre-order, features new literature on and by ...
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Things to Attend . . .
For all of you lucky people living in the great city of New York, here are two fantastic upcoming events that you should try and attend. First off, next Thursday, February 21st at 7pm at McNally Jackson, Stephen Snyder and Allison Markin Powell (both of whom make me swoon) will be talking about Japanese literature in ...
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Open Letter Newslestter [2.13.13]
The new Open Letter Newsletter was mailed out yesterday, and is now online (in a pretty, slick format). Included is information about 18% Gray, next Monday’s Tirza launch party at 192 Books & The Half King, and a bit about the 2013 Preview Podcast. If you’d like to sign up for the newsletter (and really, ...
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How Literature Saved My Life
David Shields’s books have the power to change the way you approach all art. What separates us is not what happens to us. Pretty much the same things happen to most of us: birth, love, bad driver’s license photos, death. What separates us is how each of us thinks about what happens to us. That’s what I ...
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Latest Review: "How Literature Saved My Life" by David Shields
The latest addition to our Reviews Section isn’t a translation. It’s a review I wrote for GoodReads about David Shields’s new book, How Literature Saved My Life, which dropped last week. It’s also a book that I love and that I’ve been talking about on “the podcast”: and elsewhere for ...
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Riffle, Part II
So, a couple months back, I posted a long look at Riffle, the new “Pinterest for Books.” The other day, after blowing up on Bookish I went back into Riffle and played around a bit, adding some books I’ve read in recent months, and making a few lists—all with the goal of increasing my ...
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Revenge
One of the most pleasant surprises of the literary world in the past few years, at least in my opinion, is the success that Japanese author Yoko Ogawa has seen in the United States. Her breakout, modest hit The Housekeeper and the Professor received national attention and, more anecdotally, was a top-selling book for years ...
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Latest Review: "Revenge" by Yoko Ogawa
This is the week of Will Eells reviews. In addition to writing about Persona on Tuesday, today he has a piece on Yoko Ogawa’s Revenge, translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder and published by Picador. Here’s a bit from his review: One of the most pleasant surprises of the literary world in the past ...
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Open Letter Love from the West Coast, Part II
I’m not even going to bother setting this one up—just read the opening of this review by Gregory Leon Miller from the San Francisco Chronicle: Quim Monzó might just be the best writer you’ve never heard of. One could say he’s Catalan’s best-known writer – in fact, the publicity ...
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Open Letter Love from the West Coast, Part I
A couple weeks ago, we released Zachary Karabashliev’s 18% Gray, which looks like this: and should not be confused with Anne Tenino’s 18% Gray and looks like this: Anyway, Zack’s book, which was the co-winner of the 2012 Contemporary Bulgarian Writers Contest (sponsored by the ever-wonderful ...
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Bookish: What it Isn't [Weekly Rant #1]
OK, so first off, for anyone who saw my little Facebook hissy fit last night about Bookish, I apologize. I may have overstated things a bit (yeah, I know that totally doesn’t sound like me), and jumped the gun a bit on some of my insults. That said, and before I get more fully into the Bookish conundrum, a few of the ...
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The 2013 Preview Podcast Book List
Following Friday’s posting of our latest podcast, I received a number of requests for the full list of books that we talked about. And thanks to Tom’s diligent pre-podcast preparation (seriously, I’m not even joking), I have that complete list—in the order in which they were discussed: Javier ...
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Latest Review: "Persona" by Naoki Inose with Hiroaki Sato
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Will Eells on Persona, a biography of Yukio Mishima available from Stone Bridge Press. Mishima is a huge figure in Japanese literature, and this is a huge biography, so let’s just let Will get into it: ukio Mishima is about as famous as he is infamous. The ...
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Persona: A Biography of Yukio Mishima
Yukio Mishima is about as famous as he is infamous. The enormous body of work left behind almost outshines his shocking public suicide after taking hostages with the help of his personal nationalist militia at a Self-Defense Forces base. In Persona, the first biography of Mishima to appear in English in over thirty years and ...
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Three Percent #52: 2013 Doesn't Officially Start Until We Podcast
So, it’s been a while. Due to some technical difficulties, we haven’t been able to post a podcast for the past few weeks. But thanks to the whizbang IT department at the University of Rochester, our 10,000 year old iMac is up and functioning again. Which means that 2013 can finally officially start—thanks to ...
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HIPPO Reads: TED Talks for the Literary Set
Just this morning, Kaitlin Solimine (whom I was lucky enough to meet in Lisbon this past summer), launched HIPPO Reads, an intriguing new project: HIPPO Reads is a literary startup focused on curating and delivering high quality, previously published content with an academic bent. Think of us as TED Talks for ...
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"The Perfect American" in Book and Opera Form [Weekend Reading]
Back in 2003, Other Press—one of the most interesting independent presses out there—brought out a book about Walt Disney entitled The Perfect American by Peter Stephan Jungk and translated from the Germany by Michael Hofmann. I remember hearing about this book from my friend Blake Radcliffe (which, I still ...
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Sin
Zakhar Prilepin is one hell of a writer, and an interesting figure to boot. Sin is an exciting debut in English for one of one of Russia’s most popular and critically-acclaimed writers. Though this is his first novel published in English, Prilepin has written a lot: four novels, three books of short stories, plus a ...
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Latest Review: "Sin" by Zakhar Prilepin
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Will Evans (aka Bromance Will) on Zakhar Prilepin’s Sin, translated from the Russian by Simon Patterson and Nina Chordas and published by the quasi-mysterious Glagoslav Publications. This has been an angry week at Three Percent. First, I dissed Alejandro ...
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On Submissions [We're Not Phone People]
I’d like to talk a bit about submissions. Because I’ve had a very stressful and involved week of cataloging, catching up with, and responding to every single submission Open Letter has received since essentially July of last year, I’m a little on the edge right now when it comes to submitters repeatedly asking about ...
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The Problem with Book Awards [Why America Sucks, Part Infinity]
Late last night, I came across this article about a new book award—one to reward innovative writing: [In reference to all the other book awards out there—Man Booker, Costa, IMPAC, Women’s Prize for Fiction, etc.] Enough to be going on with? Well, no. Not just because there can never be too many literary ...
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Ways of Going Home
Ways of Going Home, Alejandro Zambra’s third book to be published in English (and second translated by Megan McDowell), packs a lot of themes—historical memory, difficulties of love, honesty in art—into a brief 139 page novel set between the two great Chilean earthquakes in 1985 and 2010. It’s an ...
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Latest Review: "Ways of Going Home" by Alejandro Zambra
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a book that I talk about on our yet-unpublished “2013 Preview Podcast.” Which hopefully will be up in a few days, once our podcasting computer is fixed. So when you hear me talk about Ways of Going Home by Alejandro Zambra, translated from the Spanish by Megan ...
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Weight of Temptation
The Reeds is a camp just like any other: it has your usual hierarchy of campers, over-enthused counselors, and lovely scenic views surrounded by imposing fences and ravenous guard-dogs. It is a place that could only be found in your worst nightmares, a camp which could make even the most enthusiastic attendee cry out for ...
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Latest Review: "The Weight of Temptation" by Ana Maria Shua
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Allie Levick on Ana Maria Shua’s The Weight of Temptation, translated from the Spanish by Andrea Labinger and available from University of Nebraska Press. Allie is another of my students from last semester. Few more of these to run over the next couple weeks . . ...
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Man Booker International Prize 2013 Finalists
This morning, the finalists for the 2013 Man Booker International Prize were announced, and it’s a pretty fantastic list: U R Ananthamurthy (India) Aharon Appelfeld (Israel) Lydia Davis (USA) Intizar Husain (Pakistan) Yan Lianke (China) Marie NDiaye (France) Josip Novakovich (Canada) Marilynne Robinson ...
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A Great Opportunity
I just found out that And Other Stories, arguable the hottest and most successful new publisher of the past few years, is looking to hire a NY-based part-time publicity director. You can read the whole ad at that link (and it’s nothing like that other job listing from last month), but here’s the basics: And ...
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New Issue of Asymptote
Asymptote, one of the prettiest (and smartest) online magazines, has a new issue out to kick off the new year, and it’s pretty packed with interesting material: For one, we got to talk to our favorite Francophile, Edmund White, about why Proust is “a more profound psychologist than Freud”. We also have ...
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The Story of My Purity
I have long lamented the lack of literature translated from Italy, the country of my grandparents. The span between Dante and Umberto Eco is wide, populated with fine writers, though it seems few of them get translated, much less read. Thus, it was with great interest that I approached Francesco Pacifico’s novel, The Story ...
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Latest Review: "The Story of My Purity" by Francesco Pacifico
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Vincent Francone on the forthcoming novel The Story of My Purity, written by Francesco Pacifico, translated from the Italian by Stephen Twilley, and published by FSG. The Story of My Purity is the first of Pacifico’s books to make its way into English. ...
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A Book for Your Weekend: "The End of the Oulipo?" by Scott Esposito and Lauren Elkin
One of the books that I’m most looking forward to reading this year is Scott Esposito and Lauren Elkin’s The End of the Oulipo?, which just came out this week. As a huge fan of the Oulipo—and a huge fan of Scott and Lauren—this has the potential to be really interesting. The jacket copy ...
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The Camera Killer
The Camera Killer by Austrian writer Thomas Glavinic, translated by John Brownjohn, is a psychological thriller that was first published in 2003 as Der Kameramörde. The unnamed narrator travels to the region of West Styria over Easter weekend with his “partner” Sonja to stay with their friends, Eva and Heinrich ...
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Latest Review: "The Camera Killer" by Thomas Glavinic
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Lisa Boscov-Ellen on Thomas Glavinic’s The Camera Killer, which is translated from the German by John Brownjohn and published by AmazonCrossing. Lisa Boscov-Ellen is another MA student here at the University of Rochester, and translates from Spanish. She was ...
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More 2013 Previewing!
We’re having some catastrophic minor computer issues preventing us from being able to upload the new Three Percent podcast, but as soon as the website computer stops restarting every three seconds and every three seconds and every three seconds, you’ll be able to hear an hour of Tom and I chatting up the 2013 ...
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Sandalwood Death and Books with Numbers [January Translations, Part I]
Tom and I will record our “official” 2013 preview podcast tomorrow, so you can look forward to that, but as a way of upping the number of books we can talk about on the blog, I’d like to start a weekly “preview” column. Something that may not always be that serious, yet will at least give some ...
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Latest Review: "Firefly" by Severo Sarduy
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Will Vanderhyden on Severo Sarduy’s Firefly, which is translated from the Spanish by Mark Fried, and published by Archipelago Books. Will Vanderhyden (aka “Willsconsin,” which separates him from “Bromance Will” and “Will ...
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We Monks & Soldiers
Lutz Bassman’s We Monks & Soldiers is a post-exoticist collection of several interrelated stories set during the final shallow breaths of humanity. An exorcism is performed that may or may not have resulted in the slaughter of an innocent family. An agent carries out a strange mission with varying levels of success. A ...
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Latest Review: We Monks & Soldiers
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by J.T. Mahany—a grad student here in the University of Rochester literary translation program—on Lutz Bassmann’s, or rather, “Lutz Bassmann’s” We Monks & Soldiers, which is translated from the French by Jordan Stump, and available ...
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The Millions 2013 (Although Mostly Spring) Book Preview
The Millions just released it’s Most Anticipated: The Great 2013 Book Preview, and although there’s not a single Open Letter book included on this list, which, honestly makes it pretty damn suspect in my mind, since, if they’re skipping books like Tirza and the never-before translated L’Amour by ...
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Amerika: The Missing Person
A couple years ago, some trickster posted the first page of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest to a Yahoo group looking for advice about “his” new novel. Not surprisingly, the um, yahoos, didn’t recognize the source text and populated the message board with all sorts of terrible advice about the lack ...
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Latest Review: "Amerika: The Missing Person" by Franz Kafka
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is something I wrote about Mark Harman’s translation of Amerika by Franz Kafka, which is the book we’re discussion at the first ever Writers & Books/Plüb Book Club. (Which my iPhone autocorrected to “Book Clüb,” so fuck and yes.) Anyway, I’m not ...
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2013 Resolutions!
One of my favorite 2012 posts to write was this one in which I got to ramble unchecked about stuff I wanted to do in the New Year. Since that was so fun, I’m going to keep up the tradition with some looking back, some new resoluting, and some stupid jokes. So here goes! Resolution #1: Drink More Mimosas Seriously. ...
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A Special Appeal on the Last Day of 2012
We at Three Percent & Open Letter want to simply say: Thank you. This will probably be the last message we’ll post about our 2012 Annual Campaign, and we want to use it to let you know that, by participating, you’re making a vital (and tax deductible—TODAY IS YOUR LAST DAY TO DO SO, SO DO IT NOW!) ...
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Pow!
The first book by recent Nobel Laureate, Mo Yan, to come out in English translation, Pow! is guaranteed to get a lot of attention, especially considering the recent hubbub about his relationship to the Chinese Communist Party, to censorship, to the plight of fellow writer Liu Xiaobo. A lot of reviewers will scrutinize Pow! ...
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Latest Review: "Pow!" by Mo Yan
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece I wrote (after a very long travel experience, so forgive me) about Mo Yan’s Pow!, which is coming out from Seagull in Howard Goldblatt’s translation. Here’s the opening: The first book by recent Nobel Laureate, Mo Yan, to come out in English ...
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Kaija's Favorite Albums of 2012 [Music Podcast]
As a supplement to this week’s “Favorite Music of 2012” podcast, we’ll be posting top 10 album lists from all four participants over the course of the day. Here’s Kaija’s list. The 2012 Situational Album The Lumineers, The Lumineers I supposed a “situational album” can be best ...
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Chad's Favorite Albums of 2012 [Music Podcast]
As a supplement to this week’s “Favorite Music of 2012” podcast, we’ll be posting top 10 album lists from all four participants over the course of the day. I guess I’m up first. Album That Takes Me Back to High School Days Japandroids, Celebration Rock The Japandroids have popped up on a few ...
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Three Percent #51: Long Intros and Boy Bands [Favorite Music of 2012]
This week’s podcast features Chad, Nathan Furl, Kaija Straumanis, and Will Cleveland talking about their favorite albums of 2012. (And sometimes 2011.) It’s a pretty tight podcast, featuring thirteen different artists and some interesting insights into why we each like different styles of music. Oh, and of course ...
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If I Could Publish Any French Books I Wanted [Frenchpocalypse Trip 2012]
Continuing on about my French editorial trip that will end with the End of the World on Friday, I wanted to write a slightly more serious post just to share with everyone some of the interesting things I’ve been finding here. So, in order of books that are closest to my keyboard to those farther afield, here are the ...
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Facts and Bad Jokes [France Apocalypse Trip!]
So, I’m in Paris this week. It’s a special editorial trip that came about last minute thanks to the fact that Laurence Marie and Anne-Sophie Hermil are the most wonderful people. They brought me here yesterday (Monday morning) for 18 appointments with literary folks in four days—a rather intense schedule ...
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Raised from the Ground
One of the late nobel laureate’s earlier novels, Raised from the Ground (Levantado do chão) was originally published in Saramago’s native portuguese in 1980 but has only now been posthumously translated into English by Saramago’s long-time translator, Margaret Jull Costa. Set in the Alentejo region of ...
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Latest Review: "Raised from the Ground" by José Saramago
The lastest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by frequent contributor Jeremy Garber on José Saramago’s Raised from the Ground, which just recently came out from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in Margaret Jull Costa’s translation from the Portuguese. I assume that Saramago needs no introduction, but in case ...
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Kurt Beals Wins First-Ever German Book Office Translation Prize
Just reproducing the press release the GBO sent me, since it says everything that needs to be said in the best way possible: The German Book Office is excited to announce that Kurt Beals has won its first ever translation competition. Beals, a PhD Candidate in German Literature and Culture at the University of ...
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2013 Longlist for the International Prize for Arabic Literature
Bit behind with this, but last week the longlist of the 16 novels in the running for the 2013 International Prize for Arabic Literature (f/k/a the Arabic Booker) were announced. This year’s longlisted authors come from nine different countries, including Kuwait for the first time. Rabee Jaber, who won the Prize in ...
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More Mo Yan and the "C" Word
Mo Yan accepted the Nobel Peace Prize for Literature the other day, giving this acceptance speech: In the fall of 1984 I was accepted into the Literature Department of the PLA Art Academy, where, under the guidance of my revered mentor, the renowned writer Xu Huaizhong, I wrote a series of stories and novellas, ...
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Three Percent #50: Favorite Translations of 2012 (And Trilogies Tom Likes)
In this week’s podcast (Tom’s last one of of the year), we discuss the translations we did (and didn’t)1 read from 2012, including Maidenhair by Mikhail Shishkin, Satantango by Laszlo Krashnahorkai, Woes of the True Policeman by Roberto Bolano, and Necropolis by Santiago Gamboa. This kicks off the beginning ...
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Canvas.
Over at Full Stop, Scott Cheshire has a lot of love for Benjamin Stein’s The Canvas, including this review: The Canvas is loosely based on the account of Binjamin Wilkomirski, author of Fragments (1995), a tremendously popular Holocaust memoir; like Minksy’s story it was proven to be a fabrication. But when I say ...
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Thursday Is Fun Day!
The number one question I’m asked by people interested in Open Letter/publishing is how we find our books. We do a lot of reading of catalogs and reviews online, talking to people, getting recommendations, and, most importantly, receiving submissions over the interwebs. Well, like this one: Subject: QUERY Its All ...
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Riffle. Oh, Riffle
So, a couple weeks ago, Publishers Weekly ran an article on Riffle, asking whether it could be “the Pinterest for Books.” A social media tool powered by Odyl, Riffle takes its name from the word for thumbing through a book.1 And that’s exactly the sense of discovery that Odyl founder and CEO Neil Baptista ...
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GoodReads! Oh, GoodReads
First off, I want to point out that our new GoodReads Giveaway is now live. Between now and December 15th, you can enter to win one of fifteen copies of 18% Gray by Zachary Karabashliev that we’re going to be giving away. By now, you probably know the drill, but if you’re a GoodReads member (and if not, why not?) ...
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Open Letter Author on Open Letter Author Love
As we mentioned back when it was awarded, Dubrakva Ugresic was awarded the Jean Améry Award for Essay Writing this past fall. As it turned out, fellow Open Letter author, Arnon Grunberg,- whose Tirza should be on everyone’s must read list for the spring, gave a speech about Dubravka at the awards ceremony during the ...
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Quarterly Conversation #30 [The Reviews]
The reviews are one of the standard features in every issue of Quarterly Conversation. and there’s a ton of great pieces in this new issue. These are just a few of the highlights. Taylor Davis-Van Atta on Stig Sæterbakken’s Siamese, translated from the Norwegian by Sean Kinsella and Self-Control, translated ...
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Quarterly Conversation #30 [The Translator Interviews]
Following on the earlier post about Quarterly Conversation, here are excerpts from two interviews with translators that appear in the new issue, starting with Heather Cleary, the translator of two Open Letter books—The Planets and The Dark by Sergio Chejfec. This interview was conducted by Stephen Sparks, one of the ...
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Quarterly Conversation #30 [The Author Interviews]
Most of today’s content is brought you by Scott Esposito and Daniel Medin and the spectacular new issue of Quarterly Conversation, which, as always, features a lot of great international lit related content. Generally, when a new issue comes out, I post a summary piece linking off to all of the various articles of ...
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Thank You, National Endowment for the Arts!
The first set of Art Works grants from the NEA were announced this morning, and I’m incredibly giddy about the fact that Open Letter was awarded $45,000 for the following: To support the publication and promotion of books in translation and the continuation of the translation website Three Percent. Works from ...
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Unchain it! Unchain it NOW!!!
When it comes to the representation of lesser-known countries and their literatures, I’m clearly one to have a personal bias toward pitching anything Latvian to the world at large (moment of self-promotion: Open Letter Books will be publishing the English translation of Latvian author Inga Ābele’s novel High Tide in fall ...
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Kirkus's Best Fiction of 2012 List Featuring TWO Open Letter Titles
Now that Cyber Monday is underway, it’s about time for the “Best of Everything!!!” lists to start coming out. (Or, as documented at Largehearted Boy, continue coming out.) Personally, I fricking love these sorts of lists, to find books/albums that I need to check out, and to serve as fodder for my anger . . ...
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Bistra Andreeva: Winner of the 2012 Bulgarian Fellowship Award
In addition to supporting the publication of one Bulgarian book a year through the “Contemporary Bulgarian Writers Contest,” the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation also supports an annual fellowship opportunity, allowing one Bulgarian-to-English translator to spend a few weeks in Rochester, NY, learning about the ...
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"This Being How" by Albena Stambolova
Following on the “earlier announcement”: about Albena Stambolova’s This Being How winning this year’s Bulgarian Writers Contest, here’s an excerpt from Olga Nikolova’s translation. 8. Fathers and Their Professions Philip met Maria at a friend’s house. Although he never liked to admit ...
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Albena Stambolova Wins the 2012 Contemporary Bulgarian Writers Contest
Albena Stambolova’s novel, This Being How, translated by Olga Nikolova, has been selected as the winner of the third iteration of the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation’s annual novel contest supporting Bulgarian literature. Open Letter will be publishing this book in October 2013, making it the fourth Bulgarian ...
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Three Percent #49: Two Books, One Rant
This week’s podcast is focused on crime and detective books—both fiction and nonfiction. First off, we talk I monologue about Errol Morris’s A Wilderness of Error: The Trials of Jeffrey MacDonald and my recent Twitter fight with Joe McGinniss about this case, then we move on to talking about Wolf ...
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GoodReads Giveaway for "A Thousand Morons" by Quim Monzo
Our next GoodReads Giveaway just went live—we’re going to be giving away 15 copies of Quim Monzó’s latest collection, A Thousand Morons. And not just that, we’re going to include a “Thousand Morons” t-shirt with each copy of the book . . . (Speaking of our fantastic t-shirts, ...
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Brenner and God
Brenner and God is the first book in the “Brenner” series to come out in English, and only the second Wolf Haas title overall. The Weather Fifteen Years Ago came out from Ariadne Press a few years back and blew away the BTBA fiction committee—one reason why I was really excited to pick up this novel. ...
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Latest Review: "Brenner and God" by Wolf Haas
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece that I wrote about Wolf Haas’s Brenner and God, which is translated from the German by Annie Janusch and available from Melville House. This is the first Brenner book to come out in English, but actually the seventh in the series. I believe that Melville House has ...
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I'll Take Some of It Back [IMPAC 2013]
Every year, the insanely long longlist is announced for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and every year I make fun of the award, mainly for the number of titles in contention (154 this year), and the aesthetic shittiness of their website. Until now. There are still about 100 titles too many on the longlist, ...
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The Poems of Octavio Paz
This collection of poems spanning Paz’s writerly life also spans the historical events of the twentieth century and a significant arc of modernism. The book presents the original Spanish on the left, with the English translation on the opposing page. Translations are principally by Eliot Weinberger, but include other ...
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Latest Review: "The Poems of Octavio Paz"
The latest addition to our “Reviews Section”: is a piece by Grant Barber on The Poems of Octavio Paz, edited and mostly translated by Eliot Weinberger, and available from New Directions. Grant’s review is really solid, so I’m just going to jump right to it and give you a sample: One critical ...
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Down the Rabbit Hole
Around the midpoint of Down the Rabbit Hole, the debut novel by Juan Pablo Villalobos (translated by Rosalind Harvey, recently published by FSG, and not to be confused with the mystery novel by Peter Abrahams), the narrator, Tochtli, the young son of a Mexican drug tsar, states: Books don’t have anything in them about ...
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Latest Review: "Down the Rabbit Hole" by Juan Pablo Villalobos
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Vincent Francone on Juan Pablo Villalobos’s Down the Rabbit Hole, which is translated from the Spanish by Rosalind Harvey and available from FSG. This is a book I first heard about a while back when the innovative and amazing And Other Stories announced that ...
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2012 Translation Database is FINALLY Online [Chad's So Lazy]
So, a mere 10 months into the year, I’ve finally updated the Translation Database and just posted a new version of the spreadsheet for 2011 and posted the first version of the spreadsheet for 2012.. I’m fully aware that the 2012 list of poetry books is woefully incomplete, so if you are a poet, or a translator ...
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Bigger than a MegaUltraÜberApocaCane [Random House Penguins]
Although information started leaking last week, it wasn’t until this morning that the Penguin-Random House merger was made official: Publisher Pearson says it has agreed a deal with German media group Bertelsmann to combine their Penguin and Random House businesses. Under the terms of the deal, the two ...
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RTWCS: Ledig House Event
Next Tuesday we’re going to be hosting the second event of this year’s Reading the World Conversation Series—our annual event featuring four authors currently in residence at the Ledig House. As one of—if not the—only residencies in the U.S. dedicated to international writing and literature, ...
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Vox Tablet and The Canvas
For those of you unable to make any of the upcoming Benjamin Stein & Brian Zumhagen events (they’re in NY at the Deutsches Haus tomorrow night at 6:30, then at Columbia University Bookstore on Thursday at 6pm, and at 57th Street Bookstore in Chicago on Sunday, October 28th at 3pm), you can listen to them talk about ...
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An ALTA So Great it Made the New York Times [ALTA 2012]
Way back at the start of the year, I promised that this year’s ALTA would be “THE GREATEST CONFERENCE IN THE HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSE OF CONFERENCES.” Now, I’m not sure that was the case—although it was the most interesting ALTA I’ve ever attended—but it was awesome enough to get ...
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It's Fine By Me
On an early morning in Oslo in 1970, Arvid Jansen shimmies up his high school flagpole and replaces his nation’s flag with that of the Viet Cong. Confronted by the headmaster in front of his classmates, Arvid takes the opportunity to expound on the evils of the U.S. occupation of Vietnam and Norway’s complicit foreign ...
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2013 Best Translated Book Award: Fiction Update
OK, now that ALTA is over and the new catalog doesn’t come out for two months, I have a bit of time to concentrate on this year’s Best Translated Book Awards. Over the next couple weeks I’ll be posting information about the fiction and poetry panelists, along with an updated list of all translations ...
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Rosalind Harvey on Translation
The new issue of FSG’s Work in Progress weekly newsletter (which is maybe the best publisher newsletter out there), has an interview with Rosalind Harvey, co-translator with Anne McLean of Oblivion by Hector Abad and Dublinesque by Enrique Vila-Matas, and solo translator of Juan Pablo Villalobos’s Down the Rabbit ...
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Mo Yan Wins the 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature
In case you’re just getting up and haven’t heard the news, Mo Yan was awarded this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature. The Nobel Prize in Literature 2012 was awarded to Mo Yan “who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary”. Admittedly, I’ve never ...
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No One Even Died! [ALTA 2012]
I’m still going to need a few days to process this year’s ALTA conference before I write something more substantial, but I just wanted to say that the conference went even better than expected. The panels were brilliant, David Bellos was incredible, the parties were drunken, and the conversations were stimulating. ...
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John Darnielle, Open Letter, and What You Should Be Reading
Amid all the ALTA excitement (I’ll post some sort of roundup later today—I’m still recovering), this post about what John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats went up on Fader, and contains a ton of really great statements about Open Letter and international lit in general: Before that, I read Can Xue’s ...
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Frisch & Co. Launches
Former Open Letter senior editor, E.J. Van Lanen, announced yesterday that he’s started a publishing house dedicated to doing e-versions of international literature. As you can see in the press release below, the first titles—Anna Kim’s The Anatomy of a Night and Uwe Tellkamp’s The Tower—will be ...
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Michael Henry Heim (1943-2012)
I’m really not sure how to write this post . . . I didn’t know Michael Henry Heim as well as a lot of other people, such as Esther Allen, Susan Bernofsky, Sean Cotter, and the like, but I did have a number of really amazing interactions with him, and his passing is incredible sad and hitting me pretty hard. ...
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Three Percent #47: The Initiation Well
This week, Chad W. Post and Kaija Straumanis talk with Philip Graham — a co-founder and current nonfiction editor of Ninth Letter, author of several books, including The Moon, Come to Earth:Dispatches from Lisbon, — about Portuguese culture and literature, specifically the works of Gonçalo Tavares, whose book The ...
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ALTA 2012 Preview: Friday Morning, October 5th
Couple more days of ALTA to preview, to help all of you decide which panels you might want to attend. Today we’ll highlight all of Friday’s events, cover Saturday on Monday, and then do all the special events and readings on Tuesday. It’s unbelievable that after a year of preparing for this conference, ...
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Canvas Release Date! And a Special Offer . . .
So, yesterday was the official release date for Benjamin Stein’s The Canvas, one of the most curiously designed Open Letter books to date. With two openings, and myriad ways to read it, you can read a totally different Canvas at the same time as your friend: The novel consists of two narratives: Amnon ...
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ALTA 2012 Preview: Thursday Afternoon, October 4th
Continuing the series of ALTA preview posts (for those of you who are coming, or who wish you could be here), here’s a list of choice events from Thursday afternoon (which is only one week from now!). Also, just as a reminder, we’ll be videotaping a bunch of these events, so if you see one that intrigues you, stay ...
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Seven Houses in France
I want to do a podcast sometime about the difficulties of reading. Everything from the amount of time it takes to read a book (and where that time comes from) to what makes a particular book (Finnegans Wake for example) tricky to get into, to books that one avoids because they “seem” like they’d be a bit of ...
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Latest Review: "Seven Houses in France" by Bernardo Atxaga
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a thing I wrote about Bernardo Atxaga’s Seven Houses in France, which just came out from Graywolf Press in Margaret Jull Costa’s translation. This is the third Atxaga book that Graywolf has published, the other two being Obabakoak and The Accordionist’s Son. ...
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ALTA 2012 Preview: Thursday Morning, October 4th
This year’s ALTA kicks off officially on Wednesday night with the special opening event celebrating Open Letter’s poetry series—in particular Eduardo Chirinos’s Smoke of Distant Fires, translated by Gary Racz, and Juan Gelman’s Dark Times Filled with Light, translated by Hardie St. ...
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Three Percent #46: The Greatest ALTA of All ALTAs
This week’s podcast features special guest Kaija Straumanis to help preview the upcoming American Literary Translators Conference. (Click here for more information about the conference.) Every fall, approx. 350 translators get together for three days of panels, discussions, readings, movies, and drinking. (Oh, and ...
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ALTA Preview: "A Thousand Morons"
One of the fall Open Letter titles that I’m most jacked about is Quim Monzó’s A Thousand Morons. I’ve been a huge fan of Monzó’s for a while now (maybe since I read, The Enormity of the Tragedy, I guess) and am so proud that we have him on our list. (If you want to check him out, I STRONGLY recommend ...
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"That Other Word": Episode 5
The new episode of “That Other Word”—a podcast sponsored by the Center for Writers and Translators and the Center for the Art of Translation and co-hosted by Daniel Medin and Scott Esposito—is now available online. Sometimes marketing copy is all the copy you need . . . I’ll just let this ...
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Are You Ready for the Greatest ALTA Ever? [ALTA 2012]
I know that I’ve mentioned the fact that Rochester is hosting this year’s American Literary Translators Association conference before, but now that the dates are creeping up on us (October 3 is only 16 days away), it’s time to really start promoting this and filling you in on all of the insanely awesome ...
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The Daily Beast's "Hot Reads" for September [Sometimes a Gimmick Is Not a Gimmick]
Great news for Open Letter! The Daily Beast just posted a selection of five “Hot Reads” for September: The Spark of Life by Frances Ashcroft (Norton), We Have the War Upon Us by William J. Cooper (Knopf), Sutton: A Novel by J.R. Moehringer (Hyperion), Ike’s Bluff by Evan Thomas (Little, Brown), and The ...
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Reading in Reverse [Part III of III]
And here’s the final part of Matt Rowe’s dissertation on Daniel Levin Becker’s Many Subtle Channels. You can read part I here and part II here. Enjoy! It’s in Part III of Many Subtle Channels that Levin Becker turns to the “So What” question, the influence and value of the Oulipo in the wider world ...
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We're Flying
In his new collection We’re Flying, Swiss author Peter Stamm weaves together a multitude of perspectives with the ghostly fiber of loss. This fascinating set of short stories centers around the general theme of the “human condition”—joy and sadness, birth and death, couples and families, work and school. However, ...
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Latest Review: "We're Flying" by Peter Stamm
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Quantum Sarah on Peter Stamm’s new collection of stories, We’re Flying, which came out from Other Press in Michael Hofmann’s translation earlier this year. Peter Stamm has a number of books available in English translation, including Seven Years, ...
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Reading in Reverse [Part II of III]
Following up on Monday’s post, here’s the second part of Matt Rowe’s essay on Daniel Levin Becker’s Many Subtle Channels. Part II of Many Subtle Channels is an entertaining survey of the group’s origins and its chief personalities. Levin Becker recounts the exploits of many literary pranksters, ...
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Three Percent #45: +1
This week’s podcast features freelance book critic Jacob Silverman, who stirred up a lot of discussion last month when Slate published his piece, Against Enthusiasm about “the epidemic of niceness in online book culture.” Basically, Jacob argued that online book culture has lead away from legit discussion to ...
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Reading in Reverse [Part I of III]
As you may have noticed I’m a big fan of Daniel Levin Becker’s Many Subtle Channels a book about the Oulipo and potential literature. Which is why I asked Matt Rowe to review this for us. Well, he did. But in epic, multi-part style. (Matt Rowe is a true Three Percenter in that regard.) Today I’m posting Part ...
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Dubravka Ugresic Wins the Jean Améry Award for Essay Writing
Following the earlier post about the 2012 PEN Literary Awards, here’s another awards announcement—one that hits a bit closer to home. According to Boersenblatt, Dubravka Ugresic has been awarded the Jean Améry Award for Essay Writing for the German version of Karaoke Culture. Here’s the official ...
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John Locke Paid People to Buy His Books [Last Laughs Laugh Best]
Hardcore Three Percent fans may remember some of my issues and troubles with the hack writer, John Locke (in comparison to the talented philosopher John Locke and the John Locke who featured prominently on Lost), who is the author of hundreds1 of Donovan Creed mystery novels, which feature midgets, pseudo-thriller plot-lines, ...
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Graywolf and Per Petterson in Shelf Awareness
Today’s Shelf Awareness is basically one long love-letter to Norwegian author Per Petterson (Out Stealing Horses) and his U.S. publisher Graywolf celebrating the release of Petterson’s new novel, It’s Fine By Me, which is translated by Don Bartlett and available in better bookstores everywhere on October ...
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Three Percent #44: The Exoticism of Fruit Machines
This week’s podcast—the last before Tom goes off to visit the good people of Carolina—is a bit of a surprise. Tom told me he had a topic, but wanted to spring it on me and get my unprepared reaction. So, to share in the spirit of surprises, I’m not going to say anything about what we talked about, ...
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China Miéville and The Futures of the Novels
In today’s Guardian (my favorite media organization, in part because it’s responsible for the best soccer podcast on the planet) you can find China Miéville’s keynote speech to the 2012 Edinburgh World Writers’ conference, which is all about “the future of the novel,” or, since he wants to ...
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I Heart the Iberia [Five Books I Want to Read]
This summer has been a crapton of busy. There’s the normal publsihing10bookswiththreeemployeesOMG sort of daily adrenaline rush, and on top of that, and on top of working with a half-dozen interns and apprentices, this summer has been consumed by planning and planning and fretting over and planning the American Literary ...
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George Carroll on Translations
Sales rep superstar and international literature enthusiast George Carroll just posted a “destination guide” at NW Book Lovers that highlights a number of great presses, organizations, and books worth checking out. Many of these—like Three Percent, New Directions, the Center for the Art of ...
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PEN Center USA Translation Award to Suzanne Jill Levine
The 2012 winners of the PEN Center USA Literary Awards were announced Wednesday, and I’m extremely glad to see that Suzanne Jill Levine won in the translation category for her work on José Donoso’s The Lizard’s Tale, which came out late last year from Northwestern University Press. Unfortunately, we ...
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Almost Ready to Start Blogging Again
I know it’s been a terribly slow summer on Three Percent, and I apologize for that. Every day I come in with good intentions and 3-4 ideas for posts, but then I get sucked into planning the ALTA conference, or the never-ending deluge of emails, managing interns, printing things to mail, etc., etc. It’s been a ...
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As Though She Were Sleeping
Elias Khoury’s As Though She Were Sleeping (Archipelago, 2012) is a love story, a family tragedy, and a journey through Levantine cultural history. Considering the radical stance of Khoury’s other works – notably, Gate of the Sun, the first “magnum opus” of the Palestinian people – this novel is a more ...
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Three Percent #43: This Is Spoilers
I’m just back from family vacation, so this week we decided to take things easy and talk about The Dark Knight Rises (which we sort of spoil for anyone who either hasn’t seen it, or thinks it’s great), the Olympics, books we’ve read recently, and J. K. Rowling and her misguided attempt to prevent ...
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Maidenhair
“Mikhail Shishkin’s Maidenhair is the type of novel that professors of Russian literature can hold up as a shining example in their classrooms that no, Russian literature is not dead (nor has it ever been), while those who might not know their Pushkin from their Shishkin can read and enjoy Maidenhair as a standalone ...
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Three Percent #42: There's a Chance that Things'll Get Weird
This week, Will Evans joins us to talk about contemporary Russian literature (READ THIS BOOK) and the Read Russia initiative at this year’s BEA. (Sidenote: click on that link just to see the section at the bottom left corner where you can share the page via “Socialist Media.” Seriously.) We talk about Zakhar ...
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NEA 2012 Translation Fellowships
The NEA announced the recipients of this year’s translation fellowships yesterday, and, as always, there’s a number of interesting projects being supported. You can read about all of them here, and listed below are some of the ones that caught my eye: Daniel Brunet ...
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Newest Issue from Anomalous Press
Click here to read Issue #6 from Anomalous Press, an innovative online publication that challenges expectations about all things literary. Take, for instance, Rebecca Ansorge’s haunting Around the Bone, a memoir-in-verse which culls the titles of its sections from the anatomy of a conch. Or, Oswald del Noce’s ...
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2012 Primo Strega
This post is from Kathryn Longenbach, another of our summer interns. (But one that I haven’t set up with her own account, which is why I’m posting on her behalf. As a fan of Italian literature, she wanted to write up something about this year’s Primo Strega award, which was announced recently. Since 1947, ...
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Newest Issue from Asymptote
Click here to read the latest issue from Asymptote, an online literary journal dedicated to publishing contemporary works in translation. This issue includes a riveting excerpt from Goce Smilevski’s new book, Freud’s Sister, in which Dr. Freud visits his psychologically troubled sister at a carnival-style ...
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"Creative Constraints: Translation and Authorship"
Even if Peter Bush hadn’t have sent along the copy of his essay that’s in this collection, I think I would’ve been interested in checking out Creative Constraints: Translation and Authorship, which just came out from Monash University Press in Australia. The essays in this volume address one of the ...
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Satantango
Susan Sontag called László Krasznahorkai the “Hungarian master of the apocalypse,” which would make Satantango his magnum opus of the apocalypse. The end of the world is coming in a deluge of rain that is turning the world into a muddy wasteland that mirrors the spiritual condition of its inhabitants. Satantango ...
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Latest Review: "Satantango" by László Krasznahorkai
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Will Evans on László Krasznahorkai’s Satantango, which is translated from the Hungarian by George Szirtes and is available from New Directions. Here’s part of his review: Susan Sontag called László Krasznahorkai the “Hungarian master of the ...
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Near to the Wild Heart
“He was alone. He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life.” This is the epigraph, borrowed from Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, that captures the modernist spirit so essential to Clarice Lispector’s revolutionary novel, Near to the Wild Heart. As her fierce and precocious protagonist ...
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Inventing the Enemy
Umberto Eco introduces Inventing the Enemy as a compilation of “occasional writings” (xi); indeed, the essays in this collection were written intermittently throughout the past decade and expound upon a vast array of subject matters. Several of the essays were originally presented as lectures at various gatherings ...
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2012 PEN Translation Fund Winners
The twelve recipients of this year’s PEN Translation Fund were announced last week, and since I can’t find it on their website, I’m just posting the complete list below. Bunch of interesting sounding projects—Hillary Gulley’s and Bonnie Huie’s caught my eye (the latter for the use of the ...
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Kickstart My (Translation) Heart
Our pals over at Publishing Perspectives have an interesting couple of pieces up this morning on the fantastic Russian writer Master Chen (the penname of Dmitry Kosyrev): one is an interview with the author, and the other about a Kickstarter campaign started by Russian Life Magazine to fund the translation and publication of ...
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Second Person Singular
Like the two protagonists of his most recent novel, Second Person Singular (translated from the Hebrew by Mitch Ginsburg), Sayed Kashua is a Jerusalem-educated Arab Israeli. He is a columnist for Haaretz, a liberal newspaper, and the creator of the hit sitcom, Arab Labor. Kashua’s work is often controversial, especially ...
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Another Intern Introduction
My name is Sarah Young, but Chad calls me Sarah Two because I was the second intern named Sarah to start at Open Letter this summer. I know my nickname is not as cool as “Quantum Sarah” or “Paranoid Sarah” (whose name is actually Rachel), but I’m just grateful my parents didn’t give me a weird, hyphenated last ...
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Susan Sontag 2012 Prize for Translation
The Susan Sontag Foundation recently announced Julia Powers and Adam Morris as the winners of their 2012 Prize for Translation. Every June, the $5,000 prize is awarded to a literary translator under the age of 30 over the course of five months, during which the proposed project must be completed. The award was established to ...
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The End of the Story
Sparking major controversy in its home country upon publication in 1996, Liliana Heker’s The End of the Story chronicles the atrocity of the Argentinean “Dirty War” not on the grand scale of historical generalization, but on the infinitely more stunning and painful level of personal tragedy. The story is told through ...
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Latest Review: "The End of the Story" by Liliana Heker
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Sarah Winstein-Hibbs on Liliana Heker’s The End of the Story, which is translated from the Spanish by Andrea G. Labinger and is available from Biblioasis. As Sarah states in her introduction, this is her first book review for threepercent! Here is part of her ...
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EU Lit Prize 2012
Click here to read a new article (Publishing Perspectives, June 20) on the European Union’s annual Literature Prize, as well as thoughtful conversation about the difficulty of getting published in a “big” language. The EU’s Literature Prize was developed to facilitate cultural and artistic exchange ...
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Remembering Alicia Steimberg
The world lost an incredible writer this past week. Jewish-Argentinean author Alicia Steimberg, best-known for her novel Musicians and Watchmakers, died suddenly of a heart attack one week ago. To commemorate her life and works, JewishFiction.net has published an early-release excerpt of her novel Innocent Spirit, which was ...
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True
Elsa is dying of cancer. Her husband Martti, a successful artist, and her ambitious daughter Eleonoora, who is a renowned surgeon, are struggling to cope with the impending loss. In spite of their immense, largely independent professional success, neither Martti nor Eleonoora are able to comprehend life without Elsa. A ...
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Latest Review: "True" by Riikka Pulkkinen
The latest review to our Reviews Section is a piece by Aleksandra Fazlipour on Riikka Pulkkinen’s True, which is available from Other Press. Riikka Pulkkinen studied literature and philosophy at the University of Helsinki. Her debut novel, The Border, sparked international interest when it was published in 2006. Her ...
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(Re-)Introducing Alek!
Hi there! I’m Aleksandra Fazlipour, although I typically go by Alek. Chad introduced me before, but I finally got registered as a contributor to the site, so it’s my turn to do it again! I started doing an independent study at Open Letter in January in an attempt to fill out a Creative Writing minor that I took ...
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European Literature Prize 2012
Congratulations to author Julian Barnes and translator Ronald Vlek, whose novel Alsof het voorbij is (The Sense of an Ending, published by Atlas Contact) just won the 2012 European Literature Prize. Initiated in 2011, the Prize selects the best Dutch translations of European literary novels to appear in the last year. For ...
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The Zafarani Files
The Zafarani Files, a book with a misleadingly objective-sounding title, is, in short, a book full of all the deliciously taboo restrictions of traditional Arabic society, namely sex and lust. Despite having firsthand experience with Arabic culture, this reader, for one, was certainly surprised with the sheer lack of ...
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Latest Review: "The Zafarani Files" by Gamal al-Ghitani
The latest review to our Reviews Section is a piece by Rachael Daum on Gamal al-Ghitani’s The Zafarani Files, which Farouk Abdel Wahab translated from the Arabic and is available from The American University in Cairo Press. Gamal Al-Ghitani was born in 1945 and educated in Cairo. He has written 13 novels and 6 ...
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Dublinesque
“The funeral march has begun, and it is futile for those of us who remain loyal to the printed page to protest and rage in the midst of our despair.” Samuel Riba, Dublinesque’s depressive and narcissistic protagonist, stumbles upon this and other similarly prophetic sentiments in an online article ...
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The Russian Library Initiative: For Better or Worse
At the Read Russia event at Book Expo America last week (was it really only last week!?), Overlook Press announced a new project, the Russian Library initiative, supported by Read Russia and the Russian government that is going to result in the publication of 125 works over the next ten years that span all a thousand years of ...
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Three Percent #40: You Owe Me Whiskey!
In this week’s podcast, Tom and I talk about BookExpo America and its parties, in particular the rocking one that took place at the New Directions offices. I also rant (a bit) about why I didn’t get to go to Cape Town to present my speech, The Long Term Is the Only Race Worth Winning. There’s also a bit of ...
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Latvian Publishing Controversy
Our Latvian publishing correspondent Kaija Straumanis (no, not Janis Stirna, he’s restricted to Eurovision) came across an interesting controversy that just took place in Latvia. I think the translated letters/articles pretty much speak for themselves, but I’ll try and contextualize this as it goes along . . . ...
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Javier Calvo's "The Hanging Garden"
Javier Calvo—the author of Wonderful World which was published by HarperCollins a couple years ago—is in the States for a few events, including this one with Edith Grossman that’s taking place on Saturday at McNally Jackson in New York. To mark this, and to bring attention to an interesting young Spanish ...
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Yingelishi: Sinophonic English Poetry and Poetics
If poets are, as P. B. Shelley wrote, “the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” then translation must be one of the unacknowledged legislators of poetry. Certainly translation of Chinese poetry has been essential to modern American writing: Ezra Pound’s Cathay didn’t just invent, as T. S. Eliot put it, “Chinese ...
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Latest Review: "The Legend of Pradeep Mathew" by Shehan Karunatilaka
The latest review to our Reviews Section is a piece by Aleksandra Fazlipour on Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Legend of Pradeep Mathew, which is available from Graywolf Press. Here is part of the review: WG (Wije) Karunasena is a Sri Lankan sportswriter who has been forced into retirement because he is a drunk. He is ...
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The Legend of Pradeep Mathew
WG (Wije) Karunasena is a Sri Lankan sportswriter who has been forced into retirement because he is a drunk. He is also on a fast track to an early death. But he can only write when he’s intoxicated, and his lifelong fascinations for cricket and alcohol propel his obsessive search for Pradeep Mathew, a cricketer who had a ...
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HHhH
There is no such thing as nonfiction. Without a doubt, someone will disagree with that statement, though they would be hard pressed to compile sufficient evidence to support their position. Even the most skilled biographer or historian must confront the reality that it is never possible to accurately recreate an event ...
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From the Mouth of the Whale
Sjón’s From the Mouth of the Whale has been well received by readers and critics. Junot Díaz has called the book “achingly brilliant – an epic made mad, made extraordinary.” A.S. Byatt gave it a hearty endorsement in The Guardian. Such praise for the book is well deserved. The book’s prose is lovely and its ...
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Children in Reindeer Woods
In Children in Reindeer Woods, Kristín Ómarsdóttir, who is also a playwright, presents an interesting reflection on war. On what is introduced as a peaceful day, three paratroopers invade the temporary home for children where Billie lives and kill everyone except Billie right in front of her. Unexpectedly, one soldier ...
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Latest Review: "Children in Reindeer Woods" by Kristín Ómarsdóttir
The latest review to our Reviews Section is a piece by Aleksandra Fazlipour on Kristín Ómarsdóttir’s Children in Reindeer Woods, which Lytton Smith translated from the Icelandic and is available from Open Letter. This is the first book of Kristín Ómarsdóttir’s to be translated into English, and it received ...
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Have You Been Nookd or Kindled?
Courtesy of old college friend Naomi Firestone of the awesome Jewish Book Council, here’s an insane blog post that seems too insane/amazing to be true from a fellow North Carolinian on the blog Ocracoke Island Journal: Some weeks ago I decided that I wanted to read Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Lou Ann loaned me ...
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Doña Barbara, Gallegos, and the Backstory of a Book's Lifetime
Our old friend Jeff Waxman of University of Chicago Press and Seminary Co-op up in Chicago turned our attention to this little gem of an article the other day from Publishing Perspectives written by Maggie Hivnor, the Paperback Editor at “U. of Chicago Press, about how Doña Barbara by Rómulo Gallegos, which had been ...
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Scars, Scars, and More Scars
Over at Numéro Cinq (“A Warm Place on a Cruel Web”) there’s a great feature on Scars by Juan José Saer, a book that I recently claimed in an interview was my “favorite Open Letter book ever.” (And which I qualified by saying that my mind will change by the time the interview is over . . . My ...
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Read Russia at BEA 2012
Next week, Book Expo America, “North America’s premier meeting of book trade professionals,” will take over the Javits Center in NYC. This year’s guest of honor at BEA is none other than RUSSIA, your humble author’s area of beloved expertise, and Russia will be the focus of a TON of super-cool ...
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Will Evans: An Introduction
I’ve been reading the Three Percent blog for over a year now, and now here I am, sitting in Chad’s office, writing a blog post for Three Percent to introduce myself to the Three Percent Army – the cult of translated literature, the gang of literary ruffians who make up the core audience of Three Percent, Open Letter, ...
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J.K. Rowling, Finland, and Translation
Jill Timbers is a translator from Finnish to English who recently posted on the ALTA listserve about a very curious situation going on in Finland w/r/t the new J.K. Rowling book. I asked her to expand on this a bit, since it’s a situation that raises all sorts of questions about translation quality, profit versus art, ...
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Three Percent #39: The King of Publishing
In this week’s podcast, Tom and I talk about two related subjects: this New Yorker article about the translation of the first line of Camus’ The Stranger, and the PEN World Voices panel about “Reviewing Translations.” (See video embedded below.) There are also some digressions, mostly involving me ...
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The Walk
For the narrator of Robert Walser’s The Walk, walking is the better part of writing. Shortly before declaring his arrival at “something like the peak” of this 90-page Pearl from New Directions (translated by Christopher Middleton and Susan Bernofsky—more on that in a second), Walser’s narrator delivers a brilliant ...
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Latest Review: "The Walk" by Robert Walser
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Phillip Witte on Robert Walser’s The Walk, which comes out from New Directions next week, and was translated from the German by Christopher Middleton and Susan Bernofsky. (The joint translation set-up is explained in Phil’s review.) Phil was an intern ...
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The Brummstein
By examining the minute connections, unlikely coincidences, and painstaking natural processes that give shape to the daily world, the work of Danish author Peter Adolphsen encapsulates—both in form and content—Blake’s image of “a world in a grain of sand.” This has never been more literally true than in his most ...
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Jedward! You Make My Ear-Eyes Bleed [FuckyeahEurovision]
Two Janis Stirna posts in one day! This is quite a treat! Anyway, he sent this in to me less than half an hour ago, with just enough time for me to get it online before the semi-finals kick off. Again, if you haven’t read his earlier pieces, you can find them here, here, and here. And I’ll be back with some more ...
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The Most Serene Republic of Eurovisioning [FuckyeahEurovision!]
Today is the day of the first Eurovision semi-final! (Which you can watch live on the Eurovision.tv site.) To celebrate, we have a new post from Janis about six more contestants participating today. If you missed his earlier posts be sure and read his introduction to Eurovision and his take on the first six contestants. And ...
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The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning
Former soldier and current hitman for the Croatian mafia in New York, Tomislav Bokšić, nicknamed Toxic, has dispatched roughly 125 people. It’s a fully ingrained way of life for Toxic—he feels “restless if three months go by without firing a gun”—and takes pride in his professionalism. As a “triple ...
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Latest Review: "The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning" by Hallgrímur Helgason
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Larissa Kyzer on Hallgrímur Helgason’s The Hitman’s Guide to Housecleaning, which AmazonCrossing brought out this past January. It may be due to my Icelandic Crush, but of all the books AmazonCrossing has brought out so far, this is the one that most ...
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Because One Lispector Pic Is Never Enough
The finished copies of the four new Lispector translations—Near to the Wild Heart, A Breath of Life, The Passion According to G.H., and Agua Viva—and in addition to creating a picture of Lispector when you put the fronts together (click here to see what I’m talking about), if you flip the books over, you can ...
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An Open Secret
In An Open Secret, author Carlos Gamerro, a native to Argentina, weaves together a complex murder mystery that explores how the death of a single man both affects and implicates an entire community. Twenty years after left-wing journalist Dario Ezcurra vanished from the small town Malihuel during Argentina’s Dirty War (a ...
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World in Translation Month Redux [And a Book Suggestion for You!]
Earlier this month I posted about World in Translation Month, and asked everyone to buy one Open Letter book to a) celebrate this special month and b) save our fiscal year (which is Quite Bad). I want to take a minute to thank all of you who have helped out by buying a book directly from us (a lot of you did!), or from ...
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Smut Even Your Mother Will Like [Fifty Shades of Hating]
From today’s PW: The week leading to Mother’s Day was a good one for print books in general and adult fiction in particular. Unit sales of fiction titles at the outlets tracked by Nielsen BookScan rose 20% in the week driven by sales of that new favorite Mother’s Day gift—one of the titles from E.L. James’ ...
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The Intricacies of Translating a Single Sentence
At this year’s ALTA Conference (which will take place October 3-6 here in Rochester and will be the Best ALTA Ever . . . get more info here and if you come, I promise you a good time), we’re going to have a roundtable organized by Aron Aji to investigate the difficulties of translating a single sentence. ...
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My Little War
The period between Flemish author Louis Paul Boon’s birth in 1912 and the publication of his post-modern masterpiece Mijn kleine oorlog (My Little War) in 1947 saw Belgium ravaged by some of the worst wartime carnage that the European continent had experienced in centuries. Even as Hitler’s advancing wehrmacht sent 25% of ...
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Latest Review: "My Little War" by Louis Paul Boon
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Jacob M. Appel on Louis Paul Boon’s My Little War, which is translated from the Dutch by Paul Vincent and available from Dalkey Archive Press. Jacob M. Appel is a physician in New York City and the author of more than two hundred published short stories. His ...
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A Book You Should Read: "The Little Red Guard" by Wenguang Huang
Two of my friends have memoirs coming out this spring (the other being Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s A Sense of Direction), which is a sort of interesting phenomenon. I don’t typically read a lot of memoirs, but when it’s someone you know? . . . That’s extra intriguing. I don’t know either Gideon or Wen ...
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New Podcasts to Listen To
I just received email notification that the third episode of That Other Word, the podcast from American University of Paris’s Center for Writers and Translators and the Center for the Art of Translation is now online. This particular episode features a discussion between Daniel Medin and Scott Esposito about W.G. ...
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The Secret of Evil
As the pool of Roberto Bolaño’s as yet untranslated (or unpublished) work draws ever shallower, fans of the late Chilean novelist and poet are left hungering for whatever wayward morsels still remain. While those eager to devour something as bountiful as The Savage Detectives or 2666 are likely to be left unsated, ...
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PEN World Voices 2012 and Beyond
So, as with years past, Publishing Perspectives asked me to write up something about this year’s PEN World Voices Festival. I did so, but unlike years past, I wasn’t as effusively complimentary . . . I feel bad criticizing PEN WV because the festival has been such a huge boon for book culture over the years and ...
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Three Percent Podcast #37: No Offense
Tom and I were on fire during this week’s podcast, talking about the PEN World Voices Festival and some interesting questions we were asked in an interview for the Picador Book Room Tumblr. While talking about PEN WV, what is learned about a location from reading a book set there, what’s lost and/or gained in ...
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Purgatory
Emilia Dupuy is haunted by the memory of her missing husband, Simon Cardoso. During what seemed like a routine mapping expedition in Argentina for the couple (both of whom were cartographers), Simon vanished without a trace. A thread of hope is preserved in Emilia thirty years after his disappearance in spite of testimonies ...
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Latest Review: "Purgatory" by Tomás Eloy Martínez
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Aleksandra Fazlipour on Tomás Eloy Martínez’s Purgatory, which is translated from the Spanish by Frank Wynne and available from Bloomsbury USA. Aleksandra did an independent study with me last semester to learn about writing book reviewing. She read a bunch of ...
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Three Percent Podcast Featured on the Picador Tumblr
Tom and I answered a bunch of questions for Gabrielle Gantz and the Picador Book Room tumblr. I think this makes for a fun and interesting read, and it actually became the basis for a good part of our discussion on this week’s podcast (which will be up tomorrow). Here’s an excerpt: What do you look for ...
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Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex
Reading Oksana Zabuzhko’s Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex is like having bad sex. You’re not enjoying yourself but you don’t necessarily feel like stopping. Your mind wanders, you wonder how long until it’s over, and you may even fake a response just so it’ll stop. After all, it’s late and you need to get some ...
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Latest Review: "Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex" by Oksana Zabuzhko
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by regular reviewer Vincent Francone on Oksana Zabuzhko’s Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex, which is translated from the Ukrainian by Halyna Hryn and available from Amazon Crossings. Here’s the opening of Vince’s not-entirely-positive review: Reading ...
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The Contest of the Eurovision Begins [FuckyeahEurovision!]
We here at Three Percent clearly love Eurovison. To celebrate this year’s version of the World’s Greatest Music Competition we asked Latvian writer Janis Stirna to write a month-long series of articles about all the contestants. In our excitement to “get to the whale” (so to speak), we knew we ...
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The 2012 Best Translated Book Award Winners: Wiesław Myśliwski’s "Stone Upon Stone" and Kiwao Nomura’s "Spectacle & Pigsty"
The winning titles and translators of this year’s Best Translated Book Award were announced earlier this evening at McNally Jackson Books as part of the PEN World Voices Festival. In poetry, Kiwao Nomura’s Spectacle & Pigsty, translated from the Japanese by Kyoko Yoshida and Forrest Gander, took the top honor, and ...
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Three Percent #36: A Couple Gin & Tonics Does NOT Make Me a Better Oulipian
(My initial plan was to create a title for this podcast that was actually an acrostic spelling out “Oulipo.” The best I came up with was “Our Unique Lab Instigating Poetic Opportunities,” which is decent, self-referential, and strange, but not perfect. Unfortunately, drinking didn’t help me ...
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Overview/Review of Daniel Levin Becker's "Many Subtle Channels"
To supplement this week’s podcast, I thought I would post the review I wrote of Daniel Levin Becker’s Many Subtle Channels on GoodReads. Matt Rowe is planning on writing up a full review of this book for Three Percent, but for the time being, here you go: In reading this charming book, I tried to recall how I ...
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"Last Verses" by Jules Laforgue [5 Days of Poetry]
With the Best Translated Book Award announcements taking place Friday, May 4th at 6pm at McNally Jackson Books it’s time to highlight all six poetry finalists. Over the course of the week we’ll run short pieces by all of the poetry judges on their list of finalists. Click here for all past and future posts in ...
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Naveen Kishore of Seagull Books
We’ve raved about the beautiful Seagull Books from time to time on Three Percent, so it’s really great/interesting to see this short interview in Shelf Awareness with Seagull’s publisher, Naveen Kishore: On your nightstand now: A combo. IQ84 by Haruki Marukami. Dorothy Sayers’s Five Red ...
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Chad's Top 10 Stories
The other week, Paul Vidich, who I met in Sozopol, Bulgaria and who runs the very cool Storyville App, asked me to contribute to their Top 10 Stories feature. As it says in the introduction to my list, I gave it my “best shot.” Here are a few of the stories I chose: 1. “Continuity of Parks,” Julio ...
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"Hagar Before the Occupation / Hagar After the Occupation" by Amal Al-Jubouri [5 Days of Poetry]
With the Best Translated Book Award announcements taking place Friday, May 4th at 6pm at McNally Jackson Books it’s time to highlight all six poetry finalists. Over the course of the week we’ll run short pieces by all of the poetry judges on their list of finalists. Click here for all past and future posts in ...
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Support World in Translation Month by Purchasing Just One Open Letter Book
Years and years ago, when Karl Pohrt and I were launching the Reading the World program to enable independent bookstores to promote more literature in translation, we found out that May was officially World in Translation Month. This was a pretty happy coincidence, since we had already planned all of our activities to take ...
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Three Percent #35: All You Need Is a Gun and a Girl
This week we completely avoid talking about Amazon and the Department of Justice to focus on genre books in translation. Tom’s a big noir/thriller fan, so we talk about a number of those, but we also discuss some works of science-fiction, including XYZ. And since Tom wouldn’t send me pictures of his tattoos, ...
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Why the Child Is Cooking in the Polenta
Why the Child Is Cooking in the Polenta by Aglaja Veteranyi cartwheels through the childhood exploits of the unnamed daughter of circus performers: Romanian refugees caravanning through Europe with dreams of fame, fortune, and a big house with a swimming pool. Veteranyi’s (almost) memoir and literary debut is told from the ...
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This Month's GoodReads Giveaway: "The Planets" by Sergio Chejfec
It seems like almost everyone I talk to is a big fan of Sergio Chejfec’s My Two Worlds (translated by Margaret Carson). It got a ton of press when it came out last fall, and was even longlisted for the Best Translated Book Awards. Well, this summer (June to be exact), we’re going to be bringing out The Planets ...
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Two New Translation-Centric Websites Worth Checking Out
Over the past month, two new websites have launched that will likely be of great interest to Three Percent readers . . . First up is the Biblioasis International Translation Series, which is updated every week or so with interesting translation-related content. For example, their first post is an essay by Stephen ...
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Traveler of the Century
Traveler of the Century is an exquisite, dazzling work of fiction. Its author, Andrés Neuman, is a young argentinian writer, born in 1977, whose relative youth is belied by a remarkably prodigious literary output. Neuman has written nearly twenty distinct works, including four novels, nine books of poetry (a tenth compiles ...
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Latest Review: "Traveler of the Century" by Andres Neuman
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Jeremy Garber on Andres Neuman’s Traveler of the Century, which is just coming out from FSG in Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia’s translation. Jeremy Garber is a used book buyer for a large independent bookstore. (And one of my GoodReads friends, where I ...
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Five New Argentine Books Worth Checking Out
Over at The Argentina Independent, Joey Rubin has an article about five “exciting new Argentine novels” that have recently been translated into English. As a huge fan of Southern Cone literature, the fact that there’s quality contemporary works coming out of that area isn’t that surprising, but it ...
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Latest Review: "Dukla" by Andrej Stasiuk
The lastest addition to our Review Section is a piece by Claire Van Winkle on Andrej Stasiuk’s Dukla, which is translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston and available from Dalkey Archive Press. Claire is the first of three students (so far) of Susan Bernofsky’s who have written reviews for Three Percent. ...
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Dukla
Andrej Stasiuk, one of Poland’s foremost contemporary authors and founder of Wydawnictwo Czarne press, has led a life as complex and colorful as his writing. He was born in Warsaw in 1960 but left his hometown at age 26 to reside in the secluded city of Czarne, where he discovered the provincial beauty of rural Poland—a ...
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Quarterly Conversation #27: Saer, Lispector, Rodoreda, and More . . .
OK, granted, this came out a couple weeks ago, which is basically a million eons in Internet time, but the new(est) issue of the Quarterly Conversation is now online and is loaded with great translation-centric material. (And great reviews of Open Letter titles, and Open Letter favorites . . .) Here are short highlights of ...
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Blue Metropolis Preview
On Thursday morning, I’ll be taking off to attend (and participate in) this year’s Blue Metropolis festival in Montreal. In case you haven’t heard of it, the Blue Met is one of the (or maybe just the?) largest literary festivals in Quebec. It runs from April 18th through the 23rd, and features a ton of ...
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BTBA on Rochester Morning Show
This morning, Judge Jeff and I were on the local morning news show to talk about the 2012 Best Translated Book Award finalists. And even though it’s not even noon, I highly recommend using this as a drinking game . . . Every time Judge Jeff looks directly into the camera, do a shot. And do a double if he looks in ...
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2012 Best Translated Book Award Finalists: Fiction and Poetry
April 10, 2012—On Tuesday evening, the poetry and fiction finalists for the 2012 Best Translated Book Awards were announced during a special event at the University of Rochester, and on Three Percent, the university’s translation-centric website (www.rochester.edu/threepercent). “In previous years, there was much less ...
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Fifty Shades of Grey
So, this past weekend, Salon ran this article about Amazon’s “$1 million secret”—their recently created giving program, which has benefitted a large number of literary nonprofits.. Key word there being “nonprofit,” but I’ll get to that in a minute . . . On the whole, the article is ...
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Haruki Murakami: In Search of this Elusive Writer
For all of you Murakami fans out there, embedded below is Haruki Murakami: In Search of this Elusive Writer, an hour-long BBC documentary by Alan Yentob (presenter) and Rupert Edwards (camerawork). According to this post about it: Haruki Murakami holds the titles of both the most popular novelist in Japan and the most ...
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Margaret Carson at The Mookse and the Gripes
Over at The Mookse and the Gripes, Trevor Berrett posted a really interesting interview with Margaret Carson, the translator of Sergio Chejfec’s My Two Worlds (among other books): A “walking” book, when I finished My Two Worlds I wrote, “It’s meandering (obviously), sometimes feels pointless (deliberately), ...
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Three Percent #34: "These Creatures I Must Woo"
This week Tom and I welcomed Jeff Waxman of University of Chicago Press and 57th Street Books to the podcast to talk about different approaches to marketing different “types” of translations, such as contemporary translations vs. classic works vs. new translations vs. reprints vs. . . . It’s an interesting ...
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"Private Property" by Paule Constant [25 Days of the BTBA]
As with years past, we HIGHLIGHTED (past tense) the rest of the 25 titles on the BTBA fiction longlist. We had a variety of guests writing these posts, all of which centered around the question of “Why This Book Should Win.” Hopefully these funny, accidental, entertaining, and informative posts prompted you to ...
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BTBA Finalist Announcement Tuesday at 6pm
With only one book left to cover, we’re reaching the end of the “25 Days of the BTBA” series, which means that the announcement of the finalists is right around the corner. Literally. Next Tuesday, April 10th, fiction panelists Jeff Waxman will be here in Rochester for a special Reading the World ...
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"Kafka's Leopards" by Moacyr Scliar [25 Days of the BTBA]
As with years past, we’re going to spend the next week highlighting the rest of the 25 titles on the BTBA fiction longlist. We’ll have a variety of guests writing these posts, all of which are centered around the question of “Why This Book Should Win.” Hopefully these are funny, accidental, ...
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"Montecore" by Jonas Hassen Khemiri [25 Days of the BTBA]
As with years past, we’re going to spend the next week highlighting the rest of the 25 titles on the BTBA fiction longlist. We’ll have a variety of guests writing these posts, all of which are centered around the question of “Why This Book Should Win.” Hopefully these are funny, accidental, ...
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"Never Any End to Paris" by Enrique Vila-Matas [25 Days of the BTBA]
As with years past, we’re going to spend the next week highlighting the rest of the 25 titles on the BTBA fiction longlist. We’ll have a variety of guests writing these posts, all of which are centered around the question of “Why This Book Should Win.” Hopefully these are funny, accidental, ...
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"I Am a Japanese Writer" by Dany LaFerrière [25 Days of the BTBA]
As with years past, we’re going to spend the next week highlighting the rest of the 25 titles on the BTBA fiction longlist. We’ll have a variety of guests writing these posts, all of which are centered around the question of “Why This Book Should Win.” Hopefully these are funny, accidental, ...
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Three Percent #33: The Spaz and the Straight Man
In this week’s podcast, we talk about the future of book reviewing, focusing on a few central questions: who reads book reviews? (A: definitely not my students), what is the function of the book review in today’s world?, is there a website/app that would be the ideal book review platform? We also digress into ...
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Dream of Ding Village
Dream of Ding Village tells the story of a village destroyed by unregulated blood selling. Gloomily enough, the novel is narrated by a 12 year-old-boy who died without ever having sold his blood; instead, the narrator, Ding Quiang, was murdered by villagers with a grudge against his father, Ding Hui, the local blood head. ...
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Latest Review: "Dream of Ding Village" by Yan Lianke
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Sharon Rhodes on Yan Lianke’s Dream of Ding Village, which is translated from the Chinese by Cindy Carter, and available from Grove Press. Sharon Rhodes is a Ph.D. candidate here at the University of Rochester who wrote this as part of an assignment so far back ...
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"Leeches" by David Albahari [25 Days of the BTBA]
As with years past, we’re going to spend the next two weeks highlighting the rest of the 25 titles on the BTBA fiction longlist. We’ll have a variety of guests writing these posts, all of which are centered around the question of “Why This Book Should Win.” Hopefully these are funny, accidental, ...
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RTWCS: Ben Moser on Clarice Lispector
A couple weeks ago, Ben Moser was in town for the unfortunately acronymed NeMLA conference. We took advantage of this to host a special RTWCS event to talk to Ben about his biography of Lispector (Why This World, Oxford University Press), his new translation of The Hour of the Star, and the four Lispector books he’s ...
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"Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion?" by Johan Harstad [25 Days of the BTBA]
As with years past, we’re going to spend the next two weeks highlighting the rest of the 25 titles on the BTBA fiction longlist. We’ll have a variety of guests writing these posts, all of which are centered around the question of “Why This Book Should Win.” Hopefully these are funny, accidental, ...
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Unbelievable Ledig House Opportunity
I think this press release speaks for itself: Writers Omi at Ledig House Translation Lab, Fall 2012 Writers Omi at Ledig House, a part of Omi International Arts Center, has been awarded a grant from Amazon.com to fund Translation Lab, a weeklong special, intensive residency for five collaborating ...
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"The Druze of Belgrade" by Rabee Jaber Wins the International Prize for Arabic Fiction
The International Prize for Arabic Fiction—also known as the Arabic Booker—was announced yesterday as a sort of kick-off for this year’s Abu Dhabi International Book Fair. This is the second time Jaber has been shortlisted for the prize, which, when you think about the fact that this is only the fifth ...
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"In Red" by Magdalena Tulli [25 Days of the BTBA]
As with years past, we’re going to spend the next two weeks highlighting the rest of the 25 titles on the BTBA fiction longlist. We’ll have a variety of guests writing these posts, all of which are centered around the question of “Why This Book Should Win.” Hopefully these are funny, accidental, ...
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Bilingual Readings at ALTA 2012
FYI, here’s the information about how to participate in the bilingual readings at this year’s ALTA conference: For a chance to participate in the Bilingual Readings taking place at this year’s ALTA (October 3-6 in Rochester, NY), please send Alexis Levitin the following information by AUGUST 15, 2012: ...
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Of Flies and Monkeys
My head hasn’t been in poetry lately. Call it burn out—last year I read mostly poems—or attribute it to grad school killing my love for poetry, but I have been reading more prose as of late. Subsequently, my recent poetry reading has mostly been out of obligation. That being said, it takes a lot to get me excited ...
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Latest Review: "Of Flies and Monkeys" by Jacques Dupin
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Vincent Francone on Jacques Dupin’s Of Flies and Monkeys, which is translated from the French by John Taylor and available from Bitter Oleander Press. (Probably easiest to order this directly from SPD.) “Vincent Francone” is one of our regular ...
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"Scenes from Village Life" by Amos Oz [25 Days of the BTBA]
As with years past, we’re going to spend the next two weeks highlighting the rest of the 25 titles on the BTBA fiction longlist. We’ll have a variety of guests writing these posts, all of which are centered around the question of “Why This Book Should Win.” Hopefully these are funny, accidental, ...
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"Seven Years" by Peter Stamm [25 Days of the BTBA]
As with years past, we’re going to spend the next three weeks highlighting the rest of the 25 titles on the BTBA fiction longlist. We’ll have a variety of guests writing these posts, all of which are centered around the question of “Why This Book Should Win.” Hopefully these are funny, accidental, ...
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"Demolishing Nisard" by Eric Chevillard [25 Days of the BTBA]
As with years past, we’re going to spend the next three weeks highlighting the rest of the 25 titles on the BTBA fiction longlist. We’ll have a variety of guests writing these posts, all of which are centered around the question of “Why This Book Should Win.” Hopefully these are funny, accidental, ...
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Children in Reindeer Woods Giveaway
For all you GoodReads users, we’re giving away 10 copies of Kristin Omarsdottir’s Children in Reindeer Woods though their special program. To enter, simply click on the button below before March 31st. In terms of this book, it’s a very intriguing novel that’s kind of like a war book that’s not ...
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So You May See
From the beginning of Mona Prince’s So You May See, I was clear about what the narrator, Ayn, was trying to accomplish. She writes, in no uncertain terms, “I will write about you and me, about our love story.” She explains that she will “subsume it within a travel narrative” so that the changes and discoveries ...
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Latest Review: "So You May See" by Mona Prince
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Elizabeth “Six” Mullins on Mona Prince’s So You May See, which is translated from the Arabic by Raphael Cohen and available from the American University in Cairo Press. For those of you interested in knowing more about the novel and its translation, ...
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"Kornél Esti" by Dezsö Kosztolányi [25 Days of the BTBA]
As with years past, we’re going to spend the next three weeks highlighting the rest of the 25 titles on the BTBA fiction longlist. We’ll have a variety of guests writing these posts, all of which are centered around the question of “Why This Book Should Win.” Hopefully these are funny, accidental, ...
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It's Still Us Against Them
From an article in The Guardian about a very jacked Russian translation of a movie about Margaret Thatcher: Speaking to a crowd of supporters, Margaret Thatcher, as played by Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady, explains what she would do as prime minister: “Crush the working class, crush the scum, the ...
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"Fiasco" by Imre Kertesz [25 Days of the BTBA]
As with years past, we’re going to spend the next three weeks highlighting the rest of the 25 titles on the BTBA fiction longlist. We’ll have a variety of guests writing these posts, all of which are centered around the question of “Why This Book Should Win.” Hopefully these are funny, accidental, ...
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"Upstaged" by Jacques Jouet [25 Days of the BTBA]
As with years past, we’re going to spend the next three weeks highlighting the rest of the 25 titles on the BTBA fiction longlist. We’ll have a variety of guests writing these posts, all of which are centered around the question of “Why This Book Should Win.” Hopefully these are funny, accidental, ...
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"New Finnish Grammar" by Diego Marani [25 Days of the BTBA]
As with years past, we’re going to spend the next three weeks highlighting the rest of the 25 titles on the BTBA fiction longlist. We’ll have a variety of guests writing these posts, all of which are centered around the question of “Why This Book Should Win.” Hopefully these are funny, accidental, ...
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Three Percent #32: Everybody Loves a Bracket
With the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament getting underway this afternoon (I refuse to acknowledge the “First Four” games), Tom and I thought this would be a good time to talk about the fact that we both picked the exact same Final Four (Kentucky, Missouri, UNC, and Ohio State) and that The Morning ...
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"Purgatory" by Tomás Eloy Martínez [25 Days of the BTBA]
As with years past, we’re going to spend the next four weeks highlighting the rest of the 25 titles on the BTBA fiction longlist. We’ll have a variety of guests writing these posts, all of which are centered around the question of “Why This Book Should Win.” Hopefully these are funny, accidental, ...
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Watchword
Dehiscent: in botany, the spontaneous rupture of a plant structure at maturity to release seeds; in medicine, the rupture of a wound with much discharge. In this strong, propulsive collection of poems translator Forrest Gander uses dehiscent for the Spanish word diesminandose in one poem, and in the title of a second for ...
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"Watchword" Review and Interview with Forrest Gander
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is an extremely well-written and well-crafted piece by Grant Barber on Watchword by Pura López Colomé, which is translated from the Spanish by Forrest Gander and available from Wesleyan Press. In addition to writing such a fantastic review, Grant decided to interview Forrest ...
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"Suicide" by Edouard Levé [25 Days of the BTBA]
As with years past, we’re going to spend the next four weeks highlighting the rest of the 25 titles on the BTBA fiction longlist. We’ll have a variety of guests writing these posts, all of which are centered around the question of “Why This Book Should Win.” Hopefully these are funny, accidental, ...
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"Scars" by Juan José Saer [25 Days of the BTBA]
As with years past, we’re going to spend the next four weeks highlighting the rest of the 25 titles on the BTBA fiction longlist. We’ll have a variety of guests writing these posts, all of which are centered around the question of “Why This Book Should Win.” Hopefully these are funny, accidental, ...
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"Stone Upon Stone" by Wiesław Myśliwski [25 Days of the BTBA]
As with years past, we’re going to spend the next five weeks highlighting all 25 titles on the BTBA fiction longlist. We’ll have a variety of guests writing these posts, all of which are centered around the question of “Why This Book Should Win.” Hopefully these are funny, accidental, entertaining, and ...
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"Funeral for a Dog" by Thomas Pletzinger [25 Days of the BTBA]
As with years past, we’re going to spend the next five weeks highlighting all 25 titles on the BTBA fiction longlist. We’ll have a variety of guests writing these posts, all of which are centered around the question of “Why This Book Should Win.” Hopefully these are funny, accidental, entertaining, and ...
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Three Percent #31: We're All Winners, But Some Win Better Than Others
To celebrate tonight’s announcements of the National Book Critic Circle Award winners, Tom and I decided to go through all six categories (fiction, nonfiction, autobiography, biography, criticism, and poetry) and pick out who we thought would win. Seeing that neither of us has read many of the finalists, this makes for ...
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"Zone" by Mathias Enard [25 Days of the BTBA]
As with years past, we’re going to spend the next five weeks highlighting all 25 titles on the BTBA fiction longlist. We’ll have a variety of guests writing these posts, all of which are centered around the question of “Why This Book Should Win.” Hopefully these are funny, accidental, entertaining, and ...
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Kamchatka
Kamchatka: a remote peninsula in the Russian Far East. However, to the ten-year-old narrator in Marcelo Figueras’s novel Kamchatka, it represents much more. It is a territory to be conquered in his favorite game of Risk, it is “a paradox, a kingdom of extremes, a contradiction in terms,” and it is the last thing ...
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Latest Review: "Kamchatka" by Marcelo Figueras
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Lian Law on Marcelo Figueras’s Kamchatka that came out from Black Cat/Grove Press back last year. Lian Law was an intern and in my “Intro to Literary Publishing” class last semester, which is when she wrote this review. (And yes, we are that far ...
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You Too Can Be a Three Percent Writer
So, as you probably know, for the next four+ weeks, we’re going to be featuring a book a day from the BTBA Fiction Longlist. These posts aren’t reviews per se, but more like little intros designed to both intrigue new readers and make a case for why that particular book deserves to win the whole thing. ...
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2012 ALTA Travel Fellowship Awards
So, ALTA just sent out the following info about applying for a fellowship for this year’s conference, which will take place from October 3-6 right here in Rochester. If you’re a young translator, you really have to apply for this for a few reasons: 1) ALTA will introduce you to mentors and contacts that will ...
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"Lightning" by Jean Echenoz [25 Days of the BTBA]
As with years past, we’re going to spend the next five weeks highlighting all 25 titles on the BTBA fiction longlist. We’ll have a variety of guests writing these posts, all of which are centered around the question of “Why This Book Should Win.” Hopefully these are funny, accidental, entertaining, and ...
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"My Two Worlds" by Sergio Chejfec [25 Days of the BTBA]
As with years past, we’re going to spend the next five weeks highlighting all 25 titles on the BTBA fiction longlist. We’ll have a variety of guests writing these posts, all of which are centered around the question of “Why This Book Should Win.” Hopefully these are funny, accidental, entertaining, and ...
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Come Find Me at AWP!
So for the first year ever, Open Letter has a booth at AWP, the annual conference of the Associated Writing Programs. Our booth is J8, which, if you look at this rather daunting map, is against the wall in the Southeast Hall. Not exactly the center of all AWP foot traffic, so PLEASE come by. I promise to make it worth your ...
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And Here It Is: The BTBA 2012 Fiction Longlist
I was really excited to get the longlist from the judges last Thursday. Having removed myself entirely from the process, it was as much of a surprise to me as it is for anyone reading this. And after spending a few days going over it, checking off the titles I’ve read, and the ones I want to read, I have to say that ...
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"Translation: A Transdisciplinary Journal"
Thanks to Edwin Gentzler, the font of knowledge for all things translation, I just found out about a new journal called, simply, Translation. With this publication, the editors present the new international peer-reviewed journal translation, which from January 2012 will be published twice a year. The journal—a ...
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Three Percent #29: Get to the Whale!
This week’s podcast is a special feature on Kaija Straumanis, who recently received her MA in literary translation from the University of Rochester. Although our conversation is a bit rangy (and if you think this is random, you should visit Plüb sometime), we focus mainly on Kaija’s translation of Latvian author ...
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Sample of "High Tide" by Inga Ābele
The sample below is from Kaija Straumanis’s translation of Latvian author Inga Ābele’s Paisums (High Tide) which we discuss in this week’s podcast. Even if you don’t listen to the podcast (and if you don’t, why not?), you should take a look at this—it’s a really interesting ...
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The Noise of Time
I have to thank Daniel Medin for bringing to my attention Cynthia Haven’s post about a small French publisher focused on literature in translation: Translation is the poor stepchild of literature – academics get more applause for producing their own books, not for translating the writing of others; for writers, ...
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Death in Spring on All Things Considered
This review actually appeared online a couple months ago, but National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward’s piece on Merce Rodoreda’s Death in Spring made it onto “All Things Considered” last night. I personally think Death in Spring is one of the most unique, and interesting books that we’ve ...
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The Prague Cemetery
Umberto Eco, author of Foucault’s Pendulum and The Name of the Rose, is a writer of veritable talent. Eco compels readers by focusing his twisted microscope on our pasts to observe the brutality of human nature in different eras of history. The Prague Cemetery follows the characteristic Eco style with histrionic digressive ...
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Latest Review: "The Prague Cemetery" by Umberto Eco
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Monica Carter on Umberto Eco’s latest novel, The Prague Cemetery, which is translated from the Italian by Richard Dixon and available from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Monica is one of our contributing reviewers, is a writer in her own right, and runs Salonica ...
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Three Percent #28: Books and Being Alone
This week’s podcast is remarkable both for its complete lack of curse words (not even kidding), and for its very professional discussion about Garth Hallberg’s recent essay Why Write Novels at All? that appeared in the New York Times Magazine. We were fortunate enough to get Garth in on this podcast so that he ...
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Me and You
Outcast for his seemingly baseless anger issues, fourteen-year-old Lorenzo Cumi lies to his worried mother about being invited on a ski trip with the ‘in-crowd’ in order to ease her concerns about him. After seeing how happy and relieved it makes her, Lorenzo can’t bring himself to tell her the ...
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Latest Review: "Me and You" by Niccolo Ammaniti
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Carley Parsons on Niccolo Ammaniti’s Me and You, which is translated from the Italian by Kylee Doust and available from Black Cat. Carley Parsons was one of my interns last semester, and has previously interned at Syracuse University Press and Random House. ...
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Juan Gabriel Vasquez's "The Secret History of Costaguana"
This may be thanks to Bolano and his massive appeal, but it seems (to me at least), like Spanish literature is going through a sort of a “Second Boom.” Not so much in terms of a shared aesthetic, but in terms of having captured the imaginations of American publishers. In addition to standards like Javier Marias ...
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China's "20 Under 40"
The February newsletter from the Chinese-literature centric Paper Republic has an interesting write-up of the “Future Masters” contest—a competition organized by People’s Literature magazine, Shanda Literature, and a media company from Chengdu, to identify 20 of the best young Chinese writers. ...
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While the Women Are Sleeping
Javier Marias’s greatness in the world of world literature seems pretty much unquestioned. And I’ve always thought of him as a pretty cool guy—for boycotting the United States for as long as Bush was president, for example, which was one of the first things I learned about him. This was while I was interning at ...
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Latest Review: "While the Women Are Sleeping" by Javier Marias
The latest addition to our “Review Section”: is a piece by Phillip Witte on Javier Marias’s While the Women Are Sleeping, which is translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa and available from New Directions. Phil is one of our regular reviewers, and one of our former interns. As mentioned in the ...
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Three Percent #27: The Night of a Million Books
In this week’s podcast, Tom and I talk about the ABA’s Winter Institute, which just took place in New Orleans. We also go on about World Book Night, which you should volunteer for by clicking here. We also talked about my daughter and her “letter of hate” to the awful Dan Borislow, who, ...
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The Roving Shadows
In 2002, Les Ombres Errantes won the Prix Goncourt—possibly the most prestigious award a French literary work can receive—despite the fact that it is not a novel. Before considering The Roving Shadows in its own right, it is worth pausing to reflect on the significance of that and its subsequent publication in English. ...
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Because "Quinquennial" Is Such a Cool Word [Nordic Conference]
Just received this call for papers for the 2013 Nordic Translation Conference taking place at the University of East Anglia next April and thought I’d share it, since a) some of you might be interested in attending, and b) because this is a quinquennial event, and that sounds awesome. Deadline is in August, so you ...
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This Is Very True
Although this op-ed piece is primarily about San Francisco performing arts orgs, it really applies to any and all arts nonprofits: In general, arts organizations have done all they can to reduce costs. They’ve reached out to audiences, luring them with promotions, free stuff, and advertising they can barely afford. So ...
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This Is So Stupid, Part II
I’m not a big ebook fan for myriad reasons—including my dislike of John Locke and his $.99 empire and the fact that my memory is shit when it comes to reading on a screen—but I don’t think any of my concerns overlap with those of Jonathan Franzen: The acclaimed and bestselling novelist, who denies ...
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Stig Sæterbakken (1966-2012)
As noted on the Dalkey Archive website, Norwegian author Stig Sæterbakken took his own life this past Tuesday. Sæterbakken was the author of the novels Incubus, The New Testament, Siamese, Self-Control, and Sauermugg (the latter three constituting the “S-trilogy”), and two collections of essays, Aesthetic ...
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Do You Need More Reasons to Read Raymond Roussel?
One of the precursors to the Oulipo, and cult-author extraordinaire, Raymond Roussel is one of those authors that everyone of a certain aesthetic leaning likes to rave about. He is the admiration of many a literary fan-boy, and if there was an international fiction cosplay festival, his hat, cane, and ‘stach would adorn ...
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A Thousand Morons: The Movie Version
It’s not very often that an Open Letter book is turned into a movie (in fact, aside from Duras’s The Sailor from Gibraltar and Ilf & Petrov’s The Golden Calf [which was actually made into three different movies] I don’t think any of our titles have become films), so it’s really exciting to ...
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Mister Blue
The fictional world of Québécois novelist Jacques Poulin can, poetically speaking, be likened to a snow globe: a minutely-detailed landscape peppered with characters who appear to be frozen in one lovely, continuous moment. Mister Blue, recently published in a new English translation, captures this timelessness in a fluid ...
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Latest Review: "Mister Blue" by Jacques Poulin
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by contributing reviewer Larissa Kyzer on Jacques Poulin’s Mister Blue, which just came out from Archipelago Books in Sheila Fischman’s translation. Larissa Kyzer is a regular reviewer for us who has a great interest in all things Scandinavian and Icelandic. ...
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Endangered Language & Poetry in Mexico
David Shook—who has reviewed for Three Percent. in the past—is starting a new project to produce a short documentary film and a five-chapbook set of indigenous Mexican poetry. Rather than explain this in my own words, I asked him to write a short introductory post laying out the basis for this venture. As you can ...
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[Redacted]
E.J. and Nate have censored this post for reasons that are probably obvious. I swore to myself that I would never write about Amazon, pricing, price checking, and the suckery of NPR ever again, but then of course, NPR has to go and run this insipidly stupid piece about a “predatory” Amazon. I’m ...
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2012 Festival Neue Literatur
The lovely and energetic Riky Stock just sent me a ton of information about this year’s Festival Neue Literatur, which will take place in NYC from February 10th-12th and is curated by the also lovely and energetic Susan Bernofsky. Here’s all the info you need: The Festival of New Literature (February ...
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Chinaman Wins 2012 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature
Last week I wrote up the finalists for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature and mentioned how I thought Chinaman by Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka sounded like one of the most interesting of the six books, and that I was curious why no American publisher had picked this up. Well, two updates: On Saturday, ...
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Criticism Is Where It's At [NBCC Awards]
This weekend, the National Book Critics Circle announced the finalists for its books wards for publishing 2011 and—not to bury the lede—including Dubravka Ugresic’s Karaoke Culture as one of the five finalists in the Criticism category. This is the first major book award that one of our titles has been ...
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Three Percent #26: What's in Store for 2008 (Er . . . 2012)
After a run of special podcasts, we’re back to the normal Tom and Chad show . . . This week we decided to talk about books we’re looking forward to and other random predictions about 2012. (I believe that is the year we are living in. Although as you’ll hear when you listen, I have a few problems knowing ...
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DSC Prize for South Asian Literature
With the announcement of the winner taking place on Saturday, this seems like a good of time as any to mention the second annual DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. The DSC Prize for South Asian Literature is a first-of-its-kind initiative as it is specifically focused on the richness and diversity of South Asian ...
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Reading the World Podcast #10: Edith Grossman
After a hiatus, the Reading the World Podcast is thrilled to be back with the support of the University of California Irvine’s International Center for Writing and Translation. In this new episode, translator Edith Grossman talks about her recent book Why Translation Matters, her translations of Luis de Gongora’s ...
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Leeches
“Memory is the greatest liar.” – Leeches, David Albahari For his follow-up to Götz and Meyer, Serbian David Albahari plunges forward in time to Belgrade, 1998. Another war is going on, although the nameless narrator is not directly involved, he becomes increasingly aware of the proximity of the ...
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Latest Review: "Leeches" by David Albahari
The latest addition to our “Reviews Section”: is a piece by contributing reviewer Monica Carter on David Albahari’s Leeches, which came out last year from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt1 in Ellen Elias-Bursac’s translation. Monica Carter is a regular reviewer for Three Percent. She also runs Salonica ...
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Khaled Mattawa Wins the 2011 Saif Ghobash-Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translatio
This morning, Banipal announced that Khaled Mattawa has won of the sixth annual Saif Gobash-Banipal Prize for Arabic Literature for his translation of the Selected Poems of Adonis, published by Yale University Press. They also named Barbara Romaine as the runner-up for her translation of Spectres by Radwa Ashour (published ...
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The Morning News Tournament of Books 2012
The Morning News Tournament of Books is BACK! For the uninitiated, this is a 16-book, bracket-style “tournament” designed to crown the . . . well, I’ll just let them explain it: Today we’re announcing the shortlist for the 2012 Tournament of Books (for novels, of course, published in 2011) only a week ...
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Arabic Booker Shortlist 2012
The shortlist for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (better know as the Arabic Booker) was announced earlier today. According to Chair of Judges, Georges Tarabichi, In these novels the authors’ show an innovative use of new styles to describe the social and historical variety of the Arab world, as well as ...
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The Shadow-Boxing Woman
Fiction post-Berlin Wall (and I am referring to immediately post-Berlin Wall) is rarely told in the way that Inka Parei has done in The Shadow-Boxing Woman. The prose imitates the dark, crumbling and ravaged atmosphere of East Berlin as well as the psychological state of the narrator, aptly named Hell. Parei sets out to write ...
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Latest Review: "The Shadow-Boxing Woman" by Inka Parei
The latest addition to our Book Reviews section is a piece by Monica Carter on Inka Parei’s The Shadow-Boxing Woman, which is available from Seagull Books and translated from the German by Katy Derbyshire. Monica Carter is a regular reviewer for Three Percent. She also runs Salonica World Lit and, as part of her ...
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Six Questions for Margaret Carson [Again, We Rule]
Over at Conversational Reading, Scott Esposito has posted a six-question interview with Margaret Carson, translator of Sergio Chejfec’s My Two Worlds, which has been gathering a ton of praise. (Coincidentally, I finished reading his next Open Letter book—The Planets—while at MLA and can assure his fans that ...
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Russia's Best-Kept Literary Secret is an Open Letter Author [We Rule]
Russia Beyond the Headlines has a great piece about (and interview with) Mikhail Shishkin, the only Russian novelist to have won have won the Russian Booker, Big Book, and National Bestseller awards, and whose Maidenhair is coming out from Open Letter this summer in Marian Schwartz’s translation. Shishkin has been ...
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Keep Up the Good Work. And Please Go Bankrupt. [Some Publishers Are D*cks]
This is likely to be the first of two or three “socialist-leaning” posts I’m going to write this week in honor of the New Hampshire primary. . . . Anyway, to get to the point, I just read this PW piece and am feeling the rage. A recently introduced bill in the House of Representatives would bar the ...
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Rocking MLA Like It's 2004
The MLA conference starts today in Seattle, and I’ll be there all weekend manning the booth that Open Letter is sharing with Archipelago and Counterpath. If you happen to be attending, stop on by. I’ll have copies of a bunch of our books AND the brand-new uber-cool Spring/Summer 2012 catalog, which you have to see ...
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Great Publishing Jobs
Over the break, I heard about two great publishing jobs that might interest some of you (and many of my students, former students, and colleagues). First up, the phenomenal Melville House is hiring a publicist. Duties include performing all aspects of book publicity, including: designing campaigns; writing press ...
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It's 2012–Time for Some Resoluting!
Back when I was a kid, I used to love the start of every New Year. A fresh calendar, new journal to write in every day for a week before forgetting it in the back corner of a desk, dedicated routines (read for an hour a day! only watch TV once a week!), promises of better health and finally talking to that girl I’d been ...
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Three Percent #25: Movies. They're Like Books for Smart People!
In this week’s podcast, we finish indulging our year-end listing proclivities by running down the best movies of 2011. Chad is absent (poor guy’s never seen a movie), but, not to worry, your comfortingly consistent host Tom Roberge is joined by Nathan Furl (of Open Letter) to set the record straight about whether ...
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A Thank You from Three Percent and Open Letter
We at Three Percent & Open Letter want to simply say: Thank you. This may be the last message we’ll post about our 2011 Annual Campaign, and we want to use it to let you know that, by participating, you’re making a vital (and tax deductible) gift toward all of the nonprofit publishing, programing, and ...
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The Secret of Wilhelm Storitz
Jules Verne was a French master of fictional works portraying the fantastical that were primarily geared toward young readers, literary escapists/adventure seekers, and adults who want to experience a taste of their childhoods. Three of his best-known works are probably Around the World in 80 Days, 20,000 Leagues under the ...
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Latest Review: "The Secret of Wilhelm Storitz" by Jules Verne
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Kaija Straumanis on Jules Verne’s The Secret of Wilhelm Storitz, which came out earlier this year from the University of Nebraska Press in Peter Schulman’s translation. Kaija is an about-to-graduate MA student in Literary Translation here at the ...
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Ten Albums from 2011 [Will Cleveland's List]
Here’s guest podcaster turned guest blogger Will Cleveland’s list of best albums of 2011. He’s a bit more sincere and straightforward than I am, which is why these are presented in countdown fashion. Click here for the Spotify playlist with a bunch of songs from both of our lists. I present my top 10 ...
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Ten Albums from 2011 [Chad's List]
Although the “Best Albums of 2011” was my fault, I actually sort of hate putting together strick top 10 lists for music. Given the opportunity, I could list 20+ albums that I liked from this year, including ones from Bon Iver, I Break Horses, Mark McGuire, Matthew Shipp, Portugal. The Man, Thao & Mirah, ...
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Three Percent #24: All Sound Is Music to Someone
In this week’s podcast we take a break from that books thing to talk about the best music of 2011 according to me (Chad W. Post) and guest host Will Cleveland. Nathan Furl and Six (aka Elizabeth Mullins) also throw in their opinions about a ten artists, including Handsome Furs, WU LYF, M83, Battles, A.A. Bondy, Frank ...
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Absinthe Minded Book Recommendations [More Karaoke Culture]
At this past ALTA (which I still need to write about, I know), Dwayne Hayes of Absinthe recorded are few video interviews about people’s favorite books of the year. The first one he posted is the one that I did about . . . Karaoke Culture. You can watch it at the link above (which I approve of, since part of my face is ...
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Thirst
Gelasimov embraces the “show, don’t tell” dictum effectively throughout this short novel from the unique start. The first person narrator, later identified as Constantine or Kostya, has just returned to his home and is trying to fit a lot of bottles of vodka into his refrigerator, and on the window sill, on the ...
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Thanks, Donors, Donating, and Free Books.
We’re in the midst of our Three Percent/Open Letter Annual Campaign (don’t worry, this won’t go on forever), and we just want to say “thank you” to those you who have already contributed by making a donation. We’re not done, though, and we’re still a ways from our goal . . ...
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Farhad Manjoo, Amazon, and Independent Bookstores [Controversies]
Following on my post from yesterday, which was following on Richard Russo’s op-ed piece, which was following on Amazon’s “Price Check special,” today Slate’s tech guy, Farhad Manjoo, has his own piece about Amazon and indie bookstores—one that has seemingly pissed off everyone I know. If ...
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New Books in German: The Buzz Videos
For the past year or so, the German Book Office has been putting together short videos with German readers (critics, translators, agents, etc.) talking about titles featured in the New Books in German publication. All of these are available here, and in honor of the 30th edition of New Books in German, they created a ...
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Jellybooks: The Last.fm of Ebook Discovery?
Today’s Publishing Perspectives is all about Jellybooks, a new service for “Discovering, sharing and group buying ebooks.” Online book discovery was the focal point of the last couple weeks of my “Intro to Literary Publishing” class, so this comes at a perfect time . . . Anyway, here’s a ...
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Angel Igov's "A Short Tale of Shame"
Following up on the announcement from a few weeks back of the co-winners for this year’s Contemporary Bulgarian Novel contest, below you’ll find a long excerpt from Angel Igov’s A Short Tale of Shame. I would try and summarize this, but the summary would be long and confusing and much broader than what I ...
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Richard Russo, Bookstores, and this Amazon Price Check Thing [Controversies]
We talked about this very briefly on last week’s podcast, but now that Richard Russo has written an op-ed piece for the NY Times, I feel like it’s worth exploring this Amazon Price Check controversy in a bit more detail. First off, for anyone not familiar with this recent Amazon vs. Indie Bookstore kerfuffle, ...
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1Q84
Like many an English-speaking Murakami fan, I have been waiting to read 1Q84 for almost three years. That’s right, three years, since around January 2009, when news reports from Japan were just announcing that Murakami had finished his latest novel, one still without a title and rumored to be twice as long as Kafka on the ...
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Three Percent #23: Nonfiction Books Are Books Too
In this week’s podcast we learn the following: Chad is working through the five stages of grief about Albert Pujols and MSU (he is filled with ANGER); Tom doesn’t read a ton of nonfiction, but when he does, it tends to focus on all things violent (see a theme?); faux-karaoke singers on the subway might suck, but ...
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Year End Lists & Books You Should Read [Hearts for Scott Esposito]
OK, so I don’t really heart Scott Esposito—as well all know, he’s shit at riding a mechanical bull and that is a NECESSARY in my book—but he has been doing a lot of great work lately, and has prompted me to write an appreciation of his recent reviews and round-up of some year end lists that I’ve ...
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Three Messages and a Warning [Read This Next]
This week’s Read This Next title is Three Messages and a Warning: Contemporary Mexican Short Stories of the Fantastic, edited by Eduardo Jimenez Mayo and Chris N. Brown, with an introduction from Bruce Sterling. This will be officially available from Small Beer Press is bringing this out in late-January, but it can be ...
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A Special Appeal from Three Percent & Open Letter
As the year comes to a close, we thought we’d take a minute to look back at what we’ve done over the past twelve months. It’s also that magical time of year when we thank you all for your continued support, and ask for your help in the year to come by participating in our Annual Campaign. Most of you ...
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The Hall of the Singing Caryatids
The first I’d heard of Victor Pelevin was while interning at Words Without Borders. We published his story “Akiko” which struck me as the funniest, strangest thing I’d seen in ages. I decided to seek out his other work, and while his book A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia offered some good tales, I was left with a ...
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Latest Review: "The Hall of the Singing Caryatids" by Victor Pelevin
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Vincent Francone on Victor Pelevin’s The Hall of the Singing Caryatids, which is just out from New Directions in Andrew Bromfield’s translation. Coincidentally, I just finished reading this last night. And I completely agree with Vince’s review: ...
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My Visit to Toronto: Book Clubs and Book Discovery
One of the things that Open Letter and Three Percent is premised upon is the idea that a good publisher—especially in this day and age—is one that has a close connection to its audience. All too frequently, publishers remove themselves from their customers . . . Over the past few years we’ve written ...
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Zachary Karabashliev's "18% Gray"
As promised last week, here’s a bit more information on 18% Gray, one of this year’s Bulgarian Contemporary Novel contest’s co-winners. 18% Gray is a sort of non-linear road novel. In the present, Zack is traveling to the East Coast trying to sell off the huge bag of marijuana that has come into his ...
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The Greenhouse
2011 has been a banner year for Icelandic literature on the international stage. “Fabulous Iceland” was this year’s guest of honor at the Frankfurt Book Fair, and in August, UNESCO named the Reykjavík as one of its five Cities of Literature—the only such city where English is not the native language. Perhaps even ...
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Three Percent #22: Best Fiction of 2011
Since the year is coming to an end, it seemed like the perfect time for us to start creating our “best of” lists for 2011. We decided to start with the best fiction that we read over the past year. Our list is pretty idiosyncratic, and all the titles mentioned are worth checking out. You’ll have to listen ...
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Bulgarian Translation Fellowship
In addition to the Bulgarian Contemporary Novel contest, Open Letter and the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation also sponsor a special fellowship that allows for one Bulgarian translator to stay in Rochester for three weeks and learn about the American publishing scene and interact with the literary translation students at the ...
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Dubravka Ugresic and Jessa Crispin
Kirkus just posted a longish interview by Jessa Crispin (founder/editor of Bookslut) with Dubravka Ugresic about her new collection, Karaoke Culture. (Which, not to give too much away, is one of the books on my “Best of 2011” list that Tom and I will be discussing on this week’s podcast.) You should go ...
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2011: The Year of the Translator?
Over at The Guardian, Robert McCrum has a pretty interesting piece about how the publication of a number of high profile international works has “contributed to a new appreciation of the art of the good translation.” Through the power of global media, there is more than ever before a market for literature in ...
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Zeina
In terms of contemporary Egyptian history, there is no doubt of Nawal El Saadawi’s positive impact on the rights of women in Egyptian society as well as her impact on the human rights movement in general. She has been imprisoned for her beliefs and forced to flee her country due to threats from Islamists. As an accomplished ...
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EVENT – Thursday, Dec. 1, 2011: Sergio Chejfec & Margaret B. Carson
Our second (and final!) Reading the World Conversation Series event of the fall is happening in just a few days. As always, it’s taking place in Rochester, NY. So, if you’re in the area, you’d better check it out—lest all your friends go without you and bond intimately over the great time they all ...
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ALTA 2011: Translators Going Wild [Bull Riding]
I do have some serious things to say about ALTA 2011, which took place in Kansas City last week, but I’m trying to power through a few big things here before the Thanksgiving vacation, so I’m probably going to reserve those legit posts for next week. Instead, let’s talk about riding a mechanical ...
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RTWCS: Ledig House 2011
Every year we include a special Ledig House event as part of our Reading the World Conversation Series. This is one of our most popular events every season, in part because it includes such a diverse range of speakers, writing in a range of genres. The three guests that participated in this year’s event were: ...
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Making the Translator Visible: Lucas Klein
Special thanks to Megan McDowell for sending me a whole new batch of translator photos so that I can continue this series. For those who don’t know, this series grew out of an idea I had at the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) conference that took place back in November. Megan McDowell (the ...
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Making the Translator Visible: Edward Gauvin
Edward Gauvin is simply awesome. I first met him when he was working at the French Publishers’ Agency. Actually, that’s not exactly accurate. I first corresponded with him when he was at the FPA, but I first met him in person when he was visiting Rochester. See? People do visit Rochester. Edward’s ...
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Making the Translator Visible: Wendy Hardenberg
I was actually a bit scared of Wendy when I first met her. Not because she was particularly frightening (I’ve gotten over my fear of librarians . . . well, at least most of them), or because she was so much taller than most of the other translators (“tall” being totally ALTA-relative), but because the ...
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Making the Translator Visible: Charlotte Mandell
This is a bit of an interlude post in the series. I don’t have a picture of Charlotte—she wasn’t at the ALTA conference—so I’m hardly following through on the “visible” aspect of these entries, but after writing about the “most published translators” of the past few years, ...
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Making the Translator Visible: Erica Mena
OK, I’ve really fallen behind with this series of posts, but I’m getting back on track now. . . . Although in my defense, I’m still waiting for a few more photographs . . . But anyway, here we go with Erica Mena’s write up: Meeting Erica was one of the real highlights of ALTA. I’ve already ...
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Making the Translator Visible: Gary Racz
Gary is another great example of the hyperactively funny male translator. He’s incredibly fun, warm, and without going into any ALTA politics, one of the important people on ALTA’s board and committees who is liked by all sides. In addition to his ALTA work, and serving as review editor for Translation Review, ...
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Making the Translator Visible: Marian Schwartz
Don’t mean to play favorites here, but to be honest, in my opinion, Marian Schwartz is one of the smartest, most talented translators working today. Especially in terms of Russian translation. And retranslation. In recent years, she’s translated Envy by Yuri Olesha, Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov, A Hero of Our Time ...
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Making the Translator Visible: Jason Grunebaum
Simply put, Jason Grunebaum is one of the funniest people I’ve ever met. Super energetic, witty as all get out, he should have his own reality show. (Or something.) At least a podcast. Or a regular guest spot on someone else’s podcast. (Jason: you going to be at MLA? If so, let’s talk.) He’s also ...
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I Am a Japanese Writer
As we progress further into the 21st century, it is almost baffling that human beings still put so much stock into race and/or nationality. Because it is getting confusing. Perhaps 200 years ago, when the only human beings you had a chance of producing offspring with lived in a fifty-mile radius, it made sense to identify ...
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Latest Review: "I Am a Japanese Writer" by Dany LaFerrière
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Will Eells on Dany LaFerrière’s I Am a Japanese Writer, which is translated from the French by David Hormel and available from Douglas & MacIntyre. Will—who got a certificate in literary translation from the U of R and focuses on Japanese ...
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Making the Translator Visible: Robin Myers
Robin Myers is one of the very cool young translators that I met for the first time at this year’s ALTA conference. In many ways, she’s the perfect example of the benefits of ALTA’s fellowship program . . . A student at Swarthmore who is focused on translating Spanish poetry, I can’t imagine she ...
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Making the Translator Visible: Matt Rowe
I first met Matt Rowe when he attended his first ALTA conference a few years back as an ALTA fellow. Matt’s an interesting guy with, at expense of making a fool of my memory, an interesting history, having started his career in computers, working for, among other companies, Microsoft. Then he abandoned that all ...
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Making the Translator Visible: Pam Carmell
Since I already wrote about her once, it only seemed fitting to make Pam Carmell a bit more visible . . . I met Pam at the first ALTA conference I ever attended. If I remember right (and trust me, I probably don’t), we ended up standing next to each other in a line for something (food?) and Cristina de la Torre ...
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Making the Translator Visible: Russell Valentino
Russell Valentino is a superstar in the world of literary translation. Just look at his bio from the University of Iowa: Russell Scott Valentino is professor of Slavic and comparative literature and chair of the Department of Cinema and Comparative Literature. He has published a monograph on nineteenth-century Russian ...
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Making the Translator Visible: Megan McDowell
So after the first ALTA panel—on the “subversive” translator and the idea of making the translator “visible” without interfering too much with the original text—Megan McDowell (pictured above) and I came up with a project idea. (Or what some may call a gimmick.) We thought that we could ...
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Off to Have an ALTA-stic Time!
I’m about to head off to this year’s American Literary Translators Association conference in Kansas City, MO, where hopefully I’ll be able to post a few updates and let you in on the awesome fun that is ALTA. (And remember, next year it’s in Rochester from October 3-6. and I expect to see all of you ...
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Until the Dawn's Light
The violence in the fiction of Aharon Appelfeld—often anti-Semitic, frequently represented by the Holocaust itself—usually occurs after, or prior to, his novels’ main action. Thus the novels typically occupy one of two psychic spaces: the period of rising tension in the months or years before Hitler’s advent ...
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Latest Review: "Until the Dawn's Light" by Aharon Appelfeld
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Dan Vitale on Aharon Appelfeld’s Until the Dawn’s Light, which is translated from the Hebrew by Jeffrey M. Green, and available from Schocken Books. Dan is one of our contributing reviewers, and has written a ton of great pieces for us. Most recently, he ...
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Sometimes I Don't Think Academics Quite Get It
So, today’s Inside Higher Ed has a piece about “OccupyMLA” the “newest Occupy movement,” which is currently only in Twitter form. My knowledge of this is based almost entirely on personal prejudices and this IHE article, but for any number of reasons, this bugs me immensely.1 First off, ...
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"Thrown into Nature" by Milen Ruskov [Read This Next]
This week’s Read This Next title is Milen Ruskov’s Thrown into Nature, which is translated from the Bulgarian by Angel Rodel, and won the first annual Contemporary Bulgarian Writers Contest. This contest is sponsored by the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation, the America for Bulgaria Foundation, and Open Letter ...
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Three Percent #20: Everyone in the World Writes in English
In this week’s podcast, Tom and I talk about the strange cases of books/authors that most people don’t think of as having been translated. (Not to give away too much, but we start with Haruki Murakami.) From there, we talk about which authors are most associated with particular countries, the pros and cons of ...
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Thrown into Nature
Milen Ruskov’s second published novel (and first to be translated into English), Thrown Into Nature poses as the traipsing and unfinished manuscript of an eager young Guimaraes da Silva (“The ‘da Silva’ part is made-up, by the way, since an aristocratic title causes people pay more attention to what you say.”). Set ...
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2012 International Prize for Arabic Fiction Longlist
Seems like today is a day of award announcements . . . The International Prize for Arabic Fiction (aka, the Arab Booker) started five years ago as a way of bringing more international attention to great works of arabic literature. So far, they’ve given the award to five titles (two won last year), and all ...
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2011 Finlandia Prize
This year’s shortlist for the Finlandia Fiction Prize—awarded annually to the best novel written by a Finnish citizen—was announced yesterday, and is unique in that it’s the first list of finalists comprised entirely of women authors. Granted, this doesn’t happen very often, but I get the sense ...
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David Bellos on the new PRI's The World in Words
One of my favorite podcasts (aside from the Three Percent podcast, of course) is PRI’s The World in Words, which is hosted by Patrick Cox and covers a ton of really interesting topics related to language, translation, etc. It’s worth checking out every week, but especially this week, since the main focus is on ...
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Carrere's "Limonov" Wins the Prix Renaudot
This was actually announced a couple days ago, but I just received an email from French publisher P.O.L. celebrating the awarding of the Prix Renaudot to Emmanuel Carrère for his new novel Limonov. Limonov is not a fictional character. He exists. I know him. He was a lout in Ukraine; an idol of the Soviet underground ...
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IMPAC's Longlist Sure Is Long [Websites Should Be Pretty]
The longlist for the 2012 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award was announced earlier today, and is made up of 147 titles, the full list of which you can find here. It’s a pretty decent, if wide-ranging, group of books, which includes everything from Paul Auster’s latest to Sofi Oksanen’s Purge to our own Private ...
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Interview with Sergio Chejfec
Over at Guernica there’s a fantastic interview with Argentine author Sergio Chejfec, whose My Two Worlds (translated by Margaret Carson) is getting a lot of great publicity, and whose The Planets and The Dark (both translated by Heather Cleary Wolfgang) will be coming out from Open Letter in the next couple years. ...
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Congrats to Francisco Goldman!
Francisco Goldman was the MC at the very first Best Translated Book Award ceremony, which took place at the fantastic Melville House offices. He gave a great speech about the importance of translation, and included an anecdote about translating a Gabriel Garcia Marquez story for Playboy . . . As many of you probably know, ...
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Last.fm for Books
Spiegel Online has an interesting article about Readmill, a new start-up with the goal of making book reading a “more social” activity: The goal is to transform book reading into a social activity, bringing together readers via their e-readers, and to grab a share of the booming E-book market. Other companies ...
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Death as a Side Effect
If we were to ignore for just a moment the fact that Death as a Side Effect was originally published (in Spanish) in 1997 in Argentina, we might be tempted to read it in the context of recent healthcare reforms and debates in the United States, with the world painted by Ana María Shua nestling easily among the nightmares of ...
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Time for An Announcement [ALTA 2012]
With this year’s American Literary Translators Association conference just around the corner (Kansas City better prepare itself), this seems like a good time to announce that the 2012 conference will take place from October 3-6 right here in Rochester, NY. We’ll be posting a lot of details about this over the ...
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Better News Re: St. Mark's and Their Rent Problems
Earlier in the week things weren’t looking so good for St. Mark’s. They’ve been asking Cooper Union for a $5,000/month break in their rent (which is currently $22,500/month), but Cooper Union was using their own financial difficulties to explain why such a decrease was impossible. Well, apparently ...
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CONTEXT #23 [Back!]
After an absurdly extended hiatus, Dalkey Archive Press’s tri-ennial quarterly occasional tabloid magazine, CONTEXT is back! For anyone familiar with it, this is great news . . . CONTEXT is consistently interesting, and one of the best ways to discover and learn about “experimental,” “strange,” ...
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Fame
Daniel Kehlmann’s new book of short stories, Fame, might also be entitled The Price of Fame. Celebrated, at the age of 31, for his novel Measuring the World, Kehlmann’s latest book of episodes—ahem—short stories focuses on the murky delineation between the technologies that help us live our lives and actually living ...
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Assault on the Minibar
I mentioned this in passing a couple weeks back, but The Paris Review website recently posted Dubrakva Ugresic’s “Assault on the Minibar,” which is one of the many fantastic pieces in her new collection, Karaoke Culture. A number of sites have been linking to this essay, and I particularly like the ...
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Balls of Gold
Over at Salon, Kevin Canfield has a nice piece about the challenges of translation and the way translators are underappreciated: Gavin Bowd, the English translator for Michel Houellebecq, was working on the controversial French novelist’s “The Map and the Territory” — Knopf will publish the first American edition ...
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And Then There Was BAM!
The Melville House blog has a really interesting post about the future of Barnes & Noble that links off to this piece by Rick Aristotle Munarriz. Barnes & Noble is coming off another dreadful quarter. Back out the Nook and its digital downloads and you’ll find that sales actually fell by 11% at its ...
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Three Messages and a Warning: Contemporary Mexican Stories of the Fantastic
If nothing else, Three Messages and a Warning proves that anthology editors hold far more power than the individual authors. The problem is not so much that Three Messages fails to offer any excellent Mexican “stories of the fantastic,” but that those tales are few and poorly placed within the book as a whole. For ...
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Latest Review: "Three Messages and a Warning"
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Sara Cohen about Three Messages and a Warning, an anthology of Mexican short stories of the fantastic, edited by Eduardo Jimenez Mayo and Chris Brown and forthcoming from Small Beer Press. Sara “Number Four” Cohen was one of our summer interns, who ...
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Karaoke Culture
After taking a few weeks to mull over Dubravka Ugresic’s Karaoke Culture, I took a rainy afternoon and watched a movie with Chinese food. The movie was High Fidelity and I’ve seen it many times, but never have I thought about the final lines so much before. With uncharacteristic selflessness, Rob Gordon explains how to ...
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Three Percent #19: The Moneyball of Book Publishing
This week’s podcast centers around two things: Gerald Howard’s article in PW about the possible influence of Moneyball ideas on book publishing, and Helen DeWitt’s comments in an interview I did with her about stats in fiction. We also talk about the World Series, and my unwavering faith in the St. Louis ...
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Translation and Terrorism
This is a guest post from Acacia O’Connor, a recent graduate of the MA program in Literary Translation here at the University of Rochester. She’s currently living and working in D.C., and searching for a publisher for her translation of Exhausted Space by Tommaso Pincio. Translation, though it is infrequently ...
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Parallel Stories
Most of the books I have reviewed for this site were only reviewed in one or two other places: small journals, literary blogs, a paragraph in Publishers Weekly, perhaps . . . This is, of course, the norm for literature in translation, and the discrepancy between the quality and coverage of these books has been bemoaned enough ...
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"Parallel Stories" by Peter Nadas [Read This Next]
After a bit of a hiatus, Read This Next is back, with a book of truly massive proportions. This week’s title is Parallel Stories by Hungarian author Peter Nadas, which is translated by Imre Goldstein and just out from FSG. It’s impossible to mention this book without talking about its size and scope. The ...
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TyPA Editor's Week in Buenos Aires
A few years back, I was lucky enough to participate in TyPA’s annual Editor’s Week in Buenos Aires. It was an absolutely amazing experience (which I wrote about here) that involved meeting lots of interesting publishers and writers, learning even more about Argentine literature than I thought possible, and ...
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Amazon Funds Ledig House
Following on yesterday’s spectacular Ledig House event (we’ll have the video up soon), it only seems appropriate to spread the word about Amazon’s latest grant to this admirable organization. From the press release: Writers Omi at Ledig House, a part of Omi International Arts Center, has been awarded a ...
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International Writers from the Ledig House
Our big Reading the World Conversation Series events for the fall are just about to start, with our first event happening next Tuesday. If you’re near the Rochester (NY) area, please come and check it out. Here are the intoxicating details on event #1: Reading the World Conversation Series: International Writers ...
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Reminder: RTWCS Event Tonight!
If you’re in the Rochester area, you should definitely come out for tonight’s Reading the World Conversation Series event. This is the first one of the 2011-12 season (which may actually be the last season due to lack of funding—another story for another post) and will feature four writers and translators ...
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Murakami Profile in the NY Times Magazine
This past weekend, in advance of today’s drop date for 1Q84, Sam Anderson wrote a long, very well-textured profile of Murakami entitled The Fierce Imagination of Haruki Murakami. To be honest, I’m not the biggest Murakami fan in the world. I really like Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and to a ...
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Three Percent #18: Occupy Everything
This week’s podcast is a mixed bag of stuff. Our main focus is on book events—why from a publisher’s perspective they can be frustrating, what makes them interesting (or not), etc. But we also talk a bit about Occupy Wall Street and books that we hope are in the OWS library. Oh, and as can only be ...
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Albert Cossery and Two Lines Launch Event
On Wednesday, November 9th at 7:30pm, Two Lines is collaborating with The Bridge reading series to put on a special event at McNally Jackson (52 Prince St.) in celebration of the new issue, Counterfeits. “Counterfeits” editor Luc Sante will host the event, and will be joined by translators Aaron Kerner, Patrick ...
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Russia Is BEA's 2012 Market Focus
I’ve known about this for a while (and may have even mentioned it on here at some point), but Russia is going to the be market focus at next year’s BookExpo America. This is part of the “Read Russia 2012” program, which is explained in the official press release: Russia will be the country of ...
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Occupy Writers
Not surprisingly, we at Open Letter/Three Percent are pretty big supporters of Occupy Wall Street and the whole Occupy Movement in general. So, although it’s not exactly translation related, I thought it would be worth mentioning the Occupy Writers site that writer Jeff Sharlet started and which now boasts a pretty ...
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The Three Percent Problem & Local News
This morning, I was on our local morning show (the one that we’re generally on, which is most likely the only local news program in the whole U.S. to have featured authors from both Croatia and Iceland), to talk about The Three Percent Problem. The conversation kind of meanders, but I’m very glad that I was able ...
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Open Letter Subscription Offer
As you probably already know, since our inception, we’ve offered subscriptions to Open Letter. You can subscribe for six months or a year and receive every title that we publish during that time, which means that you receive a book about every five weeks. Also included is a letter explaining how we came to publish that ...
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EVENT – Tuesday, Oct. 25, 2011: International Writers from the Ledig House
Our big Reading the World Conversation Series events for the fall are just about to start, with our first event happening next Tuesday. If you’re near the Rochester (NY) area, please come and check it out. Here are the intoxicating details on event #1: Reading the World Conversation Series: International Writers ...
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One Last, Final Last, Icelandic Post [Icelandic Sports]
So I’m suffering the head cold of a decade, but I should be back tomorrow with normal posts, book reviews, etc., etc. In the meantime, I thought I’d leave you with a post about Stjarnan, my favorite Icelandic soccer club. To be honest, although I love me some football (especially Barcelona, especially the ...
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Sjonni's Friends, "Coming Home" [Icelandic Music]
So after highlighting a number of great Icelandic performers, it may seem a bit odd to end the week with a Eurovision song, but, well, it actually seems sort of fitting at the same time. If you’re not familiar with Eurovision, you must read this. (And then get ready for next year’s ...
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"Children in Reindeer Woods" by Kristin Ómarsdóttir [Icelandic Literature]
We’re bringing Lytton Smith’s translation of Children in Reindeer Woods next April, which is a ways off, I know, but it still seems like the perfect time to introduce this strange, haunting novel. This novel takes place at a “temporary home for children” called Children in Reindeer Woods, where ...
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Útúrdur Gives Iceland What it Wants [Icelandic Culture]
Here’s one last guest post from the wonderful Amanda De Marco. I want to publicly thank her for all of her contributions this week. I would send her a bottle of Brennivin as a token of my appreciation, but that shit is DEATH. For more of Amanda’s writings, be sure to check out Readux: Reading in Berlin. ...
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Seabear, "I'll Build You a Fire" [Icelandic Music]
There’s something about most Icelandic bands that’s just pleasing. By contrast, in my mind I associate Sweden & Finland with Death Metal (and ABBA) and Iceland with Operatic Indie Folk. An belief which will probably most definitely be clear by the end of Icelandic Week. Up now is Seabear, which was started ...
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"The Greenhouse" by Audur Ava Olafsdottir [Icelandic Literature]
Audur Ava Olfasdottir’s The Greenhouse, translated by Brian FitzGibbon, is one of only three Icelandic translations coming out in 2011, so it deserves a special bit of attention. This also happens to be the first Icelandic title to be published by AmazonCrossing, the relatively new imprint that’s dedicated to ...
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The Artists Formerly Known as Nýhil [Icelandic Culture]
This is another guest post by Amanda De Marco. Quick correction to her bio: She’s actually not currently in Iceland. But she was. Recently. Now she’s in Frankfurt enjoying the awesome that is the Book Fair. The seventh annual Reykjavik International Poetry Festival just took place last weekend. Thor Steinarsson ...
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"The Ambassador" by Bragi Olafsson [Icelandic Literature]
Since we publish two of his novels, and since we featured his band yesterday, I thought today would be a perfect day to excerpt Bragi Olafsson’s The Ambassador, which is translated by Lytton Smith. (FYI: Lytton is the one responsible for providing me with the bottle of Brennivin featured in my upcoming “Black ...
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Ólafur Arnalds, "Tunglið" [Icelandic Music]
Sorry for yesterday’s minor hiccup re: Icelandic Week. TMI: On Saturday, a car of deaf kids ran a red light and slammed into me. (Yes, I know this sounds like the set-up to a joke.) I had my two kids with me, so it was exceptionally scary, but we’re all fine. As a result though, I’ve spent the past two days ...
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Emiliana Torrini, "Gun" [Icelandic Music]
When I first started talking about Icelandic Week, Intern Six (aka Liz Mullins) insisted that I include an Emiliana Torrini song, which reminded me that Torrini is actually Icelandic . . . Here’s her bio from Last.fm: Emilíana Torrini is an Icelandic singer-songwriter, born on 16 May 1977 in Kópavogur, Iceland. ...
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Gerður Kristný [Fabulous Iceland]
Another thing I want to do this week (in addition to a special post about Icelandic cuisine) is highlight some of the as-yet-untranslated authors featured on the wonderful Fabulous Iceland site. First up is Gerður Kristný, who I had the honor of meeting last time I was in Iceland. (Facebook friends go first! Besides, ...
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Sugarcubes, "Birthday" [Icelandic Music]
This one’s a given. Bjork + Bragi Olafsson. (We’ll be featuring Bragi’s literary work later this week.) Man, does this take me back . . . Originally released in 1988, Life’s Too Good is still pretty awesome. “Birthday” was what really put The Sugarcubes on the map, and evokes a very ...
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Book Sluts [Icelandic Culture]
This is a guest article by Amanda DeMarco, editor of Readux: Reading in Berlin and contributor to Publishing Perspectives. Just so happens that Amanda is in Iceland right now, and totally wanted in on this Icelandic Week project. In addition to this piece, she’s working on at least one more for us, which will run later ...
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"Under the Glacier" by Halldor Laxness [Icelandic Literature]
In addition to featuring various Icelandic tunes this week, I also want to highlight a number of works of Icelandic literature that are available in English translation. And since Halldor Laxness is Iceland’s one and only Nobel Prize winner, he seems like the perfect author to start with. Laxness was born in 1902 and ...
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Mum, "Blessed Brambles" [Icelandic Music]
If there’s one thing Americans know about Iceland, it’s that this small country has an amazingly vibrant music scene. And over the course of this week, we’ll be highlighting a bunch of bands and performers, starting with Múm (pronounced “Moom”), one of my personal favorites. I like all of ...
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The Bridge Series: David Bellos
Last week we featured David Bellos’s Is That a Fish in Your Ear? on our Read This Next, website and after reading the sample we made available (along with the interview and full review), I’m sure that everyone in the greater NYC area will want to go see Bellos talk about his book as part of The Bridge Series. ...
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Three Percent #17: Gambling on the Nobel Prize
This week’s podcast is a special two-part episode. We recorded the first half on Wednesday and speculated about who was going to win this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature and talked about the odd and awesome British practice of betting on the winner. The second half we recorded yesterday, after we found out that ...
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The Iowa Review Forum on Literature and Translation
The Iowa Review is up to a lot of cool things . . . First off, as you can see in the ad below, they’re sponsoring a writing contest for poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, with the winners each receiving $1,500 and the first runners-up getting $750. That’s pretty solid. But more to the point of this website, ...
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Introducing Icelandic Week
The Frankfurt Book Fair kicks off next Wednesday, and since I won’t be able to attend this year (boo!), I’ve decided that instead, next week will be “Icelandic Week” here at Three Percent as a way of celebrating Iceland as this year’s Guest of Honor. We’ve got an amazing amount of stuff ...
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"Karaoke Culture" by Dubravka Ugresic [Read This Next]
This week’s Read This Next title is Karaoke Culture by Dubravka Ugresic, which is translated from the Croatian by David Williams, Celia Hawkesworth, and Ellen Elias-Bursac, and is coming out from Open Letter at the end of the month. I’m really excited about this book—in my opinion, it’s one of the ...
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Karaoke Culture
To even write this review is to participate in the Karaoke Culture the Dubravka Ugresic criticizes. To be one of the voices the mass experiment in democratic culture is only one more example of a worldwide culture that is collapsing into parodies of itself as we all become yet another karaoke singer demanding our moment and ...
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Thank God, Bob Dylan Didn't Win
And this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature goes to Tomas Transtromer. From the “Guardian:”: Praised by the judges for “his condensed translucent images” which give us “fresh access to reality”, Tranströmer’s surreal explorations of the inner world and its relation to the ...
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The New Book I Can't Wait To Read
Scott Esposito’s been on about Daniel Sada for a while now, and I’ve heard nothing but fantastic things about his work, especially the “Joycean,” “Rabelaisian,” novel Almost Never, which wont he prestigious Herralde Prize for Fiction, and which Graywolf is bringing in April in Katherine ...
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Today's Nobel Prize Odds Update + The Coolest Class Ever
So, following on yesterday’s post on the forthcoming announcement of the Nobel Prize in Literature (supposed to happen on Thursday) and the current odds at Ladbrokes, I just want to point out that the big mover today is Bob Dylan, who shot up from 50/1 to 10/1. Interesting . . . * More interesting though is this ...
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"Reading Alberto Moravia in Silvio Berlusconi’s Italy"
This past weekend, the NY Times Book Review included this interesting essay by Rachel Donadio about reading Alberto Moravia: In its culture as in its politics, Italy lives under the shadow of Silvio Berlusconi. With his endless legal entanglements and sexual imbroglios and his colorful manner of governing (or not ...
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Translators Needed for Occupy Wall Street
As you hopefully know, the Occupy Wall Street protests are now into their third week, with people of all ages and from all over the country descending on Liberty Square to speak up about a number of injustices, especially related to banks, Wall Street, and the growing disparity between the top 1% and everyone else. Aside ...
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Nobel Prize in Literature To Be Announced on Thursday
According to various reports, this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature will be announced on Thursday around lunchtime. As always, the announcement of the forthcoming announcement brings out the speculation as to who will win, the complaints about why Americans don’t win every year, and the betting. Since I ...
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TQC Long Essays
This morning at Conversation Reading, Scott Esposito announced an exciting new project of his to publish long essays: So here’s the deal: I’ve long made my love of long essays known around here. From books like Nicholson Baker’s U&I to Barthes’ S/Z to the work of Geoff Dyer, William H. Gass, Michael Martone, ...
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New Issue of Portuguese Literary & Cultural Studies: Facts and Fictions of Antonio Lobo Antunes
Since every day is a good day to talk about how great Antonio Lobo Antunes’s works are, I was really excited to get a copy of the new double-sized issue of Portuguese Literary & Cultural Studies in the mail today and find that it’s dedicated to Antunes. There are a lot of articles in here that sound really ...
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Is That a Fish in Your Ear?
It makes a strange sort of sense that the man who translated Life A User’s Manual would subtitle his new book “Translation and the Meaning of Everything.” Clearly, David Bellos isn’t lacking in ambition, and without giving away too much too soon, that’s for the best. Maybe it’s because of ...
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Is that A Fish in Your Ear? by David Bellos [Read This Next]
This week’s Read This Next title is David Bellos’s Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything, which is coming out in late October from Faber and Faber. As I mentioned on a couple of our Three Percent podcasts, this is one of the fall books that I’ve been looking forward to for ...
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Anomalous #3
Not sure why/how we haven’t written about this until now, but there’s a new online literary journal called Anomalous that’s worth checking out, especially now that they just released their third issue. Founded and run by Erica Mena, Anomalous came into being in earlier this year as a non-profit press ...
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Amazon's Table: Just Like the Kindle, Only Bigger and With Less Books Stuff
I’ll be interested to see what Amazon’s table is all about when it comes out, but I have to admit, as someone who still reads and actually likes books, I’m a bit wary . . . The New York Times has an interesting piece about this that highlights the contradictions surrounding this device. On the one ...
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Three Percent #16: There's a Book Version of That
Following on last week’s fall books preview, this podcast is centered around movies coming out over the next few months, in particular, movies based on books. Tom does most all of the recommending, since he’s a much bigger movie buff than I am, and his list includes movies that he’s really excited about ...
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Inside Higher Ed on The Three Percent Problem
At some point in the next couple weeks, I’ll post something more substantial about the sales and rankings for The Three Percent Problem, our $2.99 ebook that collects the best of the best of Three Percent and organizes these pieces into a semi-coherent look at the contemporary publishing scene. (In case you’re ...
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Good Offices
Evelio Rosero’s first novel to be translated into English since his award-winning The Armies takes place on a much smaller scale than that hallucinatory story about the damaging effects of civil war in Colombia. Good Offices, lighter in tone and slighter than The Armies, documents the events of a single day in a single ...
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"Good Offices" by Evelio Rosero [Read This Next]
This week’s Read This Next title is Good Offices by Evelio Rosero, translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean and Anna Milsom, and coming out from New Directions next week. Good Offices is the second novel by Evelio Rosero (after The Armies, 2009) to be published by New Directions. It’s also the first to be ...
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Quarterly Conversation #25
I mentioned the new issue of Quarterly Conversation a couple weeks back in relation to the long piece I have in there about Antonio Lobo Antunes, but never got around to making a post about all the other great stuff in this issue . . . So, here’s a list of excellent articles that are definitely worth checking ...
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Reading Translations Makes You Smarter
Well, OK, that’s not exactly what’s implied in these passages from Eli Pariser’s The Filter Bubble, but both of these studies are very interesting and point to a oft-underplayed reason for “why translations matter,” namely that things outside of your mental comfort zone spark creativity and other ...
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25 Best Kept Secrets in Latin America
In celebration of it 25th anniversary, FIL Guadalajara (aka the Guadalajara Book Fair) has announced the 25 Best Kept Secrets in Latin America program: 25 writers. Narrators. All invited to Guadalajara to be part of The 25 Best Kept Secrets in Latin America. With this project, the Guadalajara International Book Fair ...
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Translator Receives "Genius Grant"
This morning, the MacArthur Foundation announced the 22 recipients of this year’s “Genius Grants.” There’s always a creative writer or two included among the physicists, neuropathologists, organometallic chemists, and the like, but this year, along with poet Kay Ryan, translator A. E. Stallings will be ...
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The Nonfiction Gap
This is a special piece by Sal Robinson, freelance editor and co-founder of The Bridge, the first independent reading and discussion series in New York City devoted to literary translation. She has worked for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Phaidon, and Words Without Borders. Among the small number of translated books published ...
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The Smoke of Distant Fires GoodReads Giveaway
The Smoke of Distant Fires by Eduardo Chirinos is the second book in our International Poetry Series, and to help spread the word about this collection (which G. J. Racz did an amazing job translating), we’re giving away 10 copies through GoodReads. Just click below to enter. .goodreadsGiveawayWidget { ...
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Three Percent #15: "Let's Rock!"
This week’s podcast is our official “Fall Books Preview,” in which we list a dozen or so books we’re really excited about, diss a few states in the union, and discuss a few strange and interesting book covers. You’ll have to listen to the podcast to get the complete list, but here are a few of ...
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The Three Percent Problem Release Day!
Following up on Monday’s post, today is the official release day for The Three Percent Problem: Rants and Responses on Publishing, Translation, and the Future of Reading. This “best of” collection is a fairly coherent survey of the contemporary publishing scene, ranging from an explanation of the ...
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"Zero and Other Fictions" by Huang Fan [Read This Next]
This week’s Read This Next title is Zero and Other Fictions by Huang Fan and translated from the Chinese by John Balcom. Columbia University Press is bringing this out on October 4th. Here’s Lily Ye’s description: Huang is a celebrated modern Taiwanese writer who has been writing for over 30 years. This ...
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Zero and Other Fictions
Zero and Other Fictions is a collection that displays a unique range. Huang Fan has been writing for over 30 years and it shows (though he may have been secluded for nearly a decade during this time, studying Buddhism and not writing much fiction). The “other fictions” included in this collection include a satirical tale ...
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Houellebecq Missing
This is pretty bizarre: Michel Houellebecq, the French writer whose novels address sex tourism, sado-masochism and cloning, failed to show up for a scheduled reading tour of the Netherlands and Belgium and cannot be reached by his publishers. “We really don’t know what is happening,” said Barbara ...
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Vladislav Bajac and SPIT
The Valley Advocate just published an excellent article about Vladislav Bajac, author of Hamam Balkania and director of Geopoetika, a most amazing Serbian publishing house. In addition to publishing the best of the best of world literature, Geopoetika is also the home to SPIT (Sebian Prose in Translation), a new ...
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Some Reasons on Why We Fight
Over at the New Yorker’s Book Bench blog, Macy Halford has a post entitled “Should We Fight to Save Indie Bookstores?” The basis for her post is the petition to Save St. Mark’s Bookshop that’s going round the Internets and is focused on the difficult the store is having paying market rent in the ...
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Feature on Europa Editions
Today’s Publishing Perspectives has a special feature on Europa Editions one of the coolest presses out there. It’s mostly an interview with editor (and translator) Michael Reynolds, who recently moved to New York from Rome to work in Europa’s U.S. office. PP: How would you characterize Europa’s ...
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Andrew Barrett's Words Without Borders Debut
Over the next couple months, we’ll be featuring some of the recent University of Rochester translation students on our weekly podcast. They’re all extremely interesting (and entertaining) people, and all working on very cool projects that we’d like to feature. One of those students is Andrew Barrett, who ...
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The Bridge: Sergio Chejfec + Margaret Carson + E.J. Van Lanen
The next event in The Bridge Series will take place this Thursday, September 15th at 7pm at McNally Jackson, and will consist of a discussion about the writing, translation, and editing of Sergio Chejfec’s My Two Worlds. We just brought out My Two Worlds, the first of three Chejfec books that we’re planning on ...
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"Here's My Million Dollar Idea: A Sort of Spotify for Books"
For those of you who listen to our (semi) weekly Three Percent podcast, you may remember a discussion Tom and I had a month or so ago about the idea of a “Spotify for books,” whereby someone could subscribe to have unlimited access to all ebooks available on a given platform. As with Spotify, you wouldn’t ...
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Introducing "The Three Percent Problem" [Update on Kindle Apps]
In a variety of podcasts and other posts, I’ve made reference to a “best of Three Percent” book that we were putting together. One that would sell for $2.99 with all the proceeds going to benefit translators . . . Well, at long last, after forcing Taylor McCabe (Intern #1) to read and sort some thousands ...
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"Penguin Lost" by Andrey Kurkov [Read This Next]
Prelude Apology: Sorry for being a bit behind—I’m home sick with a nasty cold . . . More posting and podcasting next week. This week’s featured Read This Next title is Penguin Lost, the second book in Andrey Kurkov’s detective series that, yes, includes a penguin (and is translated from the Russian ...
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Penguin Lost
Viktor Zolotaryov, the hero of Death and the Penguin, here returns for a second adventure, this time seeking out his friend and closest companion, the penguin Misha. At the start of the novel Viktor is in Antarctica, having taken Misha’s seat on a plane to escape with his life at the end of Death and the Penguin. Misha ...
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Latest Review: "Lunar Savings Time" by Alex Epstein
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Daniela Hurezanu about Alex Epstein’s Lunar Savings Time, which is translated from the Hebrew by Becka Mara McKay and available from Clockroot Books. Daniela Hurezanu has reviewed for us several times in the past, and here’s her official bio, courtesy of ...
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Why Read Antonio Lobo Antunes?
That’s the title of the extremely long article I wrote about Antonio Lobo Antunes for the new issue of Quarterly Conversation. (More on that issue later.) If you’ve read this blog at all, you’ve probably come across one or more posts in which I wax poetic about the awesomeness of Antunes’s writing. ...
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"Guinea Fowls" in Storyville
There’s been a lot of talk about the revival of interest in long-form non-fiction thanks to the Internet and apps and what not. There’s longform.org, givemesomethingtoread.com, and, more to the electronic point, Kindle Singles. Now, you could argue that this isn’t really a revival, but rather an embracing ...
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Three Percent #14: Books to Read in College
Since the University of Rochester fall semester started on Wednesday, we decided that this week’s podcast would center around books that you should read in college. This includes things that should be taught in classes, some general comments on teaching the life out of literature, and why teaching literature in ...
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Splendor in Portugal
Splendor of Portugal is the tenth book by Antonio Lobo Antunes to appear in English translation, and the seventh that I’ve reviewed. Which, in some ways, makes this difficult to write. Not to mention, I just wrote an epically long piece on Antunes for a forthcoming issue of Quarterly Conversation. It was one of those ...
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"The Splendor of Portugal" by Antonio Lobo Antunes [Read This Next]
Starting next week, we’ll be posting all of the content for our Read This Next title on Thursday. You’ll get the extended preview, the translator interview, and the review all at once, giving you plenty of material to read over the weekend . . . We were planning on implementing this change this week, but, well, ...
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Interview with Jennifer Crewe of Columbia University Press
I wasn’t previously familiar with this blog, but New Yorker In Seoul looks like a really interesting place to learn about Korean culture. The other day, Patricia Park—the site’s curator and former Columbia University Press editorial intern—published “this interview” with Jennifer Crewe, ...
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Death in Spring on NPR's "You Must Read This"
Over at NPR, Jesmyn Ward has a really nice write-up of Merce Rodoreda’s Death in Spring: When a friend gave me Merce Rodoreda’s Death in Spring, he told me it would blow my mind. Ten pages in, I doubted his claim. The book begins when the narrator, a 14-year-old boy from a small mountain village, slips ...
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Richard Nash in the Boston Review
The new issue of the Boston Review has an interesting interview with publishing visionary Richard Nash about the state of publishing and Revaluing the Book: Matt Runkle: There’s a lot of worrying about the disappearance of the book as an object. Do you see the printed book in the same state of flux as the publishing ...
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New Libyan Literature
M. Lynx Qualey, who runs the excellent blog Arabic Literature (In English), wrote an interesting, useful article for Al-Masry Al-Youm entitled New Life for New Libyan Lit which discusses the future of Libyan literature post-Qadhafi: While Egyptian authors embraced social realism in the 1960s and 1970s, many Libyan ...
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Argentina Independent Spotlight on Carlos Gamerro
The Argentina Independent has a great feature on Carlos Gamerro, a very interesting Argentine writer who once contributed to Three Percent and has a couple books coming out in translation. Here’s Joey Rubin’s intro: The time has come for Carlos Gamerro to speak English. Born into a bilingual family in Buenos ...
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NEA Literature Translation Fellowships
Just an FYI that information about the next round of NEA Literature Fellowships for Translation Projects is now available online. These grants are for either $12,500 or $25,000 (which is quite possibly more than the winning translators would receive from their publishers . . . ) and the deadline for submitting is January 5, ...
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Dutch Guest of Honor at the Beijing International Book Fair
The Beijing Book Fair kicks off this week, and The Netherlands is this year’s Country of Honor. In order to celebrate this, the always industrious Dutch have put together Open Landscape-Open Book a pretty sizable program to promote Dutch literature. Although the Netherlands is the guest of honour this year, we ...
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Edith Grossman Tells it Like it Is [We Are So Small]
Over at Publishing Perspectives, there’s a profile piece by Hernán Iglesias Illa on Edith Grossman, translator extraordinaire and author of Why Translation Matters. (Which I wrote about at length for Quarterly Conversation back when it came out.) Let’s start with an interesting part about Grossman’s ...
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Is That a Fish in Your Ear? [Book Trailers]
I’m about halfway through David Bellos’s forthcoming Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything, and absolutely love it. I think we’ll be promoting this in Read This Next in late-September, and I’ll definitely be using it in my translation class next spring. I’ll ...
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Latest Review: "Lives Other Than My Own" by Emmanuel Carrere
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Monica Carter on this week’s Read This Next title, Lives Other Than My Own by Emmanuel Carrere, which is translated from the French by Linda Coverdale and forthcoming from Metropolitan Books. Monica Carter is a contributing reviewer to Three Percent, and a ...
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Lives Other Than My Own
France’s Emmanuel Carrère, filmmaker, novelist and biographer, attempts to hit fate below the belt in his latest effort, Lives Other Than My Own. Difficult to classify—it could be memoir, it could be fiction, it could be a treatise on compassion—Lives Other Than My Own presents stories of grief about people the ...
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Interview with Emmanuel Carrere [Read This Next]
The interview with Emmanuel Carrere about Lives Other Than My Own — this week’s Read This Next title — just went live. Here’s an excerpt: Lily Ye: You write that this is a book for others (especially Juliette’s daughters), but has it had an effect on you as well? How do you think this narrative ...
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Discovering Books: Booklamp vs. GoodReads
Today’s Publishing Perspectives feature is all about Booklamp.org, a new book discovery site that’s being referred to either as “Pandora for Books” or the “Book Genome Project.” Here’s a brief description: “Our program breaks a book up into 100 scenes and measures the ...
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Daniel Stein, Interpreter
To some in the realm of journalism and literary representation the notions of “poetic license” and “poetic truth” stand as two very dubious cornerstones on which to build factual novels. The shaky foundations leave all kinds of room for interpretation, embellishment and, perhaps in the wrong hands, the glorification ...
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Three Percent #13: Literary Journals, Why We Don't Read Short Stories, and the $%#@ing Brewers
For this week’s podcast, Tom and I answered our first mailbag question about literary journals, discussed the old adage that “short stories don’t sell,” and complained about the unbeatable Milwaukee Brewers. (We also talk a bit about my son’s obsession with all 19 seasons of the Mighty Morphin ...
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Matthew Battles on Tove Jansson
Over at the B&N Review, Matthew Battles (Harvard University’s rare books librarian and author of Library: An Unquiet History, Widener: Biography of a Library, along with other articles) has a long, interesting piece on Tove Jansson. He talks a bit about the recently released Fair Play, but I really like this bit ...
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Learning to Pray in the Age of Technique
In the very first scene of this book, a young Lenz Buchmann is instructed by his father to “do” a young servant girl in front of him. The command is issued without qualification, and there is no recourse for Lenz except to follow it. From this incident onward the novel spins forth a philosophy of strength, of power, of ...
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Latest Review: "Learning to Pray in the Age of Technique" by Goncalo Tavares
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Lily Ye on this week’s Read This Next title, Learning to Pray in the Age of Technique by Goncalo Tavares, which is translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn and forthcoming from Dalkey Archive Press. Here’s the opening of Lily’s review: In ...
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August Is Almost Over
Which means that we’ll be back to posting on a regular basis in the very near future . . . Like maybe Tuesday. Or September 1st. Soon. In the meantime, I thought I’d share this fun piece by Sam Kean about “translating” covers into other countries: I’ve been lucky enough to have my book ...
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Interview with Daniel Hahn [Read This Next]
To support this week’s “Read This Next”: title, we just posted an interview with Daniel Hahn about his translation of Goncalo Tavares’s Learning to Pray in the Age of Technique: Lily Ye: In Learning to Pray, the tone of the book seemed to me to be very severe, perhaps in reflection of the ...
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Learning to Pray in the Age of Technique by Goncalo Tavares [Read This Next]
This week’s Read This Next featured selection is Goncalo Tavare’s Learning to Pray in the Age of Technique translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn, and available from Dalkey Archive Press at the end of the month. E.J. wrote about Tavares a couple years back when he won the Portugal Telecom Prize for ...
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Three Percent #12: Lawsuits and Million Dollar Ideas
For this week’s podcast we decided to talk about a few recent news items, starting with this lawsuit against Apple that “alleges that the publishers and Apple colluded to increase prices for popular e-book titles to boost profits and force e-book rival Amazon to abandon its pro-consumer discount pricing.” ...
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Cain
I keep coming back to that basic question, “Why do people tell stories, and others pay attention?” Answers range from creating entertainment (Patterson or Siddons), to engaging in reflections of human nature by a writer such as Conrad or Greene, to intellectual play in novels by Barbary or Murdoch. Some novels can ...
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Latest Review: "Cain" by Jose Saramago
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Fr. Grant Barber on Cain, the latest Jose Saramago novel, available from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in Margaret Jull Costa’s translation. Grant Barber is a regular reviewer for Three Percent, a keen bibliophile, and an Episcopal priest living on the south shore ...
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Henrich Böll: My New Favorite Author
Although I tend to write these quite often, I somewhat hate doing the effusive “this author is so great!” thing. Not that the authors don’t deserve it, in fact, quite the opposite, but there’s something much more intellectually satisfying about writing a harsh diss. Virulent criticism, which is usually ...
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Thomas Beebee on "Kafka's Leopards"
In support of this week’s Read This Next title—Kafka’s Leopards by Moacyr Scliar—translator Thomas Beebee wrote this essay about the man and the novel: The extended European setting of Kafka’s Leopards is adventuresome for Scliar, but Kafka’s Leopards is a frame-tale connecting Porto Alegre in ...
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"Kafka's Leopards" by Moacyr Scliar [Read This Next]
This week at Read This Next we’re featuring Kafka’s Leopards, a short book by celebrated and prolific Brazilian author Moacyr Scliar that’s translated from the Portuguese by Thomas Beebee and forthcoming from Texas Tech University Press. This book is one of strange misunderstandings, attributions of vital ...
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The Fish Child
Here are four things you should know about The Fish Child: 1.) The novel is sensual, crude, vibrant and unyielding. 2.) The protagonists, Lala and Guayi, are the sort of characters who make dangerous, fascinating mistakes. 3.) Puenzo, born in Buenos Aires, directed a film adaptation of The Fish Child that premiered in ...
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Latest Review: "The Fish Child" by Lucia Puenzo
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Sara Cohen on Lucia Puenzo’s The Fish Child, which is translated from the Spanish by David William Foster and available from Texas Tech as part of The Americas series. We’ve written about The Americas series before, but if you’re not already ...
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Vertical Motion
The word that continues to come to mind as I read Can Xue’s short stories in Vertical Motion is uncanny. Her stories summon the feeling of the familiar as unfamiliar, of the known as unknown. The uncanny, Freud’s unheimlisch, is often described as having to do with a return, a repetition of the known which reveals an ...
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Interview with Karen Gernant & Chen Zeping [Read This Next]
As part of this week’s Read This Next activities, we just published an interview with Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping about their translation of Can Xue’s Vertical Motion. Here’s an excerpt: Read This Next: You’ve been working with Can Xue for a while now. How did you first discover her ...
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Three Percent #11: I Drink a Lot More Coffee and I'm More Jaded
This week, instead of listening to me and Tom pontificate about literary matters far and wide, we decided to change things up a bit and find out what our summer interns have been up to. With Nathan Furl standing in for Tom, we talk to Taylor McCabe (left, drinking diet soda) and Lily Ye (right, carrying two backpacks filled ...
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Cool Death and the Penguin Promo [Imaginary Places]
Just got an email about this awesome offer from Melville House that I wanted to share for a few reasons.: From the As-If-The-Cover-Didn’t-Tip-You-Off-Already department: Death and the Penguin by Andrei Kurkov is the perfect example of why the Melville House International Crime series is like no other: It’s political, ...
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Sosnowski at Poetry Daily
In case you missed it, yesterday, Andrzej Sosnowski’s “Morning Edition” (as translated by Benjamin Paloff) was featured on Poetry Daily. Here’s the full poem: Garrulous mornings, dynamic departures from the take-off of night, mouths filled with words that snap like a parachute behind the ...
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The Demon at Agi Bridge
“That must be the demon!” And what a demon it is! Oozing pustules covering bodies, blood excreting from tiny pores, sharpened horns decorating bony skulls . . . The Demon at Agi Bridge and Other Japanese Tales is an expounding collection brimming with translated historical and cultural Japanese anecdotes, focusing ...
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Latest Review: "The Demon at Agi Bridge and Other Japanese Tales" Edited by Hauro Shirane
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Sasha Miller on The Demon at Agi Bridge and Other Japanese Tales, a collection edited by Hauro Shirane, translated by Burton Watson, and available from Columbia University Press. This book is part of Columbia’s Translations from the Asian Classics series, which ...
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Interview with Bill Johnson
Following up on the Read This Next feature of Magdalena Tulli’s In Red, we now have now posted an interview with Polish translator Bill Johnston about this novel. Bill is an amazing translator and reader, and this interview is filthy with interesting insights into both the translation process and Tulli’s work as ...
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Three Percent #10: So Long, Borders!
We’re finally back from our respective vacations, and back to podcasting. The big news from when we were gone was the liquidation and ultimate demise of Borders, so this week we talked about bookselling. About the fallout of Borders closing down, about the big losers, about the possibilities for the resurgence of ...
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The Ermine of Czernopol
The Ermine of Czernopol is the first of Gregor von Rezzori’s semi-autobiographical novels about growing up in what was Austria-Hungary. In it, childhood is the conduit through which we must understand everything. The thing about a being a child is an unorthodox and oftentimes uncanny mode of perception, due to the foreign ...
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Latest Review: "The Ermine in Czernopol" by Gregor Von Rezzori
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Lily Ye on this week’s Read This Next book, The Ermine in Czernopol by Gregor Von Rezzori. This novel is translated by Philip Boehm and forthcoming from New York Review Books. This is the first book in the Von Rezzori trilogy, which also includes The Snows of ...
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Contests for Bulgarian Writers and Translators
You may remember that last year, after a wonderful trip to Sozopol where I skinny dipped in the Black Sea, drank wine, met the most amazing writers, and heard the phrase “Kentucky Fried Chicken Happy Hour,” Open Letter launched two Bulgarian literature contests sponsored by the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation. The ...
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An Interview with Gregor Von Rezzori [Read This Next]
As part of this week’s Read This Next focus on Gregor Von Rezzori’s An Ermine in Czernopol, we dug up this interview with Von Rezzori that appeared in BOMB magazine way back in 1988. Bruce Wolmer: I’m tempted to begin by asking the question interviewers on French TV like to pose: “Gregor von Rezzori, _qui ...
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Interns–They Grow Up Too Fast
Back in the tumultuous summer of 2009, Timothy Nassau was an intern here at Open Letter. He read some manuscripts, he packed some orders, he listened to a variety of rants, wrote a few blog posts and reviews, and returned to Brown University a bit wiser and with ambition in his heart. Fast-forward two years, and young ...
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Job
Job, recently published by the consistently incredible Archipelago Press in a new translation by Ross Benjamin, is the first, and still only, book by Joseph Roth—a household-canon-grade writer in Europe—I have read. (I did have to get this review out in a timely fashion, and his other, more infamous masterpiece, ...
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Interview with Alberto Moravia [Read This Next]
To finish off this week’s Read This Next feature on Alberto Moravia’s Two Friends, here’s an interview from the Paris Review with the man himself: Interviewer: You write, then—? Moravia: I write simply to amuse myself; I write to entertain others and—and, well, to express myself. One has ...
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Two Friends
One of the beautiful things about translation, to my mind, is that it polemicizes the easy notion of the complete and whole work of art, of the perfect and sacred original. Translation is a subjective reading, a series of choices made by an individual with their own background, experience and politics. It’s a common adage ...
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Latest Review: "Two Friends" by Alberto Moravia
This week’s Read This Next title is Alberto Moravia’s Two Friends, which is forthcoming from Other Press, and which Acacia O’Connor reviewed for us. Translated from the Italian by Marina Harss, Two Friends is a collection of three posthumously discovered Moravia novellas. You can read a sample here. And ...
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Richard Nash on Borders, Bookselling
Nice piece by Cursor founder, Red Lemonade publisher, former Soft Skull director Richard Nash on CNN’s website about the fall of Borders and the role of booksellers: There are many reasons why the tiny, scrappy independent publisher I ran from 2001 to 2009, Soft Skull Press, became a publisher with a Pulitzer ...
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Interview with Marina Harss [Read This Next]
As part of this week’s Read This Next feature on Alberto Moravia’s Two Friends, we just posted an interview with translator Marina Harss conducted by U of R translation grad student (and fellow soccer fan) Acacia O’Connor. Here’s an excerpt: Acacia O’Connor: Two Friends is a unique text — ...
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Numbers that Make You Go Ouch
So, Borders is basically dead-and-nearly-gone, what with their liquidation starting tomorrow and almost 11,000 employees losing their jobs in the next few weeks. This was a long time in coming, and is a surprise to no one. That said, it’s a tricky thing to formulate an adequate response to. On the one hand, over the ...
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2012 NEA Translation Fellowships
Continuing in our day of prize announcements, this morning the NEA released info on this year’s Translation Fellowships. The NEA awarded $200,000 in grant money to 16 translators—many of whom I know personally—for a wide range of projects. This is always one of the most exciting announcements of the ...
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2011 PEN Translation Fund Winners
Still catching up post-vacation, so this is somewhat old news, but still worth mentioning . . . Last week, PEN announced the recipients of this year’s Translation Fund awards. Winning translators receive $3,000 to support their work, and hopefully via the attention generated by the award, will find a publisher for their ...
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The Last Brother
Indian-born Nathacha Appanah’s The Last Brother is clearly meant to be touching. The story, told in flashback, revolves around Raj, a nine year old boy who lives with his mother and abusive father on a remote island in the Indian Ocean, and David, an orphaned Jewish refugee who has been indefinitely detained on the island ...
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Latest Review: "The Last Brother" by Nathacha Appanah
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Taylor McCabe on The Last Brother by Nathacha Appanah, which is translated from the French by Geoffrey Strachan and available from Graywolf Press. Taylor McCabe (aka “Intern #1”) is a student here at the University of Rochester where she’s majoring ...
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Two Friends by Alberto Moravia [Read This Next]
This week’s Read This Next title is Two Friends by Alberto Moravia, a posthumously published set of related novellas that’s translated from the Italian by Marina Harss and forthcoming from Other Press. The extended preview is available now and we’ll be posting a review and interview later this week. I ...
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The Days of the King
The Days of the King is a slim volume of dense and full worlds and sentences. The basic plot concerns the dentist Joseph Strauss of Berlin who is called to relocate to Bucharest in order to serve as dentist to captain of dragoons Karl of Hohenzollern who is about to become the prince of the United Principalities of Europe. ...
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Latest Review: "The Days of the King" by Filip Florian
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Lily Ye on this week’s RTN title The Days of the King by Filip Florian. This was translated from the Romanian by Alistair Ian Blyth and will be coming out from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt next month. See this post for more info on Florian, and click here for an ...
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Asian Anthologies, Part III: Digital Geishas and Talking Frogs, The Best 21st Century Short Stories from Japan
Digital Geishas and Talking Frogs: The Best 21st Century Short Stories from Japan Edited by Helen Mitsios Foreword by Pico Iyer There are some pretty wild support groups out there. Acne support groups, jealousy support groups, lactose intolerance and tooth grinding. (And yes, these really do exist. I looked them up.) But ...
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Bill Johnston Interview [Read This Next]
In case you missed it, last Friday, as part of the RTN feature on Tulli’s In Red, we posted this interview with Polish translator Bill Johnston. Here’s the opening: Lily Ye: I should start off by saying that I’m not actually that familiar with the other works of Tulli, so I wanted to ask you where you ...
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The Days of the King by Filip Florian [Read This Next]
This week’s Read This Next title is Filip Florian’s The Days of the King, translated from the Romanian by Alistair Ian Blyth and coming out on August 16th from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Florian’s first translated title—Little Fingers—got a lot of great attention (Michael Orthofer gave it a ...
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Latest Review: "Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion?" by Johan Harstad
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Kelsey Burritt on Johan Harstad’s Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion?, which is translated from the Norwegian by Deborah Dawkin and published by Seven Stories Press. Johan Harstad is a pretty prolific young Norwegian writer. Buzz Aldrin, ...
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Call Me! [Wisconsin Public Radio]
Yes, although I’m away all week (in St. Louis hanging out at the pretty psychedelic City Museum and watching the Cardinals hopefully not fall apart), I’m going to be on “Here on Earth” this afternoon talking about summer book recommendations. The show is on from 4pm – 5pm Eastern time, and you ...
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Asian Anthologies, Part I: Another Kind of Paradise, Short Stories from the New Asia-Pacific
Another Kind of Paradise: Short Stories from the New Asia-Pacific Edited by Trevor Carolan Foreword by Frank Stewart and Pat Matsueda (from Manoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing ) It is generally agreed upon that, in general, short stories are…nice, like novels for those of us with short attention spans. They ...
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Latest Review: "The Last Reader" by David Toscana
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Sara Cohen on David Toscana’s The Last Reader, which is translated from the Spanish by Asa Zatz and available from Texas Tech University Press. Sara—a summer intern and student here at the University of Rochester—is working on reviews of a few books ...
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The Last Reader
David Toscana’s The Last Reader stands as a challenge for the most dedicated readers. On the upside, it’s a challenge worth taking. Toscana’s novella vaguely imitates a murder mystery, but the real focus lies in blurring the lines between active reading and authorship, and more generally between reality and ...
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Three Percent #9: Authors I Used to Love
In this week’s podcast, we talk a bit about authors we “broke up” with. Writers like, say, Philip Roth, who evokes a pretty harsh reaction from Tom . . . Additionally we talk about authors we thought we had given up on, but to whom we keep returning and returning. And as usual, we digress a bit, talking ...
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Man Booker International vs. Translated Literature
The following piece was written by Ángel Gurría-Quintana, a freelance journalist, editor and translator. He is a regular contributor to the books pages of the Financial Times. His writing has also appeared in The Observer, The Economist, Prospect, The Paris Review and Brick. Ángel lives in Cambridge, U.K. This piece of ...
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From the Observatory
It’s not like any of Cortazar’s books are easy. Hopscotch is a tricky book, even putting aside the jarring juxtapositions that arise from the strange way of reading it (if you follow the prescribed path, you read a bunch of chapters out of order). 62: A Model Kit, which applied the theory explicated in chapter 62 ...
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Latest Review: "From the Observatory" by Julio Cortazar
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece I wrote about Julio Cortazar’s From the Observatory, which is translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean and forthcoming from Archipelago Books. It also happens to be this week’s Read This Next title. Here’s the opening of the review: It’s ...
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Interview with Anne McLean [Read This Next]
As part of this week’s Read This Next feature on Julio Cortazar’s From the Observatory, we just posted an interview with translator Anne McLean about this book, Cortazar in general, and the other authors she’s worked on. You can read the whole piece here, and here’s a short excerpt: CWP: As a ...
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Egyptian Writers
Last week, The Millions posted a very interesting piece by Pauls Toutonghi entitled Six Egyptian Writers You Don’t Know But You Should. Toutonghi opens by describing a very common problem: In Cairo, in March, the city had a surplus of intellectual energy. Literature, it seemed, might just be at the vanguard of ...
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Susan Bernofsky on The Marketplace of Ideas
This week’s Marketplace of Ideas features an hour-long interview with super-translator Susan Bernofsky about Robert Walser, Yoko Tawada, Kobo Abe, and “the uses of literary hybridity.” Definitely worth listening to (and subscribing to on iTunes—this is a consistently good podcast), and Susan’s ...
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From the Observatory by Julio Cortazar [Read This Next]
This week’s Read This Next book is From the Observatory by Julio Cortazar. Wonderfully translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean, this will be available from Archipelago Books in early August. In the words of Complete Review’s Michael Orthofer, this book is “striking, odd,” which is just about ...
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The Land at the End of the World
Judas’s Asshole. Now that title would have stood out at Barnes and Noble. Think of the cover art possibilities. Margaret Jull Costa explains that this original title of this novel, Os Cus de Judas, comes from a Portuguese colloquialism. When I moved to a town in the Northeast earlier in my life people called it ...
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Fric-Frac Club Interview with Sergio Chejfec [Read This Next]
Following up on yesterday’s post about the conversation between Sergio Chejfec and Margaret Carson about My Two Worlds, this week’s Read This Next book, today we just posted an interview originally published by the Fric-Frac Club, and translated from the French by Christie Craig. You can read the complete English ...
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Margaret Carson and Sergio Chejfec in Conversation [Read This Next]
As part of this week’s Read This Next focus on Sergio Chejfec’s My Two Worlds (translated from the Spanish by Margaret Carson), we’re going to be running two interviews with Chejfec. Up first is a conversation he had with Margaret Carson about My Two Worlds. This is a great intro to the book, it’s ...
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The Lake
“The first time Nakajima stayed over, I dreamed of my dead mom.” This is the first sentence of Banana Yoshimoto’s latest novel to be translated into English, The Lake. I vaguely recall learning or reading somewhere some sort of creative writing related piece of wisdom—or maybe it’s just some advice, or simply ...
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Latest Review: "The Lake" by Banana Yoshimoto
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Will Eells on Banana Yoshimoto’s The Lake, translated from the Japanese by Michael Emmerich and available from Melville House Publishing. This is Will’s second review in a row, so I’m not sure how much of an introduction he really needs . . . ...
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Read This Next — My Two Worlds
This week’s Read This Next selection is My Two Worlds by Sergio Chejfec, an Argentinian author who currently resides in NYC. My Two Worlds is his first book to be translated into English (it’s on sale in August, published by us), although it’s his most recent work, which is, mysteriously, how things tend to ...
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Three Percent #7: Ebook Pricing and Elitism
This week’s podcast centers around this piece about ebook pricing, which I wrote for Publishing Perspectives, and which upset approximately 70,000 self-publishing folks and fans of John Locke. Tom and I talk about some of the issues with ebook pricing and with the impact of the $.99 price point on the value of books and ...
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An Empty Room: Stories
Like countless other foreign authors, Mu Xin is only just now getting his first collection of fiction published in English with An Empty Room, though he has more than twenty books published in mainland China. What seems all the more tragic is that many of these works were written while Xin was living in the United States, as ...
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Latest Review: "An Empty Room: Stories" by Mu Xin
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Will Eells on An Empty Room: Stories by Mu Xin, translated from the Chinese by Toming Jun Liu, and available from New Directions. Will has become a regular contributor for Three Percent, and is likely to be reviewing even more for us now that he’s graduated with ...
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Interview with Linda Coverdale [Read This Next]
To supplement the advance preview of Jean Echenoz’s Lightning — this week’s Read This Next — book, I talked with translator Linda Coverdale about Echenoz, and the three “Eccentric Genius” books of his that she’s translated. You can read the entire interview here, but for now, ...
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Holy $%^&! [The More You Know]
Holy crap. After spending a week talking about $.99 ebooks and their influence on culture (see this article, and today’s podcast) this story from Reuters takes my “concerns” and EXPLODES them: Spam has hit the Kindle, clogging the online bookstore of the top-selling eReader with material that is far ...
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Mikhail Shishkin's "Maidenhair" Wins the International Literature Award
Every year, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt and the foundation “Elementarteilchen” award the International Literature Award to the best book translated into German. This year, they gave the prize (25,000 Euro for the author and 10,000 for the translator) to Mikhail Shishkin and Andreas Tretner for the translation of ...
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Lightning
There’s something fundamentally compelling about Nikola Tesla’s life. The fact that he was born either right before midnight on July 9th, or right after on July 10th. His ability to visual things in 3-D and then create them exactly how he saw them. His photographic memory. The “War of Currents.” How he ...
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Latest Review: "Lightning" by Jean Echenoz
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is my review of this week’s Read This Next book, Lightning by Jean Echneoz, which is translated from the French by Linda Coverdale and coming out from The New Press. Lightning is the third of Echenoz’s “Eccentric Genius Suite,” which also includes the ...
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European Literature Prize to Marie NDiaye
In an earlier post about the European Literature Prize, I conflated the awards ceremony with the announcement of the winner, and thought we’d have to wait until September to find out which book was selected. Thankfully, I was totally wrong, and received this announcement this morning: The novel Drie sterke vrouwen ...
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Lit&Lunch with Poet, Novelist, and Translator Fanny Howe
Where: 111 Minna St., San Francisco, CA 94105 (Minna @ 2nd) Fanny Howe is commonly ranked among the leading innovative American writers of the postwar generation. A recipient of numerous awards, Howe’s poetry in particular is noted ofr its power and approach to social justice and comtemporary issues. In this ...
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Italian Fiction and The Bridge
The next event in The Bridge series—a reading and discussion series for literary translation that takes place at McNally Jackson in NYC and is organized by Bill Martin and Sal Robinson—is tied into the Chicago Review special issue on New Italian Writing that we wrote about yesterday. Taking place on Wednesday at ...
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European Book Club: Spanish
Where: Instituto Cervantes, Amster Yard Gallery, 211 East 49th St (between Second and Third Avenues) The book discussed will be The Truth About the Savolta Case, by Eduardo Mendoza. Click here for more information about this book. The discussion will be moderated by Alejandro Alonso-Nogueira, professor of Contemporary ...
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Latest Review: "Stone Upon Stone" by Wiesław Myśliwski
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Kaija Straumanis on Wiesław Myśliwski’s Stone Upon Stone, translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston, and available from Archipelago Books. Kaija Straumanis is a grad student in the MA translation program (MALTS for short) here at the University of ...
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"Lightning" by Jean Echenoz [Read This Next]
This week’s Read This Next title is Lightning by Jean Echenoz, a book that I truly love. Simply put, Echenoz’s charm + Tesla’s crazy genius = Incredibly Engaging Novel. Over the rest of the week, we’ll be posting a few things about Echenoz’s general career (his noir books, his transitional ...
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Open Letter's $4.99 Ebook Pricing
As we announced last week, for the rest of June, all nine of our ebooks will be available for $4.99/title—a pretty good bargain, especially since they’ll go back to the standard $9.99 on July 1st . . . You can find info about all our available ebooks by clicking here here. (In case anyone’s interested, ...
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Tyrant Memory
Contemporary Latin American literature in translation abounds with words of posthumous support from Roberto Bolaño, a blurber par excellence for a generation of writers only now being ushered into the Anglo-American canon, in some cases two decades after first being published. The mild absurdity of this gold standard, ...
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Latest Review: "Tyrant Memory" by Horacio Castellanos Moya
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Julia Haav on Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Tyrant Memory, which is translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver, and will be available later this month from New Directions. It’s also this week’s Read This Next title. Julia is is a publicist for ...
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Interview with Horacio Castellanos Moya [Read This Next]
As part of this week’s Read This Next activities, we just posted an interview with Horacio Castellanos Moya about Tyrant Memory: Chad W. Post: How does Tyrant Memory compare to the other works of yours that have been translated into English? It seems to revolve around similar political themes. Horacio ...
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A Life on Paper: Stories
In reading this marvelous selection of Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud’s short fiction, I could not help but reminisce about childhood nights spent huddled near a campfire, seated at the feet of an elder and listening, enraptured, to ghost stories. Like those master storytellers whose haunting tales were exaggerated by the ...
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Latest Review: "A Life on Paper: Stories" by Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Catherine Bailey on A Life on Paper: Stories by Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud, translated from the French by Edward Gauvin, and available from Small Beer Press. Catherine Bailey is an English grad student here at the University of Rochester. (Or maybe was . . . I ...
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Piracy NOT Evil?!?! [Sane Academic Publishers]
In another case of we’ve-been-writing-about-this-for-years-and-now-it’s-happening, Inside HigherEd has a report from the Association of American University Presses conference called Could Pirates Be Your Friends? In a session titled “Is Piracy Good for Sales,” [Garrett Kiely] the Chicago press director ...
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Open Letter Ebooks: Available and Only $4.99
Maybe I’ll write something about publishing business models and pricing and whatnot later, but for now here’s the press release about our ebooks. Which I think you should rush to your nearest device and purchase immediately. June 7, 2011—Open Letter is proud to announce the launch of a new ebook series for ...
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Summer Issue of Bookforum
The new issue of Bookforum arrived in the mail yesterday. Traditionally, the summer issue (covering June/July/Aug) has a significant special section—last year it was “Utopia/Dystopia” and the year before was “Fiction Forward,” with a focus on six new writers. This year’s special section ...
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Video of Horacio Castellanos Moya [Read This Next]
As part of this week’s Read This Next focus on Tyrant Memory, here’s a link to the recording of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s appearance here in Rochester. This took place last year, so it predates Tyrant Memory, but touches on some similar themes and is one of the best RTWCS events we’ve put on. (In ...
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Horacio Castellano Moya's "Tyrant Memory" [Read This Next]
Following up on my last post, it’s a pleasure to announce that the first Read This Next selection is Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Tyrant Memory, which is translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver and available later this month from New Directions. I’ve been a fan of Horacio’s ever since I read ...
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Read This Next
As previewed on last week’s Three Percent podcast, today is the launch of Read This Next a new Three Percent project where we’ll be previewing a new work of international literature every week. Read This Next is modeled in part on the “album previews” available through KCRW and NPR, and the belief ...
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#5: What to Read Next after BEA
This week, Tom and I dropped the baseball talk (for the most part, and to avoid cursing the Cardinals in advance of the weekend series against the Cubs) to talk about BookExpo America: Harlequin & their NASCAR love series, the lack of actual books at the fair, the parties, and Patti Smith. We also talked about Read ...
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Ice Trilogy
Back a few years ago, New York Review Books released Ice, one of the first books by Russian literati bad boy Vladimir Sorokin to make its way into America. After all the hype surrounding Sorokin—for being the star of post-Glasnost Russian literature, for being well hated by the Putin Youth, for writing fairly offensive ...
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Latest Review: "Ice Trilogy" by Vladimir Sorokin
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is an insane piece that I wrote about Vladimir Sorokin’s Ice Trilogy, which is translated from the Russian by Jamey Gambrell and available from New York Review Books. I am aware of how crazily self-indulgent and odd this review is, but after writing about Sorokin so many ...
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Rochester Student/Open Letter Intern Selected for Banff Translation Program
Very excited to share the news that Andrew Barrett — a former Open Letter intern and U of R Translation Student who has written for Three Percent on a few occasions — was the only U.S. student to be chosen to attend the Banff International Literary Translation Centre’s annual summer program. I could go on ...
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The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine
“Sulfia wasn’t very gifted. In fact, to be honest, I’d say she was rather stupid. And yet somehow she was my daughter—worse still, my only daughter.” As her seventeen-year-old daughter sobs on a kitchen stool after confessing she is pregnant with an unknown man’s child, all Rosa can think about is how stupid, ...
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Latest Review: "The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine" by Alina Bronsky
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Adelaide Kuehn on Alina Bronsky’s The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine, which is translated from the German by Tim Mohr and available from Europa Editions. Adelaide is a former intern and translation student, who has written for Three Percent a couple times ...
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European Book Club: Polish
Where: New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU, 20 Cooper Square, 5th Floor The book discussed will be Primeval and Other Times, by Olga Tokarczuk. Click here for more information about this book. If you would like to register for this event, send us an email at poland.nyc@europeanbookclub.org. McNally Jackson ...
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In the Train
You know those niche documentaries about people who are really into some specialized hobby or interest—old-school arcade games, typography, central Asian throat singing? The ones that make you think: wow, these people are so kooky, they make me seem normal! and yet at the same time you can almost, in a way, see where ...
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Latest Review: "In the Train" by Christian Oster
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Emily Davis on Christian Oster’s In the Train, which is translated from the French by Adriana Hunter and available from the stylish Object Press. Emily Davis is a grad student in Literary Translation here at the University of Rochester, and is currently working ...
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Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends
Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legend is a poorly organized book that presents the reader with a disjointed narrative chronicling the life of a supremely caustic, yet also compassionate, man. The title suggests that readers will be presented with a traditional biography, chronologically narrating the private and personal life ...
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Latest Review: "Simon Wiesenthal: Life and Legends" by Tom Segev
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Jessica LeTourneur on Tom Segev’s Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends, which is available from Doubleday. We don’t review a ton of nonfiction or biographies or untranslated titles here, but Jessica (who is one of our regular reviewers) was interested in ...
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Hocus Bogus
Romain Gary was an immigrant from Russia, writer of the heroic Depression and World War II generation. He came to France with his mother in the 1930s. He attended law school in Provence and joined the Air Force in that decade. When the war broke out and France was occupied, he escaped and joined the free French army of ...
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Latest Review: "Hocus Bogus" by Romain Gary (writing as Emile Ajar)
The latest addition to our Book Reviews section is a piece by Stephen Weiner (who runs the Suspicious Humanist newsletter) about Emile Ajar/Romain Gary’s Hocus Bogus, translated from the French by David Bellos and published by Yale University Press. Hocus Bogus was one of my favorite books from the 2011 BTBA ...
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2011 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize
Earlier this week, the Goethe Institut in Chicago announced that Jean Snook was this year’s winner of the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize for her translation of Austrian writer Gert Jonke’s The Distant Sound, which was published by Dalkey Archive Press. Here’s what the jury had to ...
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Three Percent Podcast #4: Books for Baseball Players
This week is another baseball-centric podcast featuring Tom Roberge’s individual book recommendations for five Mets players. He came up with this idea as a tribute to the recently “retired” Phil Jackson (who won’t be smoking peyote in his Montana cabin), who is famous for giving books to all of his ...
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Peter Nadas & His New Book
One of the fall books that I’m interested in checking out is Peter Nadas’s Parallel Stories, an extremely long trilogy (like 1200 pages long) that’s coming out from FSG this October. This week, in FSG’s consistently interesting Works in Progress newsletter has an interview with Nadas about this new ...
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European Book Club Reads "Primeval and Other Times"
If I was on last year’s BTBA fiction panel, I would have lobbied hard for Olga Tokarczuk’s Primeval and Other Times, a fascinating book about a small Polish village, its inhabitants, and all that happens to them over the course of the twentieth century. It’s a wonderful book that’s built out of small, ...
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The Troubles of Advocating for Literary Publishing [Yes, Things Are That Bad]
This past Monday I participated in LitTAP’s 2011 Facing Pages Convening, a day-long event dedicated to helping nonprofit literary organizations to better “Tell Their Story” in fundraising documents and marketing materials. My main role in the conference was to serve as the Simon Cowell of the ...
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For an "Industry in Crisis" There Sure Are a Lot of Books
From today’s Publishers Weekly summary of Bowker’s latest report on publishing: Despite the belief in many quarters that the growth of e-books will mean the death of the printed book, the number of books produced by traditional publishers rose 5% in 2010, to a projected 316,480, according to preliminary ...
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With Dance Shoes in Siberian Snows
With Dance Shoes in Siberian Snows is an ambitious and uniquely constructed work of literary nonfiction. Published as a part of the Baltic Literature Series by Dalkey Archive Press, this moving and eloquent book tells the story of author Sandra Kalniete’s Latvian family, and the harrowing hardships they endured over the ...
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Funeral for a Dog
Thomas Pletzinger doesn’t waste any time. In the first paragraph of his stunning debut novel Funeral for a Dog, his central character Daniel Mandelkern tells exactly what to expect: “I’m sending you seven postcards and a stack of paper, XXX pages. This stack is about me. And about memory and the future.” Sure enough, ...
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Latest Review: "Funeral for a Dog" by Thomas Pletzinger
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is Jennifer Bratovich’s piece on Thomas Pletzinger’s Funeral for a Dog, available from W. W. Norton in Ross Benjamin’s translation. I’ve been holding onto this review for months, waiting first for the book to come out, then for Ross and Thomas to come here, ...
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From the Sublime to the Ridiculous [FuckyeahEurovision!]
As anyone with a heightened sense of irony already knows, tomorrow the 2011 Eurovision Song Contest Finals will take place. For the poor few out there who aren’t keyed into this annual event of epic nationalist absurdity, basically, this is Europe’s version of American Idol, but with even shittier songs ...
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Shortlist for the European Literature Prize
Back in February, shortly after returning from the Non-fiction Conference in Amsterdam, we ran this piece on the newly established European Literature Prize. Just to refresh your memory, this is based on the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Best Translated Book Award and honors the best Dutch translations of European ...
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On Translating for the Stage
Click here for Joanne Pottlitzer’s introduction to her essay. This piece was delivered last month at an event at the Americas Society in NYC. It is my pleasure to share a few words with you on translating for the stage and on the journey of translating José Triana’s Palabras comunes. One of the ongoing debates ...
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Intro to "On Translating for the Stage"
Jon Peede, formerly of the NEA, put Joanne Pottlitzer in touch with me in hopes that we could help publicize her recent essay “On Translating for the Stage.” The essay—which will go up in about 10 minutes—is very interesting, and discusses one of the singular challenge of translating drama. In order to ...
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Never Any End to Paris
Never Any End to Paris (París no se acaba nunca) is a fictionalized autobiographical work by the great spanish novelist, Enrique Vila-Matas. Only the third of his nearly two dozen books to be translated into english, this one recounts the author’s youthful days in paris during the mid 1970s. It was during this time, ...
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Latest Review: "Never Any End to Paris" by Enrique Vila-Matas
Following on yesterday’s podcast (after the posting of which, the Cardinals pounded the Cubs 9-1), the latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Jeremy Garber on the forthcoming Enrique Vila-Matas novel, Never Any End to Paris, which New Directions is bringing out later this month in Anne McLean’s ...
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Lit&Lunch with Translator Stephen Snyder
Where: 111 Minna St., San Francisco, CA 94105 (Minna @ 2nd) In this Lit&Lunch, leading Japanese translator Stephen Snyder discusses his work with two prominent Japanese writers whose work should be on every international literature lover’s shelf. First, Snyder talks about translating the surreal Japanese ...
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Adonis: Selected Poems
Anyone here in the United States who has paid attention to Nobel Prize predictions these last few years is undoubtedly familiar with the name Adonis, though probably unfamiliar with his poetry. This may have less to do with American philistinism and more to do with the lack of English translations of his work. Luckily, Yale ...
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Latest Review: "Adonis Selected Poems"
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Vincent Francone on Adonis’ Selected Poems, which Yale brought out not too long ago in Khaled Mattawa’s translation. Vincent Francone has written for us a few times in the past and is a reader for TriQuarterly Online, a site that should probably be on our ...
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Obituary: Writings from an Unbound Europe
From Contemporary Russian writer Aleksandr Skorobogatov comes some sad news about Northwestern University Press’s “Writings from an Unbound Europe” Series: The end of a publishing era RIP – Writings from an Unbound Europe The editors of Northwestern University Press have decided to ...
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Can S&S, Penguin, and Hachette Recommend the Best Books?
As mentioned before, I’m obsessed interested in the ways in which readers find books—especially in the New Digital Reality of Facebook comments and whatnot. The idea of a “Pandora for Books” (or maybe better, a “Last.fm for Books”) has been batted around for sometime now, and apparently a ...
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Stigmata
I am an ambivalent reader of graphic novels. I’m of a generation that remembers when Superman was less muscled, and hadn’t yet died or been cloned. “Adult graphic novel” designated the rumored underground works about Fritz the cat. The amazing boom of the last couple decades of literary versions has led me to ...
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The Publishing Revolution Is Here
I was going to wait until our manifesto was available online (PEN said it’d be up by last Monday . . . maybe I’m missing something?), but I’ll just jump ahead and tell a quick story or two about this panel that took place last Thursday. As part of PEN World Voice’s first “Working Day,” ...
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Which Is More True?: Students Have No Time to Read, or Students Have Crappy Taste
From The California Aggie, UC Davis’s student newspaper: Parsa is not alone. Though reading textbooks and articles is high on many UC Davis students’ to-do lists, reading books purely for pleasure? Not so much. A 2007 study conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts found that in 2005, 65 percent ...
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Day of the Oprichnik
Set in a futuristic Moscow (2028 according to the jacket copy), Day of the Oprichnik is exactly that: a day in the life of Andrei Danilovich Komiaga. The oprichniki were essentially a cultish “death squad” that was set up by Tsar Ivan the Terrible back in the mid 1500s to protect his ass and slay his enemies, and ...
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Latest Review: "Day of the Oprichnik" by Vladimir Sorokin
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece that I wrote on Vladimir Sorokin’s Day of the Oprichnik, which just came out from FSG in Jamey Gambrell’s translation. Since this is a day of Sorokin (the event write-up, the discussion in the podcast), I’m going to skip all the normal author and ...
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Vladimir Sorokin's Coming Out Party
As mentioned on last week’s podcast, and further elaborated on in this week’s one (BTW, you can subscribe to the Three Percent podcast at iTunes), Vladimir Sorokin was one of the authors I was most interested in seeing at the PEN World Voices Festival. Way back when, I read his short, early novel The Queue in a ...
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Sex in a Trunk
I think it might have been because Kim Young-ha is such an earnest entertainer. Or maybe because Bruce Fulton was such an even-spoken and perceptive moderator. Or maybe the fact that the stories in Susan Choi’s books surprised me with their violence and destruction. But for whatever reason, out of all the events ...
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PEN Tour: Washington DC
Where: The Writer’s Center, 4508 Walsh Street, Bethesda, MD 20815 Hosted by Lisa Page, President of the Pen Faulkner Board of Directors, writers from Sudan (Leila Aboulela), the United States (Daniel Orozco), and Sweden (Jonas Hassen Khemiri) stop by for what will be a memorable evening of world literature. For more ...
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Tough Nuts to Crack: Challenges in Czech to English Literary Translation
Where: Bohemian National Hall, 321 E 73 Street, New York, NY A unique opportunity to meet with the renowned translators – Peter Kussi (Milan Kundera, Jiří Gruša, Bohumil Hrabal), Paul Wilson (Václav Havel, Ivan Klima, Josef Škvorecký), Alex Zucker (Jáchym Topol, Petra Hůlová, Patrik Ouředník), and Robert ...
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PEN World Voices in Rochester [Events!]
In case we haven’t mentioned this before, tonight we’re co-hosting a special event with Writers & Books and PEN World Voices featuring three international authors: Najat El Hachmi, Marcelo Figueras, and Carsten Jensen. All the info can be found here, but in short, this event starts at 7pm at Writers & ...
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Eating Enough to Keep Drinking [PEN Receptions]
Totally stealing this title from Geoff Dyer via Joshua Furst, so thanks to both of you . . . But it really is the perfect description for what the first couple days of the PEN World Voices Festival was for me. My PEN experience started at 5:30am, when I picked up Thomas Pletzinger and Ross Benjamin from their hotel in ...
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PEN: In Conversation: Mahi Binebine and Anderson Tepper
Where: The Cooper Union, Frederick P. Rose Auditorium, 41 Cooper Sq., New York City Listen in on a conversation with a titan of Moroccan letters. In an intimate dialogue, Binebine, the author of six novels, will talk about the value of Moroccan cultural heritage, identity, empowerment, and women. Under the High Patronage ...
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PEN: Russia in Two Acts
Where: The Morgan Library & Museum, Lehrman Hall, 225 Madison Ave., New York City Watch a World Champion chess player, now journalist, unravel the complexities of Russia’s cultural and geopolitical landscape. In Part One of this event, Garry Kasparov will offer his personal spin on the state of contemporary Russian ...
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PEN: Vladimir Sorokin: Ice Trilogy (Play Reading)
Where: Old Gym, 268 Mulberry St., New York City See a live performance, directed by the Hungarian film and theater director Kornel Mundruczo, based on great Russian writer Vladimir Sorokin’s American debut, Ice Trilogy, a riveting suspense novel about the 20th century Soviet Union to modern-day Russia. With Vladimir ...
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PEN: Contemporary Writing from Japan
Where: Asia Society, 725 Park Ave., New York City One of Japan’s most influential cultural critics and translators, Motoyuki Shibata, leads a discussion with four innovative and hybrid literary masters. They’ll talk about their most formative Japanese-American influences, ranging from science fiction to manga (comics ...
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2011 Best Translated Book Award Winners: Aleš Šteger’s "The Book of Things" and Tove Jansson’s "The True Deceiver"
April 29, 2011 — The winning titles and translators for this year’s Best Translated Book Awards were announced earlier this evening at the Bowery Poetry Club as part of the PEN World Voices Festival. In poetry, Aleš Šteger’s The Book of Things, translated from the Slovenian by Brian Henry, took the top honor. In ...
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Laurence Cossé
Where: The Community Bookstore in Park Slope, 143 7th Avenue, New York City Please join Europa Editions, World Literature Today & The Community Bookstore for an evening with French novelist Laurence Cossé. Cossé will read from A Novel Bookstore, discuss her forthcoming novel An Accident in August and speak with World ...
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PEN: Brainwave, The Dreamers
Where: Rubin Museum of Art, K2 Lounge, 150 West 17th St., New York City Ever wonder about the stuff of poets’ dreams? Don’t miss the last day of the Rubin Museum’s Brainwaves Series at an unprecedented event, where distinguished bards linger in gallery spaces throughout the Museum, sharing their dreams. In an intimate ...
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PEN: The Great Global Book Swap
Where: Scandinavia House, 58 Park Ave., New York City Imagine you are invited to a great global book swap and have to bring just one beloved book originally written in a foreign tongue: what would it be? Join five eminent writers who have trotted the globe and lived everywhere from Ireland to India, Latvia to Sudan, for a ...
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Pluriverse: An Afternoon with Ernesto Cardenal with Jonathan Cohen
Where: Poets House, 10 River Terrace, New York City Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal shares his poems and talks about his life with his English-language translator, Jonathan Cohen. This is a rare New York appearance for the 86-year-old Cardenal, who is the author of more than 35 books, many of them translated into English, ...
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PEN: Writing Wrongs, Righting Wrongs
Where: High Line near 17th St., 10th Ave. Square, New York City (Rain location: Westbeth Center for the Arts) Two sets of on-stage conversations between authors who integrate key themes of coming-of-age: Missing Persons: Authors consider missing men, women, children, telling stories of individual lives—and of ...
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PEN: Green Man Flashing + Some Mothers’ Sons
Where: CUNY Graduate Center, Martin E. Segal Theater, 365 Fifth Ave., New York City The Segal Center welcomes South African playwright and cultural leader Mike van Graan for an evening of theatre and discussion, including excerpted readings from his prescient political thriller, Green Man Flashing (2004) and his drama about ...
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PEN: Workshop: Education, Knowledge, Learning
Where: Old School, 233 Mott St., New York City Debates about the nature of effective school and preparation for global competitiveness are weighted by rhetoric and have obscured a fundamental question about learning and development: what does it mean to be educated? What is the obligation of society to educate its young ...
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PEN: Standard Talks: And at Night She Summons the Ghosts
Where: The Standard, New York, High Line Room, 848 Washington St., New York City Everybody knows that the average ghost prefers to remain beyond the reaches of reality. But calling forth the literary ghost to roam among the living? Well, that’s an elegant task for an exquisite storyteller. Join host Sunny Bates and other ...
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PEN: The Next Decade in Book Culture
Where: Greenwich House Music School, Renee Weiler Concert Hall, 46 Barrow St., New York City The critic’s voice indelibly shapes the works we read. But in an age when readers are rapidly migrating to Twitter book clubs, literary web sites, and Amazon reader reviews, how will the critic continue to lead literary ...
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Three Percent Podcast #1: Literary Revolutions, Awards, and Death Rays
This week, Tom and Chad talk about the PEN World Voices Festival and the upcoming Best Translation Book Award ceremony. Along the way, they talk about Vladimir Sorokin (his “Siberian earthf***ers” and how he’s not really like Bolano), the overratedness of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and the Hungarian author ...
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PEN: Lunchtime Literary Conversations
Where: La Maison Française, 16 Washington Mews, New York City Take a respite from the day’s activity with the second event of our lunchtime conversations and enjoy a tête-à-tête between two bestselling French authors: Laurence Cossé, the author of The Corner of the Veil, Prime Minister’s Woman, and most recently, ...
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Handicapping the BTBA Poetry Field [Last Thoughts]
Sorry for the posting snafu yesterday . . . I somehow managed to leave the second part of the fiction preview on “draft,” so it didn’t go live until midnightish . . . Anyway, today we’ll go over the five poetry books that are up for the 2011 BTBA. I’m admittedly not nearly as knowledgeable ...
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Handicapping the BTBA Fiction Award, Part II [Last Thoughts]
Following up on yesterday’s look at five of the BTBA fiction finalists, below are brief bits about the remaining five titles. Again, take none of this too seriously, but please do check out and read the books—that’s the whole point of all of this. And all 15 of the shortlisted titles are fantastic—you ...
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PEN: A Global Piano and Literary Salon: From Russia with Love
Where: The Jerome L. Greene Space at WNYC, 44 Charlton St., New York City In an intimate gathering at WYNYC’s beloved Jerome L. Greene Space, participants have a rare opportunity to hear Igor Belov and Ksenia Shcherbino, two of Russia’s young, rising literary talents read from their latest works. Sip a glass of wine, ...
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Flash Cards
A few weeks ago I was visiting my grandparents in the tiny town of Kewanee, Illinois. Their house, because it is the same house where my mother grew up with her brothers and sisters, is crammed with the detritus of several childhoods and adolescences. While looking through a closet, I found a sheet of paper hand painted with ...
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Bolano's Sarcasm is Worth Some Thousands of Sales
Over at Conversational Reading, Scott put together a reading list based on Between Parentheses, Roberto Bolano’s essay collection, due out next month from New Directions. It’s an interesting list that includes Witold Gombrowicz, Horacio Castellanos Moya, Mario Vargas Llosa, Rodrigo Rey Rosa, Ernesto Cardenal, ...
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Handicapping the BTBA Fiction Award, Part I [Last Thoughts]
So, the BTBA Ceremony is taking place this Friday, where we will crown the kings & queens of the 2011 translation universe and provide them with $5,000 cash prizes courtesy of Amazon.com. Taking place at the Bowery Poetry Club at 8:45 and lasting till the wee hours, this promises to be an incredible event—one that ...
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RTWCS: Bill Martin + Piotr Sommer = Polish Poetry
Last week, the penultimate event in this year’s Reading the World Conversation Series took place and featured Bill Martin (former Literary Program Manager at the Polish Cultural Institute and translator of Lovetown) and poet Piotr Sommer (Continued) discussion Piotr’s work, some general Polish poetry trends, etc. ...
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Monkey Business [APS's Japanese Expansion]
A Public Space has always been dedicated to promoting international literature, so it’s not all that surprising that Brigid Hughes has joined forces with Roland Kelts (author of Japanamerica), Ted Goossen (professor of Japanese lit) and Motoyuki Shibata (translator into Japanese of Pynchon [!] and a number of other ...
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EVENT – Wednesday, April 27, 2011: Reading the World w/ Thomas Pletzinger & Ross Benjamin
Our final Reading the World event of the spring is coming up next Wednesday, April 27, in Rochester. (This event is not to be confused, by the way, with another that we have scheduled quickly thereafter on May 2. That event is our contribution to the PEN World Voices Tour, and we’ll be posting all the info on that ...
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MLA on Evaluating Translations
Following on the 2009 Convention’s “Focus on Translation,” the MLA1 has just released an official statement on Evaluating Translations as Scholarship. Overall, this is a pretty interesting document, both because it helps establish some guidelines for assessing translations in “personnel decisions ...
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Oulipians Have More Fun [Life A User's Manual: Part 3]
Back when the Life A User’s Manual Big Read first started,1 I referenced this huge chart of constraints that served as Perec’s guide in constructing this novel.2 At the time, the only constraint I mentioned was the “Knight’s Move,” which determines the chapter order of the novel. But as you can ...
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Outspoken Lyudmila Ulitskaya
Kind of in conjunction with the release of Daniel Stein, Interpreter, the Guardian has a longish piece on Ulitskaya that focuses on her more dissident side, especially in relation to Mikhail Khodorkovsky: Articles, Dialogues, Interviews, a collection of her letters with jailed billionaire Khodorkovsky: [Ulitskaya] was ...
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Latest Review: "We, the Drowned" by Carsten Jensen
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by K.E. Semmel on Carsten Jensen’s We, the Drowned, now available from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in Charlotte Barslund and Emma Ryder’s translation from the Danish. Jensen’s book has been getting a lot of good attention—especially from ...
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Cons and Quests; Things and Violence [Life A User's Manual: Part 2]
A few weeks back, I posted about the first section of Life A User’s Manual (TRANSLATED BY DAVID BELLOS), which is the Spring Big Read over at Scott Esposito’s Conversational Reading blog. As mentioned, I love Life, haven’t read it in years, and had every intention of keeping up with this reading group and ...
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Iowa Review Interview with Thomas Pletzinger
Thomas Pletzinger’s Funeral for a Dog (translated from the German by Ross Benjamin) has been getting a ton of great attention recently. It was praised in the New York Times and a Powells.com Review-a-Day. The mysterious forces behind the iBookstore chose it as the “Book of the Week.” We’re going to be ...
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Boyd Tonkin on the IFFP Shortlist
Boyd Tonkin’s summary of the IFFP Shortlist appeared in today’s Independent and is a great overview of these six titles: Four works from Latin American writers appeared on the long-list; three still figure here. If the Southern Cone ever went away as a heartland and hotbed of excellence in modern fiction ...
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April Fiction from Asymptote
Asymptote Journal just posted their April 2011 fiction section featuring four interesting works in translation. I first found out about this, because they included an excerpt from Ingrid Winterbach’s The Book of Happenstance, which we’re bringing out in June. The excerpt is fantastic, naturally, but the care ...
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Latest Review: "The Leg of Lamb: Its Life and Works" by Benjamin Péret
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Andrew Barrett on Benjamin Péret’s The Leg of Lamb: Its Life and Works, translated from the French by Marc Lowenthal and published by Wakefield Press. If we haven’t sang the praises of Wakefield Press yet, it’s because I’m a forgetful idiot. ...
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Second Annual Harvill Secker Young Translators' Prize
Details about the Second Annual Young Translators’ Prize (brought to you by Harvill Secker and Foyles) are now available online: The Harvill Secker Young Translators’ Prize was launched in 2010 as part of Harvill Secker’s centenary celebrations. It is an annual prize, which focuses on a different language ...
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I Know You All Want a Copy of "Lodgings" . . .
Last month, Open Letter published its first work of poetry in translation:1 Andrzej Sosnowski’s Lodgings, translated from the Polish by Benjamin Paloff. It recently received a very nice review by E. C. Belli in Words Without Borders: With Lodgings, translator Benjamin Paloff has made an important contribution to ...
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Child of Nature [Why This Book Should Win the BTBA]
Starting this week, we’ll be highlighting the five finalists in the poetry category for the BTBA. Similar to what we did for the fiction longlist, these will be framed by the question: “Why should this book win?” Click here for all past and future posts in this series. Today’s post is by poetry committee member ...
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Translating the novels of Tove Jansson: A talk by Thomas Teal
Where: Harvard Bookstore, 1256 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138 As part of Harvard Bookstore’s Friday Forum series, Thomas Teal, translator of Tove Jansson’s novels The Summer Book, The True Deceiver, and Fair Play, will speak about translating these works from the original Swedish. Although Tove Jansson is ...
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Let Us Now Praise Texas Tech's "The Americas" Series
Now that the 8th book in the Americas Series from Texas Tech has arrived, it seems like an opportune time to bring some attention to Irene Vilar’s exciting project. Irene used to run this series out of the University of Wisconsin Press back in the early 2000s, but after leaving and writing a memoir (Impossible ...
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The Chukchi Bible
A bird flies around, takes a few shits, the shit turns into land and, voilà, the world is created. That may sound like a summary of a terrible animated short or a 1970s acid trip, but it’s simply my poorly hyper-abridged version of one of many truly beautiful Chukchi folk tales that mark the beginning of time and man ...
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Please, Let's Just Get This All Over With
I resisted commenting on the $8.3 million of insane bonuses Borders is offering its top execs, but now that Borders has reached a new low and are having a meeting with skeptical publishers this morning to try and convince them that their reorg plan is viable, I think it’s time to really diss on this debacle. According ...
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2010 French-American Translation Prizes
The Florence Gould Foundation and the French-American Foundation recently announced the finalists for this, the 24th annual, French Translation Prizes. Winners will be announced in May at a swanky event, and they’ll each receive $10,000. You can find more details about the history of the prize, etc., by clicking ...
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The Bridge: Christopher Middleton and Susan Bernofsky
Last month we mentioned the first Bridge event (Steve Dolph and Edith Grossman) at the very last minute, so this month I thought I’d give everyone a heads up 22 hours ahead of time . . . Tomorrow at 1pm at the Swiss Institute (495 Broadway, 3rd Floor, NYC), Edwin Frank will be moderating a discussion with Susan ...
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Time of Sky & Castles in the Air [Why This Book Should Win the BTBA]
As started last week, we’ll be highlighting the five finalists in the poetry category for the BTBA. Similar to what we did for the fiction longlist, these will be framed by the question: “Why should this book win?” Click here for all past and future posts in this series. Today’s post is by poetry committee ...
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Indie Booksellers Choice Awards
The Independent Booksellers Choice Awards was launched by Melville House a couple months back as a way of giving independent booksellers a chance to promote the books from independent publishers that they most love. It’s a great idea, and who better to run this than the stridently independent Melville House Press? ...
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Guardian's New European Tour: Poland
Following up on last week’s post about the Guardian‘s New Europe Series, this morning they ran the pieces about Poland, including What They’re Reading in Poland, which focuses on an Open Letter author: However, the literary mainstream is made up of authors who follow Witold Gombrowicz, who teaches ...
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Readux
Seeing that we already referenced Amanda DeMarco once today, it seems like the perfect time to mention Readux the new Berlin-based online literary magazine that she’s running. Here’s how they describe the magazine on their about page: Readux is a Berlin-based literary website with reviews, interviews, ...
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Approve.
As reported by Amanda DeMarco in Publishing Perspectives, Switzerland has reinstated its fixed price system for books. On March 18 the Swiss parliament approved a fixed price system for books in German-speaking Switzerland, both for online and in-store sales as of next year. The debate over fixed book pricing is a ...
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Bolano: Who Would Dare?
Over at the New York Review of Books Blog, you can find Who Would Dare?, an essay from Roberto Bolaño’s forthcoming collection Between Parentheses. (Which Jeremy Garber reviewed for us.) After that, after I stole that book and read it, I went from being a prudent reader to being a voracious reader and from being a ...
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Cool Guardian Series
The Guardian is one of my favorite newspapers for any number of reasons, but I particularly like their series and their overall international focus. For instance, earlier this month they launched their New Europe Series, which features an in-depth look at four European countries: Germany, France, Spain, and Poland. (The ...
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An Answer from the Silence: A Story from the Mountains
Ah, the storied Swiss Alps: snow capped mountains, fields of wild flowers, burbling streams of clean water, simple folks out doing what simple folks do in such settings. Take for example the flock of sheep accompanied by blond haired girl along a winding path. Especially of note is how she picks up a rock and wings it at ...
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Latest Review: "An Answer from the Silence" by Max Frisch
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Grant Barber on Max Frisch’s An Answer from the Silence: A Story from the Mountains, an early work of Frisch’s just now translated into English for the first time by Mike Mitchell, and published this month by Seagull Books. Along with Robert Walser, Max ...
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Montreal International Poetry Prize [BIG MONEY!!]
From the Globe & Mail: Literary Montreal is the source of an audacious new literary prize announced late last week: the Montreal International Poetry Prize, which will award $50,000 for a single poem of up to 40 lines written in English. Billing itself the “World’s Largest Poetry Competition,” the prize ...
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Flash Cards [Why This Book Should Win the BTBA]
Starting this week, we’ll be highlighting the five finalists in the poetry category for the BTBA. Similar to what we did for the fiction longlist, these will be framed by the question: “Why should this book win?” Click here for all past and future posts in this series. Today’s post is by poetry committee member ...
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1Q84: The Cover
One of the most anticipated books of the year has to be Murakami Haruki’s (or Haruki Murakami’s) 1Q84, an epically long book that Random House is bringing out in October.1 And to warm up the publicity machine, they just released an image of the cover and a blog post from Chip Kidd discussing the ...
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PEN World Voices 2011: Quick Overview
This morning, PEN updated their World Voices page with info about this year’s festival, including a list of participants and a daily schedule listing all the planned events. We’ll give this more coverage as the time grows closer, but for now, here are a few of the highlights from each of the days of the ...
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Reading the World Podcast #9: Martha Collins
Erica Mena and special co-host Mike Schorsch talk with translator and poet Martha Collins about translation as political action, and translation of Vietnamese poetry. Click here for all the past podcasts (which include conversations with Suzanne Jill Levine, Bill Johnston, Esther Allen, Lawrence Venuti, and Susan Harris), ...
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Everybody Please Just Calm the &*%$ Down [We Should All Be Butler]
In honor of Butler’s semi-improbable run to the Final Four, making Brad Stevens the youngest coach in history to make it to two Final Fours, and because it’s true that publishers and bloggers and people in general freak out too much, and because it’s Monday, I’m rerunning this post from last April, ...
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Remote Control
I’m just going to fess up right now: I’m a bit of a culture snob. I can’t help it. I don’t know what happened in my upbringing that led me to be this way – that I can’t check out a summer blockbuster without reading the reviews first, that I prefer listening to the local college or independent radio station to ...
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Latest Review: "Remote Control" by Kotaro Isaka
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Will Eells on Kotaro Isaka’s Remote Control, translated from the Japanese and published by Kodansha International. (Quick side-note: the closing of Kodansha International sucks. That’s all I have to say about that. I’m out of witty attacks for ...
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BTBA Announcement on Rochester's Local Morning Show
Always fun going on the CW to talk about international literature. And I have to admit, I’m always surprised that they keep inviting us back . . . In order of mention, here are the books that were discussed: Time of Sky & Castles in the Air by Ayane Kawata, translated from the Japanese by Sawako Nakayasu ...
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2011 Best Translated Book Award Finalists
After months of reading, discussing, evaluating, and collaborating, the 14 fiction and poetry judges have settled on the 2011 Best Translated Book Award Finalists. Here’s the official press release. Highlights from this year’s fiction list include Ernst Weiss’s Georg Letham: Physician and Murder, translated from ...
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Hocus Bogus [Why This Book Should Win the BTBA]
Similar to years past, we’re going to be featuring each of the 25 titles on the BTBA Fiction Longlist over the next month plus, but in contrast to previous editions, this year we’re going to try an experiment and frame all write-ups as “why this book should win.” Some of these entries will be absurd, ...
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Agaat [Why This Book Should Win the BTBA]
Similar to years past, we’re going to be featuring each of the 25 titles on the BTBA Fiction Longlist over the next month plus, but in contrast to previous editions, this year we’re going to try an experiment and frame all write-ups as “why this book should win.” Some of these entries will be absurd, some more ...
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Eline Vere [Why This Book Should Win the BTBA]
Similar to years past, we’re going to be featuring each of the 25 titles on the BTBA Fiction Longlist over the next month plus, but in contrast to previous editions, this year we’re going to try an experiment and frame all write-ups as “why this book should win.” Some of these entries will be absurd, some more ...
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CYCLOPS [Why This Book Should Win the BTBA]
Similar to years past, we’re going to be featuring each of the 25 titles on the BTBA Fiction Longlist over the next month plus, but in contrast to previous editions, this year we’re going to try an experiment and frame all write-ups as “why this book should win.” Some of these entries will be absurd, some more ...
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To the End of the Land [Why This Book Should Win the BTBA]
Similar to years past, we’re going to be featuring each of the 25 titles on the BTBA Fiction Longlist over the next month plus, but in contrast to previous editions, this year we’re going to try an experiment and frame all write-ups as “why this book should win.” Some of these entries will be absurd, some more ...
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Festival of New French Writing: Pascal Bruckner
Following up on last week’s post about the Festival of New French Writing that took place in NY last month, today we have the second of JK Fowler’s write-ups and interviews, this time on Pascal Bruckner. According to the Festival’s website, “Pascal Bruckner belongs to that venerable lineage of ...
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Pornografia
Darkly humorous, witty and terrifying, Witold Gombrowicz’s Pornographia translated for the first time into English out of the original Polish by Danuta Borchardt, captures the tense and surreal lives of two men looking for an escape from city life in 1943 Warsaw. The narrator, Witold Gombrowicz, and his companion, Fryderyk, ...
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Latest Review: "Pornografia" by Witold Gombrowicz
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a review by Jennifer Marquart of Witold Gombrowicz’s Pornografia in Danuta Borchardt’s new translation, which is available from Grove Press. Jennifer Marquart has contributed to Three Percent in the past and is an aspiring German translator and recent University of ...
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International Prize for Arabic Fiction 2011
This morning it was announced that The Arch and the Butterfly by Mohammed Achaari and The Doves’ Necklace by Raja Alem jointly won the 2011 International Prize for Arabic Fiction. (AKA the Arab Booker.) Iraqi poet and novelist Fadhil Al-Azzawi was the chair of this year’s judging committee, and here’s what ...
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Life A User's Manual and LOST and Pynchon [Perec Reading Group: Week 1]
As mentioned a couple of times already, Conversational Reading is currently hosting a Group Read of Life A User’s Manual. This project officially kicked off yesterday with the first Part (up to page 89), and since I’m actually on schedule with this (although with nothing else), I thought I’d participate by ...
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The Black Minutes [Why This Book Should Win the BTBA]
Similar to years past, we’re going to be featuring each of the 25 titles on the BTBA Fiction Longlist over the next month plus, but in contrast to previous editions, this year we’re going to try an experiment and frame all write-ups as “why this book should win.” Some of these entries will be absurd, some more ...
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Quarterly Conversation 23 [What to Read This Weekend]
The new issue of the Quarterly Conversation went live recently and is definitely worth checking out. Every issue of the QC is great, but holy crap is this issue STUFFED with interesting pieces. Here’s a list of some of the essays and reviews that worth checking out: Notes Toward an Understanding of Thomas ...
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A Life on Paper [Why This Book Should Win the BTBA]
Similar to years past, we’re going to be featuring each of the 25 titles on the BTBA Fiction Longlist over the next month plus, but in contrast to previous editions, this year we’re going to try an experiment and frame all write-ups as “why this book should win.” Some of these entries will be absurd, some more ...
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Another Book to Add to the To Read List
One of my favorite writers from the past few years has to be Enrique Vila-Matas, whose Bartleby & Co. and Montano’s Malady are absolutely fantastic. Very excited that Vila-Matas wrote an intro for our forthcoming publication of Sergio Chejfec’s My Two Worlds, and also very excited to read his new book, Never ...
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Perec and "Matrix Literature"
Susan Bernofsky’s very interesting post about David Bellos’s very interesting comments about this very interesting sounding book is yet one more reason to rush out and start reading (and rereading) Perec: David Bellos spoke at NYU’s Maison Française last night, presenting his new translation of ...
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Zift
Published in Bulgarian in 2006, Vladislav Todorov’s debut novel Zift has been recently translated into English by Joseph Benatov and published by Paul Dry Books. The very title of Todorov’s novel Zift: Socialist Noir announces the text’s generic ambiguity. Most notably, the novel interweaves the key tropes of Soviet ...
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Latest Review: "Zift" by Vladislav Todorov
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Stiliana Milkova on Vladislav Todorov’s Zift, which was translated from the Bulgarian by Joseph Benatov and published last year by Paul Dry Books. Zift1 is Todorov’s debut novel, which was actually made into a movie that was praised by Variety as ...
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Festival of New French Writing: Atiq Rahimi
As I mentioned earlier, I participated in the Festival of New French Writing that took place in NYC a couple weeks back. It was a great festival, and I had every intention of writing up most of the panels . . . but, well. Thankfully, freelance writer and audio engineer JK Fowler1 interviewed a couple of the French writers ...
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DiscoverReads, Let Downs, and "Books"
As written about in today’s New York Times GoodReads (which has come a bit of an obsession of mine) has just launched a new site called DiscoverReads that uses an algorithm to recommend books. (Book recommendations and how people choose what to read is another obsession of mine, so this announcement is like a double ...
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The Blindness of the Heart [Why This Book Should Win the BTBA]
Similar to years past, we’re going to be featuring each of the 25 titles on the BTBA Fiction Longlist over the next month plus, but in contrast to previous editions, this year we’re going to try an experiment and frame all write-ups as “why this book should win.” Some of these entries will be absurd, some more ...
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I Curse the River of Time [Why This Book Should Win the BTBA]
Similar to years past, we’re going to be featuring each of the 25 titles on the BTBA Fiction Longlist over the next month plus, but in contrast to previous editions, this year we’re going to try an experiment and frame all write-ups as “why this book should win.” Some of these entries will be absurd, some more ...
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Hygiene and the Assassin [Why This Book Should Win the BTBA]
Similar to years past, we’re going to be featuring each of the 25 titles on the BTBA Fiction Longlist over the next month plus, but in contrast to previous editions, this year we’re going to try an experiment and frame all write-ups as “why this book should win.” Some of these entries will be absurd, some more ...
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Quim Monzo's "Gregor" at Numero Cinq
Back when I was at Dalkey, we published a fantastic short story collection entitled Bad News of the Heart by Douglas Glover. The stories in there are touching, very funny, and incredibly well-crafted. Douglas went on to “win the Governor General’s ...
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Nonnus
This post is from Andrew Barrett, one of the students in the MA program in Literary Translation here at the University of Rochester. When he told me he was working on a translation of a poem from Ancient Greek, I though, “huh, OK,” but then when I found out it was an erotic epic poem about Dionysus, I thought, ...
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Fair Play
“There is no silence like sitting in a fog at sea and listening,” writes Tove Jansson in her newly-translated story collection Fair Play. “Large boats can loom up suddenly, and you don’t hear the bow water in time to start your motor and get out of the way.” Stuck waiting out a dense, chilling fog in ...
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Latest Review: "Fair Play" by Tove Jansson
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Larissa Kyzer on Tove Jansson’s Fair Play, which was translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal and officially comes out from NYRB Classics next Tuesday. (Or in NCAA time: The day of the “first” round of the tournament, which for once, could be cool. ...
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Edith Grossman & Steve Dolph
Where: McNally Jackson Books, 52 Prince Street, (between Lafayette & Mulberry), New York, NY 10012 Edith Grossman is a translator, critic, and teacher of literature in Spanish. She was born in Philadelphia, attended the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California at Berkeley, completed a PhD at New York ...
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It's Good to Be Here [Excuses & Bits]
Admittedly, things have been a bit slow around here lately. I’ve been in NY for the Festival of New French Writing (more below), and hard at work on a grant for the National Endowment for the Arts. It’s due next week, but, I have to finish tomorrow (along with review for Bookforum) or suffer the bureaucratic wrath ...
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Reading the World Podcast #8: Mark Schafer
In this Reading the World podcast, Erica Mena talks to translator Mark Schafer about his two latest translations, Before Saying Any of the Great Words by David Huerta (Copper Canyon, 2009) and The Scale of Maps by Bélen Gopegui (City Lights, 2011). Click here for all the past podcasts (which include conversations with ...
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Italian Literature after World War II
Where: Italian Cultural Institute New York, 686 Park Avenue (between 68th and 69th streets), New York City A lecture by Italian author Giorgio Montefoschi. Montefoschi will present his analysis of Italian literature after the Second World War. His in depth viewpoint it is not the one of a literary historian, but that of a ...
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A Jew Must Die [Why This Book Should Win the BTBA]
Similar to years past, we’re going to be featuring each of the 25 titles on the BTBA Fiction Longlist over the next month plus, but in contrast to previous editions, this year we’re going to try an experiment and frame all write-ups as “why this book should win.” Some of these entries will be absurd, some more ...
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Hygiene and the Assassin [Why This Book Should Win the BTBA]
Similar to years past, we’re going to be featuring each of the 25 titles on the BTBA Fiction Longlist over the next month plus, but in contrast to previous editions, this year we’re going to try an experiment and frame all write-ups as “why this book should win.” Some of these entries will be absurd, some more ...
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In the Age of Screens (Part V)
Over the course of this week, we’ll be serializing an essay I wrote for the recent Non-Fiction Conference that took place in Amsterdam a couple weeks ago. If you’d rather not wait until Friday to read the whole thing, then click here and download a PDF version of the whole thing. Or you can click here to see all ...
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The Clash of Images [Why This Book Should Win the BTBA]
Similar to years past, we’re going to be featuring each of the 25 titles on the BTBA Fiction Longlist over the next month plus, but in contrast to previous editions, this year we’re going to try an experiment and frame all write-ups as “why this book should win.” Some of these entries will be absurd, some more ...
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In the Age of Screens (Part IV)
Over the course of this week, we’ll be serializing an essay I wrote for the recent Non-Fiction Conference that took place in Amsterdam a couple weeks ago. If you’d rather not wait until Friday to read the whole thing, then click here and download a PDF version of the whole thing. Or you can click here to see all ...
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Microscripts [Why This Book Should Win the BTBA]
Similar to years past, we’re going to be featuring each of the 25 titles on the BTBA Fiction Longlist over the next month plus, but in contrast to previous editions, this year we’re going to try an experiment and frame all write-ups as “why this book should win.” Some of these entries will be absurd, some more ...
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In the Age of Screens (Part III)
Over the course of this week, we’ll be serializing an essay I wrote for the recent Non-Fiction Conference that took place in Amsterdam a couple weeks ago. If you’d rather not wait until Friday to read the whole thing, then click here and download a PDF version of the whole thing. Or you can click here to see all ...
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In the Age of Screens (Part II)
Over the course of this week, we’ll be serializing an essay I wrote for the recent Non-Fiction Conference that took place in Amsterdam a couple weeks ago. If you’d rather not wait until Friday to read the whole thing, then click here and download a PDF version of the whole thing. Or you can click here to see all ...
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Touch [Why This Book Should Win the BTBA]
Similar to years past, we’re going to be featuring each of the 25 titles on the BTBA Fiction Longlist over the next month plus, but in contrast to previous editions, this year we’re going to try an experiment and frame all write-ups as “why this book should win.” Some of these entries will be absurd, some more ...
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In the Age of Screens (Part I Redux)
Over the course of this week, we’ll be serializing an essay I wrote for the recent Non-Fiction Conference that took place in Amsterdam a couple weeks ago. If you’d rather not wait until Friday to read the whole thing, then click here and download a PDF version of the whole thing. Or you can click here to see all ...
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The True Deceiver [Why This Book Should Win the BTBA]
Similar to years past, we’re going to be featuring each of the 25 titles on the BTBA Fiction Longlist over the next month plus, but in contrast to previous editions, this year we’re going to try an experiment and frame all write-ups as “why this book should win.” Some of these entries will be absurd, some more ...
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In the Age of Screens (Part I)
So, following up the last post about the Non-fiction Conference . . . When I was invited to talk at this, I decided that I really wanted to write something new, something that I haven’t exactly written about, or talked about before. (It’s way easier just going back to the tried-and-true, but that does start to ...
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In the Age of Screens (A Prelude)
As I mentioned some time ago, I was invited to participate in this year’s Non-Fiction Conference sponsored and organized by the Dutch Foundation for Literature. This year’s focus was on “Quality Non-Fiction in the Digital Era,” so there were a number of presentations about new developments, the future ...
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Interlude and Explanation [Why This Book Should Win the BTBA]
OK, I know we’ve been a bit slow in posting in the “Why This Book Should Win the BTBA” series. (So far we’ve only covered 5 of the 25 longlisted fiction titles.) Not sure that anyone’s really waiting on this, but I thought I’d provide a bit of an explanation and explain what we’re up ...
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Think and Drink Happy Hour
Where: Goethe-Institut New York, 72 Spring Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY Come meet the participants of the Festival Neue Literatur 2011, and enjoy wine and refreshments provided by the cultural partners. This opening reception kicks off the Festival that features six young German, Austrian and Swiss writers along with ...
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Herve Le Tellier & PEN World Voices [Sensible Pricing]
I’ll post about this again as the time grows closer, but I wanted to announce that on Monday, May 2nd, Herve Le Tellier, Amelie Nothomb, and Carsten Jensen will be here in Rochester for our annual PEN World Voices event. For this year’s event, we’ve partnered with the admirable Writers & Books who will ...
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I'm All in in a Very Big Way
One of my all-time favorite books is Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual, and for months years, I’ve been meaning to reread it. Well, starting sometime soon, Conversational Reading will be hosting a Big Read of Perec’s classic novel. No real info up there yet, but as soon as the schedule is ...
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An Interview I Love
I have to thank GoodReads reviewer extraordinaire/B&N Union Square employee (who makes the best book displays ever) Karen Brissette for pointing me to this interview. She was searching for information on Iren Nigg (who is apparently awesome and totally not translated1) and came across this Stefan Sprenger interview that ...
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mTm Journal, call for papers
Call for papers: MTM. Minor Translating Major – Major Translating Minor – Minor Translating Minor Call Deadline: 31-May-2011 mTm Journal is a new international refereed journal with an Editorial Board comprised of leading scholars in the field of translation studies. mTm aims at starting and promoting a ...
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New Issue of Bookslut
The new issue of everyone’s favorite provocatively named webmag/blog is now available and includes a few translation-related items. First off, there’s a review of To Hell with Cronje by Ingrid Winterbach and translated from the Afrikaans by Elsa Silke. The review is solid, and starts with a nice bit that ...
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EVENT – Monday, Feb. 21, 2011 – Reading the World Conversation Series: Samuel Hazo & Nirvana Tanoukhi
Our first RTW event of the “spring” (I think we’d better keep that term in quotes for a little while longer, especially in Rochester) is coming up in just a few short weeks. See below for all the advance info that’s fit to print. Reading the World Conversation Series: Samuel Hazo & Nirvana ...
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Visitation [Why This Book Should Win the BTBA]
Similar to years past, we’re going to be featuring each of the 25 titles on the BTBA Fiction Longlist over the next month plus, but in contrast to previous editions, this year we’re going to try an experiment and frame all write-ups as “why this book should win.” Some of these entries will be absurd, some more ...
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For Fans of Prizes, German Literature
I know Michael Orthofer always rants about the lack of transparency in what titles have been submitted for particular awards. (I believe the Man Booker is his big target.) Well, the good people at the Goethe Institut directly go against that trend, posting all of the titles submitted for the 2011 Helen and Kurt Wolff ...
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The New Melville House Catalog Looks Damn Good
Haven’t received the hard copy yet, but the online version of Melville House’s Summer Catalog is up, and, to be quite direct, kicks some international literary ass. First off, there’s the new Banana Yoshimoto book The Lake, which is translated by Michael Emmerich. Here’s the line from the copy that ...
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Indian Literature and the Book Business in the 21st Century
Thanks to Annie Janusch for bringing Chandrahas Choudhury’s survey of Indian literature and the book business to our attention. It’s a pretty general piece, but has some interesting info about trends in India: India’s book economy is, however, on a different arc, from that of the West and, like the Indian ...
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The Literary Conference [Why This Book Should Win the BTBA]
Similar to years past, we’re going to be featuring each of the 25 titles on the BTBA Fiction Longlist over the next month plus, but in contrast to previous editions, this year we’re going to try an experiment and frame all write-ups as “why this book should win.” Some of these entries will be absurd, some more ...
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The Facts Behind One Story in Dalkey Archive’s Best European Fiction for 2011
The following was written by Mima Simić regarding her recent experiences in publishing “My Girlfriend” in the Best European Fiction 2011 anthology. Enjoy! Best European Fiction for 2011 has hit the bookstores and review sections of your favorite cultural papers, but there’s some pretty bad non-fiction ...
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Prefacing a New Series of Posts [We Are Not Muckrakers]
Before posting Mima Simić‘s story of the offensive edits done to the story/translation of hers that appeared in this year’s Best European Fiction volume from Dalkey Archive Press, feel like I should provide a sort of frame and preface that explains my professional interests and personal concerns about running ...
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A Thousand Peaceful Cities [Why This Book Should Win the BTBA]
Similar to years past, we’re going to be featuring each of the 25 titles on the BTBA Fiction Longlist over the next month plus, but in contrast to previous editions, this year we’re going to try an experiment and frame all write-ups as “why this book should win.” Some of these entries will be absurd, some more ...
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One Hundred Bottles
When Z. was a child in Havana she learned how to disassemble and reassemble the engines of classic American cars. Z., the narrator of Ena Lucía Portela’s One Hundred Bottles, describes this skill as the most useful thing she knows, and her aptitude at the art of reconstruction is made beautifully clear in this compact but ...
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Latest Review: "One Hundred Bottles" by Ena Lucia Portela
The latest addition to our Review Section is a piece by Julia Haav on Ena Lucia Portela’s One Hundred Bottles. Julia Haav is a publicist for Europa Editions and is completing a master’s degree in the humanities, with a focus on contemporary Latin American literature, at NYU. I also believe she’s one of my ...
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European Literature Prize Longlist
At some point while I’m housebound thanks to the Colossal Snowpocalypse of the Century tm I’ll finish tweaking the write-up of the speech I gave in Amsterdam at the Nonfiction Conference, post part of that and write up some stuff about how fantastic this conference was. (If you look at the list of speakers ...
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The Golden Age [Why This Book Should Win the BTBA]
Similar to years past, we’re going to be featuring each of the 25 titles on the BTBA Fiction Longlist over the next month plus, but in contrast to previous editions, this year we’re going to try an experiment and frame all write-ups as “why this book should win.” Some of these entries will be absurd, some more ...
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Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico [Why This Book Should Win the BTBA]
Similar to years past, we’re going to be featuring each of the 25 titles on the BTBA Fiction Longlist over the next month plus, but in contrast to previous editions, this year we’re going to try an experiment and frame all write-ups as “why this book should win.” Some of these entries will be absurd, some more ...
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2011 Best Translated Book Awards: Fiction Longlist
Commentary and analysis will go in another post . . . for now, here’s the official press release. January 27, 2011—The 25-title fiction longlist for the 2011 Best Translated Book Awards was announced this morning at Three Percent—a resource for international literature at the University of Rochester. According to ...
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Spaces of Memory from Berlin to New York: A Conversation with James Youn
Where: The Jewish Community Center, 334 Amsterdam Ave at 76th St., New York, NY The JCC is delighted to welcome Habitus (and Joshua Ellison, editor), as a partner and co-sponsor of these programs. Habitus is a magazine of international Jewish culture and a Jewish magazine about the world that speaks to anyone who feels the ...
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Joseph Roth's Job: The Story of a Simple Man
Where: Deutsches Haus, 42 Washington Mews, New York, NY 10003 A reading from and discussion about the new translation of Joseph Roth’s Job: The Story of a Simple Man Read by Ross Benjamin (translator) Moderated by Paul Flemming (Associate Professor of German at NYU; Department Chair) ...
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Vita Nuova
Vita Nuova is the second volume in a trilogy of autobiographical novels based on Bohumil Hrabal’s courtship of and marriage to Eliška Plevová (nicknamed Pipsi) and the first decade or so of his fame as one of Czechoslovakia’s most beloved writers. Originally published in samizdat in Prague in 1986, not long before ...
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Latest Review: "Vita Nuova" by Bohumil Hrabal
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Dan Vitale on Bohumil Hrabal’s Vita Nuova, which is translated from the Czech by Tony Liman and available from Northwestern University Press. Dan Vitale is a regular contributor to Three Percent—a program sponsored in party through a grant from ...
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NCBB Fiction Finalists
Over the weekend, the National Book Critics Circle announced the list of finalists for this year’s awards, which consist of six categories: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, autobiography, biography, and criticism. You can find the complete list of finalists at the link above, but I just want to list the fiction finalists, ...
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Non-Fiction Conference 2011 [Amsterdam!]
As mentioned in the previous post, I’m going to be gone basically all next week to participate in this year’s Non-Fiction Conference, which is taking place in Amsterdam and is put together by the Dutch Foundation for Literature. This is a pretty amazing opportunity—not just to see Amsterdam, but because ...
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Open Letter Summer 2011 [Catalogs]
OK, so I didn’t get to writing up all the things I wanted to this week, but before taking off for Amsterdam and the Non-Fiction Conference (see next post), I thought I’d share our Summer 2011 catalog. With a little luck, I’ll highlight each of these next week, with excerpts and the like, but for now, ...
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Gary Racz Wins Alicia Gordon Award
Next spring (like March 2012), we’re publishing Gary Racz’s translation of Eduardo Chirnino’s The Smoke of Distant Fires. I’m really excited about this book, and especially excited to be able to work with Gary. I’ve only known him for a few years, but he’s one of the friendliest, funniest, ...
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Vook! [Things That Drive Me Insane]
Late on Saturday night, I came across this article by Virginia Heffernan about “video books.” Generally speaking, I like the pieces by Heffernan that I’ve read, in particular this piece about headphones. But this one on Vook? Oh dear god no. Although to be fair, I’m not sure what’s more ...
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Calypso Editions
Although they’ve only published one book so far — Leo Tolstoy’s How Much Land Does a Man Need, translated from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk with a foreword by Brian Evenson — Calypso Editions looks like a press worth paying attention to. Here’s how Elizabeth Myhr & Piotr Florczyk describe ...
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Six Questions with Charlotte Mandell
Zone has been getting a lot of attention recently, such as this review in the New York Times and in the recent issue of N+1. (I also found a copy on display at the Bay City Public Library—my hometown library—and someone had actually checked it out!) One of the first reviews of Zone actually appeared in the ...
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The Book of Things
Literary critic Edmund Wilson, writing in the 1930s, said that the pieces of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons were intended to be “prose still-lifes to correspond to those of such painters as Picasso and Braque. A pattern of assorted words, though they might make nonsense from the traditional point of view, would be ...
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Latest Review: "The Book of Things" by Ales Steger
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Tim Nassau on Ales Steger’s The Book of Things, which is available from BOA Editions in Brian Henry’s translation from the Slovenian. If you don’t know BOA Editions, they’re one of the premiere publishers of poetry in the U.S. and do a number ...
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PEN America #13 [New Issue III]
Also arriving in yesterday’s mail was the new issue of PEN America, making it a pretty big day in literary magazines . . . Anyway, this issue is entitled “Lovers,” a theme backed up on the PEN website with this forum, which you can participate in, and which currently features various authors writing about ...
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Absinthe 14 [New Issues II]
Absinthe 14 arrived in yesterday’s mail, and is loaded with interesting authors and pieces, including: An excerpt from Wieslaw Mysliwski’s Stone Upon Stone, which was translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston and recently published by Archipelago books. (Actually using this in the “Translation & ...
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World Lit Today: January 2011 [New Issues I]
The new issue of World Literature Today is now available, and the focus is on one of my favorite topics: “The Crosstalk between Science and Literature.” (Did I mention that I have a Thomas Pynchon related tattoo? And that I rushed out of MLA to see Jonah Lehrer speak about neuroscience and creativity? ...
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The Downfall of Borders According to Peter Osnos
As you may have heard, Borders is in a bit of trouble. Not that they haven’t been on the brink of disaster for years, but with the announcements of the past couple weeks—including the suspension of payments to some publishers, resignation of several execs, closing of a distribution center, etc.—it sounds ...
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Banff International Literary Translation Center [Imminent Deadlines & Important Info]
With the application deadline for this year’s Banff International Literary Translation Center program looming (applications are due February 15th), I thought I’d would be a good time to post a bit of info about Banff, the program, etc. First off, you can find all the information about Banff by clicking here. As ...
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Recent Prizes and Awards [Snowed In Odds & Ends]
Not only did I survive the MLA, but I was also able to make it all the way back to Rochester without delay. (Couple U of R professors who were scheduled to go through Atlanta, and ended up stranded in L.A. for a few extra days. Hopefully they beat this latest chapter in Snowpocalypse 2011.) Anyway, MLA was a pretty ...
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The Insufferable Gaucho
Roberto Bolaño has recently become one of the new stars of Latin American fiction, which is made all the more tragic by his death in 2003. His mammoth novel 2666 was a posthumous smash hit in both North and South America, and although much of his work was available in translation, New Directions is now publishing ...
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Latest Review: "The Insufferable Gaucho" by Roberto Bolano
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Will Eells on Roberto Bolano’s The Insufferable Gaucho, translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews and available from New Directions. Will is one of our “contributing editors” (which are sponsored by the New York State Council on the Arts) and a ...
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Uncorking Cuba: One Hundred Bottles
Where: The Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center, 600 River Street, Austin, TX Join us for a literary conversation with Achy Obejas about One Hundred Bottles, her acclaimed translation of Cuban writer Ena Lucía Portela’s provocative novel, Cien botellas en una pared. Obejas will be interviewed by ...
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The Sixty-Five Years of Washington
It is a sunny spring day in the city you have recently moved to, and on your way to work in the morning, you decide on a whim to get off the bus and walk instead. You are on a major boulevard, but at the point where you begin walking, removed from the city center, it is fairly empty. Your thoughts begin to wander, as they ...
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Latest Review: "The Sixty-Five Years of Washington" by Juan Jose Saer
The latest addition to our “Reviews Section”: is a piece by Emily Davis on Juan Jose Saer’s The Sixty-Five Years of Washington, which is translated from the Spanish by Steve Dolph and was published by Open Letter earlier this year. As noted in the past, we don’t run a lot of reviews of our own books ...
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Welcome to the Wonderful World of the MLA
This year’s MLA convention starts tomorrow, and for once, Open Letter will be exhibiting. (We’re sharing a booth with Counterpath. Number 237 in case you’re going to be there.) MLA isn’t necessarily the most uplifting of conventions, although as with anything else that’s social, I love the ...
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Imprint on Open Letter
Over at Imprint there’s an interview with me, Nathan Furl, and E.J. Van Lanen on Open Letter, in particular our book design. J. C. Gabel of the excellent Stop Smiling magazine and books put this all together. Here’s a bit from Nate and E.J. about our covers: What immediately struck me about Open Letter ...
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New Year, New Databases, New Numbers [Translation Decimation]
Now that 2010 is over, it seems like an appropriate time to post updated “Translation Databases”: and take a closer look at the state of literature in translation in the U.S. Not to give it all away, but things aren’t trending so well . . . Before getting to the numbers, here’s the normal spiel: I ...
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The Weird of Dalkey's Catalog [Publishing Mysteries & Wild Speculation]
So, in addition to the interesting books I found in going through Dalkey’s catalog, I also came across a couple of odd listings that I thought I’d share in hopes that someone out there can explain this to me . . . One of the reasons I go through all catalogs is to add all the new titles to our Translation ...
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The Good of Dalkey's Catalog [Spring/Summer 2011 Preview]
Now that the University of Rochester’s mail services is back from break, I’m swimming in a sea of books, catalogs, and mailed in donations from our annual campaign. (Well, OK, maybe not swimming in a sea of donations, but thanks to all of you who did donate. And if you haven’t donated, you can by clicking ...
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Jim Kates on Translation on "Here & Now"
Yesterday, Jim Kates (former American Literary Translators Association president, and director of Zephyr Press) was on the NPR show “Here & Now” to talk about Bringing the World’s Literature to an American Audience. Super-awesome that he namechecks us, but what’s really interesting is his list of ...
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Latest Review: "Hotel Europa" by Dumitru Tsepeneag
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Monica Carter on Dumitru Tsepeneag’s Hotel Europa, which was recently published by Dalkey Archive Press in Patrick Camiller’s translation from the Romanian. Dalkey has published several Tsepeneag novels, including the wonderfully complex Vain Art of the ...
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Hotel Europa
After reading any of Dumitru Tsepeneag’s works, the one foregone conclusion that a reader understands is that he is undoubtedly a writer of remarkable innovation and skill. This is evident in his work Vain Art of the Fugue and Pigeon Post, both highly original yet very different. In Hotel Europa, his latest novel, we are ...
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Jan 2011 Words Without Borders
The January 2011 issue of Words Without Borders is now available, and has a number of really interesting pieces. This issue’s theme is “The Work Force,” which is elaborated on in the little intro to the issue: Whether loathed or loved, work provides both livelihood and identity; and in times of economic ...
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Little Star Celebrates Ingrid Winterbach
The second issue of Little Star (Ann Kjellberg’s new magazine) is available now, and actually contains an excerpt from Ingrid Winterbach’s forthcoming novel, The Book of Happenstance. (Not to jack this post, but I’ll be posting info about all our spring titles—including this one—in the very near ...
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Nitpicking
Over the break, while I was drinking mimosas and staying as far away from work-related email as possible, NPR did a story on literature in translation, namely, Edith Grossman’s translation of Don Quixote and Lydia Davis’s Madame Bovary. Before getting all screedy, here’s a bit of the piece that I ...
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Let's Us Praise and Ponder Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Over the years, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s website has been a go-to for jokes about the disconnect between the publishing industry and how the Internet works. I really don’t think I can come up with enough insults about the total disfunction of HMH’s website. Basically, it looks like something an MBA put ...
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Learning English the Workshopping Way [Bulgarian Lit IV]
And to close out the second series of Three Percent posts in two days, I thought I’d write something short about Zdravka Evtimova’s fellowship here in Rochester, which ended last week. As I mentioned back some time ago, Zdravka won the first annual Contest for Bulgarian Translators sponsored by the Elizabeth ...
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Carlos Yushimito [Granta's Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists]
And on the 23rd Day of Awesome, we correct our mistakes . . . First off, if you’ve had trouble getting to the tag for this entire series, that’s because Textpattern and its codes for italics defeated me. Click here and you should be brought to the page listing all 22 Granta “Best of Young Spanish-Language ...
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Rodrigo Hasbun [Granta's Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists]
As we mentioned an eternity ago, we’ve been highlighting all of the authors selected for Granta’s _“Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists” special issue. Today is the final post in this series, the entirety of which can be found by clicking here.   Our final entry is by Emily Davis and ...
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Samanta Schweblin [Granta's Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists]
As we mentioned a few Fridays ago, we’ve been highlighting all of the authors selected for Granta’s _“Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists” special issue. Today is the penultimate post in this series. All past and future posts related to this issue can be found by clicking here. Today ...
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Thanks, Donors, Donating, and Free Books.
We’re in the midst of our Three Percent/Open Letter Annual Campaign (don’t worry, this won’t go on forever), and we just want to say “thank you” to those you who have already contributed by making a donation. We’re not done, though, and we’re still a ways from our goal . . ...
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Sonia Hernandez [Granta's Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists]
As we mentioned a few Fridays ago, we’re going to spend the next 3 days highlighting all of the authors selected for Granta’s _“Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists” special issue. All past and future posts related to this issue can be found by clicking here. Today we’re featuring ...
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Latest Review: "For Grace Received" by Valeria Parrella
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Acacia O’Connor on Valeria Parrella’s For Grace Received, which was published by Europa Editions last fall (which is approximately 7 catalogs in “Publishing Time”) in Antony Shugaar’s translation. Acacia is one of the MALTS (Masters in ...
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For Grace Received
They say “See Naples and die” (Vedi Napoli e poi mori). I once thought this meant that Naples, bordered on one side by a still-active volcano and the sparkling sea on the other, is so breathtaking that there’s no use searching for anything more beautiful. Not so, a southern Italian corrected me. In Naples you notice ...
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Andres Felipe Solano [Granta's Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists]
As we mentioned a few Fridays ago, we’re going to spend the next 4 days highlighting all of the authors selected for Granta’s _“Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists” special issue. All past and future posts related to this issue can be found by clicking here. Today we’re featuring ...
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Javier Montes [Granta's Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists]
As we mentioned a couple Fridays ago, we’re going to spend the next 5 days highlighting all of the authors selected for Granta’s _“Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists” special issue. All past and future posts related to this issue can be found by clicking here. Today’s featured Granta ...
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A Special Message from Three Percent & Open Letter Books
Dear Readers, Over this past year we’ve been working so hard that we sometimes forget to look up and take stock of all we’ve accomplished. The year started with an exceptional profile in the New York Times that nurtured, more than we could have imagined, a widespread awareness of Three Percent and Open ...
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Lucia Puenzo [Granta's Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists]
As we mentioned a couple Fridays ago, we’re going to spend the next 6 days highlighting all of the authors selected for Granta’s _“Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists” special issue. All past and future posts related to this issue can be found by clicking here. Today’s featured Granta ...
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Alberto Olmos [Granta's Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists]
As we mentioned a couple Fridays ago, we’re going to spend the next 7 days highlighting all of the authors selected for Granta’s _“Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists” special issue. All past and future posts related to this issue can be found by clicking here. For today’s update, Emily ...
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Birds for a Demolition
Birds for a Demolition is a deceptively slight book of deceptively simple poems. Poems that at first glance seem embedded in the natural world, in the landscape of Brazil, in the language of the wetlands. But this is in fact an expansive collection, spanning more than forty years of Manoel de Barros’s illustrious career ...
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Latest Review: "Birds for a Demolition" by Manoel de Barros
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by BTBA judge Erica Mena on fellow BTBA judge Idra Novey’s translation from the Portuguese of Manoel de Barros’s Birds for a Demolition, which came out from Carnegie Mellon University Press earlier this year. Erica Mena is a poet, a translator, and visible. ...
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"Thrown into Nature" by Milen Ruskov [Bulgarian Literature, Part III]
Milen Ruskov’s speech about the horrors of translating Martin Amis was one of the highlights of Sozopol Fiction Workshops 2010. Milen has a certain style . . . a way of stating things in a simple, direct, seemingly serious fashion. But he undercuts the understatedness of his delivery time and again with ironic comments, ...
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Elvira Navarro [Granta's Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists]
As we mentioned a couple Fridays ago, we’re going to spend the next 8 days highlighting all of the authors selected for Granta’s _“Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists” special issue. All past and future posts related to this issue can be found by clicking here. Today post is an interview by ...
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2011 Arab Booker Shortlist
The six-title shortlist for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction/Arab Booker was announced this morning, along with the names of the five judges. (Yes, this is kept secret until this announcement is made.) In case you’re interested, the panelists are: Fadhil al-Azzawi (Chair), Iraqi poet and novelist living in ...
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"Emerging from Years of Obscurity . . ." [Bulgarian Literature, Part II]
About seven years ago, when I was working at Dalkey and prepping the marketing plan for Bulgarian author Georgi Gospodinov’s Natural Novel, I came up with a bit of a crazy idea. (Yeah, surprising, I know.) This remarkable books—a moving, fragmented portrait of one man’s dealing with divorce1 that’s ...
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Translation as Literary Ambassador
Last year around this time, Larry Rohter wrote this amazing piece about the mission of Open Letter and the need for literature in translation. Which did wonders for our reputation and subscription program, and was one of the coolest pieces of publicity we’ve ever received. Well, as the holidays roll back around, ...
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Andres Ressia Colino [Granta's Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists]
As we mentioned a couple Fridays ago, we’re going to spend the next 9 days highlighting all of the authors selected for Granta’s _“Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists” special issue. All past and future posts related to this issue can be found by clicking here. Today we’re looking at ...
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Visitation
Jenny Erpenbeck has already received a great deal of well-deserved critical acclaim in the wake of her third novel, Visitation (New Directions, translated by Susan Bernofsky), which Vogue has called “a remarkable achievement.” Such a response (especially coming from the mainstream, one is tempted to say) is very exciting ...
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Latest Review: "Visitation" by Jenny Erpenbeck
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Phillip Witte on Jenny Erpenbeck’s Visitation, translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky and published earlier this year by New Directions. Phillip Witte was an intern for Open Letter way back in the day, and also had a summer internship at New Directions. ...
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Bulgarian Literature and Translation Awards [Bulgarian Literature, Part I]
We mentioned these contests a while back and at long last, here’s the official press release about the winning novel and translator. To make this all a bit more exciting, tomorrow I’m going to post short capsules on recent Bulgarian works published in English translation; Thursday I’ll post a long section of ...
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Pablo Gutierrez [Granta's Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists]
As we mentioned a couple Fridays ago, we’re going to spend the next 10 days highlighting all of the authors selected for Granta’s _“Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists” special issue. All past and future posts related to this issue can be found by clicking here. Today’s post—which ...
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Patricio Pron [Granta's Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists]
As we mentioned a couple Fridays ago, we’re going to spend the next 11 days highlighting all of the authors selected for Granta’s _“Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists” special issue. All past and future posts related to this issue can be found by clicking here. This post marks the half-way ...
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Pola Oloixarac [Granta's Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists]
As we mentioned a couple Fridays ago, we’re going to spend the next 12 days highlighting all of the authors selected for Granta’s _“Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists” special issue. All past and future posts related to this issue can be found by clicking here. Today we’re featuring ...
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Museum of Eterna's Novel (The First Good Novel)
Prologue to the Review Macedonio Fernandez is little known outside Argentina. Unfortunately I foresee this remaining the case for some time. Even with the recent translation and publication of his posthumous novel, The Museum of Eterna’s Novel: The First Good Novel (Museo de la Novela de la Eterna), by Open Letter Books ...
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Alejandro Zambra [Granta's Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists]
As we mentioned a couple Fridays ago, we’re going to spend the next 15 days highlighting all of the authors selected for Granta’s _“Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists” special issue. All past and future posts related to this issue can be found by clicking here. Today’s featured author is ...
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Oliverio Coelho [Granta's Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists]
As we mentioned a couple Fridays ago, we’re going to spend the next 16 days highlighting all of the authors selected for Granta’s _“Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists” special issue. All past and future posts related to this issue can be found by clicking here. Today’s featured author is ...
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Time to Get Your Twitter On [More Granta]
So, tomorrow morning at 9am East Coast time (which is 1400 GMT and 1500 Madrid time) we’re (meaning me, meaning Emily Davis, meaning staff from Granta) going to have a “Twitter Party” to discuss the “Best of Spanish-Language Novelists” issue, Spanish literature in general, translations, literary ...
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Matías Néspolo [Granta's Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists]
As we mentioned a couple Fridays ago, we’re going to spend the next 17 days highlighting all of the authors selected for Granta’s _“Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists” special issue. All past and future posts related to this issue can be found by clicking here. Today’s post is written by ...
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Andres Neuman [Granta's Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists]
As we mentioned last Friday, we’re going to spend the next 18 days highlighting all of the authors selected for Granta’s _“Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists” special issue. All past and future posts related to this issue can be found by clicking here. Today: Argentine novelist Andres Neuman, ...
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The Princess, the King, and the Anarchist
The Princess, the King, and the Anarchist by Robert Pagani follows the three characters in the title during a royal marriage turned violent. The novella is based on the assassination attempt of Spanish King Alfonso XIII and Victoria Eugenia on their wedding day in 1906, winding its way through the thoughts of the three main ...
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Latest Review: "The Princess, the King, and the Anarchist" by Robert Pagani
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a sharp critique by Adelaide Kuehn of Robert Pagani’s The Princess, the King, and the Anarchist, which was translated from the French by Helen Marx and published by Helen Marx Books. Adelaide Kuehn is one of our interns this semester (and will be next semester as well, so ...
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Carlos Labbe [Granta's Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists]
As we mentioned last Friday, we’re going to spend the next 19 days highlighting all of the authors selected for Granta’s _“Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists” special issue. All past and future posts related to this issue can be found by clicking here. As a Thanksgiving Day special, we’re ...
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Santiago Roncagliolo [Granta's Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists]
As we mentioned last Friday, we’re going to spend the next 21 days highlighting all of the authors selected for Granta’s _“Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists” special issue. All past and future posts related to this issue can be found by clicking here. Up today: Peruvian author Santiago ...
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The Jokers
Albert Cossery is the best dead writer I’ve discovered this year. A few of his books were published in English translation back before I was born, but this year saw the publication of two never-before-translated Cossery novels — A Splendid Conspiracy, which was translated by Alyson Waters and published by New ...
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Latest Review: "The Jokers" by Albert Cossery
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is something I wrote on Albert Cossery’s The Jokers, which was translated from the French by Anna Moschovakis and published by NYRB earlier this year. For a long time I was planning a post called “Albert Cossery is $%^&ing Amazing,” after reading A Splendid ...
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"Nocturne" by Andres Barba
See this post about Barba for more information about this piece, which was translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman. The ad in the “male seeking male” section said: I’m so alone. Roberto. (91) 3077670. and was in amongst others listing predictable obscenities and a series of oral necessities. Page 43. At the ...
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Andres Barba [Granta's Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists]
As we mentioned last Friday, we’re going to spend the next 22 days highlighting all of the authors selected for Granta’s _“Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists” special issue. All past and future posts related to this issue can be found by clicking here. First up: Spanish author Andres Barba, ...
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22 Days of Awesome [Granta's Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists]
I’ve always had a thing for Spanish literature. Not sure exactly why or how this started, although I do remember struggling my way through Cortazar’s “A Continuity of Parks,” thinking holy s— this can’t actually be what’s happening, then reading the English version, finding myself ...
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Mischief + Mayhem + Belarus
If you watch the RTWCS Ledig House event video that was posted yesterday, you’ll hear me try and introduce the wonderful, and ever mysterious, DW Gibson. DW is one of the most active people I know in the literary world, running Ledig House, scouting, writing novels, writing pirate books, helping run a publishing house . ...
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RTWCS: The State of International Publishing
It’s taken us a while, but below is the first of three recordings from this season’s Reading the World Conversation Series. (It’s been suggested that we change this to the Reading Around the World, so that the acronym would be RAWCuS . . . Not bad, not bad.) This was actually the second event of the ...
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FSG's "Work in Progress"
As any and all long-time (or probably even short-time) readers of Three Percent know, we pick on publisher websites quite a bit. (See for instance, any and every post about Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.) Most often they deserve it for many of the same reasons that we like to make fun of book ads. I’m totally ripping off ...
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The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry
The joy of an anthology is similar to the joy of a college course in literature, of listening to the radio, of attending an art exhibition: it is the pleasure of having someone else tell you what is good and important and how it all connects together. You may find the joy of a discovery or an insight that you would probably ...
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Latest Review: "The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry" edited by Ilya Kaminsky and Susan Harris
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Tim Nassau on the Ecco Anthology of International Poetry that was edited by Ilya Kaminsky and Susan Harris and came out earlier this year. (Most probably around April, seeing that April is National Poetry Month, which leads to a huge number of poetry collections coming ...
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International Prize for Arabic Fiction 2011 Longlist [International Prizes, Take Three]
Out of 123 total entries, the judges for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (aka the Arab Booker), selected 16 books for the longlist. It’s interesting to note that, according to the press release, of the 16, seven of the books are written by women (yay!), and that “religious extremism, political and ...
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The Sky Will Fall . . . Within Three to Five Years [Uplifting Monday Morning News]
So, according to Neil Van Uum, president of the Joseph-Beth Booksellers chain, which recently filed for bankruptcy, most indie bookstores aren’t long for this world: Van Uum said the bankruptcy’s roots came in the summer when the company began “to run a little bit sideways” on some of the terms of ...
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International IMPAC Dublin Award 2011 Longlist [International Prizes, Take One]
So the 2011 longlist for the IMPAC Award was announced this morning, and includes 162 books from 43 countries. According to the press release 42 are titles in translation, covering 14 different languages. This is where I usually complain about the IMPAC’s website, the absurdity of a 162 book longlist, of the name of ...
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WLT Nov/Dec Issue in Full HTML Glory!
Last time I wrote about World Literature Today, I did so in some not entirely pleasant terms. Not because of WLT‘s content—which is always fantastic—but because of problems with my subscription (which, admittedly, I did nothing to try and correct prior to posting that post) and the WLT website (which, ...
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Am I a Redundant Human Being?
The Austrian actress, writer, and painter Mela Hartwig (1893–1967) published relatively little during her lifetime: a collection of stories, a novel, a novella, and a book of poems. She did most of this work between 1921, when she married and retired from acting, and 1938, when she and her husband moved to London to escape ...
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Latest Review: "Am I a Redundant Human Being?" by Mela Hartwig
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Dan Vitale on Mela Hartwig’s Am I a Redundant Human Being?, which was translated from the German by Kerri A. Pierce and published earlier this year by Dalkey Archive Press. I remember first hearing about this book while on an editorial trip with John ...
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Snakebite: Flaubert, Translation, and the Imprint of the Real
Where: University of Chicago, Rosenwald 405, Chicago, IL Esther Allen, The 2010–11 Dedmon Writer-in-Residence As the birth of photography made visual artists increasingly anxious about realism, Flaubert devised realist novels that claimed an impersonal, photographic, and near-scientific detachment from their subject ...
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Petition for Portuguese Translation Support
Just received this call for support of the Portuguese translation programs and thought some of you might be interested in knowing about this and/or signing the petition. It goes without saying that this sort of support is invaluable. Without organizations and programs like this, the publication of literature in translation ...
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Fake Poets, Falsely Translated [Promoting The Ambassador]
As some of you might know, Bragi Olafsson’s new book — The Ambassador — released a couple weeks back. It’s an incredibly fun book centering around the journey of Icelandic poet Sturla Jon Jonsson to poetry festival in Lithuania where he loses his overcoat, steals someone else’s, is accused of ...
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Antonio Ungar Wins 2010 Herralde Novel Prize
Just received an e-mail announcement from the Spanish publisher Anagrama, that Colombian writer Antonio Ungar has won this year’s Herralde Novel Prize for Tres ataudes blancos (Three White Coffins). The Herralde Prize was launched in 1983 with the goal of promoting new works of Spanish literature. Over the years, a ...
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Michel Houellebecq's "The Map and the Territory"
The new Houellebecq novel won’t be available in English for another year, but in the meantime, ArtInfo has seven “things to know” about the new book. As with Houellebecq’s other novels, it sounds pretty interesting . . . Here are a couple of AI’s 7 points: HOUELLEBECQ IS A CHARACTER IN THE ...
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Six Words: More. Reviews. Of. Open. Letter. Books.
NPR is going all nationalist and public and polling their listeners on what they’d like to hear in terms of book reviews and book coverage: What makes a book review worth reading? What type of books should NPR cover more? What do we write about too much? Who are you people, and what do you want? As editors ...
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Unedited Foreword to Granta's "Best of Young Spanish Language Novelists" Issue (Part III)
Here’s the final part of the unedited version of Aurelio Major and Valerie Miles’s introduction to the special issue of Granta dedicated to “Young Spanish Novelists.” Part I is available here, Part II, here, and you can download a Word doc of the entire piece by clicking here. Enjoy! If a good ...
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Unedited Foreword to Granta's "Best of Young Spanish Language Novelists" Issue (Part II)
Here’s the second part of the unedited version of Aurelio Major and Valerie Miles’s introduction to the special issue of Granta dedicated to “Young Spanish Novelists.” Part I is available here and you can download a Word doc of the entire piece by clicking here. Enjoy! To select the young writers ...
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Unedited Foreword to Granta's "Best of Young Spanish Language Novelists" Issue (Part I)
This is really cool . . . Over the weekend, Aurelio Major sent me a copy of the foreword that he and Valerie Miles wrote for the special “Young Spanish Novelists” issue of Granta that’s coming out in a couple weeks. According to Aurelio, this foreword—which appears in full in the Spanish language ...
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The Wrong Blood
When you imagine a typical “war novel,” what do you think of? Most people would answer bloody battlefields and brother-against-brother dramatics, lack of supplies and bleak outlooks. However, The Wrong Blood is undeniably a novel that is centered around war, and yet these things are only minimally addressed. Instead, de ...
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Melville House Discourages Translators from Trying to Win Cash Prize, Recognition
As we announced last week, both here and at the American Literary Translators Association annual conference, Amazon.com is underwriting the 2011 Best Translated Book Awards to the tune of $25,000, allowing each winning translator and author receive a $5,000 cash prize. (And the leftover $5K will allow all of our 14 judges to ...
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RTWCS: The State of International Publishing
Just a reminder for everyone in the Greater Rochester Metro Area (which is apparently the tenth smartest city in the U.S.?) that today at 6pm the next Reading the World Conversation Series event will take place. This one is entitled “The State of International Publishing” and will feature translator Steve Dolph ...
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National Translation Award to Alex Zucker for "All This Belongs to Me"
Really late with my ALTA 2010 write-ups (there are a couple in the works though), but I wanted to make a special post congratulating Alex Zucker on receiving this year’s National Translation Award for his translation from the Czech of Petra Hulova’s All This Belongs to Me. From the press release: Alex ...
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Do These Numbers Even Make Sense?
Now, it’s nothing new for Amazon.com to release sales information without any actual hard numbers (how many Kindles have been sold?), but this announcement in The Bookseller begs a explanation: Amazon.com customers have bought more Kindle e-books than both hardback and paperback books combined for the top 10, 25, ...
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Homesick
Eshkol Nevo has plumbed the emotional depths of the word “homesick” and come up with gratifying homage to the feeling of longing. As a member of the new guard of Israeli writers, Homesick is Nevo’s first translation into English. And what a fine choice it is to introduce English-speaking readers to Hebrew ...
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Latest Review: "Homesick" by Eshkol Nevo
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Monica Carter on Eshkol Nevo’s Homesick, translated from the Hebrew by Sondra Silverston and published earlier this year by Dalkey Archive. Monica is a regular contributor to Three Percent, and runs her own excellent website, Salonica. Eshkol Nevo’s ...
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Congrats to Kate and Daniel!
This is more of public congratulations post than anything else, but I think it’s exciting that Kate Griffin and Daniel Hahn have been named as interim co-directors of the British Centre for Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia. The BCLT is one of the coolest translation centers in the world, and does ...
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Popular Hits of the Showa Era
Ryu Murakami is sometimes referred to as the “other” Murakami, the yang to the more internationally popular Haruki Murakami’s yin. But in Japan, the so-called “other” Murakami is just a strong a force in the contemporary literary scene. Ryu Murakami has won almost all the big literary prizes in Japan, ...
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Amazon.com to Underwrite Best Translated Book Awards
This is really exciting news, and most likely Jon Fine and I are announcing this to the crowd at the ALTA conference right about now . . . I know the press release below is a bit stiff in comparison to the usual Three Percent post, but it has all the appropriate info about Amazon’s underwriting of the 2011 Best ...
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Ledig House Fundraiser and Online Auction
One of my favorite literary organizations in the country has to be the Ledig House. I could go on and on about how beautiful Omi, NY is, what a great host DW Gibson is, how cool the international authors and translators are that visit, so on and forth. (And for those of you in the CNY region, you can come find out more on ...
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Publishing French Women Authors: A Dialogue
Where: CUNY Graduate Center, Room 9204/05, 365 5th Ave (between 34th/35th Streets), NY, NY Martine Reid, Professor of French at Lille III, and Domna C. Stanton, Distinguished Professor of French at The Graduate Center, CUNY, will talk about their respective experiences in publishing the texts of French women writers, as ...
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AmazonCrossing at Frankfurt
OK, with a little luck I’ll be able to post a lot of new content later this week during the American Literary Translators Conference. This is one of my favorite conferences of the year, in part because of all the cool people there, in part because the panels tend to be pretty interesting. I’ll post more about this ...
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NEA's Writers' Corner
This is cool . . . The NEA recently posted this page featuring links to samples from all the recipients of this year’s Translation Fellowships. Here’s just a sampling of the samples: Esther Allen’s translation from Zama by Antonio Di Benedetto (Spanish): The governor remitted an incomprehensible ...
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Douglas Rushkoff & "Program or Be Programmed"
I linked to this in a post the other day, but attached below is the complete interview I did with Douglas Rushkoff about our digital world, his new book, and why he decided to publish with OR Books. This interview originally appeared here. And I want to publicly thank Ed Nawotka for running this in its entirety even though ...
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It Helps to Have a Sense of Humor [Frankfurt, Day One]
Although today is the first day in which all eight halls are buzzing with excitement (or hangovers . . . whatever), the 2010 Frankfurt Book Fair officially kicked off yesterday with the TOC Frankfurt conference, the International Digital Rights Symposium, the Opening Ceremony, dozens of agent meetings at the Frankfurt Hof, ...
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Broken Glass Park
“Sometimes I think I’m the only one in our neighborhood with any worthwhile dreams. I have two, and there’s no reason to be ashamed of either one. I want to kill Vadim. And I want to write a book about my mother.” So begins Broken Glass Park, the achingly beautiful debut novel by Russian-born Alina Bronsky (a ...
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Latest Review: "Broken Glass Park" by Alina Bronsky
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Catherine Bailey on Alina Bronsky’s Broken Glass Park, which was published by Europa Editions in Tim Mohr’s translation. Catherine Bailey is a new reviewer for us—she’s a writer, artist, and activist from Seattle, WA who is currently pursuing a ...
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Bragi Olafsson at 192 Books
Where: 192 Books, 192 Tenth Ave. (at 21st St.), NYC (please RSVP by calling 212.255.4022) Sturla Jón Jónsson, the fifty-something building superintendent and sometimes poet, has been invited to a poetry festival in Vilnius, Lithuania, appointed, as he sees it, as the official representative of the people of Iceland to ...
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Lit&Lunch with Writer and Translator Carolina de Robertis
Where: Center for the Art of Translation at 111 Minna Gallery, 111 Minna St., San Francisco, CA 94105 (Minna @ 2nd) Last year, Carolina de Robertis’ translation of a slender, award-winning Chilean novel called Bonsai became a cult favorite after the book received notable praise, particularly in The Nation. At the same ...
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Symposium on Literary Translation: Part Two
This past weekend, the University of Western Sydney hosted a Symposium on Literary Translation featuring a ton of great speakers and interesting panels. Since I couldn’t be there—not only wasn’t I invited (sigh), but I was in Scranton for the very fun Pages & Places Festival—I asked Joel Scott to ...
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Michael Cunningham on Translation
Below is a guest post from intern/translation grad student Acacia O’Connor, who also used to work at the Association of American Publishers. Over the weekend the New York Times published a really great editorial about writing as an act of translation by Michael Cunningham, author of the Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner ...
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Symposium on Literary Translation: Part One
This past weekend, the University of Western Sydney hosted a Symposium on Literary Translation featuring a ton of great speakers and interesting panels. Since I couldn’t be there—not only wasn’t I invited (sigh), but I was in Scranton for the very fun Pages & Places Festival—I asked Joel Scott to ...
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Bragi Ólafsson @ The Scandinavia House
Where: Scandinavia House, 58 Park Avenue (@ 38th Street), New York, NY Sturla Jón Jónsson, the fifty-something building superintendent and sometimes poet, has been invited to a poetry festival in Vilnius, Lithuania, appointed, as he sees it, as the official representative of the people of Iceland to the field of poetry. ...
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A Novel Bookstore
“Who should we see at the police to denounce attacks against literature?” Such is the question that two bookstore owners—one an elegant heiress, the other a self-educated, solitary, bohemian bookseller—solemnly pose at the opening of French author Laurence Cossé’s satirical biblio-thriller, A Novel ...
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What Happens in Scranton . . .
Tomorrow kicks off a killer 11-day trip for me: first to NYC to pick up a rental car and three authors/transltors (Bragi Olafsson, Margaret Carson, and Sergio Chejfec) and drive them to Scranton, PA, then from there to Frankfurt, and then back in Rochester on October 11th . . . I’ll still be posting on occasion (mostly ...
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Bragi Olafsson's Upcoming Events & Giveaway
As you may already know, Bragi Olafsson’s new novel, The Ambassador, is releasing next month. It’s an awesome, hilarious, fun novel about an Icelandic poet who attends a poetry festival in Lithuania, where his coat is stolen, where he gets pretty wasted, and where he meets a bunch of eccentric poets (surprise?). ...
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Ebooks, Literary Fiction, and the WSJ
OK, so typically I like—or at least highly respect—Jeffrey Trachtenberg’s Wall Street Journal articles about publishing. He’s one of the better book reporters out there, and it’s nice that the WSJ covers our little industry. But his new piece, Authors Feel Pinch in Age of E-Books, is a bit ...
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Some Kind of Beautiful Signal
Still pounding out some pieces for the Publishing Perspectives Show Daily, so I’ll have to make this quick. (It’s way paranoid, but I have the feeling the Publishing Perspectives people will see this—hello Ed! hi Hannah! hey there Erin!—and wonder why the fuck I’m past my deadline for the pieces ...
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Robert Walser and His “Microscripts”
Where: Welles-Brown Room, Rush Rhees Library, University of Rochester Susan Bernofsky (German translator of Walser, Yoko Tawada, and more) will talk with Barbara Epler (publisher of New Directions) about the legendary Swiss author Robert Walser and his recently deciphered “microscripts,” published in English translation ...
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Tonight's RTWCS Event
For all of you within driving distances of Rochester, you really should come out tonight for our first Reading the World Conversation Series Event of the season. Barbara Epler (publisher of New Directions) will be talking with Susan Bernofsky (translator of a number of German authors) about Robert Walser’s Microscripts, ...
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PEN's New World Voices Director
Been a few months since the energetic and charming Caro Llewellyn announced her departure from PEN, where she was the director of the World Voices Festival. Well, at long last, PEN has named a replacement: PEN American Center, the largest branch of the world’s oldest literary and human rights organization, named ...
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AmazonCrossing's Spring List
A good deal of attention was paid to AmazonCrossing when they announced their first title—The King of Kahel by Nicholas Elliott—and a lot of people (self included) were interested in seeing what other sorts of books they’d be publishing in the future. I just received a copy of the galley, so I haven’t ...
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Quarterly Conversation: Issue 21
Running a bit behind with the news here, but the Fall 2010 issue of the Quarterly Conversation is now available online. As always, there’s a lot of great content here, including an essay on Nicholson Baker as the missing link between Updike and DFW, a piece on Helene Cixous’s So Close, and tons of interesting book ...
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Paul Auster in Rochester
This is for all the CNY folks: Paul Auster will be on campus on September 30th to give a George H. Ford Lecture on “Fiction and Translation.” This event is being co-sponsored by the George H. Ford Lecture Fund, the Department of English, and the Reading the World Conversation Series. Very cool opportunity to ...
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Milosz 365
And from one Polish poet to another . . . The Polish Book Institute has named 2011 “Milosz Year,” a year long celebration marking the centennial of Czeslaw Milosz’s birth, and featuring dozens of events and other initiatives. A key part of this celebration is Milosz 365, a newly launched website where you ...
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First Annual Literature in Translation Forum at Vermont Studio Center
Another to add to the long list of events I wish I could attend . . . This Friday, the Vermont Studio Center is hosting the First Annual Literature in Translation Forum featuring Polish poet Adam Zagajewski and his translator Clare Cavanaugh. Polish poet Adam Zagajewski (who will be at VSC for the week as a Visiting ...
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Brooklyn Book Festival: Reading the World
The Brooklyn Book Festival took place this past Saturday, and as always, I wish I could’ve been there. I was able to attend a few years back, and was really impressed by how many people were out browsing the stands, attending panels and readings, and generally getting excited about books. And from what I’ve heard ...
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Hot Frankfurt Titles
As previously mentioned, this Frankfurt, I’m going to be doing a lot of writing for the Publishing Perspectives Show Daily. This is actually starting now (which is one of several reasons the posts are going to be light on Three Percent this week and next), and one of the features I’m contributing to is the ...
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Prix Goncourt 2010
The longlist for this year’s Goncourt Prize was announced last week, and includes some familiar names—Amelie Nothomb, Michel Houellebecq—and some new, up-and-coming writers, such as Mathias Enard. Here’s the complete list for all you Francophiles who may have missed this1: Olivier Adam, Le ...
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Obituary: Rodolfo Fogwill
Although it hasn’t been covered in the U.S. papers (at least to the best of my knowledge), Argentine author Rodolfo Fogwill passed away at the end of last month. He published a ton of stuff in Argentina—around 20 books—but only one—Malvinas Requiem—has been published in English translation. ...
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The Year 3000: A Dream
Have you ever seen renderings or book covers from the 1800s in which the artist attempts to envision and portray a future world? They always seem quaint compared to the contemporary world as it has been realized—proof that we are so limited in imagining the unknown that it will always take on shades of what we have in ...
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Horacio Castellanos Moya and Sampsonia Way
If you haven’t already come across it, Sampsonia Way is a relatively new web magazine, with a really cool back story: In the summer of 2004, Huang Xiang became the first writer in City of Asylum/Pittsburgh’s exiled writer-residency program. He immediately made his mark on the city, figuratively and literally, by ...
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Interview with Esther Allen
Earlier this week, the NEA announced the recipients of this year’s Literature Translation Fellowships. To provide more info about the stellar group of people and projects the NEA is supporting, they’re going to be interviewing at least some of the authors for Art Works, their relatively new, and quite impressive ...
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German Book Prize Shortlist
Sorry . . . All German, all day here at Three Percent. But again, following up on the first post this morning with the overview of the German Book Prize longlist, the shortlist was announced just a few hours ago and includes exactly two of the titles I thought sounded most interesting. (I so suck at predicting things like ...
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How Much We Love "Love German Books" (& Susan Bernofsky)
Love German Books is rocking my world today . . . In addition to the German Book Prize roundup we wrote about earlier, Katy also has an interview with Susan Bernofsky about her translation of Jenny Erpenbeck’s Visitation, a novel that sounds really curious . . . Here’s the description from the New Directions ...
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Overview of the German Book Prize
Over at Love German Books, the wonderful Katy Derbyshire has a fun and informative overview of all the titles on this year’s German Book Prize longlist. As with years past (this is the third year that Katy’s written this sort of overview) she noticed some common themes among the books: Teenage girls seemed to ...
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NEA Literature Translation Fellowships
The National Endowment for the Arts just announced this year’s recipients of their Literature Translation Fellowships, and wow is this a loaded group. It’s very exciting to see so many friends and colleagues on this list, and a lot of the projects sound really amazing . . . Below is the list of winners with ...
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Jaume Cabre's Winter Journey
To celebrate the release of Catalan author Jaume Cabre’s Winter Journey, Swan Isle Press — which was founded in 1999 and publishes a lot of literature from Latin America and Spain, and is definitely worth checking out — released this video below featuring a 10-minute interview with Cabre. Definitely worth ...
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Reading the World #6: Forrest Gander
Here’s the new episode of the Reading the World Podcast. This one is hosted by Erica Mena (poet, translator, regular RTW podcast host) and Annie Janusch (translator, University of Iowa translation student) and features conversation with Forrest Gander about approaches to translating poetry and his forthcoming ...
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New Center for the Art of Translation Website
The Center for the Art of Translation recently redesigned its website, which provides a perfect opportunity to reiterate just how awesome CAT is. Lots of amazing stuff on here, including a killer list of upcoming events, an interview with Susan Bernofsky about translating Robert Walser, and information about Two Lines. So ...
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"When a book makes sweet sex to a computer, the resulting offspring is called a blog"
Since my first “Introduction to Literary Publishing” class of the semester starts in about an hour, I thought I’d share this video with some very basic information about what a book ...
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FILI Editors' Trip
Last week I had the opportunity to travel to Helsinki, Finland at the invitation of the Finnish Literature Exchange. FILI invited fourteen editors, from Tawain to the UK to the US, to attend a few lectures on the Finnish Publishing scene, meet with individual publishers and agents, and generally soak up the publishing ...
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Triple Canopy and the History-Future of Online Publishing
I’ve only begun to explore the contents, but the new issue of Triple Canopy — subtitled “Unplaced Movements” — looks incredible. And right in the wheelhouse of my obsessions . . . From the editors’ Note on Unplaced Movements: Every innovative new-media publishing venture is born ...
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PW's Indie Sleepers . . . Including "Zone"
I feel like this is a week of individual themed days . . . Yesterday was all Japanese literature and Michael Emmerich, today is all Zone . . . Publishers Weekly‘s Indie Press Sleepers list for the fall came out yesterday, featuring twenty titles from independent presses that may be slightly less hyped than ...
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Charlotte Mandell at Art Works
I only found out about this recently, but I’m really impressed with Art Works, the blog of the National Endowment for the Arts. Great way to highlight works of art, artists, and artistic organizations—and the interviews are remarkably perceptive. The most recent addition is this interview with translator ...
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The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P
In fiction, there are dangers—dangers for the writer and dangers for the reader. In Rieko Matsuura’s The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P., we have an unhealthy combination of both. When the writer takes a risk, the reader is either going to take that risk with the writer without question or stay with the idea of the risk long ...
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Latest Review: "The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P." by Rieko Matsuura
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Monica Carter on Rieko Matsuura’s The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P., which was translated from the Japanese by Michael Emmerich and published by Kodansha International. We’ve already mentioned this book on Three Percent several times, including in this ...
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A Week of Quick Links: Monday
Since basically no one is going to be in the office this week, rather than try and write up longer, informative posts, I’m going to try and post a round-up a day of interesting links/blog posts, etc., etc. No guarantees this will actually happen—I’m pretty skilled at starting projects that I never finish . . ...
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23rd Annual French-American Foundation Translation Prizes
I just received an invitation to the award ceremony for the French-American Foundation & Florence Gould Foundation Annual Translation Prizes, and since I think I missed the announcement of the finalists, I thought I’d take this chance to congratulate all ten translators being honored. Fiction: John Cullen for ...
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Prepping for Frankfurt and the Publishing Perspectives Show Daily
OK, this is a sort of odd post, and only applies to some of you, but I’m going to fall back on my traditional “screw it, it’s Friday” excuse and just post this anyway . . . As I’ve mentioned before, at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair I’m going to spend basically all of my time ...
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The Sexual Life of an Islamist in Paris
In four novels and a collection of short stories, Leïla Marouane has become a voice for the Algerian women’s rights movement, exploring themes of marriage, sex, and identity in the context of the religious and cultural divide of the Maghreb/Western Europe region. She fearlessly takes on the taboo, as her skill with comedy ...
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The Polyglot Project
I just received an e-mail from James Alonso about the Polyglot Project, a relatively new website designed to encourage people to read and appreciate classic literature in its original language. In their own words: The idea behind the Polyglot Project is simple. We want to help you get fluent in whatever language ...
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RTWCS: Robert Walser & His "Microscripts"
Just so happened that a copy of Walser’s Microscripts arrived in the mail this morning from the wonderful people at New Directions, so I thought I’d follow up on the last post with a bit more info about the first event in the fall RTWCS. On September 23rd, Barbara Epler of New Directions will talk with Susan ...
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Fall 2010 Reading the World Conversation Series Events
And here it is—the official Fall RTWCS schedule. We have three great events lined up with a possible surprise fourth in the works (more info on that when/if it happens), and hopefully any and everyone in the Central NY area will come out for these. And if you’re not living in the CNY, you can always fly in . . . ...
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Vila-Matas's New Book
I can’t access the full review (yet), but according to Stephen Mitchelmore at This Space the new issue of the TLS has an interesting review by Nick Caistor on Enrique Vila-Matas’s Dublinesca. Here’s an interesting bit that Stephen pulled out: Vila-Matas insists that there is a “moral ...
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Dynamic Pricing and Ebooks
Today’s feature article at Publishing Perspectives is an interview with Rafi Mohammed about pricing, specifically about the “1% windfall” (increase prices by 1% make $$$$) and “dynamic pricing” for books. Here are a couple choice excerpts: PP: Author Cory Doctorow has framed this debate as ...
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Publishing Perspectives Editorial (Redux, Part Two)
So, what can be done to accomplish the change in priority from “How do we pay for translated fiction?” into “How do we get more people interested in these books?” First off, there’s the “publishers are sheep” problem. I once saw Scott Moyer (formerly of Random House and Penguin, currently working at the Andrew ...
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Argentina's "Hot 20"
With Argentina as Guest of Honor at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair, there’s bound to be a ton of articles coming out about its publishing scene. And based on my obsession with Argentine literature, we’re bound to feature as many as possible. (We’ll also try to do something special to highlight a ...
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Building an Audience for Translations: Part Two
Last week, Publishing Perspectives ran the first part of an editorial I wrote on building an audience for literature in translation. And now, here’s part two. Here’s the opening: So, what can be done to accomplish the change in priority from “How do we pay for translated fiction?” into “How do we get ...
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All of the Books in the World
As many other bloggers have mentioned over the past week, Google recently came out with an announcement that there are 129, 864, 880 books in the world. This post explains how Google got to that number (very interesting), defines what a “book” is (”‘tome,’ an idealized bound volume”), and ...
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Building an Audience for Translations: Part One
As noted on Monday, I’ve been guest editing Publishing Perspectives this week, mainly writing a daily post for the blog and working on the two-part editorial that’s running today and Monday. Taking off from a conversation I had late last week, I tried to write about ways to build audiences for literature in ...
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Prose
Anyone familiar with Thomas Bernhard’s work can call forth a string of adjectives, one more off-putting than the last: bleak, anguished, splenetic, death-obsessed. Correction is about a scientist who kills himself after spending six years constructing a bizarre monument to his sister. The Loser focuses on a musician so lost ...
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Latest Review: "Prose" by Thomas Bernhard
The most recent addition to our Reviews Section is a review by Stephen Sparks of Thomas Bernhard’s Prose, translated from the German by Martin Chalmers and published by Seagull Books. Stephen Sparks is currently on his second go-round as a bookseller at Green Apple Books in San Francisco, after having spent a year as ...
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Ebooks in Argentina
Today’s Publishing Perspectives article on the forthcoming Argentine ebook market is really interesting. Octavio Kulesz from Teseo delves into some of the difficulties facing Argentine publishers regarding the creation and sale of ebooks, making a case for Argentinean entrepreneurs to come along and save the ...
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Amazon and Ledig House
I posted about this over at Publishing Perspectives (where, apparently, the only picture Hannah has of me is from a few years ago when I was kind of fat—rectifying now), but the most recent addition to the Amazon.com list of grantees is the Ledig House International Writers Residency. The Ledig House is a fantastic ...
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Internal Promotion and Blurbs
Over the weekend, in addition to proofing Mathias Enard’s Zone and rereading Julio Cortazar’s Cronopios and Famas, I started reading Justin Cronin’s The Passage. Now don’t judge—I’m a single guy in frickin’ Rochester who doesn’t own a TV and might possibly be spending too much ...
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This Week at Publishing Perspectives
This week I’m technically guest editing over at Publishing Perspectives, so we may not be posting quite as many things here. (Or at least not as many serious articles.) Ed Nawotka—the regular editor of Publishing Perspectives—put together the majority of pieces to run this week, including the one today ...
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The Autobiography of Fidel Castro
Most of the icons of the Long Twentieth Century (defined by most as stretching from the Great War to the suicide of the Soviet Union) have left the scene. If you were on team communism, chances are you in formaldehyde or you have turned over your kingdom to an heir. If you were on the capitalist side of the field, you’ve ...
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Ice Cold Crime, Cliches, and Bad Puns
Although I’m not a big reader of Nordic crime, it’s nice to know that places like Ice Cold Crime are out there, translating and publishing these titles, which probably appeal to a pretty wide audience. And Ice Cold Crime’s story — featured in this article — is kind of touching: Riding the ...
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"Zone": An Excerpt of a Sentence
In some ways, the books we publish are like having children—the newest one always smells the best, is the most EXCITING THING EVER, and is that much more aesthetically refined, er, more adorable, or whatever. But seriously, when I read our titles for the final proof, I frequently fall in love all over again, getting all ...
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Little Star and a Little Love for Jerzy Pilch
Ann Kjellberg—who has not only serves as literary executor for Joseph Brodsky, but has been an editor at The New York Review of Books, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and Artes, the journal of the Swedish Academy—recently launched a new journal called Little Star, featuring work from a host of interesting authors and ...
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Odyssey Editions
Last Thursday the publishing news of month year century broke with the announcement that the Andrew Wylie Literary Agency (one of the largest, most powerful, most intimidated, most unscrupulous literary agencies out there) had launched Odyssey Editions so they could publish ebook editions of a number of backlist titles by the ...
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Open Letter & the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation & Two Bulgarian Contests
I never had a chance to write all that I wanted to write about the Sozopol Fiction Workshop (and some of what I wanted to write—skinny dipping in the Black Sea, “Kentucky Fried Happy Hour,” etc.—was maybe a bit too “you had to be there” to really make sense anyway, so, well, you’ve ...
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Ebooks and Numbers and Little Girls in Rochester Suburbs [Random Digital Stuff]
A number of interesting e-book related articles and news items came out over the past few days, and rather than try and make something coherent out of all this, I’m just going to post a smattering of links . . . So: The big news this week was Jeff Bezos’s announcement that Amazon.com is now selling more e-books ...
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Serbian Prose in Translation (Quick Update)
Yesterday I posted a short thing about Geopoetika’s Serbian Prose in Translation series and managed to both include a few inaccuracies and leave things a bit vague and confusing. Par for the course, I know, but just to clarify a few things: Zoran Zivkovic’s novel Escher’s Loops is listed on the ...
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Amazon.com Continues to Give Extremely Helpful Grants to Extremely Good Presses
Over the past few years, Amazon.com has been awarding grants to a number of interesting projects, including a lot of ones related to literature in translation. Their list of grantees includes Open Letter (for The Wall in My Head,), PEN America (for the Translation Fund), Words Without Borders, Copper Canyon, Milkweed, Asian ...
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NBCC's Conversations with Literary Websites
Over at Critical Mass, the blog of the National Book Critics Circle, Mark Athitakis has been running a series of interviews with literary websites. To date he’s talked with Andrew Altschul of The Rumpus, C. Max Magee of The Millions, Scott Esposito of The Quarterly Conversation, and Steve Donoghue of Open Letters ...
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Serbian Prose in Translation
This is really cool . . . Geopoetika—one of, if not The, best literary publishers in Serbia—has decided to take matters into their own hands re: the translation of Serbian literature into English. In collaboration with the Serbian Ministry of Culture, they’re bringing out a number of their books in English ...
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New York Review Books Has an Amazing Forthcoming List
I’ve been a huge fan of NYRB for years. I think I even have copies of the first twelve/thirteen books in those very unfortunately designed covers. Every season I drool when their catalog arrives. I’ve been planning a post for weeks entitled “Albert Cossery is Effing Awesome,” which is due in part to ...
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"Beyond Words: Translating the World"
As if the Banff Centre — one of the few residencies for translations — wasn’t already amazing enough, they just published Beyond Words: Translating the World. From the press release: Published by The Banff Centre, Beyond Words is about the art of translation. It guides readers “along the path from ...
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Translation Preview: September 2010
Following up on last week’s post about the various summer/fall 2010 previews that came out from The Millions and elsewhere, I thought that over the next few days, we’d highlight some forthcoming titles that sound pretty interesting to me. Sure I’m missing things and whatnot, so feel free to overload the ...
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Translation Preview: August 2010
Following up on last week’s post about the various summer/fall 2010 previews that came out from The Millions and elsewhere, I thought that over the next few days, we’d highlight some forthcoming titles that sound pretty interesting to me. Sure I’m missing things and whatnot, so feel free to overload the ...
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Translation Preview: July 2010
Following up on last week’s post about the various summer/fall 2010 previews that came out from The Millions and elsewhere, I thought that over the next few days, we’d highlight some forthcoming titles that sound pretty interesting to me. Sure I’m missing things and whatnot, so feel free to overload the ...
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Translation and Collaboration
I missed this when it was on yesterday, but yesterday’s The Leonard Lopate Show was all about “Translation and Collaboration.” Edith Grossman (author of Why Translation Matters and translator of so, so many brilliant books, including Don Quixote), Idra Novey (executive director of Columbia University’s ...
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Win a Copy of Alejandro Zambra's "The Private Lives of Trees"
To celebrate Spain winning the World Cup, we’re giving away 10 copies of Chilean author Alejandro Zambra’s The Private Lives of Tress to all of our fans friends “likers” (?) on Facebook. Just visit this page and either “like” or comment on the post about the giveaway. We’ll get in ...
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And Now We All Go a Little Bit Crazy
This is kind of an inside joke going public, but whatever . . . Summer Fridays are the best time for slightly off-kilter, questionably entertaining posts. About librarians. It all started a few weeks ago, when I was at the American Library Association conference and texted my friend Ali about the Book Cart Drill Team World ...
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This Is Cool
A couple weeks ago, J. Peder Zane asked me to contribute to his Top Ten Books project featuring top ten lists from a bunch of famous writers. I was going to do an all translations list, but ended up just listing ten of my favorite books since 1950. (And I’ll admit right now that this list is unstable. Within five ...
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Podcasts from the Wolff Symposium, Part II
Earlier this week I posted about the Wolff Symposium 2010 podcasts from BEZ. Anyway, the one recording that was missing is now available, so you can check out The Art of Literary Translation with Peter Constantine, Drenka Willen, Susan Bernofsky, Ross Benjamin, Krishna Winston, and Breon Mitchell. ...
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The World Cup & Archipelago Books
I meant to write about this last week, but I’m an idiot and totally forgot. Although there’s not a lot of time left to take advantage of this, Archipelago Books is having a World Cup Special: for $90 you get a set of nine Archipelago titles by writers from the host and quarterfinal-qualifying countries, or for $35 ...
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"The Canvas": The Next German Book I Want to See Translated
Thanks to Ed Park (who wrote the amazing Personal Days, which everyone who has ever worked should definitely read) for bringing this to my attention—a novel which you can start on either end and which seemingly ends with a confrontation between the two main characters that happens literally at the middle of the ...
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Summer/Fall Previews
One of the best literary blogs out there has be The Millions. Consistently good features. Excellent writing. Interesting aesthetic taste. Et cetera. As proof, here’s a link to their Great 2010 Book Preview column that highlights a lot of interesting books coming out this summer and beyond. And although these ...
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Pratilipi Kicks off the Storm of Saer Hype
Although Argentina disappointed the world me greatly by choking—choking!—against the well-oiled and efficient German soccer army, I still heart the hell out of this country. When I retire (yeah, real funny, like, I’m sure I’ll receive a Genius grant right around that same time), I want to move to ...
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PEN Reads . . . "The Hour of the Star"
This is pretty cool. Starting this month, PEN America is launching PEN Reads an online reading group allowing readers and authors to interact. And being PEN, they’re also going to include essays and commentary from prominent world authors, scholars, etc., etc. The first book in the program is Clarice ...
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Self-Portrait Abroad
“Every time I travel I feel a very slight feeling of dread at the moment of departure, a dread sometimes shaded with a soft shiver of elation. Because I know that any trip brings with it the possibility of death—or of sex (both highly improbable of course, yet not to be excluded altogether).” Before the story even ...
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2010 Wolff Symposium Podcasts
I know I’ve written it before, and will do so again, but the Wolff Symposium is one of the absolute best annual translation-related gatherings. It’s held every June and is centered around the awarding of the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize, which is given to the best translation from German into ...
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Libraries, Ebooks, FOX News, and Choreography [Is it the Holiday Weekend Yet?]
I do have one final, semi-serious Future of Reading post to write, but I’m caught up in a few other things and will have to put that off until tomorrow . . . Now although libraries weren’t a huge part of the discussion at the RIT conference the other week, they obviously play a huge role in the future of book ...
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Reading the World Podcast #5: Bill Johnston
This month we talk with translator Bill Johnston about Polish translations, dialects, and his forthcoming translation “Stone upon Stone” by Wieslaw ...
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The Collaborators
The Collaborators is a novel about a novel. The book in question is called Dancing the Brown Java, volume one of a sprawling epic set in Resistance-era France, and perhaps the greatest French work since Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Voyage to the End of the Night.1 The reader doesn’t learn too much about the content of this ...
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Latest Review: "The Collaborators" by Pierre Siniac
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is Tim Nassau’s piece on Pierre Siniac’s The Collaborators, which is translated from the French by Jordan Stump and came out earlier this year from Dalkey Archive Press. This is kicking off a few weeks of Dalkey reviews . . . We already have a piece on Toussaint’s ...
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Tim Parks on Literature in Translation
Really interesting article called “America First?” in the new issues of the New York Review of Books. In this piece, Tim Parks looks at four recent books: Best European Fiction 2010 edited by Aleksandar Hemon, Why Translation Matters by Edith Grossman, The Novel: An Alternative History, Beginnings to 1600 by ...
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The Winter 2010 Open Letter Catalog
As some people have noticed, our new Winter 2010 catalog is now available and listed on the Open Letter website.. Totally biased, but I think this is one of our strongest seasons yet, what with Zone, the new Bragi Olafsson novel, the first of a million or so Juan Jose Saer books (one of my absolute favorites! If you ...
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Latest Review: "Heartbreak Tango" by Manuel Puig
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Larissa Kyzer on Manuel Puig’s Heartbreak Tango, translated from the Spanish by Suzanne Jill Levine and reissued by Dalkey Archive Press earlier this year with a new introduction by Francisco Goldman. Puig’s an all-time favorite of mine, and in my opinion, ...
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Chip Rossetti on Translating "Saint Theresa and Sleeping with Strangers" by Bahaa Abdelmegid
In our ongoing effort to both make translators more visible, and to provide as much interesting information about international literature as possible, we’re launching a new semi-regular series in which translators talk about something they recently worked on. This could take a few different forms—why they chose ...
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Selected Prose of Heinrich von Kleist
For as little known as he is, for as long ago as he lived and for a short a time as he was alive, it’s amazing the amount of impacting work German short story writer, poet, dramatist, and essayist Heinrich von Kleist produced during his life time. Born in 1777 and dead of suicide in 1811, Kleist suffered the bane of many ...
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Latest Review: "Selected Prose of Heinrich von Kleist"
The latest addition to our Review Section is a piece by Monica Carter on the Selected Prose of Heinrich von Kleist, which was translated from the German by Peter Wortsman and published by Archipelago Books. Monica Carter is a very steady reviewer for us, who also serves on the fiction panel for the Best Translated Book ...
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RIT's "The Future of Reading" Conference: A Recap and a Prelude
So last week (was it really just last week?), Rochester Institute of Technology hosted a three-day (and four-night) conference on the “future of reading.” I meant to write about it after seeing Margaret Atwood’s speech (which was surprisingly funny—though the weird thing was, it actually seems funny to ...
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Gerbrand Bakker's "The Twin" wins IMPAC Award
Congrats to Gerbrand Bakker, David Colmer, Archipelago Books, and everyone else involved in the creation, production, and promotion of The Twin, which won this year’s International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 2010. (Whew. Exhale.)1 This book has received heaps of deserved praise—it was a NPR pick for Best ...
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"Amateur Thursdays"
Earlier this week, Ed Nawotka wrote a great piece at Publishing Perspectives on “Amateur Thursdays” a new webcast project that’s the brainchild of Fabrice Rozie (book critic) and Giovanna Calvino (Italo’s daughter): Entitled “Amateur Thursdays” the concept is to present five-minute, edited ...
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The Year in Translations (So Far): "Purge" by Sofi Oksanen
Some time in the past I was on the Wisconsin Public Radio show Here On Earth to make some international literature summer reading recommendations. We weren’t able to cover the full list of books I came up with, so I thought I’d post about them one-by-one over the next couple weeks with additional info, why these titles ...
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European Book Club: Night Work, by Thomas Glavinic
Where: The Austrian Cultural Forum, 11 E 52nd Street (between Fifth and Madison avenues), New York, NY To register for this session, send us an email at austria.nyc@europeanbookclub.org The Book: Night Work, by Thomas Glavinic The routine of daily life is such that one goes to sleep with the security that tomorrow ...
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This *&^%ing Sucks
Sorry for the vulgarities, but I just found out from both Suzy Staubach at the University of Connecticut Bookstore and from Publishers Weekly that the Brown University Bookstore is laying off scads of employees, including Peter Sevenair, the senior buyer who has been there for 31 years and is one of the most respected ...
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The Year in Translations (So Far): "The Literary Conference" by Cesar Aira
Last week I was on the Wisconsin Public Radio show Here On Earth to make some international literature summer reading recommendations. We weren’t able to cover the full list of books I came up with, so I thought I’d post about them one-by-one over the next couple weeks with additional info, why these titles sound ...
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Sangam House Applications for 2010-2011
Another post, another approaching deadline . . . Modeled in part after the amazing Ledig House program in Omi, NY, Sangam House is a relatively new residency program in India based around the belief that assembling writers from various cultural backgrounds broadens the scope of each individual’s work. Exposure to ...
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Susan Sontag Prize Award Winners
Another day, another post that should’ve been written weeks ago . . . (In case you haven’t noticed, today is themed. And this extends beyond the blog to responding to dozens of e-mails I should’ve responded to way back when.) Last month, the Susan Sontag Foundation announced that Benjamin Mier-Cruz won the 2010 award ...
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Lind Book Club–Tomorrow!
Another day, another announcement about a cool event taking place in the immediate future . . . Tomorrow at 7pm at El Beit on Bedford and North 8th in Williamsburg, Josh Cohen (the author of the critically acclaimed Witz) will be leading a discussion about “Jakov Lind, absurdist literature, war, and Jewish writing about ...
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Quasi-Literary Gathering Tomorrow Night in Rochester
So for anyone in Rochester who reads this (and according to Google Analytics, there are at least a few of you), tomorrow night (Thursday, June 10th) at 7pm a bunch of book-loving, fun-loving Rochestarians are getting together at Tapas 177 (177 St. Paul St.) to drink heavily talk about books, or whatever. Alexa ...
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The Year in Translations (So Far): "Baba Yaga Laid an Egg" by Dubravka Ugresic
Earlier this week I was on the Wisconsin Public Radio show Here On Earth to make some international literature summer reading recommendations. We weren’t able to cover the full list of books I came up with, so I thought I’d post about them one-by-one over the next couple weeks with additional info, why these ...
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The Year in Translations (So Far): "In the Train" by Christian Oster
Earlier this week I was on the Wisconsin Public Radio show Here On Earth to make some international literature summer reading recommendations. We weren’t able to cover the full list of books I came up with, so I thought I’d post about them one-by-one over the next couple weeks with additional info, why these ...
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Summer Reading without Borders
This is sort of late notice, but I’m going to be on Wisconsin Public Radio’s Here on Earth today at 4pm Eastern time to recommend some recent works of international literature that are worth checking out. You can listen to this online, and since it’s a call in show, you can even call and ask me questions. ...
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Contemporary Bulgarian Writers
It would be hard to overstate all the amazing things the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation for Creative Writing (and Elizabeth herself) has done for contemporary Bulgarian writers. Sure, there’s the Sozopol Fiction Seminars, but they also organized a special day of panels on Literary Diplomacy to take place in Sofia, helped ...
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Sozopol Fiction Seminar 2010
Before heading off to Bulgaria to participate in the special translation panels at this year’s Sozopol Fiction Seminars, I knew next to nothing about Sozopol. I knew that we had to fly in Sofia and take a bus for something like eternity 8 hours to get to Sozopol and the Black Sea. From Wikipedia I found out that Brad ...
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Off to Bulgaria . . .
Taking off in just a few minutes for Bulgaria to participate in the translation related part of this year’s Sozopol Fiction Workshop, which is sponsored by the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation for Creative Writing. This seminar brings together English and Bulgarian writers for three days of workshops, guest lectures, and ...
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The Misadventures of the New Satan
A. H. Tammsaare was the pseudonym of Anton Hansen, considered by many to be Estonia’s greatest writer. Born in 1878 (on a farm called Tammsaare, or “Oak Island”), Hansen did not graduate from secondary school until age 25, because his family’s sporadic income necessitated long hiatuses in his education. However, he ...
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exchanges: Hack Work
The new issue of eXchanges, the University of Iowa’s journal of literature translation, is now available online complete with a rather gruesome front cover. (And I know I mention this every time a new issue comes out, but please for the love of Jacob, drop the capitalized “X” in the journal’s name. Not ...
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Readings, Conversations & Parties with Alejandro Zambra
There are a number of reasons I’m disappointed to be missing BEA this year . . . I’d love to see how this mid-week idea works out (or fails), I’d love to see who actually shows up (or doesn’t), love to see all my friends (hello!), and would love to be able to attend all the various events we’re ...
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Top 100 Language Blogs [Vote for Us!]
Three years ago, Lexiophiles — a rather intriguing German-based website about words and language and translation failures (you must check out that link . . . my favorite is “translation fail #3”) — started a Top 100 Language Blogs competition to draw attention to the best language-centric blogs out ...
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Just Waking Up . . .
Well, not really, but after being away in Torino all last week, and “recovering” from jet lag the past couple days, it feels like I haven’t posted in months, ages, eons. Tomorrow I’ll get back in the swing of things. And next week I should have a long, semi-crazy article about the Torino International ...
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Reading the World Podcast #4: Esther Allen
And here’s the new episode of the Reading the World Podcast (iTunes link, or click here to read our posts about the previous episodes). This month features a discussion among Esther Allen, Erica Mena, and Chad Post on all sorts of translation things, mainly related to Esther’s translation of Jose Manuel ...
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Almost Dead
Big publishing houses have a lot going for them. They’ve got money and media access and the power to bring a book to the forefront of a very noisy culture, if only for a moment. And, like the small presses, they have some outstanding people working for them—publishers, editors, and publicists trying their ...
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Latest Review: "Almost Dead" by Assaf Gavron
The latest addition to our Review Section is a piece by Jeff Waxman on Assaf Gavron’s Almost Dead, which was translated from the Hebrew by the author and James Lever and published by HarperCollins. I’m really glad Jeff brought this book to my attention . . . It was one that I had missed in entering info into ...
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Torino Book Fair [Arrivederci!]
Barring more volcano trouble (oh crap—looks my Alitalia flight has been delayed for 5 hours) I’m going to be in Turin for the rest of the week attending the Torino International Book Fair. The Italian Trade Commission organized this trip, bringing maybe 10 or so Americans to the book fair to help promote ...
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Object Press and Christian Oster's "In the Train"
A few months back, I was contacted by the editor of Object Press, a relatively new publishing house in Toronto that was in the process of bringing out Christian Oster’s In the Train. I’m always excited to find out about new presses doing lit in translation, especially ones with simple, effective, attractive ...
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The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction
For far too long now, the translator has been relegated to the rear-facing backseat of the literary world; the ever-so-smaller “translated by” name towards the bottom of the title page that few people (save those of us passionate about literature in translation) give more than a cursory glance to. But in Suzanne ...
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Latest Review: "The Subversive Scribe" by Suzanne Jill Levine
The latest addition to our Review Section is a piece by Jessica LeTourneur on the reissue of Suzanne Jill Levine’s classic The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction. This book has had a huge impact on translators ever since it was first published, and there was even a huge celebration of Jill at the ...
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New Books in the Japanese Literature Publishing Project
The Japanese Literature Publishing Project, which is one of the most interesting of all the various cultural agencies out there working to promote literature in translation, just announced the fifth list of titles to be included in their program. In case you’re not aware of the JLPP, this organization launched in 2002 ...
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Penguin's Central European Classics Series
Penguin sure is loaded with amazing series. Penguin Classics is an obvious standard, but the Great Ideas collection is both incredibly beautiful and intellectually stimulating. Now, Simon Winder, the editor responsible for the Great Ideas series, is launching Central European Classics: This series originates in a visit I ...
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RIT Future of Reading Conference
One of the The only Rochester summer event that I’m really excited about is the Future of Reading Conference which is taking place at the Rochester Institute of Technology from June 9th through the 12th. It promises to be a pretty awesome conference (here’s a link to the official press release) and the line-up ...
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Interview with Dennis Maloney of White Pine Press
Say what you will about Central New York (and trust me, I do, and how), but we’re one of the most vital parts of the country when it comes to literature in translation. In addition to Open Letter, BOA Editions is also in Rochester and White Pine Press is just down the road (a long, wintry road, even in July, but still) ...
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PEN World Voices 2010: Some Cool Things to Watch
OK, so another PEN World Voices Festival is now in the books. As usual, all the people at PEN (especially festival director Caro and her amazing staff of employees and interns) did a spectacular job putting this all together and making sure everything came off with a hitch. (Or at least without too many noticeable hitches.) ...
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I've Learned Not to Believe in Things [PEN World Voices]
Yesterday was one of the busiest days I’ve had in a long time. I interviewed three authors—Sofi Oksanen, Rodrigo Fresan, and Quim Monzo—I had a brunch with some people from the Villa Gillet in Lyon, France, I attended three panels, wrote one blog post, went to the Grove dinner party, headed to Brooklyn for ...
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New European Fiction [PEN World Voices]
This post originally appeared here on the official PEN World Voices blog. I still have 2-3 to write . . . Granta editor and former NBCC president John Freeman opened up this event talking about how Best European Fiction 2010 served as a sort of print version of the PEN World Voices Festival. Containing something like 40 ...
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Love Is Being Horny in a Tie [PEN World Voices]
This originally appeared on the PEN World Voices blog. I’ll be writing for them all weekend, as will a bunch of other correspondents. So if you can’t be here, you can always check out these posts. A number of years ago, when I was working for a different publishing house, Robert Coover suggested I take a look at ...
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Well This Is Just Plain Depressing
I haven’t looked into this too much yet (frantically getting ready for trip to NY and PEN World Voices), but I just got a message from NYS ARTS about the Governor’s proposed budget and its impact on the New York State Council on the Arts. According to NYS ARTS, the Governor is proposing a 40% cut to ...
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PEN World Voices: Friday's Events
Following up on yesterday’s post about today’s PEN World Voices events, here’s a list of the things taking place on Friday that seem most interesting to me. (Some of which I’ll be writing about for the PEN blogs. More on that later.) The Poetry of Edward Hopper (Scandinavia House, 58 Park Avenue, ...
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PEN World Voices Festival (Preview of Thursday Events)
I’ve been meaning to write a bunch of things about the PEN World Voices events, but, well, life has sort of gotten in the way. Instead, what I think I’ll do is simply preview some of tomorrow’s events, and then tomorrow I’ll write up stuff about Friday and weekend. I’m flying down early (like ...
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Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Brings the Translations
OK, so longtime readers of Three Percent have probably noticed that I make fun of HMH a lot. Mainly because their website is a total pile of shit, and also because of how they treated Drenka Willen. (Seriously, even though the situation was rectified—thanks to the support of Saramago, Grass, etc.—someone’s ...
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Sofi Oksanen and Christos Tsiolkas
Where: Mattress Factory, 500 Sampsonia Way, Pittsburgh, PA moderated by Bill O’Driscoll, Pittsburgh City Paper Soon to be published in twenty-five languages, Sofi Oksanen’s award-winning novel _Purg_e is a breathtakingly suspenseful tale of two women dogged by their own shameful pasts and the dark, unspoken ...
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Macedonio Fernandez Event at the Americas Society
So last month, the day after the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award, the Americas Society hosted an amazing panel to help launch Macedonio Fernandez’s The Museum of Eterna’s Novel (The First Good Novel). This event—which Open Letter executive committee member Hal Glasser helped put ...
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Review of "Why Translation Matters"
I know I had a week off (more or less, and thanks again to Edward Gauvin for kicking such ass last week), but all I’ve really got right now is this review I wrote of Edie Grossman’s Why Translation Matters. Honestly, this is one of the only things I’ve ever written that I’m pretty proud of. (And all ...
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WHAM Morning News: The Sixth Time's the Charm
For the sixth time in under three years, Chad has appeared on the preeminent local morning news show in Rochester, NY—clearly breaking/setting a record of some sort. In today’s video, Chad’s talking about Open Letter hitting the three-year mark, and our celebration on Monday, April 26, (featuring 10 ...
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The Brige of the Golden Horn
“Since their beginning, stories have pretended to take place far away. Faraway and once-upon-a-time are code words for Here and Now.” When these words from John Berger’s introduction are applied to this moving novel by Turkish playwright and actress Emine Sevgi Ozdamar, they ring inordinately true. The Bridge of the ...
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Latest Review: "The Bridge of the Golden Horn" by Emine Sevgi Ozdamar
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Jessica LeTourneur on Emine Sevgi Ozdamar’s The Bridge of the Golden Horn, which is translated from the German by Martin Chalmers and published by Serpent’s Tail. Ozdamar was born in Turkey and moved to Berlin because of her interest in German theater. ...
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Foreignization and Neologism
A shorter post today: what are blogs for if not indulging (à livre ouvert, as they say) parbaked ruminations? Removing this one from deep freeze and tossing it to the hive mind. Two summers back at Banff, an author was defending her insistence on using foreign words in her novel, which her American editor objected to. I ...
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Sofi Oksanen, Christos Tsiolkas, and Tommy Wieringa
Where: First Congregational Church of Berkeley, Channing Way at Dana, Berkeley, CA PEN WORLD VOICES FESTIVAL OF INTERNATIONAL LITERATURE BERKELEY SATELLITE EVENT presented by Berkeley Arts & Letters, The Believer, and the Center for the Art of Translation SOFI OKSANEN, TOMMY WIERINGA, and CHRISTOS TSILOKAS in ...
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Titles Are the Hardest Part
Well, not really: many are easy, literal, straightforward, straight-faced and unpunny. But we all have our pet peeves or favorites that caused trouble at the border crossing between tongues. They’re a short, easy thing to wish had gone differently. Movies provide many quizzical examples. Who knows what arcane ...
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Fado
The Polish novelist and essayist Andrzej Stasiuk owns a century-old travel map of Austro-Hungary. Aside from its fragility, he writes, its most notable feature is its level of detail: “[E]very village of half a dozen cottages, every godforsaken backwater where the train stops—even only the slow train, even only once a ...
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Towards New Ways of Reading
Bonjour à tous! Chad Post has asked me to take some time off from designing my “Google Translate is People!” t-shirts (hint: the words are superimposed over a horrified and battered Charlton Heston) and cover for him this week. I am delighted and honored to be guest blogging at “the threep.” I think this ...
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This Article Is Interesting
Laura Miller’s critique of the iBooks store is fascinating for about 10 million reasons that I don’t have the time or mental energy to go into right now. The problem that she describes—how iBooks categorization is total trash, finding book and getting recommendations is hopeless, etc.—ties directly ...
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Baba Yaga Laid an Egg
This is an admittedly biased statement (disclaimer: the first book Open Letter published was Ugresic’s Nobody’s Home, and I was responsible for Dalkey’s publishing Thank You for Not Reading a few years back), but I honestly believe that Dubravka Ugresic is one of the most interesting writers working today. Her books are ...
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Latest Review: "Baba Yaga Laid an Egg" by Dubravka Ugresic
The latest addition to our Review Section is a piece on Dubravka Ugresic’s Baba Yaga Laid an Egg. This was published by Grove as part of the “Myths” series, and was translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursac, Celia Hawkesworth, and Mark Thompson. (Each of the three translators did a different ...
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I Just Want to Go On Record
And say that I think Malcolm Jones’s critique of the Library of America is pretty stupid. I wanted to write something more inflammatory and fun, but E.J. and Nate wisely advised against it. In case you haven’t read this piece, Jones basically tees-off on the LOA, claiming they’ve “jumped the ...
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Bob Brown's Digitial Reading Device
Jennifer Schuessler has a really fun and interesting article in this week’s New York Times Book Review about Bob Brown, the Godfather of the E-Reader: Brown is perhaps best remembered for The Readies, a 1930 manifesto blending the fervor of the Futurists with the playfulness of Jules Verne. “The written word ...
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Quim Monzo: "Gasoline" and PEN World Voices [Part II]
Following up on this post, here’s the excerpt from Quim Monzo’s Gasoline that’s going to be read at the April 26th “Celebration of Open Letter” event. In terms of set-up: Heribert is supposed to be preparing for a massive two-gallery show of new work. Instead, he couldn’t care less about ...
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Quim Monzo: "Gasoline" and PEN World Voices [Part I]
Not a lot going on in terms of publishing news today, so I thought I’d take a break from the usual posts about ebooks, Zen wisdom, and disturbing novels to bring you a bit of information about Catalan author Quim Monzo, whose Gasoline recently arrived from the printer. (If you’re an Open Letter subscriber, ...
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"I Am Not Complete in the Mind"
This is not a post about my mental state—which is quite fine, thanks for asking—but a long-winded intro to next Monday’s event with Horacio Castellanos Moya. The event is at 6:30 in the Rush Rhees Library in Rochester, so everyone in CNY should come out. Horacio is an incredible writer whose work has been ...
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Siamese
Since his literary debut at the age of 18, Norwegian author Stig Sæterbakken has made a name for himself by challenging convention. At times, this challenge has manifested as an interrogation of the Norwegian nation’s sense of identity and its relationship to Europe. At others, it has revealed itself more questionably, ...
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Not To Bludgeon the Dying Horse
But following on that 192 Books post, here’s a bleak bit from Yahoo! Finance about “Businesses on the Brink of Change or Fail”: Borders Group The printed book market just doesn’t seem large enough for Borders anymore. Borders is the second-largest bookstore chain in the U.S. behind Barnes ...
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192 Books–A Retail Star
Over at Monocle.com there’s an interesting video called “Retail Stars” that features “companies and people who are setting benchmarks we should all take note of.” This particular video (click above link to check it out—192 comes in at the 3:19 mark) features 192 Books, one of my personal ...
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Nobody said it was going to be fun: Etgar Keret
Where: Columbia University, Dodge 501, New York, NY On Transcending Politics, Translating Politics, Israeli Politics, Bus Driver Politics, and Grandmas with Guns Join the Center for Literary Translation for an evening with Israeli author and filmmaker Etgar Keret. One of the most successful Israeli writers today, ...
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Hotel Iris
Reading Hotel Iris, the latest Yoko Ogawa book to be published in English, may be quite a jarring experience for those who have read Ogawa’s last novel, The Housekeeper and the Professor. Although they share a common theme of unconventional love, the two works could not be more dissimilar in tone and atmosphere. The ...
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Latest Review: "Hotel Iris" by Yoko Ogawa
The “latest addition”: to our “Reviews Section” is a piece by Will Eells on Yoko Ogawa’s Hotel Iris, which is translated from the Japanese by superstar Stephen Snyder and published by Picador. This is the third Ogawa book available in English, and we’ve actually reviewed all three. (I ...
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Everybody Please Just Calm the &*%$ Down [We Should All Be Butler]
So last night’s National Championship was one of the best basketball games I’ve ever watched. Back-and-forth, fairly well-played, intense, exciting, etc., etc., all coming down to a half-court miracle shot that was a fraction of a hair from going in and bringing the Evil Duke Empire (and their possibly unhinged ...
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April Is a Month of Poems
One of the complaints I get from time to time—about both Three Percent and Open Letter—is our lack of poetry coverage. This is primarily my fault, since I rarely ever read poetry. Probably some sort of reading deficiency, blindspot, or problem with my soul, but, well, there you have it. (It’s not as if this ...
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It's Officially Now Ethical to Steal E-Books (Sometimes)
Does anybody remember the Unethicist? Now that was an awesome column. And such a simple concept: every week Gabriel Delahaye answered the same questions featured in Randy Cohen’s “Ethicist” column, but with extremely different (and much more vulgar) answers. The perfect example of how to jack someone ...
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Entropy and Complex Business Models
The always provocative Clay Shirky has a new post out today entitled The Collapse of Complex Business Models. Granted, his focus is on how the simplicity of the internet will undermine TV producers, but a lot of his major points could be applied to the book publishing industry as well. His main idea comes from Joseph ...
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Happy Birthday, Complete Review!
As noted in the Literary Saloon today is the 11-year-anniversary of the Complete Review. In internet years, I believe that translates into approximately a millennium. Having been at this for almost three years myself, I’m astounded by Michael Orthofer’s ability to keep writing such quality posts and reviews for ...
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Marian Schwartz on Faithfulness in Translation
Yesterday’s Boston Globe has a nice interview with Marian Schwartz, one of the great contemporary translators, whose translation of Olga Slavnikova’s 2017 was recently released. (Here’s a link to K.E. Semmel’s review of 2017 that we ran last week.) Q. What is a good translation? A. I think a ...
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E-Books and Permissions
As we all know, on Saturday our understanding of the modern world was irreversibly altered when Butler upended MSU to represent the Horizon League (Horizon League?!?) in tonight’s National Championship Apple released the iPad. To mark this occasion, the Times ran an interesting op-ed from nonfiction author Marc Aronson ...
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Reading the World Podcast #3: Suzanne Jill Levine
A new month and a new Reading the World Podcast, this time with Suzanne Jill Levine, famed translator (of Three Trapped Tigers, of Heartbreak Tango, of dozens of other wonderful books) and author of the very influential The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction. We recorded this back at MLA in December (in ...
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Publisher Branding
The always interesting Publishing Perspectives has a great double-sided post today about publisher branding, with Erin Cox advocating for publishers to spend more time & money on this, and Sarah Russo arguing about why publishers shouldn’t “brand the brand.” It’s not hard to figure out where I ...
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2017
It’s hard not to think of twentieth-century Russian history as you crack open 2017, Olga Slavnikova’s Russian Booker Prize winning novel. The year 2017 will mark, of course, the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, which culminated in the collapse of the Czarist autocracy and gave rise to the Soviet Union. ...
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Latest Revew: "2017" by Olga Slavnikova
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by K.E. Semmel on Olga Slavnikova’s 2017, which is translated from the Russian by Marian Schwartz (one of our favorite translators) and published by Overlook. K.E. Semmel is the Publications & Communications Manager of The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, ...
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Museum Giveaway on Facebook
As a way of rewarding out Open Letter Facebook Fans (if you’re not one, click this link to fan us), we’re giving away 10 copies of Macedonio Fernandez’s The Museum of Eterna’s Novel (The First Good Novel) to randomly selected fans who either “like” or “comment” on the post about ...
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RTWCS: Helen Anderson and Konstantin Gurevich on Ilf & Petrov's "The Golden Calf"
Last Monday we kicked off the spring season of the Reading the World Conversation Series with an event featuring the husband and wife translating team of Konstantin Gurevich and Helen Anderson. They talked with Open Letter editor E.J. Van Lanen about the process of translating Ilf & Petrov’s The Golden Calf, which ...
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Globish
Robert McCrum—one of my favorite UK book critics, due in part to his interest in all things international—has a really interesting looking book coming out this May. Entitled Globish, it will be available in the UK from Penguin, and from W.W. Norton in the U.S. (although god help me to find this on the Norton ...
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April 12, 2010 – Reading the World Conversation Series: Horacio Castellanos Moya
Our first Reading the World Conversation event was Monday, and it featured Helen Anderson & Konstantin Gurevich—the translators of our recently released edition of the Russian comedic classic The Golden Calf by Ilf & Petrov. Video of whole, engaging discussion will be posted soon, but, now, it’s time to ...
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Schedule for "Your Face Tomorrow"
Again with me and the last minute postings, but if you’re planning on participating in Conversational Reading’s YFT Reading Group, here’s the official schedule: VOLUME 1 –1: Fever– Week 1, March 21-27: pp. 3 – 95 (Section ends at: “But before getting back to the Tupras . . .”) Week 2, ...
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Rossica Young Translators Prize
I feel like I’m always posting about these awards/fellowships/prizes six seconds before the deadline (curses on the limits of 24-hour days!), but here’s a really interesting prize for translators under the age of 25: Rossica Young Translators Prize 2010 Now in its second year, the Rossica Young ...
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Google, Machine Translation, and Literature
The other week, the New York Times ran a piece on advances in Google’s translation tools, focusing on the way Google essentially crowdsources its mechanical translations by searching its mammoth database of web pages, books, etc. Creating a translation machine has long been seen as one of the toughest challenges ...
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Don Juan: His Own Version
Peter Handke’s latest novella to be published in English translation is narrated by a chef who operates and lives in an inn in the Île-de-France region outside Paris, near the ruins of the Port-Royal-des-Champs convent. Experiencing a period of solitude due to lack of business (all his neighbors — his potential ...
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As a Counterbalance to the International Poetry Post . . .
Congrats to Polish poet Tomasz Rozycki for winning the 3 Quarks Daily 2010 Prize in Arts & Literature. Rozycki won for Scorched Maps, a poem that was posted on PEN America with some commentary about the poem’s origins. (And translated by Mira Rosenthal.) Here’s the actual poem and opening of the ...
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The Possibility of International Poetry
The Poetry Foundation website posted a fascinating conversation last week between author/editor/translator Ilya Kaminsky and reviewer Adam Kirsch. The reason for this interview was the recent release of The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry (full review forthcoming), and the main topic is the possibility, or ...
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"Your Face Tomorrow" Reading Group
After reading a bunch of glowing reviews for the third volume of Javier Marias’s Your Face Tomorrow trilogy (including this one from the Independent in which the trilogy is referred to as “one of the most thoughtful and inspiring fictional works of the last decade”) I tentatively decided that I would spend ...
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ADIBF and the Future of Book Culture
Over the next day and a half, while everyone watching basketball I’m going to repost a number of the things that I wrote for the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair. The ADIBF is the premiere professional fair for the Arab world, thanks in part to an arrangement with the Frankfurt Book Fair. Everyone involved with the ...
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The Book Market in Algeria [ADIBF 2010]
Over the next day and a half, while everyone watching basketball I’m going to repost a number of the things that I wrote for the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair. The ADIBF is the premiere professional fair for the Arab world, thanks in part to an arrangement with the Frankfurt Book Fair. Everyone involved with the ...
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Best-Sellers: Creation, Publication, Promotion [ADIBF 2010]
Over the next day and a half, while everyone watching basketball I’m going to repost a number of the things that I wrote for the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair. The ADIBF is the premiere professional fair for the Arab world, thanks in part to an arrangement with the Frankfurt Book Fair. Everyone involved with the ...
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The Translation of Heidi [ADIBF 2010]
Over the next day and a half, while everyone watching basketball I’m going to repost a number of the things that I wrote for the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair. The ADIBF is the premiere professional fair for the Arab world, thanks in part to an arrangement with the Frankfurt Book Fair. Everyone involved with the ...
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The Impact of International Literary Awards [ADIBF 2010]
Over the next day and a half, while everyone watching basketball I’m going to repost a number of the things that I wrote for the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair. The ADIBF is the premiere professional fair for the Arab world, thanks in part to an arrangement with the Frankfurt Book Fair. Everyone involved with the ...
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Five Minutes with Azar Nafisi [ADIBF 2010]
Over the next day and a half, while everyone watching basketball I’m going to repost a number of the things that I wrote for the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair. The ADIBF is the premiere professional fair for the Arab world, thanks in part to an arrangement with the Frankfurt Book Fair. Everyone involved with the ...
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Everybody Loves Google. Except When They Don't. [ADIBF 2010]
Over the next day and a half, while everyone watching basketball I’m going to repost a number of the things that I wrote for the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair. The ADIBF is the premiere professional fair for the Arab world, thanks in part to an arrangement with the Frankfurt Book Fair. Everyone involved with the ...
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Hello there!
I feel like it’s been ages since I last posted anything new here . . . In my defense, it’s kind of tricky finding the time to come up with good material during a ten-day trip to Abu Dhabi, two panels (including the 2010 BTBA announcement), and an extended trip to New York. Two-and-a-half weeks of traveling is ...
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Independent Foreign Fiction Prize Longlist
So, even though we’re in danger right now of becoming a blog that only writes about book prizes (or maybe I’m only feeling that way because the Best Translated Book Award has been on my mind for so long), we would be remiss if we didn’t make mention of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize ...
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European Book Club Breakfast
Where: Romanian Cultural Institute in New York, 573-577 3rd Avenue (at 38th Street), New York, NY Join the European Book Club partners for a special breakfast on March 10 to learn more about this cross-country collaboration project dedicated to promoting contemporary European literature among NYC readers. The event will ...
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LIT&LUNCH: Alison Anderson on JMG Le Clézio and Muriel Barbery
Where: 111 Minna St (Minna @ 2nd), San Francisco, CA Literary translation is often a job with little renown and few financial rewards, but translator Alison Anderson managed to strike it big twice in 2008: the French author JMG Le Clézio, whose novels Anderson has translated, received the Nobel Prize for literature, and ...
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Silje Bekeng on the Modern Norwegian Novel
Norwegians are said to be born with skis on their feet—ready from birth for a life in harmony with the inhospitable Nordic nature. Maybe my mother was lacking some important vitamin during the pregnancy. No skis accompanied me into this world. Instead of seeking the woods and mountains like a true ...
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Reading the World Podcast #2: Susan Harris
Well, it’s the beginning of the month and time for another Reading the World Podcast. Erica Mena and I co-host this monthly podcast, which features interviews with authors, translators, scholars, publishers, and other international literature enthusiasts. All of the episodes we’ve taped are pretty awesome—a ...
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Interview with Margaret Schwartz
Following on last week’s serialization of Margaret Schwartz’s introduction to Macedonio Fernandez’s The Museum of Eterna’s Novel (The First Good Novel), here’s an interview that she did with Meredith Keller, one of our current interns. Meredith Keller: I know you spent your Fulbright year ...
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Festival Neue Literatur: Small Town Discussion
Where: Deutsches Haus NYU, 42 Washington Mews, New York, NY Free and open to the public Authors: Martin Becker, Lorenz Langenegger, John Wray In conversation with Daniela Strigl and Klaus Nüchtern I hate being odd in a small town If they stare let them stare in New York City At this pink eyed painting albino How ...
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Preface to a Prologue of an Idea of a Thought (Part V)
While I’m tanning doing journalism at the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair, I thought it would be interesting to totally overload everyone on Macedonio Fernandez. Museum of Eterna’s Novel ranks right up there as one of the books that I’m most proud to be associated with. It’s unique, strange, ...
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Preface to a Prologue of an Idea of a Thought (Part IV)
While I’m tanning doing journalism at the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair, I thought it would be interesting to totally overload everyone on Macedonio Fernandez. Museum of Eterna’s Novel ranks right up there as one of the books that I’m most proud to be associated with. It’s unique, strange, ...
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Leaving the ADIBF for Dutch Cuisine and Odd Cab Rides
I actually managed to leave the ADIBF for a few hours today to attend a special lunch at the home of the Dutch Ambassador. I was mainly there to talk with Maarten Valken about next January’s “Non-Fiction Conference,” which will be focused on e-books. (More on this later, but in brief, this sounds like an ...
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Preface to a Prologue of an Idea of a Thought (Part III)
While I’m tanning doing journalism at the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair, I thought it would be interesting to totally overload everyone on Macedonio Fernandez. Museum of Eterna’s Novel ranks right up there as one of the books that I’m most proud to be associated with. It’s unique, strange, ...
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"The Brittle Age and Returning Upland" by Rene Char [BTBA 2010 Poetry Finalists]
Over the next three days, we’ll be featuring each of the ten titles from this year’s Best Translated Book Award poetry shortlist. Click here for all past write-ups. The Brittle Age and Returning Upland by Rene Char. Translated from the French by Gustaf Sobin. (France, Counterpath) This guest post is by ...
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Preface to a Prologue of an Idea of a Thought (Part II)
While I’m tanning doing journalism at the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair, I thought it would be interesting to totally overload everyone on Macedonio Fernandez. Museum of Eterna’s Novel ranks right up there as one of the books that I’m most proud to be associated with. It’s unique, strange, ...
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Preview of the 2010 International Prize for Arabic Fiction
I hate reposting Abu Dhabi blog entries while the fair is still going on (or, to be more accurate, just starting), since everyone should be visiting the official ADIBF blog for info about all the goings on. That said, since I will be attending the award ceremony for this year’s Arab Booker later tonight, and since with ...
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Preface to a Prologue of an Idea of a Thought (Part I)
While I’m tanning doing journalism at the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair, I thought it would be interesting to totally overload everyone on Macedonio Fernandez. Museum of Eterna’s Novel ranks right up there as one of the books that I’m most proud to be associated with. It’s unique, strange, ...
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"Selections" by Nicole Brossard [BTBA 2010 Poetry Finalists]
Over the next five days, we’ll be featuring each of the ten titles from this year’s Best Translated Book Award poetry shortlist. Click here for all past write-ups. Selections by Nicole Brossard. Translated from the French by Guy Bennett, David Dea, Barbara Godard, Pierre Joris, Robert Majzels and Erin ...
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So, This Is Abu Dhabi [ADIBF 2010]
It took an extra day and 28+ hours of travel, but I’m finally in Abu Dhabi for this year’s International Book Fair. The Snowpocalypse of Thursday night/Friday morning left me (blissfully—but that’s for another post . . . like one for Thursday) stranded in the Rochester region, with my original flight ...
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"Scale and Stairs" by Heeduk Ra [BTBA 2010 Poetry Finalists]
Over the next six days, we’ll be featuring each of the ten titles from this year’s Best Translated Book Award poetry shortlist. Click here for all past write-ups. Scale and Stairs by Heeduk Ra. Translated from the Korean by Woo-Chung Kim and Christopher Merrill. (Korea, White Pine Press) This guest post ...
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"K.B. The Suspect" by Marcelijus Martinaitis [BTBA 2010 Poetry Finalists]
Over the next seven days, we’ll be featuring each of the ten titles from this year’s Best Translated Book Award poetry shortlist. Click here for all past write-ups. K.B. The Suspect by Marcelijus Martinaitis. Translated from the Lithuania by Laima Vince. (Lithuania, White Pine Press) This guest post is ...
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The Greatest Event Since It and the World Began
This is still a few weeks away, but seeing that I’ll be off in Abu Dhabi for a while (see tomorrow’s post), I thought I should mention this now. On Thursday, March 11th at 7:00pm at the Americas Society (680 Park Ave, NYC) there will be a special event in honor of the first English publication of Macedonio ...
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Bookstore Materials for BTBA 2010
Following on the last post about McNally Jackson, the other thing that I e-mailed to the booksellers on our mailing list was this pdf brochure/flyer that anyone can print out and use in promoting this year’s BTBA finalists. This can be printed double-sided (just make sure to go into print settings first and indicate ...
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BTBA 2010 and McNally Jackson
Last week I sent out a brief message to our indie bookseller mailing list (which all booksellers can easily join by e-mailing me at chad.post [at] rochester.edu) about the Best Translated Book Award Finalists and how we’d be willing to run pictures of any displays that the stores put together for the award. (To be ...
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"Lightwall" by Liliana Ursu [BTBA 2010 Poetry Finalists]
Over the next eight days, we’ll be featuring each of the ten titles from this year’s Best Translated Book Award poetry shortlist. Click here for all past write-ups. Lightwall by Liliana Ursu. Translated from the Romanian by Sean Cotter. (Romania, Zephyr Press) Poetry judge Matthew Zapruder — poet, ...
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Chad Talks up the 2010 BTB Awards on WHAM News
Continuing his proud tradition of infiltrating your local morning news shows (if your locale happens to be Rochester, NY), Chad was on WHAM news, again, this morning. In just over four minutes, he talked about the recently announced Best Translated Book Award finalists, the breadth of languages and cultures highlighted ...
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BTBA 2010 Fiction Finalists: A Recap
A commenter asked the other day for links to all of the daily summaries for this year’s BTBA fiction finalists. Well, I’ll do you one better . . . Below are all ten shortlisted books with links to AND excerpts from the overview pieces: César Aira, Ghosts. Translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews. ...
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"The Russian Version" by Elena Fanailova [BTBA 2010 Poetry Finalists]
Over the next ten days, we’ll be featuring each of the ten titles from this year’s Best Translated Book Award poetry shortlist. Click here for all past write-ups. The Russian Version by Elena Fanailova. Translated from the Russian by Genya Turovskaya and Stephanie Sandler. (Russia, Ugly Duckling ...
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Min Kamp
Last fall at Frankfurt I visited with quite a few Norwegian publishers, and every one of them was talking about Karl Ove Knausgård’s Min Kamp (My Struggle, or Mein Kampf to make the provocation plain), which our good friends at Oktober Forlaget were publishing in six volumes, three in one season and three the next, for ...
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World's End
It’s incredibly difficult to imagine that there is anything new to say about Pablo Neruda. But Neruda, probably the most prolific poet of the twentieth century, provides endless opportunities for his readers, scholars and critics to re-evaluate his oeuvre. World’s End (Copper Canyon, 2009) is a treasure-trove of intimate ...
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Latest Review: "World's End" by Pablo Neruda
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is Erica Mena’s examination of Pablo Neruda’s World’s End, which came out last year from Copper Canyon, and is translated from the Spanish by William O’Daly. In case anyone’s keeping track, that makes two—count ‘em, two—poetry reviews ...
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"Desert" by J.M.G. Le Clézio [BTBA 2010 Fiction Longlist]
We did it! Here’s the final featured title from this year’s Best Translated Book Award fiction longlist. Click here for all past write-ups. Desert by J.M.G. Le Clézio. Translated from the French by C. Dickson. (France, David R. Godine) Below is a guest post from Monica Carter, a member of the BTBA ...
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The Year of Jakov Lind
Today marks the third anniversary of Jakov Lind’s death. It was the occasion of his death that first brought Lind to our attention—I’m pretty sure I first read about him on Ready, Steady, Book, where Mark posted a link to his obituary. I did a little investigating at the time, and I discovered that his books ...
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"Brecht at Night" by Mati Unt [BTBA 2010 Fiction Longlist]
Over the next two days, we’ll be highlighting a book a day from the Best Translated Book Award fiction longlist. Click here for all past write-ups. Brecht at Night by Mati Unt. Translated from the Estonian by Eric Dickens. (Estonia, Dalkey Archive) Below is a guest post from Bill Marx — the man behind ...
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"Landscape with Dog and Other Stories" by Ersi Sotiropoulos [BTBA 2010 Fiction Longlist]
Over the next four days, we’ll be highlighting a book a day from the Best Translated Book Award fiction longlist. Click here for all past write-ups. Landscape with Dog and Other Stories by Ersi Sotiropoulos. Translated from the Greek by Karen Emmerich. (Greece, Clockroot Books) Below is a guest post from ...
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"News from the Empire" by Fernando del Paso [BTBA 2010 Fiction Longlist]
Over the next six days, we’ll be highlighting a book a day from the Best Translated Book Award fiction longlist. Click here for all past write-ups. News from the Empire by Fernando del Paso. Translated from the Spanish by Alfonso Gonzalez and Stella T. Clark. (Mexico, Dalkey Archive) I can’t do half the ...
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Indie Bookstore Pics (Part II)
Did I ever mention that I’m obsessed with Lost? I mean, this international lit thing is great, but right now, given the choice between writing a long post about Fernando del Paso’s News of the Empire or spending my lunch watching last night’s episode, I can safely say that you’ll be reading a long ...
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Indie Bookstore Pics (Part I)
The other week I was talking with Paul Kozlowski of Other Press about studies that have been done on what gets a reader to actually purchase a book. As we all cynically assume, when it comes to purchasing a physical book from a brick-and-mortar store, reviews hardly matter at all—it’s all about the cover and the ...
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Indie Presses on Campuses
This PW article by Judith Rosen actually came out last, but I got so busy with life—and the BTBA longlist write-ups—that I never had a chance to post about it . . . Entitled “Indie Presses Find a Home on Campuses,” the piece focuses on the handful of presses located on university campuses, what the ...
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Chad on Chicago Public Radio
Chad was on Chicago Public Radio’s Worldview yesterday afternoon. His shout outs included: Per Petterson, JMG Le Clézio, Herta Müller, and Stieg Larsson. Americans don’t get the chance to read many books written by authors who aren’t from this country. That’s because just about three percent of all the ...
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The Changeling
Kenzaburo Oe, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994, has always been a novelist concerned with big, important ideas and big, important problems, and yet his works are always written on a much smaller scale, focusing on that one individual character and how he is affected by the world around him. One may never read a ...
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Latest Review: "The Changeling" by Kenzaburo Oe
The “latest addition” to our Reviews Section is a piece on Nobel Prize winning author Kenzaburo Oe’s The Changeling, which was translated from the Japanese by Deborah Boliver Boehm and comes out from Grove Press in March. Will Eells—who is a former Open Letter intern and did a fantastic job ...
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"Vilnius Poker" by Ricardas Gavelis [BTBA 2010 Fiction Longlist]
Over the next seven days, we’ll be highlighting a book a day from the Best Translated Book Award fiction longlist. Click here for all past write-ups. Vilnius Poker by Ricardas Gavelis. Translated from the Lithuanian by Elizabeth Novickas. (Lithuania, Open Letter) Vilnius Poker may well be one of the darkest ...
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BTBA Finalists Event at Idlewild Books
We still have a few (like seven) books from the fiction longlist left to profile, but to be honest, my attention is turning to next week’s announcement of the fiction and poetry finalists . . . As we did last year, we’ll be announcing 10 books from each category—truly the best of the best of the literature ...
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"In the United States of Africa" by Abdourahman Waberi [BTBA 2010 Fiction Longlist]
Over the next eight days, we’ll be highlighting a book a day from the Best Translated Book Award fiction longlist. Click here for all past write-ups. In the United States of Africa by Abdourahman Waberi. Translated from the French by David and Nicole Ball. (Djibouti, University of Nebraska Press) Below is a ...
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"Op Oloop" by Juan Filloy [BTBA 2010 Fiction Longlist]
Over the next nine days, we’ll be highlighting a book a day from the Best Translated Book Award fiction longlist. Click here for all past write-ups. Op Oloop by Juan Filloy. Translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman. (Argentina, Dalkey Archive) I waited years for this book to come out. Years. Back in the ...
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"There's Nothing I Can Do When I Think of You Late at Night" by Cao Naiqian [BTBA 2010 Fiction Longlist]
Over the next ten days, we’ll be highlighting a book a day from the Best Translated Book Award fiction longlist. Click here for all past write-ups. There’s Nothing I Can Do When I Think of You Late at Night by Cao Naiqian. Translated from the Chinese by John Balcom. (China, Columbia University ...
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Tales from a Finnish Tupa
It’s a frequently-cited notion that fairy tales and folk stories provide children with a sort of moral or educational compass. Don’t stray from the path. Don’t talk to strangers. Work hard and be honest. Don’t trust your stepmother. But while we may generally associate this literary form with children, it’s ...
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Latest Review: "Tales of a Finnish Tupa" adapted by James Cloyd Bowman and Margery Bianco
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Larissa Kyzer on Tales of a Finnish Tupa, adapted by James Cloyd Bowman and Margery Bianco from a translation by Aili Kolehmainen with illustrations by Laura Bannon. I know we’ve been a bit slow about getting new reviews online, but now that the BTBA fiction ...
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"Every Man Dies Alone" by Hans Fallada [BTBA 2010 Fiction Longlist]
Over the next eleven days, we’ll be highlighting a book a day from the Best Translated Book Award fiction longlist. Click here for all past write-ups. Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada. Translated from the German by Michael Hofmann (Germany, Melville House) Below is a guest post from Tom Roberge, an editor ...
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"The Discoverer" by Jan Kjaerstad [BTBA 2010 Fiction Longlist]
Over the next twelve days, we’ll be highlighting a book a day from the Best Translated Book Award fiction longlist. Click here for all past write-ups. The Discoverer by Jan Kjaerstad. Translated from the Norwegian by Barbara Haveland. (Norway, Open Letter) Yes, The Discoverer is the third volume in Jan ...
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Reading the World Podcast #1
Over the past few months I’ve dropped hints here and there about the Reading the World podcast series that Erica Mena and I put together. We came up with the idea out of the last ALTA conference, and at the MLA convention this past December, we talked with a number of translators about their work and various issues ...
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"The Weather Fifteen Years Ago" by Wolf Haas [BTBA 2010 Fiction Longlist]
Over the next fourteen days, we’ll be highlighting a book a day from the Best Translated Book Award fiction longlist. Click here for all past write-ups. The Weather Fifteen Years Ago by Wolf Haas. Translated from the German by Stephanie Gilardi and Thomas S. Hansen. (Austria, Ariadne) Wolf Haas’s The ...
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The Most Important Television Event of the Century
Begins tonight with the season six premiere of Lost. And of course, since I lost the TV in my divorce (grr!) and have my kids tonight (yah! except for the no going over to someone’s house to watch Lost aspect), I’ll have to wait until tomorrow or Thursday to actually see tonight’s episode . . . So if anyone ...
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"Giving the Fig"
I’m no marketing guru, but there is one rule of advertising that I think everyone should follow: if you dominate a market, never draw attention to your (smaller) competition. This is why Apple attacks Microsoft so directly in ads—for better or worse, Microsoft has a market share the size of a Chicagoan’s ...
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Indie Bookstores, Google Preview, and the Interwebs
Below is a special guest post from Jeff Waxman, bookseller at Seminary Co-op in Chicago (one of the five greatest indie bookstores in America) and managing editor of The Front Table. As someone who loves independent bookstores—and worked in them for years—I really want to see them survive, but Jeff’s post ...
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"Death in Spring" by Merce Rodoreda [BTBA 2010 Fiction Longlist]
Over the next three weeks, we’ll be highlighting a book a day from the Best Translated Book Award fiction longlist. Click here for all past write-ups. Death in Spring by Merce Rodoreda. Translated from the Catalan by Martha Tennent. (Spain, Open Letter) The other day, I had a really interesting conversation ...
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I Want to Be the Rain on Your Game-Changing Gadget
So guess what’s not pictured above in the image of the brand new iPad and its crucial apps? IBooks, the “magical bullet” that’s going to “save” the publishing industry . . . OK, so I’ll admit upfront that I was more than a bit skeptical about the iPad/Tablet/Slate before the ...
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"Memories of the Future" by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky [BTBA 2010 Fiction Longlist]
Over the next three weeks, we’ll be highlighting a book a day from the Best Translated Book Award fiction longlist. Click here for all past write-ups. Memories of the Future by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky. Translated from the Russian by Joanne Turnbull. (Russia, New York Review Books) Since today is the day ...
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"Ghosts" by Cesar Aira [BTBA 2010 Fiction Longlist]
Over the next three weeks, we’ll be highlighting a book a day from the Best Translated Book Award fiction longlist. Click here for all past write-ups. Ghosts by Cesar Aira. Translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews. (Argentina, New Directions) During a late night phone conversation last night, I mentioned ...
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A LOST Book: Shusaku Endo's "Deep River"
OK, so the podcast about the literature of Lost is now online in its entirety, and hopefully is of some interest to Lost fans . . . We covered a ton of stuff in here: past books from the show, including The Third Policeman, The Invention of Morel, VALIS; my feeling that the best aesthetic lens through which to approach Lost ...
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"Rex" by Jose Manuel Prieto [BTBA 2010 Fiction Longlist]
Over the next three weeks, we’ll be highlighting a book a day from the Best Translated Book Award fiction longlist. Click here for all past write-ups. Rex by Jose Manuel Prieto. Translated from the Spanish by Esther Allen. (Cuba, Grove Press) I’m about to give away the game in relation to this novel . . ...
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How to Time Travel to February 2nd . . .
Long-time 3% readers know that in addition to literature in translation there are a couple other obsessions that pop-up here on the blog, like my love of the St. Louis Cardinals (and related hatred for the Cubs) and my nearly unhealthy obsession with Lost. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with the show knows about ...
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So Translation Is Having a Moment . . . (Part III)
So, on top of articles in the Chronicle and the New Yorker, there was a third moment for translation that took place last week—The Elegance of the Hedgehog has now been on the NY Times Bestseller list for 52-weeks. From the Europa Editions website: Five years ago, when we opened Europa Editions, people seemed to ...
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So Translation Is Having a Moment . . . (Part II)
When I was in New York last week for sales calls and publicity meetings (which is why the blog has been so slow . . . But I’m back! And excited about life, the BTBAs, books, and everything, so expect an onslaught of material for the next few days . . . ), everyone was all abuzz about the fact that the New Yorker ran an ...
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NPR on Jaipur Literature Festival
Morning Edition had a cool piece on this morning about this year’s recently concluded (as in today) Jaipur Literature Festival, which included a few seconds with the Festival’s director William Dalrymple. It’s only the Festival’s 5th year, but they have managed to line up an impressive list af ...
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So Translation Is Having a Moment . . . (Part I)
I know E.J. posted Jennifer Howard’s article on translation in the academy last Monday, but because it’s such an interesting—and charged—topic, and because it’s just one of a few cool translation-related articles that came out in the past week. The recent MLA convention—where the focus ...
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Latest Review: "Monsieur Pain" by Roberto Bolaño
The latest addition to our Review Section is a piece on Roberto Bolaño’s first novel to come out in 2010: Monsieur Pain, translated by Chris Andrews and published by New Directions. This review is by Dan Vitale, a writer and editor who has written a number of pieces for Three Percent. And he definitely makes this ...
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"The Skating Rink" by Roberto Bolaño [BTBA 2010 Fiction Longlist]
Over the next four weeks, we’ll be highlighting a book a day from the Best Translated Book Award fiction longlist. Click here for all past write-ups. The Skating Rink by Roberto Bolaño. Translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews. (Chile, New Directions) Well, 2009 wasn’t nearly the “Year of ...
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"The Confessions of Noa Weber" by Gail Hareven [BTBA 2010 Fiction Longlist]
Over the next four weeks, we’ll be highlighting a book a day from the Best Translated Book Award fiction longlist. Click here for all past write-ups. The Confessions of Noa Weber by Gail Hareven. Translated from the Hebrew by Dalya Bilu. (Israel, Melville House) It’s hard to write an objective overview ...
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"The Zafarani Files" by Gamal al-Ghitani [BTBA 2010 Fiction Longlist]
Over the next five weeks, we’ll be highlighting a book a day from the Best Translated Book Award fiction longlist. Click here for all past write-ups. The Zafarani Files by Gamal al-Ghitani. Translated from the Arabic by Farouk Abdel Wahab. (Egypt, American University in Cairo Press) I came across The Zafarani ...
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"Wonder" by Hugo Claus [BTBA 2010 Fiction Longlist]
Over the next five weeks, we’ll be highlighting a book a day from the Best Translated Book Award fiction longlist. Click here for all past write-ups. Wonder by Hugo Claus. Translated from the Dutch by Michael Henry Heim. (Belgium, Archipelago) I might be wrong about this, but it seems like Hugo Claus is one ...
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"The Mighty Angel" by Jerzy Pilch [BTBA 2010 Fiction Longlist]
Over the next five weeks, we’ll be highlighting a book a day from the Best Translated Book Award fiction longlist. Click here for all past write-ups. The Mighty Angel by Jerzy Pilch. Translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston. (Poland, Open Letter) The Mighty Angel is a difficult book to talk about. ...
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"The Twin" by Gerbrand Bakker [BTBA 2010 Fiction Longlist]
Over the next five weeks, we’ll be highlighting a book a day from the Best Translated Book Award fiction longlist. Click here for all past write-ups. The Twin by Gerbrand Bakker. Translated from the Dutch by David Colmer. (Netherlands, Archipelago) Archipelago has done an amazing job of creating a brand for ...
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The Sebald Lecture: Absent Jews and Invisible Executioners
Where: Kings Place, London N1, United Kingdom Curated by The British Centre for Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia and The Society of Authors WG Sebald’s novels are almost unique among the narrative fiction written by non-Jewish Germans in the postwar period for their depiction of the lives of ...
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Desert
The lack of any article in the title should immediately tip off the reader: Desert is not about a particular desert, such as the Sahara, or even the desert, that great thirsty body that covers the world in sandy blotches and makes travelers conflate Perrier with Dom Pérignon. Both are certainly integral to the novel, but the ...
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Latest Review: "Desert" by J.M.G. Le Clézio
The latest addition to our Review Section is a piece on Nobel Prize winner J.M.G. Le Clézio’s Desert, translated from the French by C. Dickson and published by David R. Godine as part of the amazing Verba Mundi series. Timothy Nassau, an intern here last summer and current student at Brown, wrote this review. ...
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Why More Foreign Writers Aren't Published in America
Over at Publishing Perspectives, Emily Williams continues her series of articles on scouting with one about why more books aren’t published in English translation. Her focus is more on “large scale houses that compete for high profile submissions” than on the small, indie, nonprofits like Open Letter and ...
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"The Tanners" by Robert Walser [BTBA 2010 Fiction Longlist]
Over the next five weeks, we’ll be highlighting a book a day from the Best Translated Book Award fiction longlist. Click here for all past write-ups. The Tanners by Robert Walser. Translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky. (Switzerland, New Directions) Thanks to New York Review Books, University of ...
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2010 Best Translated Book Awards: Honorable Mention
Before jumping into the day-by-day look at each of the 25 titles on the Best Translated Book Award fiction longlist I thought I’d post about a few of the books that didn’t make the list. It’s cliched to even say, but it really is difficult coming up with this list. Down to the final moment of voting, I was ...
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Edward Hopper
Edward Hopper (Graywolf, 2009) is a complex and striking work of narrative-lyrical poetry, skirting on the epic, that is also one of the more interesting books of poetry to be recently published in English. There are a number of things that make Lawrence Venuti’s translation of Ernest Farrés’s book of poems in the voice ...
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Latest Review: "Edward Hopper" by Ernest Farrés
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Erica Mena on Edward Hopper, a poetry collection by Catalan author Ernest Farrés, translated by Lawrence Venuti and published by Graywolf Press. I’ve been interested in this collection for a while—partly because I love Catalan lit, but also because Quim ...
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New WWB Site + Quim Monzó
The January issue of Words Without Borders is online (as is their new, and Vastly improved, website), and this month it focuses on ‘flash fiction.’ Our own Quim Monzó has two stories featured, Thirty Lines and The Fork. Also featured is one of my personal favorites, José Eduardo Agualusa. (Even if you ...
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To Be a Hipster Is to Be Remarkably Provincial
There was a time when I thought Flavorpill’s Daily Dose e-mail was all right. Sure, there was the occasional annoying tone, the fact they never covered any of our books, and the hipper-than-thou sort of attitude. But still, it picked up where VeryShortList was before the New York Observer drove it into the ground bought ...
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2010 Best Translated Book Award: Fiction Longlist
After months and months (twelve to be exact) and books upon books, our nine fiction panelists finally came up with the 25-title fiction longlist for this year’s Best Translated Book Award. It was a rather difficult decision—it always is, and for me, there’s always a moment where it seems like 30 books ...
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Unpacking Galassi's Op-Ed Piece
On the surface, the op-ed piece that FSG publisher Jonathan Galassi wrote for the Tiimes this past weekend seems pretty mundane. His main point seems to be that good editors at good publishing houses make good books better. Or more directly: publishers do more than simply print and sell books. They have special knowledge ...
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BOMB's Americas Issue
Every year BOMB puts together a special “Americas Issue” focusing on art and literature from a different part of the Americas. This tends to mean South America, but you never know, maybe Canada will be—or was?—the focus at some point in time. Regardless, this is always one of my favorite issues of the ...
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Genres, Tags, and Why Don't We Subcategorize Books?
Today’s piece in the New York Times on indie rock sub-categorization isn’t particularly interesting . . . although when you apply what’s been happening in music to the world of books, there are a few intriguing outcomes. The main thrust of Ben Sisario’s Times piece is that indie music has atomized ...
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Plants Don't Drink Coffee
Plants Don’t Drink Coffee, Basque author Unai Elorriaga’s first novel to be translated into English, spins four intersecting tales about the magic of everyday life. Narrated by Tomas, an earnest young boy and several other members of his sweetly eccentric family—including a rugby-obsessed uncle and a ...
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Latest Review: "Plants Don't Drink Coffee" by Unai Elorriaga
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Larissa Kyzer on Unai Elorriaga’s Plants Don’t Drink Coffee, which was translated from the Basque by Amaia Gabantxo and published by Archipelago earlier this year. Elorriaga is one of only a handful (or maybe only two?) contemporary Basque authors to have ...
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Back from MLA and Goodbye to 2009
Sorry that things have been a bit quiet around here. A couple days after Christmas I drove down to Philadelphia for this year’s Modern Language Association Convention, which had a special focus on Translation. (Jen Howard wrote a great summary piece about this for the Chronicle of Higher Education that’s worth ...
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Open Letter in the NY Times
A few weeks ago, Larry Rohter of the New York Times came up to interview just about everyone involved in Open Letter and the University of Rochester’s Literary Translation programs. The piece he was working on appeared in the paper over the weekend. So, if you’re curious what we’re doing up here, and if ...
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Winter Reading List
One of the best unexpected results of putting together the translation databases is being able to put together an awesome reading list of forthcoming translations. (Or, to put it in a slightly more negative light: to know about way more interesting books than I’ll ever have time to read.) The spring is a perfect ...
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The She-Devil in the Mirror
At last year’s Best Translated Book Award ceremony, there were three novels cited as the best of the best: eventual winner Attila Bartis’s Tranquility, Roberto Bolano’s 2666, and Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Senselessness. All the judges agreed that Moya’s book was really tight and amazing. ...
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Latest Review: "The She-Devil in the Mirror" by Horacio Castellanos Moya
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece on Horacio Castellanos Moya’s The She-Devil in the Mirror that I wrote. Katherine Silver translated this, and New Directions published it a couple months ago. Senselessness was one of my favorite books from last year, and She-Devil is up there on my Best of 2009 ...
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Summer 2010 Open Letter Catalog
Only seems appropriate that just before Christmas we should announce our summer list of titles . . . You can click here to download a pdf version of the new catalog (which contains excerpts from all the books), or, for those of you who are anti-pdf, the list below has the basic information for the next five Open Letter ...
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Translation Databases: 2009 & 2010
Since we’re basically at the end of the year, I thought it would be a good time to do one last final update to the 2009 Translation Database . . . and to post the first one of 2010. First off, here’s the link to download the 2009 Translation spreadsheet. As you can see, this file contains all the original ...
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Running
Jean Echenoz’s Running is a fictional investigation of the life and athletic genius of Emil Zátopek, a Czech long-distance runner who is widely regarded as one of the great runners of the 20th Century. The novel opens in World War II, with the German invasion of Moravia. Emil, a teenager at the time, is working at ...
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Latest Review: "Running" by Jean Echenoz
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by our own E.J. Van Lanen on Jean Echenoz’s Running, which was recently released by The New Press in Linda Coverdale’s translation. Personally, I’m a big Echenoz fan—especially of his earlier noir-detective books like Cherokee—and this is ...
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Jan/Feb 2010 Issue of World Literature Today
Michael Orthofer has complained in the past about the crappy format of World Literature Today online, and he’s absolutely right. WLT (along with the Review of Contemporary Fiction, another publication resisting the online world) is one of the most interesting magazines being published today concerned with international ...
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If We Don't Publish It, People Won't Steal It
Every time I feel like I’ve said all I really want to say about e-books and digital revolution (see all of these pieces from my recent trip to Paris), some crazy announcement or other is made, feathers are ruffled, barbs are traded, and I feel the insane itch to comment . . . And no matter how much I try and resist ...
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Filling in Gaps in The Golden Calf
Early this month, Open Letter released its new translation of The Golden Calf by Ilf & Petrov, a satiric Russian writing duo from the 1930s who are most well known for this novel and its predecessor, The Twelve Chairs , which was made into a Mel Brooks movie. Both of these books are insanely funny, although to be honest, ...
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Open Letter/University of Rochester MLA Reception
December isn’t just about gifts, year-end lists1, and tax-deductible donations2—it’s also about academics getting together at the Modern Languages Assocation conference to present papers, interview for jobs, and drink.3 This year’s convention takes place in Philadelphia from the 27th until the 30th, ...
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PRI's World Books Holiday List and Podcast
I’m a big fan of year-end lists. Especially year-end lists that include Open Letter titles . . . But seriously, the International Reads for the Holidays feature that Bill Marx put together for PRI’s World Books is a very solid, quirky, highly literary collection of great titles from 2009. Bill is a panelists ...
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Best Translated Book Award: Poetry!
A few weeks back, I posted about the 2010 Best Translated Book Award and included all of the dates and information for the Fiction selections. (To recap: We’ll announce the 25-title longlist on Tuesday, January 5th, the ten finalists on Tuesday, February 16th, and the winner at a TBD day in mid-March.) In terms of ...
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And Now, the French-American Foundation Award
I believe I posted about this a few weeks ago, but with the deadline coming up quick, it’s worth mentioning again: The Florence Gould Foundation and the French-American Foundation are currently accepting submissions for their Annual Translation Prizes. This year the foundation will present a $10 000 cash ...
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Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize
Following on the last post about December being a month of year-end donations, it’s also a month of submitting applications and books for a variety of awards. So here’s the first of three posts about various book prizes: On behalf of the Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture at Columbia University, I am ...
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Support CAT, Win Books
December isn’t all about gift getting, crowded shopping malls, uncomfortable family gatherings, and cookies—it’s also about year-end donations to worthy non-profit organizations such as the Center for the Art of Translation. As an added incentive, if you donate more than $5 to CAT, you’ll be entered ...
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Haruki Murakami and the Problems of Popularity
I’m home sick—damn winter colds that are even resistant to Advil Cold & Sinus, the Wonder Drug—so it’s a perfect day for a guest post from intern Will Eells. You might remember Will from his review of The Housekeeper and the Professor, and he will be writing more reviews for us in the future, ...
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Catching Up on "What Bolano Read"
Fallen way behind on tracking the brilliant Melville House series on “What Bolano Read.” These ten posts are culled from Roberto Bolano: The Last Interview and Other Conversations, which Melville House recently published. And which you can purchase for 20% off during Melville’s Holiday Sale (more on the sale ...
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Kirkus Reviews, Out!
As was announced yesterday, Kirkus Reviews (and Editor & Publisher) is shutting down. Which kind of has people a bit worked up. It’s not every day that you see such a palpable sign of your industry’s troubles as when one of the few pure trade publications just ceases to be. When I was at Dalkey, a Kirkus ...
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The Penguin Classics Borges Series
One of my favorite parts of this job (aside from seeing our own books in print and on bookstore shelves) is opening the mail and seeing all the new books coming out. Especially when I receive things like the first two volumes of the new Borges series that Penguin Classics is bringing out next April. These first two ...
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Europes
After having published Return to Calm, Host Publications now offers us another book by Jacques Réda, also bilingual and also in Aaron Prevots’s translation—Europes. If in an “official” way Europes could be called a “travel essay,” the book’s fluid character undermines this characterization. Recording the ...
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Latest Review: "Europes" by Jacques Reda
The latest addition to our Review Section is a piece by Daniela Hurezanu on Jacques Reda’s Europes, which was translated from the French by Aaron Prevots and published by Host Publications. Daniela Hurezanu—a translator and author who wrote a great review for us of Memory Glyphs—makes this book sound ...
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New Issue of eXchanges
Although I can’t say that I love the edgy capitalization in the journal’s name, I can say that I am a big fan of eXchanges and all of the super-brilliant people who work on this. For those not familiar, eXchanges (OK, last time I’m typing that) is the online journal of literary translation that comes out of ...
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What Bolano Read: Parts 2 and 3
Last week we mentioned the MobyLives series on What Roberto Bolano Read, which is tied into their recent release: Roberto Bolano: The Last Interview & Other Conversations. Well, I fell a bit behind, so here’s some info on the two most recent posts: From Antipoetry: Roberto Bolaño once declared that Franz ...
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NPR's Picks for Best Foreign Fiction
Today is a day of gushing posts . . . Up next: NPR’s year-end literary lists. I remember loving these last year, and am a big fan of the holiday lists they’ve posted so far. Even if I’m not planning on reading any of these books, the Indie Booksellers list is pretty cool, and Alan Cheuse has some intriguing ...
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Is The Quarterly Conversation The Greatest Online Literary Magazine Ever?
My unabashed love for The Quarterly Conversation is longstanding and predates all reviews/excerpts of Open Letter titles . . . In fact, I remember when we first launched Three Percent (back in the simpler, halcyon days of summer 2007 . . . ) Scott Espositon and Quarterly Conversation/Conversational Reading was by far the most ...
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Ten Days of Bolano's Readings
Melville House is simply amazing. The books, the Art of the Novellas series, the recently released Bolano interview book, their MobyLives blog, and their cool t-shirts. And now, their ten day feature on What Bolano Read: Over the next two weeks, we’ll be hosting “What Bolaño Read,” a series of posts by Tom ...
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New Issues: Rattapallax and PEN America
After briefly lamenting the fact that there’s not a lot of places to turn to to learn about/gain exposure to international poetry, I opened my mail and found the new issue of Rattapallax, which, along with CALQUE and Circumference, is one of the best sources for poetry in translation. This particular issue kicks off by ...
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Five Dials Issue 8.2
Just received this e-mail about the new issue of Five Dials: The latest edition of Five Dials — number 8b — is now available. As you will notice, it is an addendum, but a far better addendum than, say, the one you find at the back of your Self Assessment Tax Return. Your free copy is available ...
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Anonymous Celebrity
Ignacio de Loyola Brandao’s fourth book to appear in English, Anonymous Celebrity is most definitely the novel of his most concerned with contemporary issues, and may well be his funniest and richest novel to date. I say this as a big fan of Brandao’s writing (and not just because it’s fun to pronounce his ...
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Latest Review: "Anonymous Celebrity" by Ignacio de Loyola Brandao
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece that I wrote on Ignacio de Loyola Brandao’s Anonymous Celebrity. It’s a great book—one of my favorites of 2009 (so far)—and worth reading (especially if you liked Zero . . . all four hundred of you out there who bought it, that is). Here’s ...
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European Book Club: To Siberia
Where: Norwegian Consulate, 825 Third Avenue, 38th Floor (entrance on 50th Street), New York, NY To Siberia: A brother and sister are forced ever more closely together after the suicide of their grandfather. Their parents’ neglect leaves them wandering the streets of their small Danish village. “Sistermine” dreams of ...
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And In Case You Weren't Already Enamored With Translators . . .
Over at the BOA Editions blog there’s a guest post from Idra Novey—poet and translator of The Clean Shirt of It by Paulo Henriques Britto—about “bad girls” and translation: Whenever this happens, I think of an interview I read a few years ago in the New York Times Magazine with the writer ...
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More Dispatches from Guadalajara
Because it snowed today in Rochester, I’m going to post again about the Guadalajara Book Fair. Mainly, I want to apologize for doing crap research before linking to Hermano Cerdo’s coverage of the fair . . . Their coverage is excellent, and Hermano Cerdo deserves tons of traffic, but there are some others also ...
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TLS Best Books of the Year
Always a big fan of TLS‘s best books of the year feature in which they ask authors to talk about the best books they read over the past year. Even cooler when an Open Letter title is included . . . (And we’re 2 for 2! Last year, The Pets by Bragi Olafsson was selected.) Ali Smith The final parts of two ...
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A Holiday Present for Bolano Fans
I know I’m late to the game on this, but last month Melville House published Roberto Bolano: The Last Interview & Other Conversations featuring a conversation with journalist Monica Maristain—which turned out to be Bolano’s best—along with a collection of conversations with other Latin American ...
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International Authors at the ADIBF
One of the coolest bookfairs to attend is the Abu Dhabit International Book Fair. It’s the coolest in part for the setting (who doesn’t want to visit Abu Dhabi and neighboring Dubai?), in part for the chance to learn a ton about the Arab publishing world, in part for the great programming, and in part because Irum ...
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Translation Is a Love Affair
One of the most interesting facets of Translation Is a Love Affair is the brief bio on Sheila Fischman: Sheila Fischman has published more than 125 translations of contemporary French-Canadian novels including works by Jacques Poulin, Francois Gravel, Anne Hebert, Marie-Claire Blais, Michel Tremblay, and Gaetan Soucy. In ...
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International Literary Quarterly: November Issue
The International Literary Quarterly is consistently good, but I think this month’s issue will be of extra special interest to Three Percent readers: Volta: A Multilingual Anthology This unusual anthology contains seventy-five poems in seventy-five languages. Seventy-four of these poems are ...
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NBCC: Why Translation Matters?
A couple weeks ago, the National Book Critics Circle hosted a panel at Prairie Lights Books in Iowa City entitled “Why Translation Matters?” and featuring Sarah Fay, Christopher Merrill, Cole Swenson, Russell Valentino, (incorrectly identified as Rudolph Valentino on the NBCC info page, which isn’t ...
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Ugly Duckling Presse Subscriptions
2010 Subscriptions to Ugly Duckling Presse are now available. They limit the total number of subscribers to 200 and usually sell out pretty quickly, so act fast. There are three levels of subscriber/donors: At the BASIC SUBSCRIBER level ($150) you receive more than 20 books throughout the year, sent directly to your ...
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Aira on Translation
Seems ironically fitting to follow the first Making the Translator Visible post with this bit from Conversational Reading about a recent interview with Cesar Aira (whose Ghosts is—to steal a line from a New York Times article—so good it’s in need of adjectives yet invented that would be written in italics ...
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2009 Finlandia Prize Nominees
FILI just announced the finalists for this year’s Finlandia Prize—a 30,000 euro award given every year to the best Finnish works of fiction, nonfiction, and children’s literature. Personally, I’m most interested in the fiction, so here’s the complete list with descriptions of each title from ...
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Danuta Borchardt on Pornografia
Where: The Bookstore Of Gloucester, 61 Main St., Gloucester, MA The Bookstore Of Gloucester is pleased to welcome acclaimed translator DANUTA BORCHARDT for a conversation about her translation of Witold Gombrowicz’s novel Pornografia. Witold Gombrowicz wrote Pornografia after leaving his native Poland for Argentina ...
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Divine Madness: Hamsun in America
Where: 58 Park Ave at 38th St, NY, NY $9 ($6 ASF members. In recognition of the 150th anniversary of Knut Hamsun’s birth, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, NRK, has produced a series of films about the author’s life and work. Divine Madness: Hamsun in America portrays the hardships of Hamsun’s childhood, his ...
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"You Have Nothing to Lose but Your Spoons" [ALTA Conference]
As if it isn’t obvious from my earlier posts about ALTA, I’m a huge fan of the conference, the people, the panels. (To riff on the nature of the panels for a second: these are almost anti-MLA type events. It’s an unwritten—or maybe even written—rule that you don’t read a paper on an ALTA ...
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"Glory Is a Drag" [ALTA Conference]
OK, so I may have cocked up the title of yesterday’s ALTA post—my typing/hearing skills are pretty suspect . . . It should’ve read “Short Stop Only While Getting It Off,” although “short drop” might be a bit more, um, dirty—but I’m positive I have today’s right. It ...
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The 2010 Edition of the Best Translated Book Award
Although it seems (to me at least) like we just had the 2009 Best Translated Book Award ceremony a couple months ago, it’s getting to be that time again . . . For the 2010 award, our group of nine fiction panelists (more on them below and more on the poetry people next week), all original translations published ...
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"Short Drop Only While Getting It Off"
So, I’m back from Southern California, all post-ALTA inspired about translation, the state of translation, the amazing manuscripts people are working on, etc. But I’m way, way too jetlagged and exhausted to actually write any real posts today . . . So, in a blogging version of an “under ...
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The Future of Latin American Fiction (Part V)
To celebrate the recent release of Jorge Volpi’s Season of Ash, all this week we’re going to serialize a speech that Jorge gave this past summer on the Future of Latin American Fiction. And, as a special offer, for the next 20 people who subscribe to Open Letter—either a 5 book or 10 book ...
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The Future of Latin American Fiction (Part IV)
To celebrate the recent release of Jorge Volpi’s Season of Ash, all this week we’re going to serialize a speech that Jorge gave this past summer on the Future of Latin American Fiction. And, as a special offer, for the next 20 people who subscribe to Open Letter—either a 5 book or 10 book ...
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The Future of Latin American Fiction (Part III)
To celebrate the recent release of Jorge Volpi’s Season of Ash, all this week we’re going to serialize a speech that Jorge gave this past summer on the Future of Latin American Fiction. And, as a special offer, for the next 20 people who subscribe to Open Letter—either a 5 book or 10 book ...
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Video: Reading the World w/ International Writers and Translators from Ledig House
Last Thursday, we held our final Reading the World Conversation Series event of the fall, featuring a group of four international writers and translators in residence at Ledig House — an international writers residency in New York that specializes in hosting authors and translators from around the world. Now, the ...
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LIT&LUNCH: Re-translating a Masterpiece: Breon Mitchell on Günter Grass
Where: 111 Minna Gallery, 111 Minna St, San Francisco, CA Bring a lunch and join the Center for this LIT&LUNCH event! 2009 sees the publication of one of the most important re-translations in decades: Breon Mitchell’s re-translation of The Tin Drum by Günter Grass, only the second time this novel has been translated ...
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The Future of Latin American Fiction (Part II)
To celebrate the recent release of Jorge Volpi’s Season of Ash, all this week we’re going to serialize a speech that Jorge gave this past summer on the Future of Latin American Fiction. And, as a special offer, for the next 20 people who subscribe to Open Letter—either a 5 book or 10 book ...
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The Housekeeper and the Professor
Contemporary Japanese literature is all too easy to stereotype. As far as the American reading public goes, the only books that come out of Japan seem to be under one of three genres. The first is the “bizarre things happening in an otherwise normal setting” in the mold of Haruki Murakami. As one of the most successful ...
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The Future of Latin American Fiction (Part I)
To celebrate the recent release of Jorge Volpi’s Season of Ash, all this week we’re going to serialize a speech that Jorge gave this past summer on the Future of Latin American Fiction. And, as a special offer, for the next 20 people who subscribe to Open Letter—either a 5 book or 10 book ...
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Hey There, I'm an Author, You're a Reader . . . (Part V of the French Study Trip)
This isn’t the easiest of series to wrap up. In part because of today’s schedule (I have meetings/class from 10am until 1pm, so god only knows when this post will actually go live), and in part because there are no real conclusions that can be drawn. Well, except maybe one: Coming at it from a publishing ...
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Best Review Ever
From Okla Elliott’s review of Season of Ash in Inside Higher Ed: Jorge Volpi’s Season of Ash is the kind of novel that reminds me why I read novels in the first place, but it’s also the kind that makes me wonder why I bother to write. Before the end of this review, I am going to try to convince you that Volpi ...
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Open Letter Books Receives Grant from Amazon.com
We’re interrupting the longest posts known to bloggers to officially announce a grant that we received from Amazon.com to support The Wall in My Head. Here’s the official press release: Open Letter Books has been awarded a $20,000 grant from Amazon.com to support the publication and promotion of The Wall in My ...
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What's Your Consumer Surplus? (Part IV of the French Study Trip)
So for the past couple years I’ve been taking business classes at the University of Rochester’s Simon School. Slowly (and I mean really slowly) working my way towards a M.B.A. (And making interesting friends along the way. If you want a lesson in perspective, try explaining the publishing world to future ...
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How to Sell Books in France (Part III of the Study Trip Posts)
OK, so despite my best efforts, I don’t really have an overarching design to all of these posts about the study trip. I do have ideas about what I’m going to write about tomorrow (good/bad of eBooks and pricing) and on Friday (authors and business models), but I can’t actually imagine that reading these from ...
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French Study Trip (Interlude)
As is only appropriate for someone writing about technology, publishing, and audience development, I’ve been posting all of these French Study Trip posts on my Facebook account as well. Personally, I don’t imagine anyone ever reads these (did you see that one yesterday? It was like the War & Peace of ...
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Drawing Out the Meta-Concepts
There are any number of ways to approach the idea of eBooks and the havoc (and joys!) they might play on the business of publishing. As I alluded to yesterday, our group broke into a few different camps relating to this: there was the corporate side of things (Maja from Hachette, Molly from Penguin, Julia from Harper) whose ...
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Danuta Borchardt discusses Pornografia
Where: Harvard Book Store, 1256 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA Harvard Book Store is pleased to welcome acclaimed translator DANUTA BORCHARDT for a conversation about her translation of Witold Gombrowicz’s novel Pornografia. Witold Gombrowicz wrote Pornografia after leaving his native Poland for Argentina in ...
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French Study Trip
We’ll have a few other sorts of posts going up this week (like maybe, finally, a few new book reviews—this fall has been rather rough on our schedule, but I have pieces in the works on Anonymous Celebrity by Ignacio de Loyola Brandao, The Informers by Juan Gabriel Vasquez, and Running Away by Jean-Philippe Toussaint), but ...
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2 for $22 (reboot)
I know it feels like like self-promotion day on Three Percent, but this bit of promotion is important . . . really (at least to those of you who’ve written in asking about it). The other week we launched an awesomely great deal with a catchy name: 2 for $22. The deal is this: Choose any 2 books for $22 flat (not even ...
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Starred review from PW
Our release of The Golden Calf by Ilf & Petrov is only a few weeks away, and Publishers Weekly has already run a splendid and starred review (and our first starred review in PW, at that): A hilarious blend of absurdist, futurist and surrealist sensibilities, this new (and only complete) translation of Ilf and ...
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Goodbye FBF 2009! Goodbye!
This post originally appeared on the Frankfurt Book Fair blog. I highly recommend visiting the official blog for interesting posts from Richard Nash, Alex Hippisley-Cox, and Arun Wolf I really do love book fair and publishing people and the business of publishing and the discovery of new artists. I love drinking too much, ...
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"The Best Chinese Fiction You've Never Read"
This post originally appeared on the Frankfurt Book Fair blog. I highly recommend visiting the official blog for interesting posts from Richard Nash, Alex Hippisley-Cox, and Arun Wolf Now that the Fair has transformed from a “professionals only” gathering into Cosplay Central, I found some time to swing by the ...
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Independent Indian Publishers Join Forces
This post originally appeared on the Frankfurt Book Fair blog. I highly recommend visiting the official blog for interesting posts from Richard Nash, Alex Hippisley-Cox, and Arun Wolf In order to better promote works of Indian literature and independent Indian presses, a number of publishers are talking about joining forces ...
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Schwob It
This post originally appeared on the Frankfurt Book Fair blog. I highly recommend visiting the official blog for interesting posts from Richard Nash, Alex Hippisley-Cox, and Arun Wolf Seems like every year the Foundation for the Production and Translation of Dutch Literature (NLPVF) comes to the Frankfurt Book Fair with ...
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Why You Should Attend the ADIBF
This post originally appeared on the Frankfurt Book Fair blog. I highly recommend visiting the official blog for interesting posts from Richard Nash, Alex Hippisley-Cox, and Arun Wolf Over the past few years, the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair has grown substantially, taking on a more professional focus and serving as ...
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RTWCS: Jorge Volpi and Alfred Mac Adam
If you happen to be here in Rochester, you should definitely come to U of R’s Plutzik Library at 6:30 for tonight’s Reading the World Conversation Series event with Jorge Volpi and Alfred Mac Adam. Jorge is one of the founding members of the “Crack” group—a collection of young Mexican ...
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Czech Literature Portal
This post originally appeared on the Frankfurt Book Fair blog. I highly recommend visiting the official blog for interesting posts from Richard Nash, Alex Hippisley-Cox, and Arun Wolf After a while, all of the various “book market” presentations from the various countries start to sound the same . . . I know that’s a ...
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Blaft! Or the Sound of a 20kg Weight Crushing a Pomegranate
This post originally appeared on the Frankfurt Book Fair blog. I highly recommend visiting the official blog for interesting posts from Richard Nash, Alex Hippisley-Cox, and Arun Wolf While I’m crushing on India, I thought I’d take a post to introduce Blaft, a very young, very hip, very successful Indian press ...
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GlobalLocal: New Directions in Publishing
This post originally appeared on the Frankfurt Book Fair blog. I highly recommend visiting the official blog for interesting posts from Richard Nash, Alex Hippisley-Cox, and Arun Wolf Back in February, a publishers’ roundtable took place in New Delhi to talk about opportunities of new markets, new models, new ...
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Argentina: Micropresses and Great Authors
This post originally appeared on the Frankfurt Book Fair blog. I highly recommend visiting the official blog for interesting posts from Richard Nash, Alex Hippisley-Cox, and Arun Wolf Just for the tango alone, Argentina would rank as one of my favorite countries in the world. And when you throw in their literary ...
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Juergen Boos on Attendance, China, and the Future of Publishing
This post originally appeared on the Frankfurt Book Fair blog. I highly recommend visiting the official blog for interesting posts from Richard Nash, Alex Hippisley-Cox, and Arun Wolf Prior to the start of the Book Fair there was a lot of speculation about what might happen: would attendance fall down thanks to economically ...
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Estonian Literature, Book Buying, and Capitalism
This post originally appeared on the Frankfurt Book Fair blog. I highly recommend visiting the official blog for interesting posts from Richard Nash, Alex Hippisley-Cox, and Arun Wolf One of the most interesting figures Kaidi Urmet of the Estonian Publishers’ Association dropped in her speech about the Estonian Book ...
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Argentine Writers and the World Book Capital
This post originally appeared on the Frankfurt Book Fair blog. I highly recommend visiting the official blog for interesting posts from Richard Nash, Alex Hippisley-Cox, and Arun Wolf One of the coolest books I’ve come across so far is 12 Argentine Writers volume, which is available at the Buenos Aires Ministry of ...
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Four Big Ideas
This post originally appeared on the Frankfurt Book Fair blog. I highly recommend visiting the official blog for interesting posts from Richard Nash, Alex Hippisley-Cox, and Arun Wolf As part of the Education Forum taking place in Hall 4.2, there was a CEO roundtable this afternoon to discuss “Four Big Ideas that Will ...
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Putting the Reader First at TOC Frankfurt
This post originally appeared on the Frankfurt Book Fair blog. I highly recommend visiting the official blog for interesting posts from Richard Nash, Alex Hippisley-Cox, and Arun Wolf The first ever Tools of Change Frankfurt conference took place all day today, bringing together representatives from a number of different ...
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The Discoverer by Jan Kjaerstad (Part V of V)
The Frankfurt Book Fair is going all week, so rather than vanish for a few days, all this week we’re serializing the opening of Jan Kjaerstad’s _The Discoverer, translated from the Norwegian by Barbara Haveland. This is the follow-up to The Conqueror (although each book in the Wergeland Trilogy can be read ...
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Video: Reading the World w/ Charlotte Mandell
Video is now up from our Reading the World Conversation Series event with the acclaimed French-to-English translator Charlotte Mandell. It’s in seven parts, and there’s interesting stuff throughout—with parts 1-3 comprising the reading and parts 4-7 comprising the questions/answer portion (conducted with ...
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The Discoverer by Jan Kjaerstad (Part IV of V)
The Frankfurt Book Fair is going all week, so rather than vanish for a few days, all this week we’re serializing the opening of Jan Kjaerstad’s _The Discoverer, translated from the Norwegian by Barbara Haveland. This is the follow-up to The Conqueror (although each book in the Wergeland Trilogy can be read ...
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The Discoverer by Jan Kjaerstad (Part III of V)
The Frankfurt Book Fair is going all week, so rather than vanish for a few days, all this week we’re serializing the opening of Jan Kjaerstad’s _The Discoverer, translated from the Norwegian by Barbara Haveland. This is the follow-up to The Conqueror (although each book in the Wergeland Trilogy can be read ...
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Blogging from Frankfurt
Chad may be at the Frankfurt Book Fair all week—making it quieter over here—but you can still read all about it on the Frankfurt Book Fair blog. Chad and a handful of others are all ...
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The Discoverer by Jan Kjaerstad (Part II of V)
The Frankfurt Book Fair is going all week, so rather than vanish for a few days, all this week we’re serializing the opening of Jan Kjaerstad’s _The Discoverer, translated from the Norwegian by Barbara Haveland. This is the follow-up to The Conqueror (although each book in the Wergeland Trilogy can be read ...
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The Discoverer by Jan Kjaerstad (Part I of V)
The Frankfurt Book Fair starts tomorrow, and in a few short hours I’ll be on a plane to Germany. (Hastily preparing for a Tools of Change panel I’m going to be on a mere six hours after I land . . .) Anyway, I will be blogging for the FBF site, and hope to update Three Percent with that info, but in the meantime, ...
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Rhyming Life & Death
The short novel is a form in which writers typically exercise great control over their material, accepting the abbreviated length as a kind of challenge, working within that limitation to craft a tight, jewel-like story in which all the elements of the piece—plot, tone, imagery—work together to create a unified ...
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Latest Review: "Rhyming Life & Death" by Amos Oz
We’re really not trying to kick Amos Oz while he’s down, but in addition to not winning the Nobel Prize for Literature yesterday (there had been rampant speculation, and he was the odds-on favorite for a while), it sounds like his new novel is as messy as the new Houghton Mifflin Harcourt website1 . . . At least ...
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Omission in Herta Muller Coverage [UPDATED]
I’m just going to let this speak for itself . . . It’s a letter to the New York Times from esteemed translator Esther Allen who is also the executive director of the Center for Literary Translation at Columbia and the author of To Be Translated or Not To Be, a recent PEN/Ramon Llull Report on translation and ...
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A Word from the President of MLA on Translation
If you’re in academia, you’re probably already aware that the Presidential Forum theme for this year’s Modern Language Association conference is “The Tasks of Translation in the Twenty-First Century.” To put the theme in context, MLA President Catherine Porter (whom I had the great fortune to ...
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European Book Club: The Have-Nots
Where: Goethe-Institut, 5 East 3rd Street (between Bowery & Second Avenue), New York, NY To register for this session, send an email to germany.nyc@europeanbookclub.org About the book: On September 11, 2001, former couple Jakob and Isabelle meet at a party following a years-long separation, and this time the two ...
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Nobel Prize for Literature for 2009 Given to Herta Mueller
Wow. Michael Orthofer was right and Romanian-German author Herta Mueller has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. From the Associated Press: Romanian-born German writer Herta Mueller won the 2009 Nobel Prize in literature Thursday, honored for work that “with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of ...
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Michael Orthofer's Nobel Prize Speculation
Not many people are as dialed into the Nobel Prize for Literature speculation as Michael Orthofer of the Literary Saloon. And his post this morning about the possibility of Herta Müller being announced as the winner tomorrow is pretty intriguing. And before anyone says “Herta who?,” Michael already put together ...
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The Next Volume of Haruki Murakami's 1Q84
One of my interns mentioned this the other week, and now The Millions points to this article about ads for next summer’s release of the third volume in Murakami’s already mammoth 1Q84: Murakami is currently working on the story, aiming for a release next summer, sources said. Sales of the first and second ...
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More Walser
Over at the New Directions blog there’s a fascinating interview with translator Susan Bernofsky (one of my favorite translators) on Robert Walser (one of my favorite authors). Number of interesting comments on the process and art of translation, but this bit about Walser’s Microscripts was what caught my ...
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Five Dials, Number 8: The Paris Issue
Published by Hamish Hamilton in pdf format and distributed free of charge through their website, Five Dials is a pretty amazing publication that doesn’t seem to get nearly as much attention as it deserves. I mean, in just this 45-page issue there are pieces by Ali Smith, Geoff Dyer, Susan Sontag (on Camus), John Updike, ...
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Today: Reading the World w/ Charlotte Mandell
To all those in the Rochester area, don’t forget that—today at 5:00 p.m. at the University of Rochester—celebrated French translator Charlotte Mandell (Balzac, Flaubert, Proust, et al.) will be reading from her new translation of Zone by Mathias Énard (a 517-page, one-sentence novel, forthcoming from Open ...
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The Future Has Yet To Arrive
Sure, it’s undeniable that e-books are going to play a significant role in the future of publishing (according to this survey from the Frankfurt Book Fair, most professionals believe e-sales will surpass sales of traditional books by 2018—more on this article later in the week), but it’s clear from these two ...
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Other Translation Awards and Fellowships
After yesterday’s post about the Susan Sontag Translation Prize, a reader contacted us about other translation funding opportunities with upcoming deadlines, namely the NEA Translation Fellowships and the PEN Translation Fund Award. We do try and write these up every year, but as someone familiar with how easy it is ...
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The City Lights No Contest
Just received this message from City Lights about a contest they’re running to tie-in with the release of Mario Bellatin’s wonderful Beauty Salon: In a recent interview with PRI’s World Books, Beauty Salon author Mario Bellatin described a writing technique called the “No Method”: “For ...
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The Wheel of Publishing History
In my spare time [sic], I’ve been reading Ted Striphas’s very interesting The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control, which was released by Columbia University Press earlier this year, and very thoughtfully reviewed by Richard Nash in the most recent issue of The Critical Flame. At ...
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Baba Yaga Laid an Egg by Dubravka Ugresic
Thanks to Lauren Wein for sending me a galley of Dubravka Ugresic’s latest book, Baba Yaga Laid an Egg. (Which is translated by Ellen Elias-Bursac, Celia Hawkesworth, and Mark Thompson.) This was released in the UK not too long ago (and has been receiving some great reviews) and will be available here in the States ...
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Oct. 6, 2009 – Reading the World Conversation Series: Charlotte Mandell
I know we just announced the new RTWCS events, but we’re already on the heels of the first one next week(!), featuring the incredible French translator Charlotte Mandell. Anyone and everyone is welcome to attend. Here’s all the info: OCT. 6, 2009 5:00 p.m. Sloan Auditorium (in Goergen Hall) University of ...
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Reading the World Conversation Series: Announcing Our Fall 2009 Events
For all those in the Rochester area, here are the events we’ve scheduled for this fall’s Reading the World Conversation Series. More information on each individual event will be posted soon, but here is the rundown, so you can mark your calendars now. These events are hosted by Open Letter and University of ...
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The Tanners
In the most recent translation of Swiss writer Robert Walser’s work, The Tanners, we are reminded once again why Kafka and Musil were fans—his wit. And like everything in Walser’s writing, it is nuanced and subtle. Instead giving us our melodrama straight with no chaser, he blends it with irony, insouciance and ...
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Latest Review: "The Tanners" by Robert Walser
The latest addition to our Reviews section is a piece by Monica Carter on Robert Walser’s The Tanners, which was recently released by New Directions in Susan Bernofsky’s translation. (This is overly personal, but this review is a confluence of four of my favorite people, publishers, and authors. Monica + Susan + ...
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Wherever I Lie Is Your Bed
Although the official pub date isn’t until November 9th, a copy of the sixteenth volume of Two Lines arrived in the mail yesterday. It’s edited by Margaret Jull Costa and Marilyn Hacker, and contains a number of excerpts from interesting translations coming out this year, including the new translation of Gunter ...
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Russian Sports Franchise Owners Are Interesting Fellows
Over at Lizok’s Bookshelf, Lisa Hayden Espenschade has an interesting post about Russian billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov, the new majority shareholder of the Brooklyn New Jersey Nets. Apparently, in addition to acquiring American sports franchises and serving as a member of the “Supreme Council of the Sport Russia ...
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Dream of Reason
Rosa Chacel (1898-1994) sculptor, novelist, poet, essayist, feminist was born and died in Spain, with Brazil as a second home. She was a contemporary with the Generation of ’27, which included Garcia Lorca and Ramon Jaminez, and she was familiar with the writings of Freud and James Joyce and the philosophies of Nietzsche ...
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Latest Review: "Dream of Reason" by Rosa Chacel
The latest addition to our review section is a piece on Dream of Reason by Rosa Chacel, translated from the Spanish by Carol Maier and recently published by the University of Nebraska Press as part of their European Women Writers Series. I’ve written about this book on a few occasions, mainly because of the Javier ...
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Where You Can Get Your International Poetry Fix
I don’t read nearly as much international poetry as I do prose, but for those of you out there who are more lyrically inclined, here are two sites worth exploring: Lyrikline is celebrating its 10th Anniversary this year, and over that time has compiled a damn impressive database of poems from around the world ...
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Merce Rodoreda in The Nation
Natasha Wimmer has an interesting piece on Catalan author Merce Rodoreda. It’s great introduction to Rodoreda—considered to be one of the greatest Catalan authors of all time—even if Wimmer does prefer The Time of the Doves (available from Graywolf) to Death in Spring (which we brought out last year and was ...
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Horacio Castellanos Moya and the "Bolano Myth"
At Conversational Reading, Scott Esposito points to an interesting article by Horacio Castellanos Moya about his disgust with the “Bolano Myth.” The article is primarily based on Sarah Pollack’s essay “Latin America Translated (Again): Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives in the United ...
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October Translations
I can’t believe September is almost over . . . Although I’m sort of glad—October brings the Frankfurt Book Fair, a study trip to France (more on that in another post), and another playoff appearance for the St. Louis Cardinals. (Next year, Cubs fans. Next. Year.) October also brings some interesting ...
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Hoppla! 1 2 3
As frequently occurs, a few days ago I was browsing through a bookstore when something caught my eye. The book was Negative Horizon by Paul Virilio, which “sets out [his] theory of dromoscopy: a means of apprehending speed and its pivotal—and potentially destructive—role in contemporary global ...
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Latest Review: "Hoppla! 1 2 3" by Gerard Gavarry
Looks like this is going to be a week of Dalkey Archive reviews, with my piece on Anonymous Celebrity by Ignacio de Loyola Brandao coming out on Thursday or Friday . . . And not to give away too much, but my review is much more positive than what Timothy Nassau (former Open Letter intern who’s actually back in school ...
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Events To Attend
Our events calendar is a bit empty right now (if you’re hosting—or attending—any interesting events related to international literature, please e-mail us so that we can include it on that calendar to the right . . ), but there are a number of interesting events coming up that might be of ...
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Natasha Wimmer and Roberto Bolano's Forthcoming Books
Two Words — the excellent blog of the Center for the Art of Translation — posted an interesting, brief conversation with Natasha Wimmer about her forthcoming Bolano translations. I think any and all Bolano fans will be especially intrigued by this bit: Natasha Wimmer: I’ve read The Third Reich (and in fact, ...
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Nordic Voices and Hallgrimur Helgason [Iceland Follow-Up Post] [UPDATE]
Last week I mentioned a few contemporary Icelandic authors, including Hallgrimur Helgason. In the post about Hallgrimur, I mentioned The Author of Iceland, which won the 2001 Icelandic Literature Prize, and sounds like a cool, playful book. Well, not only did someone comment about how this is “one of the top 5 ...
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Santiago Gamboa Wins the La Otra Orilla Literary Award
Every culture seems to have its own set-up for literary awards. In France, there are millions. Literally. Bars give out prizes for the best work by a female author published between January and May. (Or so I’ve heard.) And these aren’t scoffed at prizes, but include ceremonies with glitz and celebrity. In Spain ...
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The Confessions of Noa Weber
For years now, Melville House has been one of the most exciting independent presses out there. The political books they’ve done are fantastic, the Art of the Novella Series is arguably one of the most genius marketing/editorial publishing projects of the past decade, and the return of the Moby Lives blog (I still wear ...
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Crushing on Iceland and Another Interesting Author
First off, I can’t believe that I managed to leave Hallgrimur Helgason off of yesterday’s list of contemporary Icelandic authors. His novel 101 Reykjavik was published a few years back by Scribner, and was also made into a movie. The book of his that always sounded most interested to me though is The Author of ...
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Editor's Week in Buenos Aires
I went on this trip a couple of years ago (and wrote about it and the U.S. Embassy back in the early days of Three Percent), and can’t recommend it highly enough. Amazing experience and the best opportunity I know of to really find out about Argentine literature. Not to mention, Gabriela Adamo does a brilliant job ...
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Some Icelandic Authors
The article I wrote for Publishing Perspectives about the Iceland Literary Festival (along with a video interview with Kristjan B. Jonasson, the head of the Icelandic Publishers Association) will go live tomorrow morning, but in the meantime, I thought I’d put together a short write-up of some of the interesting ...
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European Book Club: The Mighty Angel
Where: Solas Bar, 232 East 9th Street, 2nd Floor (between Second & Third Avenues), New York, NY To register for this session, send us an email at poland.nyc@europeanbookclub.org The Book: The Mighty Angel begins with its alcoholic narrator, Jerzy, having returned home from the “alco ward” for the eighteenth and ...
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The Mighty Angel Book Club
For any of you Jerzy Pilch fans, Chad is hosting an evening tomorrow at Solas Bar in NYC (232 E. 9th Street, around the corner from St. Mark’s Bookshop) to discuss Pilch’s The Mighty Angel. It’s a part of the excellent European Book Club series. The event starts at 7 PM, and I bet you could even talk Chad ...
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Speaking at the Speed of Print
Anyone who’s met me knows that I can, on occasion, speak a bit fast. Almost incomprehensibly fast. Especially if English isn’t your first language . . . This “talent” kind of came in handy at the 21st Century Publishing Symposium at the Reykjavik International Literary Festival last week. The symposium ...
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2009 Nike Award Shortlist
Last week they announced the shortlist for the prestigious NIKE Award, which will be awarded on October 4th. The shortlist: The Flypaper Factory, Andrzej Bart (WAB) The writer narrates the imaginary Łódź trial of Chaim Rumkowski, chairman of the Judenrat in the Łódź Ghetto. Bambino, Inga Iwasiów (Świat ...
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Excerpt
Anne McLean’s translation of Colombian novelist Evelio Rosero’s The Armies is the winner of this year’s Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, given by Great Britain’s Independent newspaper to honor excellence in translated works of fiction published in the UK. (It’s McLean’s second nod from the The Independent in ...
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The Armies
Anne McLean’s translation of Colombian novelist Evelio Rosero’s The Armies is the winner of this year’s Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, given by Great Britain’s Independent newspaper to honor excellence in translated works of fiction published in the UK. (It’s McLean’s second nod from the The Independent in ...
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Latest Review: "The Armies" by Evelio Rosero
Over the past few years, New Directions has put together what is arguably the best collection of contemporary Latin American literature available from any single publisher. Sure, there’s the heaps of Bolano titles. But there’s also Cesar Aira. And Horacio Castellanos Moya. There’s Guillermo Rosales’s ...
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Tomorrow's E-Utopia? [Part 4 of 4]
Here’s the final part of the paper I’m preparing for the Iceland Literary Festival. Click here for part one and here for part two and here for part three. Again, please pass along any comments/suggestions you might have—in no way is this essay fixed in stone. (I’m sure there are a million minor typos ...
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Tomorrow's E-Utopia? [Part 3 of 4]
Here’s the third part of the paper I’m preparing for the Iceland Literary Festival. Click here for part one and here for part two. The last section—the part that’s critical of the e-future—will go up over the weekend. Now we’re back to e-books: What’s quicker than right-fucking-now? ...
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Tomorrow's E-Utopia? [Part 2 of 4]
Here’s the second section of the paper I’m preparing for the Iceland Literary Festival. Click here for part one. The third part will go up later today, and the fourth over the weekend. Let me back up a bit to give a broader context for how e-books hold some promise to revolutionize the business of publishing ...
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Tomorrow's E-Utopia? [Part 1 of 4]
Next week I’m going to be in Reykjavik for the Icelandic Literary Festival, where I’ve been asked to give a brief speech on e-books and translations. In preparation I’ve written something that’s far far too long for the speech . . . But, I thought I’d run it here over the weekend, giving me the ...
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The Skating Rink
I’m as guilty as anyone for helping hype Roberto Bolaño’s two big books—“big” both in terms of reputation and size—that FSG released over the past two years. I loved both The Savage Detectives and 2666. I loved the heft, the ambition, the overreaching, and the risks he took. But ...
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Latest Review: "The Skating Rink" by Roberto Bolano
The latest addition to our review section is a piece that I wrote about Roberto Bolano’s The Skating Rink. Bolano is a personal favorite, and I think this latest translation is very charming: I’m as guilty as anyone for helping hype Roberto Bolaño’s two big books—“big” both in ...
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September Issues
New issues of a bunch of my favorite magazines (online and in print) came out this week. Here’s a quick summary: The new Bookforum is a three-month issue, so thankfully there’s a lot of great stuff. Ben Anastas on faith in fiction, a review by Matthew Shaer of Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s The Informers, a ...
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Brazos Bookstore: Featured Store of the Month
This post is two days overdue, so you may already have noticed that Brazos has replaced Skylight as our “Featured Bookstore” for September. Back when I did sales calls at Dalkey, I used to love calling Brazos and talking to Karl Kilian. Very nice guy, very kind, very interested in our books. So I was dismayed ...
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Georges Borchardt in Poets & Writers
Nice video interview with agent Georges Borchardt up at the Poets & Writers site. I love listening to Georges Borchardt, even when he doesn’t include Open Letter as a new small press that he recently had dealings with. (Like last year when we published Marguerite Duras’s The Sailor from Gibraltar) But ...
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And Let Us Now Praise Georges Perec
Yesterday’s afternoon mail brought with it two Georges Perec books that Godine just brought out: a new edition of Life A User’s Manual and Thoughts of Sorts, a collection of essays published posthumously in France in 1985. And which, according to the jacket copy, “completes the Godine list of ...
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Dubravka Ugresic's "Baba Yaga Laid an Egg"
This won’t be available in the States until next spring, but Dubravka Ugresic’s Baba Yaga Laid an Egg is already getting some great press in the UK, such as this piece in the London Review of Books by Marina Warner: Dubravka Ugrešić’s Baba Yaga Laid an Egg is the latest, most inventive and most ...
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Good Books, "Difficulty," and Plot
I think blogs were created for the very reason of attacking articles like Lev Grossman’s Good Novels Don’t Have to Be Hard, which appeared in the Wall Street Journal over the weekend. This article is so annoying and so preposterous that it’s actually dangerous. It opens with Grossman’s praising ...
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Rupert in the B&N Review
Every week, I’m more and more impressed with the B&N Review. And I swear, it’s not just because our books turn up in there on a rather regular basis . . . The latest to be reviewed there is Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer’s Rupert. Great piece by Christopher Byrd that opens: Scout’s honor: On a ...
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Cool Russian Books (And Journals)
One of the most interesting journals I’ve heard about recently is Chtenia: Readings from Russia a very well-produced publication that features a wide range of works by Russian authors, from classic authors to new voices. And it includes not just fiction (although they do claim to be the “only regularly published ...
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Normance
When a reader, and I mean a true reader looking for guts, the unexpected and the challenging, encounters Céline, she knows that her literary fate is forever changed. Gather your beatniks, your cynics, your semi-autobiographers and toss in a dirty handful of John Kennedy Toole and this might give an idea of what reading ...
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Latest Review: "Normance" by Louis-Ferdinand Céline
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Monica Carter on Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Normance, which was translated by Marlon Jones and published earlier this year by Dalkey Archive Press. Monica is one of our long-time reviewers and runs the always excellent Salonica World Lit website. She also works ...
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Another Guardian Top Ten List
In addition to Selcuk Altan’s Turkish lit list, The Guardian also posted a top ten list of books about the Berlin Wall. Suzanne Munshower’s list—which is presented in a narrative format with interesting details about each of the books—actually overlaps a bit with The Wall in My Head the book about ...
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Friendly Fire
The subtitle of A. B. Yehoshua’s Friendly Fire is A Duet, but its most distinguishing characteristic is the dissonance between its two voices. In the novel’s series of brief alternating sections we are shuttled between the perspectives of a gently controlling husband, Amotz Ya’ari, an engineer; and his increasingly ...
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NY Times on "Woman from Shanghai"
Earlier in the month we posted a piece by Chinese translator—and amazingly nice guy—Wen Huang about Xianhui Yang’s collection of “stories” Woman from Shanghai. And no, those aren’t unnecessary quotes—these pieces are based on real-life events, with added fictional/literary aspects in ...
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Observer, Paper-over-Board, and Oprah
OK, I threw my little fit about this on Facebook, and now that that’s out of my system, I can take a more tempered, critical look at Leon Neyfakh’s article in today’s New York Observer about books without dust jackets. (It’s new! It’s hip! It’s trendy!) September will see the ...
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"Migration" by Mathias Énard
Last week we posted about a new story of Mathias Énard’s that appeared in Le Monde. Énard, as you may already know, is the author of Zone, a critically acclaimed, award-winning 517-page one-sentence novel that we’ll be bringing out next year. Well, in the meantime, superstar translator—and recent NEA ...
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NEA Translation Fellowships (Follow-Up)
I know E.J. posted about this last week, but I wanted to give my own personal shout-out to a few of the recipients of this year’s NEA Translation Fellowships. Complete descriptions of all sixteen funded projects can be found here, but in addition to the projects E.J. mentioned—Charlotte Mandell’s ...
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Yoko Tawada on Ideograms and Dostoevsky
For all its noise, Facebook can still be a great way of keeping up with what your friends are working on. For instance, over the weekend, Susan Bernofsky posted about a Yoko Tawada she recently translated for the “Japan Focus” issue of the“Asian-Pacific Journal.”:http://japanfocus.org/ The article ...
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Bragi Olafsson in the L.A. Times
While I was gone last week, Michael Shaub blogged about Bragi Ólafsson’s The Pets for Jacket Copy: With its 99.9% literacy rate (seriously), and a roster of great authors (Halldór Laxness, Hallgrímur Helgason) that belies the fact that it has a smaller population than Bakersfield, the nation of Iceland could ...
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Center for the Art of Translation Blog
The Center for the Art of Translation in San Francisco has (finally?) started a weblog. It’s called Two Words, and Scott Esposito, who, you know, has some experience in the field, is running it. According to an e-mail they sent out yesterday: We’re eager to make the blog a resource for people who love ...
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Thirlwell on Hrabal
I don’t usually like to re-post things that have appeared on The Literary Review, mainly because I think our site and Michael’s have an audience Venn diagram that looks more like a single big circle than two overlapping ones, but this is too good to pass up. This weekend, Adam Thirlwell had a piece in The ...
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Latest Review: Beauty Salon by Mario Bellatin
The latest addition to our review section is a piece by Larissa Kyzer on Mario Bellatin’s Beauty Salon. Bellatin’s a pretty interesting author (see this post about the recent NY Times profile) and hopefully a bunch more of his books (especially Flores) will come out in the near future. ...
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Mario Bellatin in the New York Times
This is a few days old now, but it was great to see Larry Rohter of the New York Times do a special feature on Mexican novelist Mario Bellatin. Bellatin—and his books—are really interesting. Even the opening story in the piece is awesome: A few years ago the Mexican novelist Mario Bellatin attended one of ...
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Mathias Enard in Le Monde
Next fall we’ll be bringing out Zone, a 517-page, one-sentence book by Matias Enard that was all the rage in France last fall and, at least from the sample I’ve read, is utterly amazing. (Here’s a Chicago Tribune article about the book, and here’s a thoughtful review that ran at Quarterly ...
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The Aesthetics of Reading
Rob Walker—author of Buying In, one of the best marketing/business books of the past few years—just found a listing on Etsy for a hardcover copy of Buying In that “has been sealed and cut by hand to fit Amazon’s Kindle 6” Wireless Reading Device.” Seriously. Here’s the full ...
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Blame the Translator
Over at Paper Republic, Lucas Klein just posted an interesting piece about the recent translation snafu that marred Hillary Clinton’s recent visit to the Congo. For anyone who hasn’t heard about this, during a Q&A session an interpreter supposedly “misinterpreted” a question from the audience ...
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Landscape in Concrete
We meet a familiar angst-ridden Russian early in the pages of Jakov Lind’s novel Landscape in Concrete: Dostoevsky’s Underground man surfaces in the guise of Gauthier Bachmann to here tread the desolate earth of the Ardennes during WW ll. No longer confined by inertia to his wretched little room, this protagonist is on ...
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Latest Review: Landscape in Concrete by Jakov Lind
The latest addition to our review section is a piece by Nigel Beale on Jakov Lind’s Landscape in Concrete. Usually we don’t run reviews of our own books (which initially seemed like a good idea, but sort of doesn’t make sense, since Open Letter books are as interesting as a lot of the titles we do review, ...
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Free Wall in My Head Galley
We’ve never really tried this before, but for a limited time, the complete galley of The Wall in My Head: Words and Images from the Fall of the Iron Curtain can be accessed via Yudu by clicking here.- The book is absolutely gorgeous (thanks to Rohan, Nate, Sal, and many others), and has an impressive list of ...
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Bloomberg.com and Art
I’ve written before about how excellent the books/art coverage is at Bloomberg.com, and how much this surprises me. (It shouldn’t, I know.) Still, when I came across this editorial by Jeremy Gerard about the new NEA chairman Rocco Landesman, I assumed it would be some sort of anti-arts funding diatribe . . . but ...
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Retranslated Classics
Sticking with PW for another post, Lynn Andriani has a great piece about three “iconic 20th-century novels being released in new translations” this fall: Solzhenitsyn’s In the First Circle (translated by Harry T. Willetts, and which restores nine chapters missing from the “lightened version” ...
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BEA + The Public?
From Publishers Weekly: Adding a public component to BookExpo America has been one of the most hotly debated topics regarding possible changes to the annual event. BEA officials have discussed it internally and with their customers, and the concept has now received a major boost from Penguin, whose CEO, David Shanks, and ...
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Frankfurt Book Fair International Bookseller Program
Just got a message from Riky Stock at the German Book Office that there are still a few openings for this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair International Booksellers Program. Similar to the editor’s trip, this program helps introduce booksellers from around the world to their German counterparts. Somewhat geared towards ...
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I Think I'm Going to Like the New NEA Chairman
From the NY Times article after he was confirmed: But in his first sit-down interview since his nomination by President Obama, Mr. Landesman’s comments suggested that he may nevertheless raise hackles on Capitol Hill after he is sworn in in the next few days. Speaking recently in his office above the St. James Theater ...
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Laish
The opening sentences of Laish, the Israeli writer Aharon Appelfeld’s fourteenth novel to be published in English translation, are deceptively like those of a typical first-person confessional story: “My name is Laish, and those who like me call me Laishu. I have yet to run into anyone with such a strange name. . ...
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E-Readers: The Good, Bad, and Flexible
Today’s Publishing Perspectives piece is a great editorial by editor Ed Nawotka on e-books, specifically in relation to kids books: My daughter loves to read. “Book, ook, ook,” she’ll say, trying to form the right word that will get my attention to plop onto a beanbag chair, pull her into my lap, and read to ...
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Let's Get Stupid Like It's 1995
From Ocala.com: U.S. Rep. Cliff Stearns, joined by 50 fellow congressional Republicans, has fired off a scathing letter to the head of a federal arts agency, expressing outrage that taxpayer money went to groups that produce “objectionable and obscene movies, plays and exhibitions.” Moreover, the ...
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This Is Cool
. . . and most probably illegal. (Shhhh!) But the online magazine Admit Two has been serializing Charles Malamuth’s translation of Ilf & Petrov’s famous Little Golden America—a travelogue of the two writers’ trip through America that’s been out of print for eons. (Although Ilf & ...
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All Over the National Book Foundation Site Today
Following up on the post about Gravity’s Rainbow, the National Book Foundation just posted a short appreciation I wrote of William Gaddis’s J R. J R is the perfect novel for our new recession-driven world. Similar to Gravity’s Rainbow (which I wrote about earlier), this is another encyclopedic novel with ...
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Jane Friedman and Larry Kirshbaum on Obsessed
Until yesterday I’d never heard of Obsessed with Samantha Ettus and doubt I’ll be watching this much in the future (“the typical guest on Obsessed is a charismatic fireball of talent and passion . . . [and] has likely been on Oprah, The Today Show and countless other media outlets sharing industry ...
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Lance Fensterman on Cons vs. Trade Shows
Today’s Publishing Perspectives (which everyone in the universe should subscribe to), has a great piece by Lance Fensterman, the man behind BookExpo America, the New York Comic Con, the New York Anime Fest, and the soon-to-be-launched Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo. The interaction (or lack thereof) between ...
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"A screaming comes across the sky."
This summer the National Book Foundation has been posting reader reactions to each of the 77 fiction winners from its 60-year history. Along with Casey Hicks (whose overview is great—Byron the Bulb!), I wrote a short bit about Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, which went online today. (Perfect timing with ...
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“I hope to be remembered as a writer who speaks the truth”
Below is a guest post from Wen Huang, whose translation of Liao Yiwu’s The Corpse Walker is now available in paperback, and whose translation of Xianhui Yan’s Woman from Shanghai releases on Thomas Pynchon day today. We’re planning on reviewing this in the next week or so—sounds ...
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Ivan Klima in The Guardian
The Guardian had a short overview of the life and work of Ivan Klima (Love and Garbage, Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light, too many others to mention) this weekend: Incredibly, he returned to Prague after the 1968 uprising was put down: Klima began to fight back against these privations straightaway. ...
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Some Upcoming Events at Skylight Books
Here’s a message from Monica Carter of Salonica and Skylight Books—our featured indie store of the month—about some interesting upcoming events. One of the trademarks of Skylight Books is the ability to recognize and promote the literary greats of our time. Ten years ago, Skylight Books not only ...
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State of Translations in Publishing Perspectives
Today’s Publishing Perspectives includes an editorial that I wrote about the “state of translations” in America attempting to explain the dip in the number of translations coming out this year: For years, people have speculated that the number of literary works in translation being published in the ...
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Cliffs
Olivier Adam is the author of many novels and children’s books, several of which have been adapted for film, including his debut Je vais bien, ne t’en fais pas. In 2004 he won the Prix Goncourt for his short story “Passer l’hiver.” He is also a founder and current member of the program planning committee of ...
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Ha Jin on "The Writer as Migrant"
Nigel Beale—whose interviews are always really interesting—recently posted a great discussion with Ha Jin about his recent book, The Writer as Migrant, which was recently released by University of Chicago Press and sounds pretty good: Ha Jin’s journey raises rich and fascinating questions about ...
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First Review of Murakami's 1Q84
The new Murakami book — 1Q84 — is now available in Japan, and this review at Neojaponisme is the first comprehensive take on the book that I’ve come across. Long review for a long book that sounds pretty intriguing (if not in need of a bit of editing): 1Q84 sprawls 1055 pages in the hardback version and ...
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Cursor
The new issue of PW, has a lengthy article by Richard Nash about his new venture (in collaboration with Dedi Felman), which is called Cursor: After months of work, with Dedi’s help I outlined my vision for a new venture at this year’s BookExpo America. Then called Round Table, now tentatively called Cursor, ...
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Salonica Overview of Online Resources for Eastern European Literature
Over at Salonica, Monica Carter posted a very comprehensive, incredibly useful guide to online resources for information about Eastern European literature. Definitely worth exploring. ...
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Nicolson Baker on the Kindle
The new issue of The New Yorker has a really interesting piece by print-advocate Nicholson Baker about the Kindle. It’s worth reading the whole article—I haven’t read a review of the Kindle quite like this one—but here are a few of the highlights: It came, via UPS, in a big cardboard box. Inside ...
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2009 Man Asian Literary Prize Longlist
The twenty-four title longlist for the 2009 Man Asian Literary Prize was announced last week and is listed in full below. The press release has bio information for all of the authors, but not a lot of info on their books. (Just as Michael Orthofer has his bit about how this award isn’t Asian enough I have my standard ...
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Predatory Pricing, or, What Happens in a Country Without a Fixed Book Price Agreement
Following on last week’s post about the benefits (or in the eyes of Kim Heijdenrijk, the non-benefits) of a Fixed Book Price Agreement, I found this article by Stacy Mitchell about the shift in book sales from B&N and Borders to Costco, Target, Wal-Mart, etc. It’s a pretty interesting piece about the impact ...
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Review of Bolano's The Skating Rink
The Abu Dhabi-based The National has one of the first reviews of Bolano’s The Skating Rink, which is coming out from New Directions later this year. Giles Harvey’s raview spends a lot of time on Borges and Poe, detective fiction, and the creation of the reader of detective fiction, which is all quite ...
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Anti-Fixed Book Price Essay
Generally speaking, I’m a fan of the “fixed book price agreement” that’s in place in a number of countries around the world. (At least 18, according to Wikipedia, aka America’s Best Source of Information.) I’ve mentioned a few times in posts here on Three Percent, always emphasizing the way ...
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Michiel Heyns on Translation, Creativity, and "Re-creating"
Over at the Tin House blog (which is relatively new and very solid), South African author Michiel Heyns has an interesting essay about creativity and translation: I have just sent off the first draft of a translation of a 130,000-word novel, Etienne van Heerden’s 30 Nagte in Amsterdam (30 Nights in Amsterdam). By ...
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Latest Review: "The Unit" by Ninni Holmqvist
Our latest review is of Ninni Holmqvist’s The Unit, which was translated from the Swedish by Marlaine Delargy and published by Other Press. Pretty interesting book (at least for the first two-thirds) about a future Sweden where those who are unwed and childless at the age of 50 have to live the rest of their lives in ...
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Arts Funding Post-Recession
BBC One’s Art in Troubled Times: A New Deal for Art aired yesterday and sounds pretty fascinating: The Great Depression and the Second World War changed what was expected of the arts; Alan Yentob asks if this recession could see the next transformation. Artist Chuck Close talks about the New Deal in America ...
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Introduction to Elsa Morante's Aracoeli
Our most recent release—which shipped to subscribers last week—is Elsa Morante’s Aracoeli, her last novel, and by far her darkest. Below you’ll find the excellent introduction Robert Boyers wrote for our reissue of this book. Thirty years ago, Elsa Morante seemed to many American writers and critics ...
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Alane Salierno Mason on Big Think
Alane Salierno Mason, the founder of Words Without Borders, got interviewed at Big Think about literature in translation: They have several other videos with her as well: on publishers (as they say, “A few stoic houses are carrying the torch for literature in translation.”), on the founding of Words Without ...
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B&N to Amazon: It Is So On
Yesterday afternoon, Barnes & Noble sent a strong message to Amazon that it’s not about to give up the ghost, no matter how many Kindle accessory ads show up in the New York subway. As reported at Digital Daily, B&N has launched a 700,000 title ebook store (there are only 300,000 titles available for the Kindle, ...
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Where Have I Been These Past Few Months
That I didn’t realize New Directions has a blog. Not terribly active, but still, today’s post about Borges’s history with ND is pretty interesting. To provide some context for this quote: earlier in the summer ND held a contest to see if anyone could identify the first publication of Borges by ND. Answer: ...
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E-Book Prices and the Possibility of Piracy
I’ve written in the past about the $9.99 ebook and my belief that supply and demand is the most important factor in arriving at this price point. Over in Slate, Jack Schafer argues that a side-effect of publishers trying to increase ebook prices (because they’re afraid that a cheap ebook will cannibalize the ...
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The Book of the Future
Over the weekend Bob Stein at the Institute for the Future of the Book blogged about the video below, calling it “the most exciting vision of the book of the future since Apple’s Knowledge Navigator in 1987,” and point out that “interestingly, the film also includes an elegant solution to the question ...
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Scandinavian Crime Novels
Although I’m personally not a reader of Scandinavian crime fiction (unless you can somehow count Jan Kjaerstad’s trilogy in that group, which is closer to a leap than a stretch), I find the debate between Nathaniel Rich and Larissa Kyzer about why these books are so popular pretty fascinating. First off, ...
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Texas and Translations
A few months ago we posted about the University of Texas Press’s decision to relaunch its Latin American literature in translation series. (And at some point soon we’ll have a full review of the first new title in the series, And Let the Earth Tremble at its Centers by Gonzalo Celorio.) Well on Friday I found ...
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European Union Prize for Literature
The first twelve winners of the European Union Prize for Literature were announced earlier this week with the aim of bringing increased attention to the contemporary European literature. This is a bit of an odd prize—each year an award is given to one author from 11 or 12 of the various EU countries. The list of ...
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The Possession
Over the past decade, Seven Stories has brought out a number of Annie Ernaux titles, including A Man’s Place, A Woman’s Story, and A Simple Passion to great critical acclaim. The Possession, which was originally published in France in 2002, is the most recent title of hers to be beautifully rendered in English by ...
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The Vampire of Ropraz
If it weren’t for Michael Orthofer of Complete Review, I don’t think I would’ve ever picked up this slender book. I don’t mind my vampires on TV (True Blood is a pretty decent show), but I tend to avoid them in literature. (No, I haven’t read Twilight and probably never will.) But this ...
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Latest Review: "The Vampire of Ropraz" by Jacques Chessex
The latest addition to our review section is a piece on Jacques Chessex’s The Vampire of Ropraz, a curious little book from one of Switzerland’s most revered authors. Here’s the opening of the review: If it weren’t for Michael Orthofer of Complete Review, I don’t think I would’ve ...
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Skylight Books: Indie Bookstore of the Month(s)
OK, I fell a bit behind on updating our Indie Bookstore of the Month. And I wasn’t able to do all that I wanted to do for The Booksmith. But now that things in my life are calming down, I’m ready to get back into this, and as a result, for the rest of July and all of August we will be be featuring Skylight Books ...
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Spain's Digital Initiatives and Price Fixing
Yesterday’s Publishing Perspectives (which you should really subscribe to if you haven’t already—it is that consistently good) had an interesting piece about a digital distribution company for ebooks that is being set up by Planeta, Random House Mondadori, and Santillana (the three biggest publishers in ...
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Vincent Kling on Gert Jonke
CALQUE has an excellent piece by translator Vincent Kling on the recent death of Austrian writer Gert Jonke. Kling’s piece and the five short pieces he translated are all worth reading, but here are a few highlights: Parody is alive and well: a rough parallel from the 2008 election in the United States is found in ...
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Another Clarice Lispector Post
Following up on my earlier post about Benjamin Moser’s forthcoming Lispector biography, Why This World, I want to correct some information about her available titles. In addition to all the New Directions ones I listed on the original post, Family Ties is also available from the University of Texas Press, and this ...
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The Wall in My Head Blog
Back a few weeks ago when The Guardian was running its series of short stories from Eastern Europe, I mentioned our forthcoming anthology, The Wall in My Head: Words and Images from the Fall of the Iron Curtain, which releases on November 9th, marking the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Well, to build ...
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Azorno
Inger Christensen, who passed away in January of this year, is best known in America as an experimental poet, if she is known at all. Now the second of her three novels (also the second to appear in English; Harvill Press published her 1976 book The Painted Room in 2000) is finally appearing in America over forty years after ...
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Latest Review: "Azorno" by Inger Christensen
I’m planning on writing a post next week with the current list of books that have been nominated for the 2010 Best Translated Book Award longlist. (It’s an era of transparency, no? And besides, wouldn’t you like a bit of time to be able to read some of these titles before the longlist announcement?) I ...
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Interview with Susan Bernofsky
Very interesting interview with Susan Bernofsky (“widely considered to be one of the best English translators of German literature today,” who has translated Robert Walser, Jenny Erpenbeck, and Yoko Tawada, among others) in The Brooklyn Rail. Theoretically, this interview is supposed to be about her forthcoming ...
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New Issue of The Critical Flame
The second issue of The Critical Flame is now available online, including a review of J.M.G. Le Clezio’s Desert by Scott Esposito: Desert was acclaimed as Le Clézio’s “breakout” novel by the Swedish Academy, but the book’s mass appeal can be difficult to see at first — it is not the easiest read to get ...
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Yet Another of My Big Mistakes
PW offers up some encouraging news about the book business on Wall St.: Led by a remarkable rebound by book retailers, the Publishers Weekly Stock Index jumped 23.9% in the first six months of 2009, easily beating the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which declined 3.7% in the January through June period. That’s ...
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More on Benjamin Moser's Clarice Lispector Biography
From today’s Publishing Perspectives piece by Moser about the origins of his project (Why This World) and all that he went through to research this elusive figure: Maybe because the project began with such élan, I found myself undaunted by the many obstacles that were thrown at me. Neither the cuisine of rural ...
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Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector
One of the fall books that I’m really looking forward to is Benjamin Moser’s biography of Clarice Lispector entitled Why This World, which, according to the back jacket, is “based on previously unknown manuscripts, numerous interviews, and years of research on three continents.” Moser replaced the ...
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Paper-Over-Board Follow-Up
So a couple weeks ago I caused a little bit of a stir by announcing via an article in Publishing Perspectives that we were abandoning the paper-over-board format in favor of all paperbacks. We got a lot of responses about this, ranging from people who were disappointed and love paper-over-board, to booksellers explaining that ...
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Dubravka on the BBC
Dubravka Ugresic’s Baba Yaga Laid an Egg was recently published in the UK as a part of The Myths series—“a long-term global publishing project where some of the world’s most respected authors re-tell myths in a manner of their own choosing.” She appeared on BBC Radio 4 recently to discuss the ...
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And Now Back to Your Regularly Scheduled Blogging . . .
Well, hopefully. It might take another day to get back in the swing of things, but I am back and will be writing a couple reviews this week, featuring July’s store of the month, etc., etc. (And finally replying to e-mails, in case you’re waiting for a response . . .) In the meantime, here’s a link to a ...
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Curriculum Vitae
Imagine the scene we are all familiar with: you are writing up a C.V. to send out to those who might judge your capabilities, your efficacies, and the quality of your existence to date from what you were able to condense onto a single side of a sheet of letter paper. Imagine adding, among sections detailing work experience ...
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The Private Lives of Trees
We wanted to post this article about Alejandro Zambra in The Nation when it came out a few weeks ago, but we were in the middle of trying to sign Zambra up, so we wanted to wait until it was official. Readers who consider Roberto Bolano the pole star of contemporary Chilean fiction will be jolted by Zambra’s ...
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Op Oloop
The first time I heard of Juan Filloy was during an editorial trip to Germany, organized by the German Book Office and including a day of “speed dating” with other publishers. It was at one of my first “dates” that I met the very hip editors from Tropen Verlag who, after finding out that I worked at ...
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Kahn & Engelmann
Hans Eichner’s first novel (and last—he passed away earlier this year), originally published in 2000 in Austria, was released in English last month, directly after the eminent German scholar’s death. Kahn & Engelmann opens with a joke: a traveling joke and a Jewish joke. In the summer of 1938, a Jewish ...
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Books to Look Forward To: "Pornografia" by Witold Gombrowicz
The past few years has seen a bit of a Witold Gombrowicz renaissance. Yale University Press has published Danuta Borchardt’s retranslations1 of Cosmos and Ferdydurke, Archipelago published Bill Johnston’s translation of Bacacay, and Dalkey Archive reissued A Kind of Testament. And coming in November from Grove ...
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Editors Speak Piece on Merce Rodoreda's Death in Spring
Jeff Waxman from The Front Table was kind enough to let me write a pretty long piece on Merce Rodoreda’s Death in Spring, a book that I absolutely love. Rodoreda’s something special, and the book (which is paper-over-board—get it while it’s hot!) has one of the most intricate, fitting, and cool covers ...
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The Frankfurt Book Fair's Press Trip to China
As mentioned last week, China is the Guest of Honor at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair, and to prepare for this, four journalists from the FBF have headed over to Peking on a “journey of literary discovery.” (Which I believe means listening to a lot of speeches about China’s book industry and traveling ...
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Jan Kjaerstad's Trilogy
The third part of Jan Kjaerstad’s “Wergeland Trilogy” (The Seducer, The Conqueror and The Discoverer) was recently released in the UK (our edition comes out in September), and Paul Binding wrote a really nice overview of the book for The Independent: The Discoverer completes the trilogy to which ...
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Paper-Over-Board and a Bit of an Announcement
My first article for Publishing Perspectives went live this morning and is all about the advantages (and disadvantages) of the paper-over-board format. I have a visceral hatred for dust jackets – I strip them off, I crinkle them, I lose them. So in 2007, when in the process of launching Open Letter (a new ...
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Editor of "Transit Tehran" Arrested in Iran
From Newsweek: Among the dozens of people arrested overnight in Tehran was Newsweek reporter Maziar Bahari, who has covered Iran for the magazine for over a decade. Bahari was home asleep at 7 a.m. when several security officers showed up at his Tehran apartment. According to his mother, who lives with the 41-year-old ...
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Design, the Kindle, and Reading Newspapers
Farhad Manjoo’s recent piece in Slate offers a unique take on one of the advantages newspapers have over the Kindle—the ability to convey information through design elements: Every newspaper you’ve ever read was put together by someone with an opinion about which of the day’s stories was most ...
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"This Part of Town Is No Place For Old-Timers" by Jachym Topol [Guardian Short Stories from Eastern Europe]
The final installment in The Guardian‘s_ Stories from a New Europe series is This Part of Town Is No Place for Old-Timers by Czech author Jachym Topol. David Short translated this piece about a Czech writer remembering life before 1989, his father’s failure as a writer and dissident, and how the post-wall society ...
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World Literature Weekend: Elias Khoury with Jeremy Harding
Where: London Review Bookshop, London, UK Edward Said described Elias Khoury as an artist who gives ‘voice to rooted exiles and trapped refugees, to dissolving boundaries and changing identities, to radical demands and new languages’. Best known to English readers for his epic Gate of the Sun, Khoury’s new novel is ...
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World Literature Weekend: Voicing the Masters (and Mistresses): Translation with Variations
with Marina Warner and Robert Chandler Where: Stevenson Room, British Museum, London, UK Marina Warner, the prominent writer, critic, historian and broadcaster, and Robert Chandler, the eminent translator of Russian texts, will together explore their interest in the translation of oral stories into written literature. ...
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World Literature Weekend: Ma Jian with Flora Drew
Where: BP Room, British Museum, London, UK Ma Jian’s Beijing Coma, winner of the T. R. Fyvel Index on Censorship Award and shortlisted for this year’s Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, is a seminal novel about the Tiananmen Square protests. Gao Xingjian, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, has called Ma’s ‘one ...
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World Literature Weekend: Translation: Making a Whole Culture Intelligible?
with Independent Foreign Fiction Prize-winning translators Anne McLean, Anthea Bell, Daniel Hahn and Frank Wynne Where: London, UK Chair: Kate Griffin, Arts Council England Anthony Burgess insisted that ‘translation is not a matter of words only’. Umberto Eco has said that ‘translation is the art of failure’. ...
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Carlos Ruiz Zafon at International House
Where: International House, 1414 E. 59th Street, Chicago, IL 60637 We are very excited to welcome Carlos Ruiz Zafon as he discusses his new book, The Angel’s Game. “The whole of Barcelona stretched out at my feet and I wanted to believe that, when I opened those windows, its streets would whisper stories to me, ...
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Frankfurt Book Fair: Finland and International Booksellers
Over the past couple days, I’ve received two interesting press releases from the Frankfurt Book Fair worth sharing. First off, it was announced earlier this week that Finland will be the 2014 Guest of Honor. From the press release: Finland is known for its literary export of children’s books – for example, ...
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A River & A Sound and an Interesting Danish Writer
A River & A Sound is a brand new online magazine published in association with the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University that grew out of a one-of-a-kind, literary entertainment program designed to make literary events more exciting. You can check out the rest of the magazine at the link above, but ...
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Adam Thirlwell's Tribute to Barbara Wright
This past weekend, Adam Thirlwell (author of the novel Politics and The Delighted States, which is all about translation) wrote a really nice tribute in The Guardian to late translator Barbara Wright (who would’ve loved to have received a fan letter from Adam—and most likely would’ve sent him a cool ...
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Zgaiba by Stelian Tanase [Guardian Short Stories from Eastern Europe]
The latest entry in The Guardian‘s series of short stories about the transformations of Eastern Europe post-1989 is Stelian Tanase’s Zgaiba, translated from the Romanian by Jean Harris. (Who runs the Observer Translation Project, which is the best source online for information about Romanian literature.) So ...
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Crap
The National Endowment for the Arts just announced some of the highlights from its 2008 “Survey of Public Participation in the Arts,” and the results, well, aren’t very encouraging. Here are just some of the gloomy findings: There are persistent patterns of decline in participation for most art forms. ...
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Good News for Detroit Arts and for Cultural Orgs in General
Not sure when the last time the words “good news” and “Detroit” were used in the same sentence, but according to the Detroit Free Press, the Erb Family Foundation of Birmingham has recently announced $1.6 million in grants to 35 local arts organizations, “ranging from $100,000 to the Detroit ...
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The German Donald Duck, or, The Power of a Translator
This is a couple weeks old now, but star translator Susan Bernofsky wrote an excellent article for the Wall Street Journal about the immense popularity of the German version of the Donald Duck comic book: Comics featuring Donald are available at most German newsstands and the national weekly “Micky Maus”—which ...
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Chocolate by Michal Olszewski [Guardian Short Stories from Eastern Europe]
The second installment in The Guardian‘s series of short stories from Eastern Europe is ‘Chocolate’ by Michal Olszewski. Olszewski is a young (b. 1977) Polish writer who works in Krakow for the daily paper, Gazeta Wyborcza. The story—which is wonderfully translated by recent “Found in ...
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A Manifesto for Scholarly Publishing
The recent issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education has a really interesting piece by Peter J. Dougherty—director of Princeton University Press—on the future of academic publishing. Rather than lament the slow, never-ending death of print, he takes a different approach: And while university presses grapple ...
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Best Harper's Ever & A Giveaway
Well, at least in relation to Open Letter books . . . The new issue of Harper’s has two pieces on Open Letter titles: a long review by Robert Boyers of Woman of Rome: A Life of Elsa Morante by Lily Tuck and a shorter review of Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer’s Rupert in Benjamin Moser’s New Books column. (Both pieces ...
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Guardian's Short Story Project
To mark the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, all this week The Guardian will be running original short stories from a host of Eastern European writers. Up first is East German writer Clemens Meyer with Of Dogs and Horses, a short story from Die Nacht, Die Lichter (published by S. Fisher in German, but is ...
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Memory Glyphs: 3 Prose Poets from Romania
Of the three authors featured in the prose poem collection Memory Glyphs, beautifully translated from the Romanian by Adam Sorkin with Mircea Ivanescu, Bogdan Stefanescu and one of the poets (Radu Andriescu), only the latter is still alive. From the translator’s preface we find out that Cristian Popescu died when he was not ...
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Latest Review: Memory Glyphs: 3 Prose Poets from Romania
The most recent addition to our review section is a piece by Daniela Hurezanu on Memory Glyphs: 3 Prose Poets from Romania, which was recently released in the U.S. by Twisted Spoon Press and is translated from the Romanian by Adam J. Sorkin with Radu Andriescu, Mircea Ivanescu, and Bogdan Stefanescu. Like all TSP books, the ...
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Dream of Reason by Rosa Chacel
Going through all my BEA catalogs, Rosa Chacel’s Dream of Reason (University of Nebraska Press, translated from the Spanish by Carol Maier) was one of the books that really caught my eye. And not just because it’s long (like 776-pages long), or because the author is compared to Joyce, Proust, and Woolf ...
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Man Gone Down Wins IMPAC Prize
As announced yesterday, Michael Thomas has won this year’s International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for his novel Man Gone Down (Grove). Here’s the description from the Grove website: A beautifully written, insightful, and devastating first novel, Man Gone Down is about a young black father of three in ...
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And One Last Piece of Awful News
At least this post isn’t about a bookstore/publisher closing—instead it’s about the absolute grossness of corporations: On Sunday, a Bookseller story by Victoria Gallagher reported that “sources” were saying “Penguin is believed to have signed an exclusive deal with W H Smith” bookstores to be ...
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Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Symposium
The Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Symposium (participants pictured above) took place earlier this week, and was one of the most interesting symposiums I’ve ever attended. The Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize—which goes to the best translation from German published in the past year—was awarded ...
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REX at the Rex: A Conversation with José Manuel Prieto and Esther Allen
Where: Hotel Rex, 562 Sutter St., San Francisco Co-Sponsored by PEN West and the Center for the Art of Translation REX is a sophisticated literary game rife with allusions to Proust and Borges, set in a world of wealthy Russian expats and mafiosos in western Europe. It is the final volume in a trilogy of novels that ...
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Reading from REX: José Manuel Prieto and Esther Allen
Where: 111 Minna Gallery, San Francisco Co-Sponsored by PEN West and the Center for the Art of Translation REX is a sophisticated literary game rife with allusions to Proust and Borges, set in a world of wealthy Russian expats and mafiosos in western Europe. It is the final volume in a trilogy of novels that includes the ...
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Bookstore of the Month: The Booksmith (San Francisco)
We’re a couple days behind, but this month’s featured bookstore is The Booksmith in San Francisco’s historic Haight Ashbury neighborhood. The store opened in 1976 by Gary Frank, who recently sold the store to Christin Evans and Praveen Madan. The Booksmith has a long history of hosting great events, and ...
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Gunter Grass and the New Translation of The Tin Drum
Over the past couple weeks, I’ve been gorging myself on Gunter Grass novels in preparation for the panel I’m moderating tomorrow with Krishna Winston (Crabwalk), Breon Mitchell (The Tin Drum), and Michael Henry Heim (My Century, Peeling the Onion)—arguably three of the best German-English translators working ...
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Here's the Future? (Random BEA Thoughts, Part V)
Follow these links for Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV. If you’ve read the first four parts of this post (or this piece I wrote a few months ago), you pretty much know where this is headed. After X years of keeping BEA confined to the “trade,” I think things have to open up to the ...
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We're Not Who We Think We Are (Random BEA Thoughts, Part IV)
Follow these links for Part I, Part II, and Part III. Over the past few years the debate between print and online reviewers has been one of the more contentious in all of the book business. Similar to publishing, this is an area where technology has outstripped the prevailing model, where with a couple bucks, a smart ...
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Portrait of a 1989 “Counter-revolutionary”
Liao Yiwu is the author of “The Corpse Walkers: Real Life Stories, China from the Bottom Up.” On June 4, 1989, Liao composed a poem, “Massacre,” that condemned the government’s brutal crackdown on the student pro-democracy movement in Tiananmen Square. He distributed underground and for which he was ...
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"Bookishness Goes Marginal": A Report from the Bookishness Symposium
A few weeks back we mentioned the then upcoming symposium at the University of Michigan on the “future of reading.” Well, the amazing Karl Pohrt was able to attend and wrote this comprehensive piece on the somewhat bleak gathering. Bookishness: The New Fate of Reading in the Digital Age is the title of a ...
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That Mad Ache/Translator, Trader
Françoise Sagan rocketed to international fame with her debut novel Bonjour, Tristesse. After failing her baccalaureate, she wrote this novel when she was eighteen years old and it became the novel that all her other works would be measured against. It has the trademark French style, lean and sober, with philosophical ...
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Free Manga Porn Stuff (Random BEA Thoughts, Part III)
Follow these links for Part I and Part II. Over the past few years, the book industry has become much flatter, allowing many, many more people to enter into the business. For instance, the advent of self-publishing allows almost anyone to become an author and make their book available for sale. Blogs turn your voracious ...
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Bringing Corn to the Chickens (Random BEA Thoughts, Part II)
Part I of this BEA-roundup can be found here. Attendance (and foot traffic on the floor) tends to become the primary evaluative criteria. And the show was crowded on Friday. (Although Saturday afternoon was a bit bleak, and on Sunday, it was damn near post-apocalyptic.) But one interesting thing—and I’m sure ...
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So, Was It Good for You? (Random BEA Thoughts, Part I)
If there’s one thing publishing people like more than complaining about how bad business is, it’s analyzing whether or not BookExpo America was successful. Which isn’t easy to determine . . . Lance Fensterman (who runs the show for Reed Exhibitions) has pointed out before how difficult it is to quantify the ...
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$10 Fundraiser Update
We want to graciously thank all of you for the overflowing response to our first $10 fundraising campaign. As we said at the beginning, these contributions truly add up to a very significant total. What’s more, the demonstration that there is a broad base of support for literature in translation is something that ...
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Enard's Zone wins Le prix du Livre Inter 2009
Mathias Enard’s Zone, which Open Letter is proud to be publishing next May, has won Le prix du Livre Inter 2009. The prize is awarded by France Inter, which is a public radio station in France (their podcasts are great if you’re trying to learn French!). It’s a unique prize: France Inter invites 24 listeners ...
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New Bookforum Website
Late last week, Bookforum launched their new website, which has all of the great features of the previous one (the daily round up blog, articles from the print version, etc.), but has also added a couple of cool things, like a daily review section and a syllabi section containing lists of recommendations within a particular ...
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New Eyes on the Arab World—Breaking Down Barriers of Fear and Prejudice
Where: The New York Public Library, 42nd Street, New York, NY New Eyes on the Arab World—Breaking Down Barriers of Fear and Prejudice Sponsored by the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Foundation, in cooperation with the Center for Literary Translation at Columbia University and ArteEast. Peter Theroux, Raja Alem, Tom ...
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A Mind at Peace
In his novel A Mind at Peace, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar asks if it’s possible for a culture that is tied so closely and intimately to its past to survive in a trying time of change. The novel begins in Istanbul the morning of the declaration of World War II and ends with the same announcement, framing the story while we learn ...
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Latest Review: A Mind at Peace by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar
The latest addition to our review section is a piece by Emily Shannon on Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar’s A Mind at Peace, which was translated from the Turkish by Erdag Göknar, published by Archipelago Books late last year, and most famously given as a gift to President Obama by Deniz Baykal, a member of the Turkish ...
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Rossica Translation Prize to Amanda Love Darragh
Announced earlier this week, this year’s Rossica Translation Prize was awarded to Amanda Love Darragh for her translation of Iramifications by Maria Galina. The prize of £5,000 is split between the translator and publisher—which in this instance is the admirable Glas, one of the finest publishers of ...
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Publishing Perspectives
It doesn’t officially launch until June 1st, but Publishing Perspectives the new daily newsletter from the Frankfurt Book Fair, and run by Ed Nawotka and Hannah Johnson is off to a pretty solid start. It’s kind of a “literary VeryShortList,” featuring one interesting, well-developed story each day and ...
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Susan Sontag Award: Year Two
I don’t think I received a press release about this, but the 2009 Susan Sontag Prize for Translation has been awarded to Roanne Sharp for her proposed translation of La Mayor by Juan Jose Saer. Which is fantastic—we’re actually publishing three Saer books over the next few years, but not this one. . . . At ...
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Wolf Totem on NPR
Over the next few days, NPR’s Morning Edition is going to be featuring Chinese writers, as a part of their ‘China at 60’ series that’s looking at the history of the People’s Republic. This morning they featured Jiang Rong, the author of Wolf Totem, which Howard Goldblatt translated and Penguin ...
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Summer Issue of Bookforum
Just in time for BookExpo, the summer fiction issue of Bookforum is now available in print and online. This year’s special fiction issue is all about fiction forward: We invited dozens of publishers to submit excerpts from books that will be published in the fall and winter, and we selected six of the very best. ...
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A Few Good Reviews for Open Letter Titles
This was a great week for Open Letter books, with three of our recent releases getting some nice coverage: First up was Hannah Manshel’s review of Death in Spring for The Front Table: In English for the first time in Martha Tennent’s translation, Death in Spring is about a society that finds highly elaborate ...
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BookExpo America's Cultural Program
Over the next few days, we’re going to highlight a few of the goings on at this year’s BookExpo America, the parties, the panels, etc. I thought I’d start out by highlighting the two events taking place next Friday and Saturday featuring the Arab world, this year’s Global Market Forum focus. Both of ...
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2009 NIKE Awards
Haven’t found the full list online yet, but apparently the longlist for this year’s NIKE Literary Award (the most prestigious literary award in Poland) have been announced. I’ll post an update when I find the full list, but for now, I can say that both Bambino by Inga Iwasiow and Poland Marches On by our own ...
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The Ninth
English-language readers have been enthusiastic about the excellent, albeit sinister, works of fiction by Hungarian writers like Nobel-Winner Imre Kertész, Best Translated Book Award Winner Attila Bartis, and the wonderful Péter Esterházy. We’ve been enthusiastic about being disturbed and moved, subjected to nightmare ...
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Four Korean Authors
Tim Nassau is interning at Open Letter over the summer, researching books we should have translated and writing some posts for the blog, such as the one below that gives a brief overview of a few interesting Korean authors. The Korea Literature Translation Institute has the expressed goal “of contributing to global ...
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Haruki Murakami's new book: 1Q84
The Millions has an interesting post about the forthcoming Haruki Murakami book. Apparently, after details about Kafka on the Shore leaked out, Murakami “insisted that his fans be allowed to approach the new book with no preconceptions,” so info on the new novel is pretty scarce. The title is 1Q84, it will release ...
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European Book Club: Margherita Dolce Vita
Where: Brooklyn Public Library, Trustees’ Room, Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn, NY For more information about the Brooklyn Public Library’s session of Margherita Dolce Vita, go to: http://www.brooklynpubliclibrary.org/events/eurobookclub.jsp. To register for the Brooklyn Public Library’s session, please e-mail ...
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Gallimard Montreal: Interview with Saskia Deluy and Julien Lefort
To celebrate Gallimard Montreal as our featured bookstore of the month I interviewed both Saskia Deluy and Julien Lefort about the store, Quebec literature and publishers, the future of indie bookselling, etc. Chad W. Post: Could you tell me a bit about the history of Gallimard Montreal? When it was founded, it’s location ...
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Latest Review: The Naked Eye by Yoko Tawada
I believe that The Naked Eye (translated by Susan Bernofsky from the German and published by New Directions) is the fourth of Yoko Tawada’s works to make their way into English. Kodandsha did The Bridegroom Was a Dog back in 1998 (this was translated just from the Japanese), and New Directions did Where Europe Begins in ...
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The Naked Eye
My cinema was a “Ma,” she wrapped me in her mucous membranes. She shielded me from the sun, from the force of visibility. Life was being played out on the screen, a life before death. People fought there, or else slept together. They cried and sweated, and the screen remained dry. The cinema, its stage, had no depth, ...
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Latest Review: The Class by Francois Begaudeau
The latest addition to our review section is Jessica Cobb’s review of Francois Begaudeau’s The Class, which is one of the few examples I can think of where the movie has been getting much more praise than the novel. (See this Complete Review review.) The Class is a novel about the everyday life of a Paris ...
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The Class
The Class is a novel about the everyday life of a Paris public school literature teacher who thinks that his current position is a bit useless. The teacher who narrates this book paints not only a picture of his depressing life but of those other educators who are in the same position. Through weighty dialogue, Begaudeau also ...
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A Romanian Bookstore in Manhattan
Last year, the first foreign-language edition of the Book Review launched in Romania. Now, in another unexpected bit of cultural turnabout, Midtown Manhattan has gotten what must be its only Romanian bookstore. (ed: look for one of Open Letter’s board members in the photo) Well, sort of. From now until July ...
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Bookishness: The New Fate of Reading in the Digital Age
Where: University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, 3222 Angell Hall 9:30-10:00: Coffee and Refreshments 10-12:00: Panel on New Reading Practices and Literacies in a Digital Age 2:00-4:00: Forum on New Institutions for the Digital Age At the current moment of ever-accelerating technological change, it’s particularly ...
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Mighty Angel Giveaway
For anyone who’s not a subscriber to the Open Letter newsletter, here’s this week’s entry. (You can sign up by entering your e-mail into the box on the upper right hand side of the Open Letter homepage.) This week’s Open Letter update is pretty simple and straightforward. To celebrate the release of ...
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Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
Just got word that the winner of this year’s Independent Foreign Fiction Prize is Evelio Rosero for The Armies, which was translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean. It’s available in the UK from Quercus (but not in the U.S. . . . or at least not yet) (Correction: It’s coming out from New Directions in ...
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Pretend This Post Appeared Yesterday . . .
As pointed out at Moby Lives yesterday marked the 93rd year after the death of Sholem Aleichem. (No, I don’t think 93 has any real numerological significance, but anniversaries are a nice reason for writing about someone’s work/life. And this does happen to be the 150th year after Aleichem’s birth . . . ...
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Salzburg Global Seminar: The Findings
It’s been a while since I last wrote about the Salzburg Global Seminar on Translation, but just today the final summary and recommendations was released and mailed out to a number of “shareholders.” Click here for a pdf version of the final report, which includes recommendations in four areas: How is ...
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Latest Review: The Zafarani Files by Gamal al-Ghitani
The latest addition to our review section is a piece on Gamal al-Ghitani’s The Zafarani Files. Al-Ghitani has a couple other books available in English translation from the American University of Cairo Press, including Pyramid Texts and The Mahfouz Dialogs. Based on the strength of this particular novel, I have the ...
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The Zafarani Files
I picked this book up at the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair, the day after attending the Sheikh Zayed Book Awards, where Gamal al-Ghitani (aka Jamal Al Ghitani) won the award for Literature. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, based on the description of al-Ghitani’s work given at the event and on the above ...
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Rocco Landesman to Head the National Endowment for the Arts
It still has to be approved by Congress, but Rocco Landesman has been appointed to serve as the next chairman of the NEA, a post most recently held by poet Dana Gioia. I’m not much of a theatre-goer, so Landesman is new to me. Based on the info in the New York Times article, he sounds like a lot of fun: Mr. ...
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Fail, Fail Again
Just when you thought the Times had figured out how to correctly pair writers with appropriate topics . . . Kidding—the Times will never get that straight. Here’s some clips from today’s review of Lost‘s season finale: [. . .] the producers of “Lost,” who have devoted the show’s fourth and ...
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A Tribute to the Chinese Earthquake Victims
My friend Wen Huang — translator of Liao Yiwu’s The Corpse Walker and Xianhui Yang’s Woman from Shanghai — contacted me this morning about the article below that Liao Yiwu wrote in remembrance of the one year anniversary of the devastating Beichuan earthquake. As referenced in passing in the piece ...
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Life Incorporated
A few weeks ago we posted a brief interview that Jason Boog of GalleyCat conducted with Douglas Rushkoff about conglomerates and the media. This interview tied into Rushkoff’s latest book — Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back — which is a fantastic critique of the rise of ...
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For Everyone in Ann Arbor . . .
The “Bookishness: The New Fate of Reading in the Digital Age” conference taking place at the University of Michigan on Friday, May 15th looks pretty amazing. There are two main panels: one on “New Reading Practices and Literacies in a Digital Age” and one on “New Institutions for the Digital ...
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European Book Club: Margherita Dolce Vita
Where: Istituto Italiano di Cultura, 686 Park Avenue, New York, NY Please contact italy.nyc@europeanbookclub.org to register. Please note that this address is only valid to register for the Italian session at the Istituto Italiano di Cultura. Margherita Dolce Vita: Stefano Benni’s enormously popular and distinctive mix ...
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Latest Review: Brothers by Yu Hua
If things go right, I think we’ll be running five reviews this week—which definitely makes up for the one we skipped last week. Up first is Yu Hua’s Brothers, a very long novel, very ambitious novel about two boys growing up in China during the period of the Cultural Revolution and the economic boom that ...
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Brothers
As detailed in the profile of Yu Hua in the New York Times Magazine, he’s considered to be one of China’s most important contemporary writers. In fact, two of his novels — To Live and Chronicle of a Blood Merchant — were honored in China as two of the most influential books of the last decade. But ...
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The Year of Jakov Lind
Although the fiction buyer at Barnes & Noble had her doubts about 2009 being the “Year of Jakov Lind,” this year really does represent the best chance this overlooked, peculiar Austrian writer has of being rediscovered. Over the course of the next few months, three Lind titles will be reissued: Landscape in ...
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Japanese Issue of Words Without Borders
Corridor of Dreams, which is the May issue of Words Without Borders, is now available online and focuses on contemporary Japanese literature. From translator and guest editor Allison Powell’s introduction: Over the past several decades, a steady stream of fascinating writers from Japan have appeared in English, ...
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Arab World and BEA's Global Market Forum
As the focus of this year’s Global Market Forum at BookExpo, the Arab publishing world will be highlighted through a series of panels and cultural event kicking off the morning of Friday, May 29th with a ribbon cutting by Lance Fensterman and His Excellency M. Amr Moussa, General Secretary of the Arab League. All of ...
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Tour of One Hundred Indie Bookshops
To promote Valeria’s Last Stand, debut novelist Marc Fitten isn’t just going on a normal author tour—instead he’s decided to stop at 100 independent bookstores across the country. He’ll be documenting all his stops on his blog, giving the rest of us a chance to find out about some of the best ...
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Featured Bookstore of the Month: Gallimard Montreal
Granted, there are still dozens of indie stores in the U.S. to feature as the bookstore of the month, but there are two good reasons why we chose to feature Gallimard Montreal for the month of May: 1) May is World in Translation Month, so it seemed fitting to feature a store from one of the most translation-centric ...
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Interview with Rakesh Kumar of Blaft
Following up on the earlier post on Indian publishing at the ADIBF and LBF, it seems like as good a time as ever to post this interview with Rakesh Kumar of Blaft Publications that I conducted a few months back when I was researching the article on Indian publishing that I wrote for the Frankfurt Book Fair newsletter. ...
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Indian Literature and Publishing in Abu Dhabi and London
As pointed out at the Literary Saloon, the new issue of the Literary Review at The Hindu has a couple of articles about India’s presence at the recent London and Abu Dhabi book fairs. It’s interesting how different these two articles are—the one on the ADIBF is more focused on India’s entrance into ...
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Zubaida's Window
Iqbal Al-Qazwini, author of Zubaida’s Window, writes a story that reflects a life of her own. She now lives in East Berlin and is an Iraqi Exile herself, which brings a heightened creditability to the first novel that she has written. As an active member of the Iraqi Women’s League, the largest Arabic Women’s Rights ...
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"In Walks the Translator"
Thankfully, Paul Verhaeghen just posted the opening statement he gave at the “Writers as Translators” panel that he was during the PEN World Voices Festival. All of the opening statements from the panelists were really interesting, but this one stood out to me: Allow me to open with a simple statement of ...
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Catalan Days: Rodoreda and Jessica Lange
Catalan Days — a month-long festival celebrating the arts, food, and literature of Catalonia and the Balearic Islands — really got underway on Saturday with a performance by Jessica Lange of Merce Rodoreda’s The Time of the Doves. This event was arranged in part to celebrate our release of Death in Spring, ...
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PEN World Voices: Recap
The fifth annual PEN World Voices Festival ended on Sunday, and based on the attendance at the few events I went to, it was pretty successful. I wasn’t able to attend as many panels as I would’ve liked, which is sort of a plus and minus for the festival—there’s a lot to choose from and you really do ...
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TONIGHT – On the Edge: Writing in Post-Reunified Germany
In last last-minute switcheroo (sp?), Chad will be moderating-and-more at a PEN World Voices Festival event tonight in NYC. Title: On the Edge – Writing in Post-Reunified Germany When: Friday, May 1, 6–7:30 p.m. Where: Deutsches Haus, 42 Washington Mews You can get the full info here, but what that page ...
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English vs. The World
There is so much wrong with Philip Jones’s “English writers outperform rivals” post on The Bookseller.com, that I’m not even sure where to start . . . I’ll get to the actual content of the article in a minute, but first off, what is up with this title? Since when did English writers have ...
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Every Man Dies Alone
Hans Fallada, née Rudolph Ditzen, led a tumultuous, short life, producing several great works even under the crushing hand of the Nazi Regime. Fallada’s own life, itself worthy of several novels, was plagued by drugs, alcohol, stints in sanatoriums, and most importantly, artistic integrity as a writer. At eighteen, he ...
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Latest Review: Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada
Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone, translated from the German by Michael Hoffmann and published by Melville House earlier this year, has been receiving a ton of good attention, such as this review in the New Yorker and this bit for the daily Very Short List e-mail. Never before published in English, this novel is a ...
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Jan Kjaerstad at the Norwegian Seaman’s Church
Where: The Norwegian Seamen’s Church, 317 East 52nd Street (betw. 1st & 2nd Aves.), New York, NY Meet the Norwegian author Jan Kjærstad at the Norwegian Seamen’s Church as he presents his latest novel published in the United States, “The Conqueror”. The event takes place on Tuesday April 28, ...
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Marketing Translations and Other "Difficult" Books
That was the name of the panel that I moderated at this year’s London Book Fair, and which featured Abby Blachly of LibraryThing, Lance Fensterman of Reed Exhibitions (in particular, BookExpo America and New York Comic Con), Bob Stein of the Institute for the Future of the Book, and Mark Thwaite of ReadySteadyBook.com, ...
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Paper Republic's List of Chinese Books to Publish
Thanks—in a somewhat roundabout way—to Arts Council England funding, I had the chance to meet with Eric Abrahamsen and Nikki Harman from Paper Republic at the London Book Fair. Paper Republic is one of the best online sources for information about Chinese literature, especially thanks to resources such as their ...
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2009 Blue Metropolis Festival
Montreal’s 11th annual Blue Metropolis (or rather, Metropolis Bleu) took place this last weekend, featuring a huge number of international writers, events, readings, and languages. According to an article in the Montreal Gazette, the Metropolis Bleu Festival was the “world’s first multilingual literary ...
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Ghosts
The entire plot of Ghosts, Cesar Aira’s third novel to be translated into English and published by New Directions, is encapsulated in this story told over New Year’s Eve dinner: Patri thought for a moment before speaking: I remember a story by Oscar Wilde, about a princess who was bored in her palace, bored ...
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Latest Review: Ghosts by Cesar Aira
Our latest review is of Ghosts by Cesar Aira, translated by Chris Andrews and published by New Directions. Ghosts is a very interesting book, and one of the front-runners for my personal 2010 Best Translated Book longlist . . . Here’s the opening of the review: The entire plot of Ghosts, Cesar Aira’s third ...
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2009 PEN Translation Fund Recipients
The recipients of this year’s PEN Translation Fund Awards were announced last week, and once again, a number of really interesting projects are highlighted—including a number that are still looking for a publishers . . . For those unfamiliar with the prize, this was established in 2003 thanks to an anonymous ...
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And We Exhale . . .
OK, after ten days of book fairs and festivals in three countries, I’m finally back in Rochester . . . for the time being. The PEN World Voices Festival kicks off today in New York, and after our event here in Rochester on Thursday—a Reading and Conversation with Norwegian author Jan Kjaerstad (The Conqueror, The ...
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A Sample of Saer
Next year we’re publishing the first of three novels by Juan José Saer, and Steve Dolph (the co-founder and co-editor, with Brandon Holmquest, of the translation journal and soon-to-be-book-publisher Calque) will be translating all three of the novels. The other day Steve sent us a paragraph from his translation of ...
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Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival
Where: Montreal, Canada Theme 2009: Words that Matter Words do matter, today more than ever. Times of turmoil are times of danger, as we lose much of what we have valued. These are times of opportunity as well, as we rethink what we have taken for granted, discriminate between what matters more and what matters less, and ...
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Katherine Silver wins NCBA Translation Award
The 28th Northern California Book Awards were held in San Francisco last weekend, and, in conjunction with the Center for the Art of Translation, they awarded a Translation Award “to bring attention to all the wonderful translations coming out of the Bay Area and to encourage local audiences to read more international ...
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Rex
It a more perfect world, I would have enough time to read this book at least one more time before even attempting to write this review. Rex is a novel that’s filthy with references to other novels, plays, essays, TV shows, works of art, etc. Even from the opening line—“I’ve been reading it for years, ...
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Latest Review: Rex
Our latest review is of Rex by Jose Manuel Prieto, translated from the Spanish by Esther Allen and published this month by Grove. This is the second book of Prieto’s that Grove has published—Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire came out a few years ago—and hopefully isn’t the last. As you can ...
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Espresso Book Machine–Live!
So right before leaving for the London Book Fair (and Free the Word! festival), I talked to a class at the University of Rochester about e-books, print on demand, and the digital future of publishing. Of course, during this discussion the Espresso Book Machine came up, and I made everyone watch this video, which we posted ...
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Suzane Adam and Becka Mara McKay—Laundry
Where: Magers and Quinn Booksellers, 3038 Hennepin Avenue S, Minneapolis, MN 55408 Israeli author Suzane Adam is joined by her translator Becka Mara McKay for a reading from her novel Laundry and a conversation about the translation process. Laundry is a novel of psychological suspense that focuses on family ...
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Latest Review: Pluriverse by Ernesto Cardenal
In honor of today’s Ernesto Cardenal event in Ann Arbor, we thought we’d post a review of Pluriverse that Vincent Francone wrote for us. The collection—which came out from New Directions earlier this year—covers Cardenal’s entire career, and Vincent has nothing but positive things to say about ...
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European Book Club in May: Stefano Benni's Margherita Dolce Vita
Registration is open for next month’s European Book Club, in which Italy is the focus country, and the title being discussed is Stefano Benni’s Margherita Dolce Vita, which was translated by Anthony Shugaar and published by Europa Editions. Stefano Benni’s enormously popular and distinctive mix of the ...
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Tahar Ben Jelloun
I’m hoping to get to Tahar Ben Jelloun’s Leaving Tangier in the near future, but in the meantime, Moroccan Board has a nice review of the novel, and an interesting interview. Q. You write in French but your books have been translated into many languages. What do you see as the challenges of publishing your ...
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Didn't We Read This Story Just a Few Months Ago?
Yesterday it was announced that Moody’s has downgraded Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s rating, which sounds sort of familiar . . . probably because they did the same thing last December. This isn’t good news for the Education Media & Publishing Group—which is incorporated in the Cayman Islands and ...
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Free the Word!
The British equivalent to the PEN World Voices Festival, the Free the Word! festival kicks off on Thursday night with a discussion on the main stage of Shakespeare’s Globe featuring Nadine Gordimer, Tariq Ali, Samir El-youssef and Tahmima Anam. Put on by International PEN, the festival runs through Sunday and ...
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More eARC Info
Last week, Jessica Stockton Bagnulo, Jenn Northington, Stephanie Anderson, and other independent booksellers started a conversation about the benefits of eARCs—electronic versions of the Advance Reading Copies all publishers send out to reviewers, booksellers, bloggers, etc. My complete post about this can be found ...
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Catherine Bohne is an Indie Heartthrob
Over at Bookslut, this week’s “Indie Heartthrob Interview” is with Catherine Bohne, a great drinker of wine (from personal experience), a wonderful person for late night conversations (ditto), and owner of the Community Bookstore in Park Slope (which has a great display of NYRB, Archipelago, and New ...
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International Science Fiction
Following up on last week’s post about Clemente Palma, I thought I’d point out the World SF News Blog, which is the only site I know of where you can see posts about The French on Mars, a hundred year retrospective on French stories about Martians, or a three-part post about South African Speculative Fiction, or a ...
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Turkish Lit and President Obama
Paper Cuts wrote about this last week, but I think it’s cool enough to repeat . . . Last week, during a visit to Turkey, Pres. Obama was presented with a copy of A Mind at Peace by Ahmet Hamd Tanpinar, which was recently translated into English by Erdag Göknar and published by Archipelago Books. From Paper ...
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Doghead
When first published in Denmark in 2005, Morten Ramsland’s Doghead was a staggering success. Although Ramsland’s prior poetry collection and first novel had been largely overlooked, Doghead received widespread popular and critical acclaim, winning numerous national prizes, including the prestigious Danish Booksellers’ ...
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Peruvian Science Fiction Writer Clemente Palma
Although he’s considered to be the first Peruvian science fiction writer, there’s precious little information about Clemente Palma available in English. That said, what is out there is extremely intriguing . . . and seems almost made up. Or like he’s an entry from Bolano’s Nazi Literature in the ...
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Gods and Soldiers
This anthology of both fiction and non-fiction features thirty pieces from a wide variety of African writers from across the continent—from the West, Sub-Saharan, North, East, and ending in the Southern Regions. Editor Rob Spillman (the editor of Tin House) claims in his introduction that “this anthology is intended ...
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E-Books and Indie Bookstores: Part II — Business Models
Putting aside the environmental, financial, and promotional advantages to sending eARCs to independent booksellers, the one paragraph of Jessica Stockton Bagnulo’s post that troubled me was this: I think for a lot of booksellers right now, the idea of an e-reader provokes growls of hostility because it’s ...
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Another Interesting Job
I don’t want to get in the habit of posting too many job openings, but in this economy, I’m sure there are a lot of qualified people out there looking for positions just like this: Free Word DIRECTOR A groundbreaking new centre for literature, literacy and free expression, Free Word, will open in June ...
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E-Books and Indie Bookstores: Part I — eARCs
I have to visit a graduate seminar later today to talk about e-books and the future of the publishing industry, so the impact e-books will have (or rather, are having) on publishing structures (like indie bookstores) has been very much on my mind the past few days, so finding Jessica Stockton Bagnulo’s post about recent ...
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Laundry
Suzane Adam is an renowned author in Israel and received the Kugel Prize in 2006 for her novel, Janis’s Mother. Adam’s first novel, Laundry, her first novel to be translated from Hebrew into English, is a novel that captivates from the first page with a mysterious narrator and even more elusive plot. The novel ...
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Academic Publishing Woes
Although universities are supposed to be “recession proof” (something we’re all finding out isn’t quite true in relation to this particular recession—again, thanks investment bankers!), university presses obviously aren’t. University presses face a lot of the same challenges as trade ...
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Harvard Crimson on Three — Yes, Three — Open Letter Titles
Last Thursday was “Open Letter Day” at the Harvard Crimson, as the university daily newspaper covered three new Open Letter books: The Mighty Angel by Jerzy Pilch, Death in Spring by Merce Rodoreda, and Landscape in Concrete by Jakov Lind. (Typically, these links would be to our Indie Bookstore of the Month, but ...
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The $9.99 E-Book Boycott
This piece at GalleyCat about the “informal boycott” going on at Amazon for e-books costing more than $10 is very curious. Readers are tagging $10+ e-books with a 9 99 boycott tag and making rational arguments as to why the price should be under $10: “Kindle books are kinda like movie tickets. While you ...
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Another Anniversary
As stated in the opening editorial of the new issue, Pratilipi is celebrating its first anniversary. A bilingual quarterly, Pratilipi is one of the best online magazines featuring contemporary Indian authors. They cram a lot into each issue (see this issue’s table of contents and staggering list of contributors), ...
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Happy Birthday to the Complete Review
Back on April 5, 1999, the Complete Review published its first review, giving Nicholson Baker’s The Everlasting Story of Nory a “C” for being “too cute for its own good.” Well, 2,250 reviews and ten years later and CR is still going strong. Michael Orthofer has a nice write up about his first ...
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Alain Mabanckou Interview
Richard Lea has a great audio interview with Alain Mabanckou about Broken Glass, his second novel to be published in English. (Although apparently only in the UK for now. Soft Skull did African Psycho a couple years ago, but I haven’t seen a listing for the new book yet.) The Guardian also posted a positive review of ...
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Unnecessary Quotes!
OK, so this isn’t exactly translation related, but hell, it’s Friday and I think this just became my new favorite blog. When living in Normal, IL, I was obsessed for a time with misused quotation marks. And trust me, Normal is filthy with unnecessary quotes . . . like the headline in The Pantagraph (the local, ...
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Walking Tour of NY Independent Bookstores
Based on the response to their online walking tour of NY indies, The Millions are taking this idea physical and have organized a real walking tour of independent bookstores in New York. (Or at least six of them.) On Saturday, May 2nd at 11am, participants will meet at Three Lives (154 W. 10th at Waverly Place) and go from ...
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Open Letters Monthly on My Uncle Napoleon
I remember when the Modern Library first published Iraj Pezeshkzad’s My Uncle Napoleon a few years, but this review by Bryn Haworth makes it sound really interesting. (When Byrn writes about the book itself. The stuff about today’s Iran is good, but this novel sound intriguing to me for other, more literary ...
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Rose Mary Salum and Two Lines's Annie Janusch
Over at Entre Los Espacios, Rose Mary Salum is continuing her line-up of bad-ass interviews. Last month she talked with a slew of editors at translation literary journals (such as Absinthe and Calque), and today she has a nice interview with Annie Janusch from Two Lines. And tying in to the previous post about editing ...
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New Nordic Blog and "The Normaliser"
Nordic Voices is an interesting addition to the lit blog world. Run by three British literary translators (who combined translate from Finnish, Swedish, Russian, and Estonian), the goal of the blog is to bring more attention to Nordic literature (beyond the thrillers) and related translation issues. The site is still ...
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Vilnius Poker in the B&N Spotlight
The Barnes & Noble Review continues to impress me by covering books/movies/CDs that aren’t best-sellers, such as Christopher Byrd’s piece on Vilnius Poker: While reading Ricardas Gavelis’s Vilnius Poker, a line from Joyce’s Ulysses surfaced in my memory, “Stephen bent forward and peered at ...
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April's Indie Bookstore: Shaman Drum
As you can see on the right side of the page, our featured indie bookstore for the month of April is Shaman Drum Bookshop in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Karl Pohrt and I are good friends (he’s actually on the advisory committee for Open Letter as well), and worked together to help launch the Reading the World program. ...
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Death in Spring: Review and Event
Death in Spring by Merce Rodoreda is probably our biggest book of the spring. I was planning on giving away a few copies of the galley, but the response from reviewers was so overwhelming that we quite literally ran out (we don’t even have a copy in our archive) and even had to send out a few unbound copies. This ...
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Some April Translations
For whatever reason, April is a huge month for literature in translation. According to the translation database there are 39 works of fiction and poetry coming out in translation this month. We will be running full-length reviews of a number of these titles, but over the course of the month, I thought I’d highlight the ...
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Latest Revew: Mr Dick or The Tenth Book
Monica Carter’s piece on Mr Dick or The Tenth Book is the latest addition to our review section. In addition to checking our Monica’s review, I’d also recommend checking out her recently redesigned web publication Salonica World Lit. Included in this redesign—which looks great—is an ...
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Mr Dick or the Tenth Book
Jean-Pierre Ohl has written a novel that is at once a curious and adept mix of homage to Charles Dickens, send-up of literary scholarship, and mystery. Generally, I’m leery of books based on literary figures or borrowing heavily from a previous book to bolster a premise, but Mr. Ohl, a bookseller from Bordeaux, France, ...
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Douglas Rushkoff Tells It Like It Is
Over at Galley Cat Jason Boog posted a two-minute video with Douglas Rushkoff (whose new book Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back is at the very top of my galley reading stack) about media conglomerates. Not necessarily anything that hasn’t been said before, but I love the line ...
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Yu Hua's Newsweek Profile and Chinese Censorship
This post by Bruce Humes highlighting all the bits cut out of the Chinese translation of a recent Newsweek profile of author Yu Hua (Brothers) is fascinating: Yu, a former dentist with the charm of a salesman and an unassuming nature that have earned him comparisons to a peasant, has avoided the censorship of Chinese ...
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Jeremy Davies on Roubaud's The Loop
Over at the always interesting Front Table, editor Jeremy Davies has a nice piece about the forthcoming release of Jacques Roubaud’s The Loop, (click to pre-order from Seminary Co-op) the second “branch” in his “Great Fire of London cycle.” At some point I’d become aware that The Great ...
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Neuman wins Alfaguara Prize
Argentina’s Andres Neuman on Monday was awarded Spain’s Alfaguara Novel Prize – considered among the most prestigious of its kind in the Spanish language – for “El viajero del siglo” (The Traveler of the Century). Neuman, a novelist, poet and short story writer who was born in 1977 in Buenos Aires but ...
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Zoetrope: The Post-Post-Boom Issue
E.J. mentioned this earlier, but now that we actually have a physical issue in hand, I thought I’d add a bit of information. As noted in the earlier post, this issue of Zoetrope: All-Story is dedicated to contemporary Latin American writers. All of the writers included in this issue are under 40 (born ...
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To any of you who aren’t yet part of the Open Letter group on Facebook, take a second to join, won’t you? The group is on its way to becoming a much more active place with invites to upcoming events, info about new books and the publishing world, and probably a few contests for free stuff, too . . ...
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Publishing Translations Into (and out of) Arabic
This post originally appeared at the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair blog. One of the most admirable aspects of the UAE is how much money is spent on cultural activities. The Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture & Heritage does a remarkable job funding events (such as the book fair) and helping to cultivate the apperception ...
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For English-Speaking Readers
This post originally appeared at the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair blog. After spending a week in Abu Dhabi talking with Arabic publishers, looking at Arabic stands, I’m personally very interested in reading a few contemporary Arabic works. As most everybody knows, translation ain’t a specialty of American/UK ...
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Women in Publishing: Marketing Outside the Mainstream
This post originally appeared at the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair blog. One of the liveliest and interesting professional programs of the week was “How Did You Do It?” a special Women in Publishing Business Lunch that focused on innovative marketing strategies implemented by two independent presses. Rana Idress ...
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E-Everything
This post originally appeared at the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair blog. One of the most interesting panels I’ve attended here at the book fair was the “Business Potentials of Digital Publishing” seminar that took place this afternoon. This is a topic that I’m personally really interested in, and following a few ...
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The Education Chapter
This post originally appeared at the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair blog. As mentioned earlier, in addition to copyright and piracy issues, the other main emphasis at the ADIBF is educational publishing. To this end, the fair organized a two-day “Education Chapter Conference” to provide publishers and educators with ...
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Professionalizing the Arab Publishing Industry
This post originally appeared at the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair blog. One of the larger topics at the ADIBF is the professionalization of the Arab publishing world. As I’ve mentioned earlier, there is no pan-Arab distribution system, there’s a good deal of piracy and copyright infringement, etc. The “Spotlight ...
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Touring the ADIBF
This post originally appeared at the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair blog. Earlier today Ursula Holpp took our group of journalists on a quick tour of the fair, introducing us to some of the most influential and interesting Arab book market representatives. After spending even just a couple hours walking around, trying to ...
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The Arab Book Market: Facts and Figures
This post originally appeared at the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair blog. Bachar Chebaro, general manager of Arab Scientific Publishers and Secretary General of the Arab Publishers Association, kicked off this year’s professional program with his presentation on “News from the Arab Book Market.” As a member of the ...
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Arrival at the Abu Dhabi Book Fair
This post originally appeared at the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair blog. After twenty-some-odd hours of travel (including a twelve-hour flight in a seat with a busted entertainment center that kept restarting and restarting as if it was possessed), I’m here in Abu Dhabi, at the Book Fair, waiting for the opening ...
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March Issue of the Frankfurt Book Fair Newsletter
The new issue of the Frankfurt Book Fair is now available online, and includes: Information about Argentina’s new translation subsidy program; An interview with Akshay Pathak about the GBO New Delhi and the Indian book market; and, An article I wrote on the future of publishing in India. ...
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PEN's Poetry Slam
This is pretty cool: Inspired by live translation slams that proved to be audience favorites at the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival, and again at PEN World Voices, PEN’s online Translation Slam aims to showcase the art of translation by juxtaposing in a public forum two “competing” ...
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ADIBF: The Fair, The Awards, The Parties
What’s interesting to me about the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair is how it manages to address a number of different constituencies in a variety of ways. Whenever I attend a book fair, I always end up placing it into some imaginary book fair constellation: BEA is for booksellers and publishers, London is all about ...
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Thoughts on the Abu Dhabi Book Fair: Context
As I mentioned earlier I’m in Abu Dhabi, writing a blog for the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair blog. It’s all going pretty well—I have a few posts up, a few more interesting ones on the way—but since trips like this generate a lot of thoughts, comments, and ideas, and since the book fair blog ...
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Save Shaman Drum
We posted Karl Pohrt’s letter about the state of Shaman Drum last month, and it looks like his call for help is being answered. According to PW: In response to two open letters from bookseller Karl Pohrt to the Ann Arbor community, a loose coalition of booklovers is coming together to save Shaman Drum bookstore ...
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Abu Dhabi Blog
For anyone interested, Ed Nawotka and I will be posting about the Abu Dhabi Book Fair at the fair’s official blog. We’ll have pictures, stories, and funny anecdotes all week . . . ...
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International Prize for Arabic Fiction Winner
It isn’t up on their site yet, but our man on the inside tells us that the winner of the 2008/2009 International Prize for Arabic Fiction is Yusuf Ziedan for BEELZEBUB. I don’t know much about the book I’m afraid, but here’s the description from the IPAF site: Set in fifth century Upper Egypt, ...
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This Week
Things might be a little slow here at Three Percent this week. I’m going to be in Abu Dhabi attending—and writing about—the book fair. I’m not sure where exactly my articles/reports will appear, but as soon as I have the link, I’ll post it here. As a mini-preview of things to come, after I get ...
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Charlotte Mandell on Translating The Kindly Ones
To complement all the review coverage that Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones has been receiving, Ron Hogan from Beatrice, has posted a piece by Charlotte Mandell about translating this controversial novel: People talk about ‘free translation’—and they usually mean something that I’d judge sloppy or ...
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Fuentes's Recommendations
Since Mexico is the guest of honor at the Salon du Livre 2009, Le Monde has a piece by Carlos Fuentes about five Mexican authors/books he thinks should be more well known. The list includes works by Ignacio Padilla (Shadow without a Name is a really cool book), Pedro Angel Palou (not translated into English), Cristina ...
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NPR and The Sailor from Gibraltar
Jessa Crispin (the woman behind Bookslut) wrote a great reivew of Marguerite Duras’s The Sailor from Gibraltar) for NPR: But this is a novel by the cerebral French writer and filmmaker Marguerite Duras, so nothing much happens at all. And it’s all the more thrilling because of it. There are long philosophical ...
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Some Buzz for The Conqueror
In my opinion, Jan Kjaerstad’s The Conqueror is one of the best books we brought out in our first season. Compelling and engaging, with a brilliant over-arching structure, it’s a novel that’s very literary and very readable, and one that we were really hoping would take off. (Especially since this is part of ...
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Discussion of Review of Brothers
Thanks to Literary Saloon for bringing this to our attention. Over at Paper Republic there’s an ongoing discussion of the recent New York Times review by Jess Row of Yu Hua’s Brothers. It all starts when Bruce Humes raises a few questions about the review: —-Does Jess Row know Chinese? This is never ...
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NBCC
Just announced: Roberto Bolano’s 2666 has won the 2008 National Book Critic Circle Award for Fiction. It’s always great to see a translation win a NBCC. (I might be mistaken, but I think the last book to do it was Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl back a few years ago.) Last month, Marcela ...
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2009 Best Translated Book Award Ceremony
Following on last week’s post with some pictures, here’s the video (thanks, Monica!) from the 2009 BTB Award ceremony at which Francisco Goldman told a great story about translating Gabriel Garcia Marquez for Playboy, and I managed to give the wrong award to Barbara Epler. ...
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April/May Bookforum
The new issue of Bookforum is now available online, and, as always, has some interesting pieces about some interesting works of international literature, including: William Giraldi’s review of Aharon Appelfeld’s Laish: “Being labeled a Holocaust writer might indeed irritate Appelfeld, but no living ...
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Indpendents and What the Kids Are Reading
In the Guardian, Hirsh Sawhney has a piece about how independent publishers of the world are going to save literature: Could literary culture really be breathing its last? Should readers and writers be running for cover? Of course not. But what, then, will save literature from economic disaster? Simple: independent ...
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Five Spice Street
Recently, I happened to be on the same flight as super-translator Michael Henry Heim (who literally speaks more than a dozen languages). We got to talking about books (naturally) and about what we were currently reading, and as it turns out, we had both brought along Can Xue titles for our trip. He was reading Blue Light in ...
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Latest Review: Five Spice Street
Our latest review is of Can Xue’s Five Spice Street (click here to order from Harvard Book Store; click here for the review), which was recently released by Yale University Press as part of the Margellos World Republic of Letters Series. Before getting into the review itself, I want to mention that Can Xue and Isabel ...
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Bacacay: The Polish Literature Weblog
The Polish Cultural Institute in New York recently launched Bacacay, a new blog with info on Polish literature for English-language readers, translators, reviewers, publishers, and so on. Even though the site is brand new, Bill Martin has done a great job putting together some really interesting, informative posts, such as ...
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The Future of Calque
The rumor’s been floating out there for the past few months that the recent issue of Calque is also the final issue. As Steve and Brandon write on the Calque website this is “both true and not strictly accurate.” It’s true that the current format of the magazine is going to end, but Calque will live ...
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Manual Labor
Continuing my series of posts about the Salzburg Global Seminar on Translation (earlier posts available here) I wanted to share the most depressing study about translation I’ve ever heard about—the CEATL Survey of Translator Working Conditions. CEATL—the Conseil Européen des Associations de Traducteurs ...
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Obituary: Barbara Wright (1915-2009)
This is horrible news. From the Alma Books Bloggerel: John Calder called me this afternoon to give me the sad news of Barbara Wright’s death last night, after complications from a hip operation. Barbara was one of the greatest and most influential translators from the French, and was almost as instrumental as John ...
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Observer Translation Project
The Observer Translation Project is a relatively new website featuring news, reviews, and samples from and about Romanian authors. From the About Us page: We highlight a “pilot” author each month. This is the place to learn about Romanian writers, find updates on Romanian writing abroad, read CV’s, take a look at ...
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Harvard "Select Seventy" and Other Open Letter Publicity
I just found out last week that the Harvard Book Store selected The Conqueror by Jan Kjaerstad as part of its Select Seventy program. As implied by the name, this program consists of seventy books selected by booksellers and buyers—all of which are sold at a 20% discount for the month. Seeing any of our books on a ...
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Pictures from the Best Translated Book Party
It feels like the award party for the 2009 Best Translated Book Award took place ages ago, and although we posted about the two winners (Hiraide’s For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut and Bartis’s Tranquility), we never actually put up any photos of the event . . . Monica Carter actually recorded the entire ...
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Anuvela Correction
I fixed the original post already, but in writing about Anuvela, I mistakenly said that this collective was made up of seven women—it’s actually six women and one man. What’s worse is that Robert Falco Miramontes was one of the translators who worked on the Ken Follett translation that I mentioned . . ...
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Tim Wilkinson Interview
Hungarian Literature Online has a really nice interview with Tim Wilkinson, who is probably best known as Imre Kertesz’s new translator. But for all publishers out there, Tim’s translated a lot more than Kertesz. In fact, he has a whole host of translations sitting in his desk waiting for a publisher . . . ...
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You Can Take the Man Out of Publishing, But . . .
He may have resigned from Soft Skull, but as evidenced in a recent post, at his personal blog—always a source of great erudition and entertainment—Richard Nash still has a lot to say about the business of publishing, the so-called “death of the book,” etc.: People, the book will live on with the ...
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French Voices — Year Four
Information about the fourth year of French Voices was announced yesterday. As stated on the above website, the goal of French Voices is to ensure that contemporary French works (both fiction and non) are published in English translation. To that end, each year, between seven and twelve titles are selected to be part of ...
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Five Against One
Continuing my random recollections of last week’s Salzburg Global Seminar on Translation in a Global Culture, I thought that today I’d write about Anuvela, a really interesting “translation collective” that I learned about at the seminar. In brief, Anuvela is a collective of seven translators (six ...
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March 2009 Issue of Words Without Borders
Lots of interesting pieces in the new issue of Words Without Borders, which focuses on Greece this month. I have to admit that I haven’t heard of many of these writers (although the pieces by Thanassis Valtinos, Margarita Karapanou, and Ioanna Karystiani look particularly interesting), I am familiar with both Karen ...
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The NEA and Stimulus $$
As reported at the L.A. Times‘s Culture Monster the NEA has already posted information about how to apply for some of the $50 million awarded to the agency as part of the recent stimulus package. According to the site: The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act provides $50 million to be distributed in direct ...
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Austrian Translation Prize
I believe this was announced a few weeks back, but yesterday I received some information about the newly launched Austrian Translation Prize: The Austrian Cultural Forum New York is pleased to announce the Austrian Cultural Forum Translation Prize, aimed at the promotion of intercultural exchange between the Republic of ...
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CALQUE Issue No. 5 Reading
For anyone who’s not a subscriber, the new issue of CALQUE Magazine is now available for purchase. (You can also find some interesting supplementary online material via that link.) Rumors about CALQUE have been circulating of late, and according to Steve and Brandon, this will be the final issue of the magazine. But ...
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Translation Journals
This started a while ago, but Rose Mary Salum of Entre los espacios has been interviewing a number of translation journals/magazines about issues of readership, editing, etc., with pretty interesting results. Each question is a separate post, so here are links to the four already online, along with a quote from one of the ...
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More Devastating Statistics
One of the interesting people I met at the Salzburg Seminar last week was Ruediger Wischenbart, who now runs a consulting firm, analyzes the global publishing market, and is working with Three Percent favorite Lance Fensterman on developing the program for the Arab World to be Guest of Honor at this year’s BEA. ...
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A Couple Books from the German
These two books arrived a couple weeks ago and are nearing the top of my reading list: Every Man Dies Alone is one of three Hans Fallada books Melville House is bringing out this season. (The Drinker and Little Man, What Now? being the other two.) A mammoth book (although written in only twenty-four days!), Every Man Dies ...
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University of Rochester's Translation Program
The new website for the University of Rochester’s Literary Translation Program is now available online, complete with information about the undergrad and graduate certificates and the M.A. program. Although the certificate program has been up and running for the past year or so, it’s very exciting to have this ...
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The Sound of Translation
Feels like ages since I last posted anything to the blog . . . but at least I have a good reason. Following our Best Translated Book Award Party in New York (more on that later), I left for Salzburg, Austria to spend a week in the castle below talking about translation. Seriously. And in case you’re wondering, yes, ...
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Richard Nash to Leave Soft Skull
Sad to see one of my favorite publishing people leave their job, but based on his post on Soft Skull’s blog I’m actually encouraged about his future: When I explained to my colleagues yesterday that I would be consulting and freelancing, some were concerned this was a euphemism for leaving publishing. It is ...
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Europa in the News
This is a few days old already, but our friends at Europa Editions had a nice write up in the Times: Some larger publishers are starting to envy Europa’s selection and its frankly retro publishing model. Mr. Carroll “finds things, picks things up for a little bit of money and makes a lot out of them,” said Jonathan ...
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Kindle Review
In case you’re dying for more Kindle news, the New York Times has finally run their review: But as traditionalists always point out, an e-book reader is a delicate piece of electronics. It can be lost, dropped or fried in the tub. You’d have to buy an awful lot of $10 best sellers to recoup the purchase price. If ...
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Noir
Olivier Pauvert’s Noir — his first and only novel to date — brings nihilism, amorality, and fascism to a dystopian nightmare that manages to make the city of Paris seem less than pleasurable, and even downright frightening. Fans of well-written science fiction will be sucker punched by the direct prose that ...
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2009 Best Translated Book Winners
Just more than two months after the longlist, we are proud to reveal the winners of the 2009 Best Translated Book Award (click here to download the official press release). The announcement was made tonight at a special award party that took place at Melville House Books in Brooklyn, and was hosted by author and critic ...
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Allan Kornblum on How to Publish in a Recession
Scott Esposito’s series on independent presses in the recession continues with a look at Coffee House and its founder, Allan Kornblum: SE: How sensitive is Coffee House to unexpected changes in grants and donations? For instance, if some of your expected grants got stuck in limbo due to budget cuts and freezes, ...
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The State of Shaman Drum
Last week, Shelf Awareness ran a short bit about the precarious state of Shaman Drum Bookshop’s finances. This was based on a letter that owner (and Open Letter advisory board member) Karl Pohrt wrote for the Ann Arbor Chronicle. Rather than rehash what was said, or speculate about the Shelf Awareness piece, ...
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The Cost of E-Books
I agree with Scott, Bob Miller’s account of why e-books should be almost the same price as a print edition is a bit muddy (is there anything that Miller says that isn’t1? ): There seems to be a common refrain in many discussions of e-books, the idea that publishers should charge next to nothing for e-books ...
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Three Spanish Books
While I was at the AWP conference, a ton of interesting books arrived in our offices, all worth writing about. I’ll try and cover more of these over the next few weeks, but for now, I thought I’d look at the three titles translated from Spanish that caught my eye. Rex by Jose Manuel Prieto is one of the spring ...
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In the United States of Africa
As Percival Everett states in his introduction, Djibouti author Abdourahman Waberi’s first novel to be translated into English is particularly interesting for the way in usurps not just our expectations, but much of what we have come to believe constitutes a novel: This is where In the United States of Africa Waberi ...
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Another T-Shirt Idea . . .
A sales rep’s comment about the design of The Conqueror: “It’s OK, I guess. It looks so . . . European.“ ...
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Life at the Frankfurt Book Fair
Following on his hilarious (and spot-on) piece on the MLA convention, Gideon Lewis-Kraus has an article in the new Harper’s on life and the Frankfurt Book Fair. As is evident from the title—“The Last Book Party”—Gideon’s piece is more about the people, the social aspects, the scene of ...
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Not a Typical Reading
Also in today’s N.Y. Times is a story about the newspaper reporter Xu Lai, who was stabbed at a recent reading: Mr. Xu was accosted in a restroom by two men who stabbed him in the stomach and then threatened to cut off his hand before fleeing, according to the friends and fellow bloggers who posted the news on the ...
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Mabanckou review
Laila Lalami reviews Alain Mabanckou’s Broken Glass in The National “In Africa, when an old person dies, a library burns.” When the Malian writer and ethnologist Amadou Hampâté Bâ uttered these words at a Unesco assembly in 1960, he was attempting to draw attention to Africa’s tradition of oral ...
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Gallimard on Gallimard
For those of you who read French, the blog at the Nouvel Observateur has a really cool piece about the history of Gallimard that was written by Antoine Gallimard—the grandson of the founder of Gallimard, Gaston Gallimard, and the company’s current Président et Directeur Général [CEO]: Un jour, Daniel ...
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…you are also a consumer.
In The New Atlantis, Christine Rosen has a great article about reading and ‘digital literacy’. The Kindle will only serve to worsen that concentration deficit, for when you use a Kindle, you are not merely a reader—you are also a consumer. Indeed, everything about the device is intended to keep you in a ...
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The Future of BEA
Today’s Publishers Weekly Daily included a pretty big announcement about the future of BookExpo America, which includes some significant changes, and some interesting/disturbing implications. First off, the specific changes: The annual meeting, set for New York May 29-31, will now also be held at New York’s ...
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Machine
Although Danish author Peter Adolphsen has made a name for himself as a formalist for whom economy is a virtue (to date his five novels and short story collections are less than 300 pages combined), “as a reader,” one reviewer writes, “you feel you have covered a huge distance with him.” Drawing comparisons to Borges ...
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Arts Funding and Government Waste
OK, I won’t say anything at all about the government letting us down, or tax cuts vs. real stimulus, but I do want to point out one really sad fact about the nation we live in—looks like the government will spend $62 billion on keeping the F-22 raptor alive (a plane designed during the Cold War and criticized by ...
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Chelsea Green in the Recession
The latest installment in Scott Esposito’s series on how to publish in a recession features Margo Baldwin of Chelsea Green, which just finished its best year ever. Margo’s responses are really interesting—especially her predictions about the future: Scott Esposito: As someone who has been publishing for ...
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Now That's Some Math I Can Get On Board With
Kindle sales figures continue to be as clear as mud . . . After yesterday morning’s announcement of Kindle 2.0, it was reported everywhere — thanks in part to the misleading awesome chart below and to Bezos’s actual words: “Today, more than 10 percent of the units we sell are Kindle books.” ...
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New Quebec Fiction
There’s not a lot of detail in the post, but at the Globe and Mail book blog, Linda Leith has an overview of new books from Quebec. Her main point is to emphasize the differences between the Quebec literary scene and that found in “English Canada,” differences both in terms of literary style and ...
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The Book Beast
Not so sure how I feel about this . . . Sure, Tina Brown gave lipservice to the importance of covering books: “It’s really important to support books and I am so distressed by what is happening to the publishing world,” she told us over the phone yesterday. “Book sections are closing everywhere ...
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Richard Nash on Publishing in a Recession
The latest entry in Scott Esposito’s fascinating series of interviews with independent publishers about publishing during a recession is now available online. This time he talks with Richard Nash, publisher of Soft Skull, and one of the smartest (and most articulate) people in the field when it comes to talking about ...
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Eating a Translated Burrito
The source of this somewhat odd post title is Aviya Kushner’s article in the new issue of the Wilson Quaterly. Entitled McCulture Aviya writes about the strange relationship of American readers to other cultures, including the way in which readers resist translations, but love bicultural writers: It’s not that ...
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NYSCA Update
A few weeks ago I posted about the likelihood that the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) was going to have $7 million taken away from it for this current fiscal year, impacting over 500 arts organizations across the state and eliminated hundred of grants (including two to Open Letter). Well, on Tuesday, this cut ...
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Best Valentine's Day Gift
This is a pretty self-promotional post, but we really appreciated Karen Vanuska’s comment on her blog about The Sailor from Gibraltar: received my copy of The Sailor from Gibraltar from Open Letter Books today. For a blissful half hour, I stopped grading papers, working on articles and reviews and working on ...
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Oh Boy, Here We Go Again
Today’s Boston Globe has one of the most upsetting articles I’ve read in a long while. Entitled “Stimulus Funding for Arts Hits Nerve,” it’s about the furor over the $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts that was included in the stimulus package that passed the House, but is absent ...
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Yet Another Bad Publishing Idea
When HarperCollins announced their latest innovation—“video books”—earlier this week, thousands of people around the country came up with the same joke: “yeah, video books . . . they’re called movies.” But honestly, that’s just the tip of the stupidity iceberg. First off, ...
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The latest wave of e-book discussion
One of the best technology websites around, Ars Technica, takes a look at e-books. What’s most interesting to me about this particular article is that it was written by someone, John Siracusa, who was there at the very beginning of e-books. I honestly can’t remember the first e-book I read on its ...
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Lithuanian Translation through Google
Everyone knows how much fun it is to run random phrases through Google’s translation program. No matter where you start, what comes out is some of the coolest surreal poetry ever. Well, after reading our post about Vilnius Poker in Lyrtas, translator Elizabeth Novickas punched in my quote, and this is what came ...
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European Book Club
I’m somewhat ashamed that this is the first time we’re posting about the European Book Club. I’m not sure exactly when this started (I just found out about it from Bill Martin of the Polish Cultural Institute), but looking at the books included in the 2008 program—Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser, ...
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Recent Reviews of The Pets
Bragi Olafsson’s The Pets came out a few months ago, but with Iceland and its overturned government in the news these days, it’s a pretty good time for reviews to be appearing . . . Just this week two new reviews came out, the first being Lara Tupper’s piece in The Believer, which puts Olafsson’s novel ...
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The Philoctetes Center Event on Translation
A couple weeks ago, the Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of the Imagination (one of the best names I’ve ever come across), hosted an interesting event on translation: Borges once noted that nothing was more central to the “modest mystery” of literature than translation. Across centuries and ...
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Bookselling and Bloggers
In a post picking up on the whole “future of book reviewing” discussion, Kassia Krozser brings up a point that’s crossed my mind at times: Booksellers Should Hand-Sell on the Internet: One of the great things about new technology is that it opens up the conversation in multiple direction. [. . ...
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Recent Findings . . .
First, from the L.A. Times: Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh and Harvard Medical School looked at the media habits of 4,142 healthy adolescents and calculated that each additional hour of TV watched per day boosted the odds of becoming depressed by 8%. [. . .] The researchers described several possible ...
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New Books from China
It’s no surprise that more and more Chinese literature is making its way into English (there were 11 original works of fiction and poetry that came out in the U.S. in 2008, and through the first half of 2009, I’ve already identified 9), but this spring has a number of titles that look really fantastic, and that we ...
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Unfortunately My Lithuanian Is a Bit Rusty
Otherwise I’d translate this article from Lyrtas about Ricardas Gavelis’s Vilnius Poker. (The one part I can pick out is the fantastic translation of my name: “Chadas W. Postas.” Very cool.) Elizabeth Novickas—who has a great introduction to the novel that will appear in the next issue of ...
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E-Books and Indie Presses
This article in the Christian Science Monitor about e-books and indie presses is fantastic for showing how smaller presses are more proactive when it comes to e-anything. But it’s not the bigger houses, such as Macmillan or HarperCollins, that are moving the fastest. Instead, some of the most extensive ...
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I Will Not Make a Coherent Argument
Rob Walker brought my attention to this article about the author as brand: Paradoxically, the proliferation of digital media that is arguably the biggest threat to traditional publishing also offers authors more opportunities than ever to distribute and promote their work. The catch: In order to do that effectively, ...
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Lorin Stein on 2666
Lorin Stein, the American editor of Bolaño’s 2666, was on NPR last week. They broadcast a discussion he led about 2666 at Politics and Prose in Wasington, ...
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Charlotte Mandell Interview
Our own Charlotte Mandell (she’s doing Zone for us) is interviewed on Maitresse: The translator Charlotte Mandell did the heavy lifting for two of the more exciting imports from France: this year’s The Kindly Ones, by Jonathan Littell, and next year’s Zone, by Mathias Enard. Mandell, who lives in ...
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BOMB's Americas Issue Event
Just a reminder that BOMB’s special event for the 10th anniversary of its “Americas Issue” is taking place tonight at the King Juan Carlos Center at NYU (53 Washington Square South). The event starts at 6:30 and includes readings from two great Chilean poets—Raul Zurita and Nicanor Parra—and ...
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Global Correspondences: A Benefit Reading for PEN America
On Tuesday, February 24th, PEN America will put on the first ever event specifically for the magazine. If you’re not familiar with it, PEN America is definitely worth checking out. Lots of great fiction, nonfiction, poetry, drama in every issue, including a number of pieces from international authors. (The most recent ...
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John Updike (1932-2009)
I think I read the Rabbit books at too young an age to ever fully appreciate John Updike’s work. But once I started working at Dalkey, the thing I did appreciate was his amazing literary taste. Over and again we would be reprinting a somewhat obscure author, like Robert Pinget, and in searching for reviews and quotes ...
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Best Translated Book of 2008: Fiction Finalists
I think I speak for all the panelists when I say that this was a pretty difficult task. I think we all had 13-15 books that we felt deserved to be in the top 10 . . . But in the end, I think we came up with a very solid list. For additional info about any of these titles, click on the links below, or visit the pretty minisite ...
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Future of Publishing, Again
It’s probably not the best strategy to wait until things start to implode to talk about flaws in a particular business model (*cough* investment banking cough auto industry cough), but now that the publishing industry is falling apart it seems like there has been an enormous number of articles about what’s wrong ...
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Best Translated Books of 2008: Poetry Anthologies
This post is giving away something about the make-up of the ten “Best Translated Book of 2008” poetry finalists . . . But whatever, there were four great poetry anthologies that came out this past year that deserve a bit of extra recognition, so in advance of tomorrow’s announcement, here are a few extra ...
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Best Translated Books of 2008: University Presses
Admittedly, books from university presses are under-represented on this year’s Best Translated Book of 2008 fiction longlist, a situation that will hopefully change next year. But for now, I thought that before announcing the finalists for fiction and poetry (and yes, I do know what they are, but that post ...
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Best Translated Book 2008 Longlist: The Book of Chameleons by Jose Eduardo Agualusa
This is it—the last overview of a book from the 25-title Best Translated Book of 2008 fiction longlist. The 10 finalists will be announced on Tuesday . . . Click here for all previous overviews. The Book of Chameleons by Jose Eduardo Agualusa, translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn. (Angola, Simon & ...
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Translation and Politics
Paper Republic has an interesting post about the politics of translation as related to the censorship of Obama’s inaugural address in China. From The Star U.S. President Barack Obama’s inauguration speech has a little twist in translations available on some Chinese websites where his references to ...
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Is Anyone Translating this Book?
Flammarion released Ennemis Publics—a series of letters between French “bad boys” Bernard-Henri Lévy and Michel Houellebecq—last fall, and based on the recent review in the Times Literary Supplement, this sounds like it would be a lot of fun to read, even if it’s not as over-the-top and ...
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Template for an e-Book Only Publishing House
Over at Urban Elitist, David Nygren has put together a description of what a e-book only publishing house could look like. I think David would be the first to admit that this model is neither fully complete or the only possible model, but it’s an interesting scheme, and one that ties into the world view that Lev ...
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Best Translated Book 2008 Longlist: The Post-Office Girl by Stefan Zweig
We’re into the home stretch now . . . For the next two days we’ll be highlighting a book-a-day from the 25-title Best Translated Book of 2008 fiction longlist, leading up to the announcement of the 10 finalists. Click here for all previous write-ups. The Post-Office Girl by Stefan Zweig, translated ...
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Declan Spring of New Directions, Scott Esposito, and the Economy
Scott Esposito of Conversational Reading is starting a series on how the economic downturn/recession/late-capitalist implosion is impacting smaller, independent presses. As he writes, all the coverage has been focused on Random Reorganizing, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Hijinks, etc., but not much on what’s going on at ...
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Best Translated Book 2008 Longlist: Khirbet Khizeh by S. Yizhar
We’re into the home stretch now . . . For the next three days we’ll be highlighting a book-a-day from the 25-title Best Translated Book of 2008 fiction longlist, leading up to the announcement of the 10 finalists. Click here for all previous write-ups. Khirbet Khizeh by S. Yizhar, translated from the ...
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Best Translated Book 2008 Longlist: Voice Over by Celine Curiol
We’re into the home stretch now . . . Over the next four days we’ll be highlighting a book-a-day from the 25-title Best Translated Book of 2008 fiction longlist, leading up to the announcement of the 10 finalists. Click here for all previous write-ups. Voice Over by Celine Curiol, translated from the ...
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Best Translated Book 2008 Longlist: Yalo by Elias Khoury
We’re into the home stretch now . . . Over the next five days we’ll be highlighting a book-a-day from the 25-title Best Translated Book of 2008 fiction longlist, leading up to the announcement of the 10 finalists. Click here for all previous write-ups. Yalo by Elias Khoury, translated from the Arabic ...
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Vilnius Poker by Ricardas Gavelis
After reading a 20-page sample of Vilnius Poker by Ricardas Gavelis, everyone on our editorial committee agreed that we had to publish this book. It’s complicated, dark, occasionally humorous, fragmented, told from several conflicting viewpoints, inconclusive, and considered to be “the turning point in ...
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New Hermano Cerdo
For all Spanish readers, the new issue of Hermano Cerdo is now online. In his post about it, Scott Esposito points out this review of a new anthology of fiction by Peruvian women. It would be great if a few more Peruvian women writers made their way into English . . . ...
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Gregg Nations: The Chronicler of Lost
Long term readers of this blog already know that in addition to international literature, another thing we’re very passionate about is the TV show Lost. (Which should come as no surprise—_Lost_ is the best, and most literary, show on network TV. Any show that puts together a special promo video to talk about how a ...
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Best Translated Book 2008 Longlist: Detective Story by Imre Kertesz
We’re into the home stretch now . . . Through next Friday we’ll be highlighting a book-a-day from the 25-title Best Translated Book of 2008 fiction longlist, leading up to the announcement of the 10 finalists. Click here for all previous write-ups. Detective Story by Imre Kertesz, translated from the ...
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The Life and Times of Cody's Bookstore
Stacy Perman of Business Week wrote an excellent article about the downfall of Cody’s Books in San Francisco. Cody’s was always one of Dalkey’s greatest accounts (and probably would’ve been for Open Letter had they been around when we started selling our books), in part because of a bookseller name ...
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Vice Magazine and John Calder
I have to thank Dan Visel for bringing this to my attention. Until he e-mailed me, I hadn’t looked at Vice magazine in quite some time. But what a fiction issue! Heinrich von Kleist’s The Earthquake in Chile (forthcoming from Archipelago), an interesting list of recommendations from writers who are also teachers, ...
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Best Translated Book 2008 Longlist: The Darkroom of Damocles by Willem Frederik Hermans
We’re into the home stretch now . . . Through next Friday we’ll be highlighting a book-a-day from the 25-title Best Translated Book of 2008 fiction longlist, leading up to the announcement of the 10 finalists. Click here for all previous write-ups. The Darkroom of Damocles by Willem Frederik Hermans, ...
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Fair and Balanced
In contrast to the news from the NEA about adult reading, here’s some more sobering info from Publishers Weekly: November bookstore sales were as bad as people thought they were. Preliminary figures from the U.S. Census Bureau show that sales dropped 13% in the month, falling to $1.05 billion. Sales for all of ...
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Best Translated Book 2008 Longlist: Tranquility by Attila Bartis
We’re into the home stretch now . . . Through next Friday we’ll be highlighting a book-a-day from the 25-title Best Translated Book of 2008 fiction longlist, leading up to the announcement of the 10 finalists. Click here for all previous write-ups. Tranquility by Attila Bartis, translated from the ...
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Bureaucratic Imagination on the Bolaño phenomenon
The Bureaucartic Imagination has an interesting post on the Bolaño hype in the States. It also touches on one of the ‘big problems’ of literature in translation: Moreover, his books are often about the mundane details of very specific and frankly petty literary disputes and details that must make little ...
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E-Publishing Is Still Totally 1.0
From PW: On December 23 ScrollMotion released the first batch of its widely anticipated e-book apps for the iPhone, starting with titles such as Twilight and Eragon. Within 24 hours the company had pulled them from the iTunes store due to security issues. “Security issues”? I sure hope they mean something ...
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Kjaerstad's Covers
We’re really proud of our cover designs, which have thus far all been done by the super-talented Milan Bozic, and we’ve been waiting for one of the book cover blogs to notice them. Finally, prèmier de couverture has a little write-up about Milan’s designs for our Jan Kjaerstad ...
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Festival of New French Writing
Next month NYU’s Center for French Civilization and Culture, in partnership with Cultures France and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy are putting on a Festival of New French Writing that promises to be really interesting. It runs from February 26th to the 28th and features the following French and American ...
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News of Open Letter Reaches Batavia!
I feel bad laughing at this, but we just found out that on Saturday, the Daily News published this article about the release of our first title . . . which came out last September. Dubbed the “break-out” book for fall 2008 by Publishers Weekly, Nobody’s Home, by Croation author Dubravka Ugresic, is the ...
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WHAM, the news source for international literature
Local Rochester TV station 13 WHAM’s This Morning is, I think I can state quite definitively, the nation’s single most important local morning television news source for international literature. Chad made his third appearance on This Morning this morning, where he talked about our Best Translated Book Award, ...
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Best Translated Book 2008 Longlist: Homage to Czerny: Studies in Virtuoso Technique by Gert Jonke
We’re into the home stretch now . . . For the next two weeks we’ll be highlighting a book-a-day from the 25-title Best Translated Book of 2008 fiction longlist, leading up to the announcement of the 10 finalists. Click here for all previous write-ups. Homage to Czerny: Studies in Virtuoso Technique by ...
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Metropole
Reading Ferenc Karinthy’s Metropole is like being lost in someone else’s nightmare where there are no exits. Karinthy creates an existential version of hell, stunning the reader not by blatant displays of horrifying circumstances, but by a gradual series of small failures that defeat and degrade the narrator and the ...
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Best Translated Book 2008 Longlist: Metropole by Ferenc Karinthy
For the next several weeks we’ll be highlighting a book-a-day from the 25-title Best Translated Book of 2008 fiction longlist, leading up to the announcement of the 10 finalists. Click here for all previous write-ups. Metropole by Ferenc Karinthy, translated from the Hungarian by George Szirtes. (Hungary, ...
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Some Glorious Publishing News for Your Friday Reading
Man, every article in my Google Reader seems to be filled with doom and gloom . . . Here are just a few: “Store sales fell 5.2% at Barnes & Noble in the nine week holiday period ended Jan. 3, dropping to $1.1 billion. Same store sales at the nation’s largest bookstore chain fell 7.7%; B&N had predicted that comp ...
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Open Letter and the Best Translated Book Award on Facebook
I know we should’ve done this sooner, but we just set up an Open Letter group and a Best Translated Book Award group on Facebook. So if you’re on Facebook, please join. (And feel free to invite all of your friends.) We don’t have much on the Open Letter site (yet), but on the BTB group there are cover ...
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Will You Like It?
Although he includes a few caveats about its effectiveness, Tim’s post at the LibraryThing blog about their new “Will you like it?” feature is pretty interesting. Each book page now has a little bar that, after clicking, will predict whether or not you’d like a particular book. How does it ...
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Obituary: Richard Seaver
One of the legends of publishing, Richard Seaver died from a heart attack on Tuesday. The New York Times has a very nice obituary that highlights his stint at Grove Press, and a bit about what he did at Arcade over the past twenty years. For the past 20 years, Mr. Seaver and his wife ran Arcade Publishing, which has ...
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Best Translated Book 2008 Longlist: The Waitress Was New by Dominique Fabre
For the next several weeks we’ll be highlighting a book-a-day from the 25-title Best Translated Book of 2008 fiction longlist, leading up to the announcement of the 10 finalists. Click here for all previous write-ups. The Waitress Was New by Dominique Fabre, translated from the French by Jordan Stump. ...
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CALQUE's Interview with Absinthe's Dwayne Hayes
It’s great to see two of the best translation journals in conversation . . . Just yesterday, Steve Dolph of CALQUE published this interview with Dwayne Hayes, editor and founder of Absinthe. There’s a lot of great stuff in here, including Dwayne’s comments about wanting to become the biggest-selling ...
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The Blockbuster Model: A Reader's Response
Yesterday morning, I got all bent out of shape about Anita Elberse’s “Blockbuster or Bust” article in the Wall Street Journal. I wasn’t the only one—GalleyCat has a few nice responses, including this quote from a senior editor at a major house: “many of the bestsellers that keep us afloat ...
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Robert Giroux and Publishing
The recent issue of New York magazine has a great article by Boris Kachka about Robert Giroux that includes these choice bits: Consider what brought Giroux to FSG in the first place: The same frustration with bottom-line publishing that drives literary editors to drink today. Giroux had spent the decade after World War ...
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Bad Blood
Borisav Stankovic’s novel, Bad Blood, was first published in 1910 in his native Serbian and has recently been translated into English for the very first time. Bad Blood is about Sofka, a strong-willed Serbian beauty who is destroyed and humiliated by a cold and hypocritical society that she tried to transcend. That ...
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Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Comes to Their Senses
From the New York Observer: Drenka Willen was just one of many individuals—including one woman seven months pregnant and another on maternity leave—to be hastily laid off last month from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt amid budget cuts. She is, however, the only one among them whom the severely troubled company’s CEO, ...
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Best Translated Book 2008 Longlist: Senselessness by Horacio Castellanos Moya
For the next several weeks we’ll be highlighting a book-a-day from the 25-title Best Translated Book of 2008 fiction longlist, leading up to the announcement of the 10 finalists. Click here for all previous write-ups. Senselessness by Horacio Castellanos Moya, translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver. ...
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The Business of Blockbusters: Good?
I’ve been internally fuming ever since I read this Blockbuster or Bust article in the Wall Street Journal by business school professor Anita Elberse. Elberse is most famous for her take-down in the Harvard Business Journal of the long tail theory. Now she’s back, ready to defend the “blockbuster model” ...
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Best Translated Book 2008 Longlist: The Taker and Other Stories by Rubem Fonseca
For the next several weeks we’ll be highlighting a book-a-day from the 25-title Best Translated Book of 2008 fiction longlist, leading up to the announcement of the 10 finalists. Click here for all previous write-ups. The Taker and Other Stories by Rubem Fonseca, translated from the Portuguese by Clifford ...
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Guardian on Jean-Pierre Ohl
We just got Ohl’s Mr Dick or The Tenth Book in for review, and after reading this piece in The Guardian I’m pretty sure we’ll be covering it in the near future. Monsieur Dick, Ohl’s first novel, came out in France four years ago and has won three literary prizes. The English translation has just ...
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Obituary: Gert Jonke
I had the chance to meet Gert Jonke in Vienna a few years back. I was there with Dalkey publisher John O’Brien, looking for Austrian writers to publish in English. (One of the titles we heard about was A Fucking Masterpiece, which, according to the reading report we got, actually wasn’t, but it’s still one ...
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Best Translated Book 2008 Longlist: I'd Like by Amanda Michalopoulou
For the next several weeks we’ll be highlighting a book-a-day from the 25-title Best Translated Book of 2008 fiction longlist, leading up to the announcement of the 10 finalists. Click here for all previous write-ups. I’d Like by Amanda Michalopoulou, translated from the Greek by Karen Emmerich. ...
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Complete Review and International Literature
I don’t think there’s a reviewer, or publication, in America that’s as diverse as Michael Orthofer’s Complete Review. Nor as meticulous about record keeping and self-aware about its reviewing trends. Back in 2004, Michael started the How International Are We? report to find out how good of a job he ...
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Upcoming Translation Grants
I’d totally stealing this post from Paper Republic. If it weren’t for PR, I think these dates would’ve passed without my noticing. (Isn’t it still the middle of December?) NEA Translation Fellowship applications are due on January 9th. All instructions and application info can be found here. The ...
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Here on Earth: The Best Books in Translation
Yesterday, I had the somewhat surreal experience of being on Wisconsin Public Radio’s Here on Earth with Esther Allen (brilliant translator, director of the Center for Literary Translation, and all around amazing champion of literature in translation) and host Jean Feraca while waiting to catch my flight out of ...
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Best Translated Book 2008 Longlist: Death with Interruptions by Jose Saramago
For the next several weeks we’ll be highlighting a book-a-day from the 25-title Best Translated Book of 2008 fiction longlist, leading up to the announcement of the 10 finalists. Click here for all previous write-ups. Death with Interruptions by Jose Saramago, translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull ...
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Ready Steady Book's Books of the Year Symposium
Over at Ready Steady Book Mark Thwaite has posted the “Books of the Year 2008 symposium” featuring recommendations from a host of authors, translators, and reviewers, including Scott Esposito (who recommends Adolfo Bioy Casares and others), Charlotte Mandell (who is all about Flann O’Brien), her husband ...
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Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Literary Work
One other MLA thing worth mentioning is that Timothy Billings and Christopher Bush (of Middlebury College and Northwestern University respectively) won this year’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for their translation of Stèles by Victor Segalen, which was published by Wesleyan University Press in 2007. NYRB ...
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MLA
For the uninitiated, this article from an old issue of The Believer is a great description of MLA. Especially this bit about publishing and tenure: The upshot: university presses, once institutions of gentlemanly loss in the service of niche scholarship, have been forced to reorient themselves toward the bottom line. ...
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We Will Return Shortly
As you may have noticed, this has been a pretty slow week . . . We’re taking off for the holidays, but will be back next week with more profiles of the 25 books on the Best Translated Book of 2008 fiction longlist, and a write-up about the sixth Open Letter spring 2009 title, Merce Rodoreda’s Death in Spring. ...
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Translation Databases: Last one for 2008 and first one for 2009
It was just about a year ago that I started thinking about creating a “translation database” to keep track of all original translations of fiction and poetry published in the U.S. After all the speculation, guesstimation, and incomplete or inaccurate studies, I thought it would be useful to produce an actual list ...
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WWB's favorite books
This time of the year the Words Without Borders staff sits around the Words Without Borders fireplace with our mugs of hot toddy, chatting about the books we’ve been reading. Into the wee hours on one such night, Joshua said, “Hey, why don’t we mention some of our favorites from the year on the blog?” And so here ...
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Open Letter Spring 09 Catalog: The Discoverer by Jan Kjaerstad
I referenced this book in my earlier post about “The Conqueror galley giveaway”: but in introducing the spring Open Letter titles, it definitely deserves it’s own entry. The Discoverer is the final volume in the “Wergeland Trilogy,” a collection of three books—The Seducer and The ...
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Special Conqueror Giveaway
Yesterday afternoon we found out that The Conqueror by Jan Kjaerstad, the second book in the “Wergeland Trilogy,” received a glowing, starred review in Kirkus: Back in the day, Jonas Wergeland was an inquisitive student, brilliant, capable of speculating that “Dante’s observations on the celestial ...
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Best Translated Book 2008 Longlist: Bonsai by Alejandro Zambra
For the next several weeks we’ll be highlighting a book-a-day from the 25-title Best Translated Book of 2008 fiction longlist, leading up to the announcement of the 10 finalists. Click here for all previous write-ups. Bonsai by Alejandro Zambra, translated from the Spanish by Carolina De Robertis. (Chile, ...
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Hermano Cerdo's Books of the Year
I first found out from Scott Esposito of Conversational Reading that Hermano Cerdo — the fantastic Spanish-language blog about literature and martial arts — is running an incredible Books of 2008 series of posts. They’ve asked a wide range of authors and editors (mostly Spanish, although not entirely) to ...
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Latest Review: Close to Jedenew
We’re all about Melville House . . . in addition to the forthcoming post about Alejandro Zambra’s Bonsai, we also just posted this new review of Kevin Vennemann’s Close to Jedenew another book from Melville House’s Contemporary Art of the Novella Series. This review was written by Douglas Carlsen, ...
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Close to Jedenew
“We do not breathe.” So begins Kevin Vennemann’s Close to Jedenew. The story of an event. A day in July, 1941. A moment between evening and night. Between “what was” and “nothing remaining.” A survivor’s tale—of movement from the “we” to the “I.” A story ...
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Best Translated Book 2008 Longlist: Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolano
For the next several weeks we’ll be highlighting a book-a-day from the 25-title Best Translated Book of 2008 fiction longlist, leading up to the announcement of the 10 finalists. Click here for all previous write-ups. Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolano, translated from the Spanish by Chris ...
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Best Translated Book 2008 Longlist: 2666 by Roberto Bolano
For the next several weeks we’ll be highlighting a book-a-day from the 25-title Best Translated Book of 2008 fiction longlist, leading up to the announcement of the 10 finalists. Click here for all previous write-ups. 2666 by Roberto Bolano, translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer. (Chile, FSG) What ...
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Bloggerel and John Calder on the Internets
Alma Books—run by the former publishers of Hesperus Press, who, in addition to publishing their own line of fantastic book, acquired Calder Books last year—recently launched a book blog called Bloggerel. I have to admit that I just found out about this yesterday, from our comments section no less, but based on ...
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Best Translated Book 2008 Longlist: The Lemoine Affair by Marcel Proust
For the next several weeks we’ll be highlighting a book-a-day from the 25-title Best Translated Book of 2008 fiction longlist, leading up to the announcement of the 10 finalists. Click here for all previous write-ups. The Lemoine Affair by Marcel Proust, translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell. (France, ...
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Bit of Love from Barnes & Noble
Not too terribly long ago, Barnes & Noble.com started Barnes & Noble Review a weekly web magazine featuring reviews of books, CDs, DVDs, etc. Pretty interesting strategy—rather than compete with Amazon on price, provide compelling editorial content. B&N has attracted a nice line of reviewers, including John Freeman ...
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Open Letter Spring 09 Catalog: Rupert by Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer
Info about the first three books from the spring 2009 Open Letter list can be found here. Today we’re covering our June title, Rupert: A Confession by Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer. The premise of this book is that Rupert has been accused of a terrible crime (which isn’t revealed in full until the very end) and has to ...
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Bulgakov the Ukrainian?
The Ukrainians and the Russians both claim Bulgakov as one of their own: The identity crisis arises it seems because although Bulgakov was born in what is now Ukraine’s capital, a city he immortalized in his first novel The White Guard, the playwright and novelist was ethnically Russian, wrote in Russian and moved ...
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New Issue of Pratilipi
The new issue of Pratilipi, the online, bimonthly magazine about Indian literature, is now available. This issue’s title is “Translating Bharat / India: Something Will Ring” and contains five pieces from a conference that took place at Laussane to study the “Cultural India” created by ...
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New CONTEXT
The new issue of CONTEXT Magazine is now available online. (And I assume in print. For some reason, we don’t get copies in Rochester, but this is usually available at bookstores like St. Mark’s.) Almost all of the readings, interviews, etc., are about recent Dalkey titles, such as the interesting excerpt from ...
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NEA Literature Grants
I’m going to write more about this next week, but this morning, the National Endowment for the Arts announced the recipients of the 2009 Access to Artistic Excellence grants. A lot of fantastic organizations received funding this year, such as Archipelago, the Center for the Art of Translation, Graywolf, Copper Canyon, ...
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The Future of Reading is Fine, Move Along, Nothing to See Here
The Guardian—which has self-admittedly entered the season of the “crap survey”—has an article today about a recent study on what reading material most attracts the other sex. A survey commissioned by the National Year of Reading has found the top 10 reads to impress a woman. Top of the list is ...
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Urban Elitist on the Future of Publishing
The future of publishing is a hobby-horse of mine, and I’m always excited to find someone else — like David Nygren at Urban Elitist — writing long, intelligent articles about this topic. A lot of his ideas will be familiar to frequent readers of this blog, but the way he describes the situation is ...
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Canadian Literature of 2008
Omnivoracious has a nice write-up about the 5 Best Books Out of Canada This Year. Sure, these aren’t necessarily translations, but they are international . . . and if there’s any English-speaking country whose literature receives less attention in the U.S. than books in translation, it’s Canada. (I’m ...
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2009: The Year of Translations?
At the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Bob Hoover has an article about the troubled publishing industry—specifically Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and their “acquisitions freeze . . . err wait, no, we’re not going out of buisness, please agents, keep sending us submissions” situation—that has an interesting ...
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Best Translated Book 2008 Longlist: The Great Weaver from Kashmir by Halldor Laxness
For the next several weeks we’ll be highlighting a book-a-day from the 25-title Best Translated Book of 2008 fiction longlist, leading up to the announcement of the 10 finalists. Click here for all previous write-ups. The Great Weaver from Kashmir by Halldor Laxness, translated from the Icelandic by Philip Roughton. ...
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"It has a lot of commas."
The french novel Zone by Mathias Énard has been receiving some early press for a few reasons. 1. We’re publishing it (with an English translation by Charlotte Mandell) in spring 2010. 2. It’s about 500 pages. 3. It’s about 1 sentence. The Chicago Tribune just ran an article, including some helpful ...
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"It has a lot of commas."
The french novel Zone by Mathias Énard has been receiving some early press for a few reasons. 1. We’re publishing it (with an English translation by Charlotte Mandell) in spring 2010. 2. It’s about 500 pages. 3. It’s about 1 sentence. The Chicago Tribune just ran an article, including some helpful ...
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Pushkin's Second Wife and Other Micronovels
Yuri Druzhnikov is most well known for his novel Angels on the Head of a Pin (2003), which was included on the University of Warsaw’s list of the top ten Russian novels of the twentieth century. Though six of his books have been translated in English, he has not received as much critical attention as other contemporary ...
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Open Letter Spring 09 Catalog: Aracoeli by Elsa Morante
A couple weeks back I started unveiling the spring/summer Open Letter list . . . and then promptly got distracted by our Best Translated Book of 2008 award. But now I’m back . . . We announced The Mighty Angel by Jerzy Pilch and Landscape in Concrete by Jakov Lind earlier, and today I’d like to write about our ...
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Best Translated Book 2008 Longlist: What Can I Do When Everything's On Fire? by Antonio Lobo Antunes
For the next several weeks we’ll be highlighting a book-a-day from the 25-title Best Translated Book of 2008 longlist, leading up to the announcement of the 10 finalists. Click here for all previous write-ups. What Can I Do When Everything’s On Fire? by Antonio Lobo Antunes, translated from the Portuguese by ...
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Lost in Translation Reading Challenge
Here’s another challenge I can get on board with: The reading challenge is simple. Read six books in translation over the course of the year. If you post about your selection, comment here on the most recent post with a link so that we can all benefit from your experience and insights or email me and I will either ...
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December Frankfurt Book Fair Newsletter
The December Issue of the Frankfurt Book Fair Newsletter is now available online and includes a number of interesting pieces. The article on the 10th Anniversary of the German Book Office, which highlights the difficulties of getting German titles published in English translation and the job the GBO is doing to make this ...
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Le Clezio's Nobel Prize Lecture
Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio’s Nobel Prize lecture, In the Forest of Paradoxes, (also available as a pdf file) was released last night. It takes its title and starting point from a provocative passage from Stig Dagerman’s Essaer och texter: How is it possible on the one hand, for example, to behave as if ...
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Best Translated Book 2008 Longlist: Camera by Jean-Philippe Toussaint
For the next several weeks we’ll be highlighting a book-a-day from the 25-title Best Translated Book of 2008 longlist, leading up to the announcement of the 10 finalists. Click here for all previous write-ups. Camera by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, translated from the French by Matthew B. Smith. (France, Dalkey Archive ...
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Kafka's Office Writings
Recently released by Princeton University Press, Kafka’s Office Writings may well be the last of the last of the Kafka texts to appear in English. Kafka’s writings as a professional lawyer with the Workmen’s Accident Insurance Institute, may not seem to hold a lot of promise, but the description of the ...
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We Agree
From Literary License’s 12 Days of Books: An Open Letter subscription is the perfect gift. It’s cheap (just $65 for half a year and $120 for the full year), and the books are intelligently chosen and beautifully designed. Your giftee will thank you throughout the year as the books get delivered month after month, ...
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Knopf, Black Wednesday, and More Publishing Struggles
Seems like every day there’s more bad publishing news . . . Yesterday was declared Black Wednesday by Media Bistro as Random House restructured, essentially consolidating within themselves, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s publisher Becky Saletan abruptly resigned, HMH fired executive editor Ann Patty along with ...
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Best Book Covers of 2008
Over at the Book Design Review, Joseph Sullivan has a post about his favorite covers of 2008. Lots of interesting covers here, including one of my favorites—the cover of Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, designed by David Pearson. There’s even a poll for readers to ...
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Things To Do Tonight in New York
I usually don’t post things like this, but there are two great events happening tonight that I wish I could be at. First off, Archipelago Books is having their “third biennial fundraising auction” tonight at the Cultural Services of the French Embassy at 972 Fifth Ave. from 6:30 to 8:30. Lots of great ...
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Holt Uncensored Returns
Pat Holt is back, this time in blog format. For those unfamiliar with Holt, she’s been in the business for her entire career, including stints at Houghton Mifflin, as a correspondent for PW, and as the book review editor for the San Francisco Chronicle. Her e-newsletter Holt Uncensored was a critical look at all ...
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The Elegance of the Hedgehog
Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog, her sophomore effort after a well-received debut Une Gourmandaise (The Craving), is the perfect introductory foray into those neophytes who consider the world of translated fiction intimidating. It is erudite while being accessible, intellectual as well as sweet, stylistic ...
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Publishing Models, Translations, and the Financial Collapse (Part 11–The End)
_This is the eleventh and final part of a presentation I gave to the German Book Office directors a couple weeks ago. Earlier sections of the speech can be found here, or collected in a single pdf file. On a more personal level, editors—real, living breathing people, not just the faceless corporation—can reach ...
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Some End of the Year Reading Lists
In anticipation of announcing the fiction longlist for the “Best Translated Book of 2008” on Thursday, here are a couple other “year end” lists worth checking out. I don’t remember The Guardian using this format for its year end lists in the past, but then again, I have a hard time remembering ...
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Salzburg Global Seminar on Translation
This February, a very interesting seminar on translation is taking place as part of the Salzburg Global Seminars, an organization that “convenes imaginative thinkers from different cultures and institutions, organizes problem-focused initiatives, supports leadership development, and engages opinion-makers through active ...
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Zone, Zone, Zone
Mathias Enard’s Zone, which we’ve mentioned a few times already, just keeps racking up attention. Thanks to Michael, for pointing out that Zone made Lire‘s 20 best books of 2008 list. According to my pidgin French, they say that it “possesses a scope that is rare in the French novel” and that ...
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Two Spanish Prizes
This is kind of old news, but last week Juan Goytisolo was awarded Spain’s National Prize for Literature, an extremely prestigious award honoring a writer’s career. Goytisolo is one of my all-time favorite writers, especially Makbara, Marks of Identity, Count Julian, and Juan the Landless. I actually had the ...
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Publishing Models, Translations, and the Financial Collapse (Part 9)
This is the ninth part of a presentation I gave to the German Book Office directors a couple weeks ago. Earlier sections of the speech can be found here. There are still a number of parts left to post, but these should all be up before the end of the month. Stage Four: What Happens Next? Although it seems that everything ...
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Skunk: A Life
Written after the fall of the Soviet Union, the novel, Skunk: A Life paints a picture as to what life was like during the 1950s in Soviet Russia from a post-Soviet perspective. The themes in Peter Aleshkovsky’s novel are classically Russian: he illustrates the internal moral battle that everyone must endure in a ...
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Publishing Models, Translations, and the Financial Collapse (Part 8)
This is the eighth part of a presentation I gave to the German Book Office directors a couple weeks ago. Earlier sections of the speech can be found here. There are still a number of parts left to post, but these should all be up before the end of the month. The most frightening news of recent times involves the Borders ...
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Borders Update
As reported in Publishers Weekly,: sales at Borders fell by 10% in the third quarter to $693.4 million, resultiing in a net loss of $172.2 million for the period. And in terms of being for sale? Well, that’s now a thing of the past: Borders also announced that it is no longer for sale. Company CEO George Jones ...
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Publishing Models, Translations, and the Financial Collapse (Part 7)
This is the seventh part of a presentation I gave to the German Book Office directors a couple weeks ago. Earlier sections of the speech can be found here. There are still a number of parts left to post, but these should all be up before the end of the month. Stage Three: Financial Collapse, the Borders Situation, ...
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Latest Review: Belonging
Our latest review is of Belonging: New Poetry by Iranians Around the World, edited and translated by Niloufar Talebi. Niloufar is an extremely talented translator and performer, and runs the very impressive Translation Project, which promotes contemporary Iranian literature through a variety of media. A great example of ...
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Chad on Omnivoracious
Heidi, over at Omnivoracious, Amazon’s weblog, has an interview with Chad, and some nice things to say about Open Letter: If you looked at the recent media frenzy over Bolano’s 2666 (even The Economist has a story about it), you’d think that translations were really hot this year. According to a ...
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Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Mathias Enard's Zone
Yesterday afternoon, Publishers Weekly sent out an e-mail alert regarding Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s decision to “temporarily” (their quotes, not mine) pause acquisitions. Which doesn’t sound very good: Josef Blumenfeld, v-p of communications for HMH, confirmed that the publisher has ...
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New Frankfurt Book Fair Newsletter
The November Issue of the Frankfurt Book Fair Newsletter is now available online. There are a few interesting pieces in here, including one about China’s new program to fund translations: Dr. Jing Bartz: The minister from the General Administration of Press and Publication (GAPP) approved the first list of ...
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Publishing Models, Translations, and the Financial Collapse (Part 6)
This is the sixth part of a presentation I gave to the German Book Office directors a couple weeks ago. Earlier sections of the speech can be found here. There are still a number of parts left to post, but these should all be up before the end of the month. There are a few key differences between the commercial houses and ...
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Open Letter Spring 09 Catalog: The Mighty Angel
Over the next couple weeks, I’ll be unveiling the Open Letter Spring 2009 list. (All posts about this list can be found here.) This “unveiling” kicked off last week with a bit about Jakov Lind’s Landscape in Concrete, and next up is our April 2009 title, The Mighty Angel by Jerzy Pilch. A novel about ...
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Translate.
A couple weeks ago one of our translators directed me to this very impressive web-based project dedicated to academic research on translation. The project actually began in 2005—and supposedly ends this year—so there’s a ton of content available online. This concept piece lays out the drive behind this ...
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Publishing Models, Translations, and the Financial Collapse (Part 5)
This is the fifth part of a presentation I gave to the German Book Office directors last week. Earlier sections of the speech can be found here. And we’ll probably be posting bits and pieces of this for the next week or so. Obviously there’s more that goes into the resistance of commercial publishers to ...
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The Next BIG Translation?
Back a couple years ago, Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes was all the rage. The son of Robert Littell, Jonathan has dual-citizenship here and in France, and, in an unusual move, wrote this 900-page novel of a former Nazi officer in French. In this article by John Litchfield, Littell explains his ...
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Publishing Models, Translations, and the Financial Collapse (Part 4)
This is the fourth part of a presentation I gave to the German Book Office directors last week. Earlier sections of the speech can be found here. And we’ll probably be posting bits and pieces of this for the next week or so. Stage Two: Translations, Economic Censorship, and Independent Presses So where do ...
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David Albahari Update
In my post yesterday about Ellen Elias-Bursac, I mentioned the new David Albahari book that she’s translating. I found out yesterday that the title of this book is Leeches, that Harcourt is planning on bringing it out in Fall 2010 (so long to wait!), and that the book is amazing. ...
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Open Letter Spring 09 Catalog: Landscape in Concrete
Over the next week or so, I’ll be unveiling all six of Open Letter’s spring 2009 titles. Our finished catalog will be back from the printer in the not-too-distant future, and on our website before that, but I thought it would be fun to give a bit of special attention to each of the titles. First up is a reprint ...
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Latest Review: The Tsar's Dwarf
Larissa Kyzer’s write-up of Danish author Peter Fogtdal’s The Tsar’s Dwarf is the latest addition to our review section. It’s fitting that Larissa would be the one to review this—in addition to reviewing for The L Magazine and working towards her Master’s in Library Science, she’s ...
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Publishing Models, Translations, and the Financial Collapse (Part 2)
This is the second part of a presentation I gave to the German Book Office directors last week. Earlier sections of the speech can be found here. And we’ll probably be posting bits and pieces of this for the next week or so. Although it’s a bit more complicated than this, the survival strategy of commercial ...
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Latest Review: Customer Service
Our latest review is a piece I wrote about Benoit Duteurtre’s Customer Service (translated from the French by Bruce Benderson), which is part of Melville House Press’s fantastic Contemporary Art of the Novella series. It’s a pretty funny book that a lot of people will be able to relate to: The novella ...
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Customer Service
Benoit Duteurtre’s satiric novella, Customer Service, is a kind of modern quest narrative pitting a rational man against an omnipresent, almost Kafka-esque corporation too soulless to provide any genuine help to its customers when things go wrong. The novella opens with the hapless narrator leaving his cell phone in a ...
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30 Great Authors from Argentina
In one of my Frankfurt posts I mentioned the 30 Great Authors from Argentina (warning—pdf file) “brochure” that the Fundacion TyPA put together to help promote writers who had yet to be translated out of Spanish. It’s hard to describe this elegant, unique brochure (more like oversized trading cards ...
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Graphic Novels from Europe
This week, the fifth New Literature from Europe with a special focus on graphic novels: Celebrating its fifth anniversary, the literary series New Literature from Europe this year takes on the burgeoning world of graphic novels. Graphic Novels from Europe presents five days of discussions, exhibits and book signings, to ...
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Publishing Models, Translations, and the Financial Collapse (Part 1)
On Friday, I was invited by Riky Stock of the German Book Office to give a presentation to GBO directors from around the world about publishing post-financial collapse. Which is a pretty big topic, and one that will probably dominate conversations post-holiday season, especially if the retail sector struggles as much as ...
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Books and the Holiday Season
This is shaping up to be a very depressing holiday season—at least in terms of retail. On Friday, the U.S. Census Bureau released some rather sobering figures, including the fact that bookstore sales dropped by 4.5% in September. And if that wasn’t bad enough, in October, the entire retail sector fell by 2.8%, the ...
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Pawel Huelle Interview
To help promote the new Pawell Huelle book, The Last Supper, that’s forthcoming from Serpent’s Tail, Polish Writing has translated and posted a two-part interview (I, II) with Huelle which originally appeared in Gazeta Wyborcza: Violetta Szostak: I’m rather nervous about this interview… Paweł ...
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Twelve Loops
In the socio-cultural milieu of his native Ukraine, Yuri Andrukhovych has achieved the kind of status that demands that his name be followed by “himself” every time it shows up in print. His previous novels Recreations and Moscoviad are two important reasons for this recognition, and Twelve Loops is yet another work that ...
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As If We Had Any Doubt
According to a recent report from the University of Manchester, fiction can be just as powerful as facts in teaching people about the world. The report — “The Fiction of Development: Literary Representation as a Source of Authoritative Knowledge” — was written by David Lewis, Dennis Rodgers, and ...
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Blaft Publications and Zero Degree
One translated book I recently had to add to the 2008 translation database is Zero Degree by Charu Nivedita (translated from the Tamil by Pritham K. Chakravarthy and Rakesh Khanna), which was published by Blaft Publications earlier this year. I have to admit that until reading Rakesh Khanna’s comment on an earlier ...
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Best Translated Book of 2008
The panel of international lit fans behind the Best Translated Book of 2008 award is starting its discussions about which titles should make the longlist, but there’s still time for you to get your vote in. Please feel free to enter your recommendations into the comments section, or e-mail them to me at chad.post at ...
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2009 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
The immense longlist for the 2009 IMPAC award was announced yesterday. As always with the IMPAC, the list is all over the place and almost too long (146 novels!) to really mean something. The process for awarding the IMPAC goes on for almost a year, with the shortlist being announced on April 2nd, and the winner on June ...
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Even O is Hip to It
A number of 2666 reviews are out now, including one in the L.A. Times and one by Adam Kirsch in Slate. And even in O Magazine, which compares the book to a video game (?!): Holding a reviewer’s copy of 2666 in public was like brandishing the newest Harry Potter at the playground three months before the on-sale ...
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2008 Miriam Bass Award Ceremony
This year’s Miriam Bass Award for Creativity in Independent Publishing was given to Jill Schoolman of Archipelago Books, a good friend, fantastic publisher, and energetic advocate for international literature. She truly deserves this award and all the accolades that Marianne Bohr included in her introduction: This ...
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New Directions: Spring & Summer 2009 Catalog
Barbara Epler gave me a copy of the new New Directions catalog at the 2666 party on Friday, and it’s so amazing that it deserves its own post. There are a ton of translations coming out from ND next year—well, OK, nine—a good mix of classic authors (Walser, Borges, Bolano) and some new (like Guillermo ...
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Here We Go . . .
I really don’t want to spread a sense of “doom and gloom” about the publishing industry, but wow, this bit of info about Borders from GalleyCat is not very encouraging: GalleyCat has received a copy of a “special alert” sent from a major book distributor specializing in independent ...
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2666: The NY Times Review
On the same day as the 2666 Launch Party (which, thanks to the d-bags curators of myopenbar.com was crowded with non-literary folk [seriously, we should all prank them by submitting hundreds of fake events featuring free booze], although Zadie Smith, Natasha Wimmer, Michael Miller, Craig Teicher, Mark Binelli, and many more ...
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The Howling Miller
The Howling Miller is just the second of Arto Paasilinna’s thirty-plus books to be translated into English, the really excellent The Year of the Hare being the other. Before I start in on the book, however, I want to issue a complaint, which is maybe also a warning: The Howling Miller is not translated into English ...
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The Fantastic Opening to Pinocchio
NYRB’s monthly Letter from the Editor is by far my favorite publisher newsletter. Edwin Frank is one of the most well-read, articulate editors in the country, and with such great material to write about, his pieces are always incredibly interesting. (You can sign up to receive these here and you can sign up to ...
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Galley Giveaway
We haven’t done this before, but we have a couple extra copies of the galley for Vilnius Poker by Ricardas Gavelis and rather than let them rot, we thought we’d pass them along to you. Considered to be one of the turning points in contemporary Lithuanian literature, Vilnius Poker is an ambitious book ...
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New European Poets
Where is that wild and endemic high-heeled shoe Europe . . . ? — Branko Cegec (translated from the Croatian by Miljenko Kovacicek) It is difficult to get beyond the novelty inherent in the New European Poets project. Its remarkable scope, breadth and depth show-cases 290 poets representing 45 nations, all ...
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Sebald on Stage
Thanks to Conversational Reading (and Vertigo before that) for bringing “i-witness” to our attention. From Wales Online Like most of us, Paul Davies and Fern Smith enjoy immersing themselves in a good book. [Ed. Note: That use of “like most of us” signals that we’re not reading a U.S. ...
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How to Package Digital Media
Not that anyone’s paying attention to anything aside from the polls today, but the other day there was an interesting article on the Book Design Blog that I’ve been meaning to mention. Entitled “How to package books for digital media,” this piece looks at what sort of “enhanced content” ...
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Simon & Schuster to Do at Least One Le Clezio
And it’s the one that sounds the most interesting: Anne-Solange Noble, foreign rights director at Le Clezio’s French publisher Gallimard, has been working feverishly to get more of the author’s titles on American bookshelves. And, although there were seven Le Clezio titles which were published by ...
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An interview with Idlewild Books' David Del Vecchio
Bookslut has an interview with David Del Vecchio, the owner of Idlewild Books: At Idlewild, “International Literature” is not hidden away, but is featured and celebrated. To uncover a particular niche that is missing in the independent bookselling business is rare and exciting. To successfully open a ...
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Special Feature on Graywolf
Today’s posts are all Minnesota related . . . Using Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses and To Siberia as the entryway, the City Paper has a great feature on Graywolf Press, one of the largest—and most successful—nonprofit presses in the country. The press is directed by Fiona McCrae, who is nicely ...
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An Amendment I'm In Favor Of
In Minnesota tomorrow, voters will weigh in on adding an amendment to the state constitution that would create a significant amount of money for the arts: [. . .] this amendment is important. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to help solidify some of the best things about this state. Its beneficiaries ...
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Grand Idea Surrounding Crappy Content
Joe Wikert writes about the recent push at Thomas Nelson to engage with book bloggers. I’m not sure how revolutionary it is to offer writers/bloggers a copy of a book if they will review/write about it (we call these review copies), but, you know, good job Thomas Nelson, this “free book” strategy got ...
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Oprah Backlash
I wondered when someone would speak out against Oprah’s endorsement of the Kindle. From the Vroman’s Bookstore Blog: Unless you’ve been living under a rock or, I don’t know, focusing on the election or something, you probably know that Oprah is just crazy about Amazon’s ebook reader the ...
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Of Kids & Parents
It’s a banal thing to say, but Twisted Spoon Press is one of the most under-appreciated small publishers. For years—sixteen according to its website—TSP has been producing beautiful editions of books by Central and Eastern European authors. Some of the names on their list are ...
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Books and Booze Totally Mix
In order to draw more customers to their (relatively) new downtown Grand Rapids location, Schuler Books & Music is trying to get a liquor license: Fehsenfeld envisions adding beer and wine to his cafe’s extensive coffee menu, so bookstore patrons could have a glass with dinner, browse the books, relax by the ...
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Stock Market and Art
Not the most common of connections, but that’s the angle that Bloomberg‘s Robert Hilferty takes in his review of Proust’s The Lemoine Affair: A hundred years ago French novelist Marcel Proust (1871-1922) lost money in the stock market, too. And as he would in the epic In Search of Lost Time, he ...
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Dubravka on The World
Novelist and critic Dubravka Ugresic talks to World Books editor Bill Marx about her latest collection of essays, “Nobody’s Home,” which trains a wryly spiky eye to a number of subjects, from the plight of public intellectuals to the fluid nature of cultural identity in the age of ...
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One Last Frankfurt Post
Over at Beyond Hall 8 there’s a piece by Edward Nawotka about a protest by GWARA (Georgian Writers Against Russian Aggression) featuring four Georgian authors. Each of the four authors wrote an essay for the event, and the one by David Tursashvilli that Nawotka includes is brilliant: I feel ashamed yet I have to ...
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Congratulations to Paper Republic
Another late post by us—I think we’ll be catching up for the next month—but congratulations to Paper Republic: We are delighted to announce that Paper Republic has received a substantial grant from Arts Council England to develop the website and to fund associated activities. Our aim is to re-design the ...
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Calque on ALTA Conference
I can’t express how disappointed I was to have to miss the ALTA conference this year. This is by far my favorite annual conference for any number of reasons. (I once wrote a piece for Words Without Borders about how I loved ALTA because most of the translators were shorter than me. That’s incredibly unusual and ...
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Slice Magazine #3: In Translation
Slice is a relatively new magazine that focuses on new voices—this issue contains pieces by a number of seventh graders—while also containing some more established writers and a number of interviews. I first came across Slice over the summer and thought that it had a lot of potential. In terms of design (and to ...
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Arabic Literature in English Translation
In the Literary Saloon post about David Tresilian’s A Brief Guide to Modern Arabic Literature, Michael Orthofer quotes this paragraph about the dismal (though not terribly shocking) number of Arabic books translated into English since World War II: Recently modern Arabic literature seems to have made several long ...
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Ross Benjamin on Kevin Vennemann's Close to Jedenew
Over at Love German Books is a very interesting interview with Ross Benjamin about his translation of Kevin Vennemann’s Close to Jedenew for the Melville House Art of the Contemporary Novella series. Ross, tell us about the book . . . It’s an account of a pogrom against a Jewish family by their ...
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Toni Morrison on U.S. Insularity
French translator Alison Anderson pointed me to this article from Bibliobs the literary section of the weekly French newsmagazin Nouvel Observateur. Interesting what Toni Morrison has to say about the Horace Engdahl/American insularity situation: Toni Morrison. – Je pense que ces propos reflètent effectivement, ...
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Growing interest in Der Turm
A few days age we wrote about the German Book Prize Winner, Uwe Tellkamp’s Der Turm, and lamented the fact that there wouldn’t be much interest in the 1000+ page book from American or British publishers. Well, a little birdie tells me that we were quite mistaken and that Suhrkamp is fielding a “huge wave ...
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2008 Man Asian Literary Prize Shortlist
Still catching up on the news of the past week, including the announcement of the five finalists for the Man Asian Literary Prize. The five shortlisted authors and their books are: Kavery Nambisan, The Story that Must Not be Told Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi, Lost Flamingoes of Bombay Miguel Syjuco, ...
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Funding for the Arts, Wikis, and Brian Lehrer
I wish I had come across this sooner . . . Earlier this week the L.A. Times blog Jacket Copy posted a piece about today’s episode of the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC. As part of his 30 Issues in Thirty Days series, today’s show focuses on “Arts and Culture Funding,” looking at Obama’s and ...
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New Farafina
I have to admit that I hadn’t heard of Farafina until seeing it referenced on Laila Lalami’s blog. Focused on African culture, each issue combines “everything from photo essays to cartoons, art interviews to political exposes, narrative essays to short stories.” The latest issue, guest edited by ...
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BEA Opening its Doors to the Public?
Even though I don’t approve of the 14-year-olds at Frankfurt who dress up in very skimpy clothes to look like their favorite manga characters and be photographer by old dudes, nor do I approve of the general lack of understanding among the great public on how to walk down hallways and up escalators, it was nice to see ...
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Goodbye, Frankfurt Book Fair 2008
This somewhat maudlin post originally appeared on the Frankfurt Book Fair blog. Although the Fair doesn’t officially close for a little while, for all intents and purposes, my time here is over. I’ve met with all the people I needed to meet with, visited all the stands I needed to visit, and drank enough beer to last me ...
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Omnivoracious w/ Bragi
Omnivoracious, Amazon.com’s weblog, has an interview with Bragi Ólafsson about The Pets, lies, and his new book: Amazon.com: Tell me more about that, what that was like. BÓ: Most of the time it was very stupid questions and silly answers. That’s what the pop press is basically about. Playing around. ...
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A Non-Deal at Frankfurt
This post originally appeared on the Frankfurt Book Fair blog. (And hopefully this situation will be written up in the near future by someone with more info and journalistic skills.) In addition to talking about Marguerite Duras at the Frankfurter Hof (as Ed mentioned below), Anne-Solange, the rights director for Gallimard, ...
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Contemporary Romanian Writers
My friend Bogdan from Polirom pointed me to this excellent new site, Contemporary Romanian Writers. They sum it up nicely: www.romanianwriters.ro is now online. It offers publishers from all over the world English-language presentations of the contemporary Romanian writers published by Polirom and Cartea Românească, ...
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The European Union and Translation Culture
This post originally appeared on the Frankfurt Book Fair blog. (Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like the English-language version of this brochure—”* Great Translation by the Way”—is available for download from the NLPVF site. Here’s the Dutch version and if anyone can find the English, ...
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Book Piracy!
This post originally appeared on the Frankfurt Book Fair blog. As Richard Nash and I agreed, the only thing that needs to be said about book piracy is that there’s no where near enough of it. Anyway, here goes: The possibilities of the internet and our increasingly-connected culture can make a publisher’s eyes ...
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Book Piracy!
This post originally appeared on the Frankfurt Book Fair blog. As Richard Nash and I agreed, the only thing that needs to be said about book piracy is that there’s no where near enough of it. Anyway, here goes: The possibilities of the internet and our increasingly-connected culture can make a publisher’s eyes ...
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International Congress of Young Booksellers
This post originally appeared on the Frankfurt Book Fair blog. (There was also talk of an International Society of Young Publishers—more on that in the near future.) Athough most of the talk at Frankfurt is about the publishers, editors, agents, and authors, it’s also a great place for booksellers to connect with ...
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New International Promotions
This post originally appeared on the Frankfurt Book Fair blog. In contrast to Russia, both the Korean government and the Romanian government have recently launched large projects to better promote their writers abroad. The Korea Literature Translation Institute (6.0 E 937) recently published some wonderful, quite elegant ...
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Intro to Russia's Publishing Scene
This post originally appeared on the Frankfurt Book Fair blog, and drew a comment . . . At the urging of the Frankfurt Book Fair and the German Book Office in Moscow, Russian representatives put on a special “Look at Russia” seminar earlier today. Vladimir Grigoriev, the deputy head of the Federal Agency for Press and ...
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Publishing Argentina
This originally appeared on the Frankfurt Book Fair blog. This past spring I was fortunate enough to be able to participate in a Editors’ Week in Buenos Aires. It was an amazing experience, solidifying my lifelong interest in Argentine literature, and giving me a once-in-a-lifetime chance to visit the place where many of ...
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Global Innovations and Market Opportunities for Educational Publishers
This post originally appeared on the Frankfurt Book Fair blog. (And this is one of the most serious ones I wrote.) Today’s EPP (Educational Publishing Pavilion) panel on “Global Innovations and Market Opportunites,” blended together two of the primary focuses running throughout this year’s Frankfurt Book ...
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Back from Frankfurt: A Recap
Because I wrote for the Frankfurt Book Fair blog and newsletter, and because yes, I did stay out too late at the Frankfurter Hof and elsewhere, and because the Sportschule (a great place to stay, if not a bit Spartan) has some serious internet difficulties, I really didn’t have a chance to write my usual gossipy, ...
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The Jackal, Bolano, and the Sadness of Big Deals
I’m disappointed in myself for not having found out about this during the Frankfurt Book Fair, but Wylie is making a major play for Bolano, which means that Scott Moyers can now claim that he created Bolano. (Before this Bolano was a little known writer published by some small press like New Visions or whatever, but we, ...
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On NPR . . .
Yesterday, the NPR news program Day to Day talked at some length about “The Best Foreign Books You’ve Never Heard Of”—a discussion spurred, like so many others, by Jean-Marie Gustave le Clezio’s recently awarded Nobel Prize for Literature and the general U.S. reaction of “Ba?” So, ...
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Bit More on Frankfurt
One of the coolest things that happened last night was when, in the middle of the Berlin Verlag party, everyone went dead silent to watch the announcement of the Booker Prize. (_The White Tiger_ by Aravind Adiga won.) For one thing, it was interesting to see people freaking out over a book award. Of course, people from ...
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Reporting from Frankfurt
OK, it’s technically only day one, but man, everyone already looks and seems exhausted. (The stress of the financial crisis? One too many at the Frankfurter Hof? All of the above?) I’m planning on posting more about the fair here later, but as I mentioned before, I’m also blogging for the English language ...
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This Thing Called Frankfurt
Another week, another excuse for the probably lack of posts after today. This afternoon I fly out to the Frankfurt Book Fair where I’ll mingle, chat, and drink with thousands of publishers, editors, agents, authors, etc. The fair is almost beyond description, and is indispensable for anyone interested in staying in ...
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Daniel Hahn on Translating
Daniel Hahn’s new blog at Booktrust’s Translated Fiction site is a pretty interesting experiment: About to embark on translating a fourth Agulausa book, Estação das Chuvas, Daniel has kindly agreed to write a diary about the process from start to finish, which will appear exclusively on this ...
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Enrique Vila-Matas
Thanks to Conversational Reading for bringing Enrique Vila-Matas’s new website to our attention. In addition to the stylish photos, the site includes info about his books, a nice bio, and links to fifteen interviews. BTW: The site is only available in Spanish . . . ...
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More Nobody's Home Reviews
As Dubravka Ugresic’s reading tour winds down—her final event is a conversation with Brigid Hughes on Tuesday at 7pm at Melville House Press—her review coverage continues to expand. Most recently Booklit gave the book a long, thoughtful, positive review, my favorite part of which is the ...
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Latest Review: The Great Weaver from Kashmir
It seems fitting that we run this review of Iceland’s only Nobel Prize winner right after the Le Clezio announcement, and while Bragi Olafsson (our Icelandic author) is on his reading tour. Larissa Kyzer—who reviewed The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo for us last month—wrote this review of the first Halldor ...
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The Great Weaver from Kashmir
If the international community recognizes Iceland for something other than Björk, vikings, and glaciers, it is undeniably the country’s historic and richly diverse literary tradition. Deemed by the Swedish Academy to be the “cradle of narrative art here in the North,” Iceland not only has the legacy of the ...
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The International Literature Evangelist
I’ll tell ya, it seems like forever since we posted a video of Chad. Luckily, Publishers Weekly has just published a lovely article-slash-interview with our director. It’s all about things like Open Letter, the books we publish, our websites (such as this one), and literature in translation. Also, there is an ...
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No Video of Chad Here
This entry contains no video of our director, Chad Post. Since there is no video, you will not see him being interviewed on local news or for a major print publication. Also, in this entry, he will not be seen talking about Open Letter, the books we publish, our websites (such as this one), or literature in translation. There ...
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Here Comes the Backlash
Last week, I worried that Horace Engdahl’s comments about American literature and the Nobel Prize would result in a bit of an anti-foreign literature backlash. And as Edward Gauvin pointed out in the comments, it’s starting . . . From Adam Kirsch’s article at Slate: All of these criticisms are, of ...
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Latest Review: Mansarda
We wrote about Kis’s Mansarda when we first heard about it a while back when we first heard about Serbian Classics Press, thanks to Michael Orthofer. At long last, we now have a review written by Erik Estep, a librarian at East Carolina University. ...
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Hate Letter Books
One of the more intriguing books coming out of France this fall is Public Enemies, a series of letters between Michel Houellebecq and Bernard-Henri Lévy. As described in the Financial Times: Mr Houellebecq is a novelist who – in the words of the American writer John Updike – has a “thoroughgoing ...
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Mansarda
Serbian Classics has published a long-awaited English translation of Danilo Kis’s first novel, Mansarda. Kis, one of the most critically praised writers from the former Yugoslavia, made his reputation with the novels Garden, Ashes and Hourglass. A collection of short stories centered around the Stalinist purges of the ...
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Boom Goes the Dynamite!
A number of people had emailed or called me about the controversial statements made by Swedish Academy’s permanent secretary Horace Engdahl about American writing, basically stating that the U.S. is too culturally insular to have a writer worthy of the Nobel Prize. (The last American to win was Toni Morrison in ...
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Translation Prizes 2008
Over at the Literary Saloon Michael Orthofer has a great summary about the 2008 “Translation Prizes,” lamenting the generic name and overall lack of coverage: We realise it’s sort of an umbrella-designation — the six prizes do come with their own names and/or sponsors — but it still seems ...
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Recent Reviews of Literature in Translation
There are a couple of decent reviews of works in translation from the Sunday papers that are worth mentioning. The first is a review of Carlos Fuentes’s Happy Families that appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle: In his latest short-story collection, “Happy Families,” Mexican author Carlos Fuentes ...
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The State of Publisher-Reader Relations
Yesterday, E.J. and I were talking about the presentation on the “state of publishing in the U.S.” that he has to give as a Frankfurt Fellow. I thought it would be funny—and totally unexpected—if instead of giving the usual doom and gloom speech1, he provided a vision of an ideal book culture, one ...
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Another Entertaining List
From The Times is this list of 10 books not to read: 9: Lord of the Rings – J R R Tolkien The best I can say about this book is that it was a very useful tool at school for helping to choose your friends. Carrying a copy of Tolkien’s monstrous tome was the equivalent of a leper’s bell: ‘Unclean! ...
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He Kind of Has a Point
From The Guardian blog post by Michael Caine about the recent (or not so) surge in reprinting “lost classics”: Take a closer look at this recent publishing wheeze, and it soon reduces to digging out the obscurer works of not-so-obscure writers. If you listen carefully you’ll notice something that sounds ...
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Joe Wikert's Bookstores vs. Online Series
Earlier this week Joe Wikert completed his six-part series of posts (this links to the final piece, which has links to the first five parts) about how brick-and-mortar bookstores could better compete with online retailers (aka Amazon.com). Taken as a whole, I’m not sure his suggestions would necessarily fix all the ...
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Dubravka Ugresic on the Internets
Over the past week or so, Dubravka’s book (Nobody’s Home) has been making its way around the internet, garnering some really nice praise along the way. First off, it received a great review (4 out of 5) by Gwen Dawson at the always excellent Literary License. And then yesterday, Douglas Rushkoff (whose ...
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Rupert by Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer
Reading a translation when it first comes in is always a fascinating, exciting experience. Frequently we acquire books based on a sample translation, a reader’s report, and conversations/recommendations from trusted readers and translators. Although this system—for all its baroque qualities—works quite well, ...
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Very Special Offer
Tonight is the night of the Dubravka Ugresic/Breyten Breytenbach reading at the 92nd St. Y, and as it so happens, I have a few tickets available for this. (I’m here in Rochester, resting up for my next New York to Minneapolis to Frankfurt, Germany trip.) If you’re a die-hard Ugresic (or Breytenbach) fan, and ...
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Daniel Kehlmann Against the German Book Prize
Over at the Literary Saloon, — Litblogging’s Finest Source of International News — Michael Orthofer reports on Daniel Kehlmann’s article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung railing against the German Book Prize. I can’t read the article in the original (which can be found here), but ...
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Bryten Brytenbach on The World
South African writer, painter, and political activist Breyten Breytenbach talks to World Books editor Bill Marx about what his new book, “All One Horse.” says about his schizophrenic creative career. Breytenbach also reads a selection from the volume. Bryten Brytenbach will be appearing with Dubravka ...
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CALQUE Interview with Pratilipi
The always interesting CALQUE blog posted an interview over the weekend with the editors of Pratilipi, a relatively new bimonthly web magazine dedicated to publishing and promoting Indian writers from a number of regions and languages. Their goals are really quite ambitious and include a future print edition with a ...
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Publishing in Russia
Not too far removed from the New York article, is this piece from the Moscow News about the recent Moscow International Book Fair. The Moscow International Book Fair (MIBF), which takes place every September, is considered the biggest event in the domestic publishing area, and a benchmark for conclusions about ...
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Latest Review: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Our latest review is of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the first book in the “Millennium Series.” (The other two titles—The Girl Who Played with Fire and Castles in the Sky—will be available from MacLehose Press in the UK in January 2009 and January 2010 respectively. Not sure ...
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The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
In his 2001 article, “Scandinavian Crime Novels: Too Much Angst and Not Enough Entertainment?” author Bo Tao Michaëlis relates an American publisher friend’s understanding of Scandinavian crime novels: You [Scandinavians] contrive to express this simultaneously social and existential anxiety in your crime novels ...
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New York on the (Bleak) Future of Publishing
Going into it, I expected to disagree vehemently with Boris Kachka’s article about the publishing industry that’s simply titled, The End. But after reading the entire thing, and discovering that he’s primarily concerned with “the end” of commercial publishing, I found this rather well-thought out ...
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Going to Be a Slow Week . . .
This is probably going to be a slow week for Three Percent. Dubravka Ugresic arrives in Rochester tonight and we have a packed weeks of events, interviews, classroom appearances, etc., lined up for her. Specifically, tomorrow morning she’ll be on WHAM-13’s morning show (a local TV-station, whose previous guests ...
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Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis!
I absolutely love pronouncing Machado de Assis’s name. It flows in a lively, exotic way—especially when spoken with an exaggerated accent—and is one of the longest author names I know of. When we first started Open Letter, Machado de Assis’s Epitaph of a Small Winner (aka, The Posthumous Memoirs of ...
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R.I.P. DFW
David Foster Wallace’s passing this past Friday is a huge blow, and incredibly sad. There’s not much to add to the discussions and appreciations online (such as this one that Ed Champion put together). DFW was an amazingly talented writer, whose Infinite Jest is one of the greatest books to come out in the past ...
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Two Notes on the NEA
As reported in the New York Times Dana Gioia is stepping down from the NEA in January: “I’ve given up six years of my life as a writer,” Mr. Gioia, 57, said earlier in the week from his office in Washington. “I felt I had to go back to writing when I still have the kind of stamina to do it ...
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Plastic Logic's Pretty Cool Looking E-Reader
Today at DEMOfall 08, Plastic Logic revealed a pretty damn slick looking e-reader that could (in theory) end up competing with the Kindle—especially in terms of business users. As you can see in this video the reader is a 8 1/2” x 11” full-sized reading touch-screen that’s about the size of a ...
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Bob Stein's Unified Theory of Publishing
The other day, Bob Stein posted a really interesting article at If:Book about his so-called “unified theory of publishing” which tries to address these particular questions: What are the characteristics of a successful author in the era of the digital network? Ditto for readers: how do you account for ...
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I Love Dollars
Zhu Wen’s book of stories, I Love Dollars, established him as a pivotal figure in Chinese literature of the 1990s. As a part of the New Generation, these writers seek to produce a new literature in the post-Mao era, one that conveys nihilistic characters in a hedonistic society and reflects the capitalistic society of ...
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New FILI Newsletter
The latest newsletter from the Finnish Literature Exchange (the government sponsored organization dedicated to promoting Finnish lit worldwide) arrived yesterday and included a couple interesting article/links. First off, there have been a few additions to the Beginners’ Guide to Translation, which, to be honest, I ...
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Another Cool Bookstore Blog
The Front Table has gone through a few changes over the years. Dedi Felman—who, until recently, worked with Words Without Borders—helped found this publication, which Seminary Co-op (in Chicago) distributed to all of their members. At one point in time, Philip Leventhal—now an editor at Columbia University ...
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Susan Sontag Translation Prize
The Susan Sontag Foundation recently released information about their 2009 translation prize, this time awarding young translators working on Spanish into English projects: This $5,000 grant will be awarded to a proposed work of literary translation from Spanish into English and is open to anyone under the age of 30. The ...
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Saramago's Latest
Complete Review pointed this out as well, but the Independent has an article by Elizabeth Nash about the latest Saramago book, The Elephant’s Journey: Portugal’s Nobel Literature laureate Jose Saramago has announced the completion of his latest work “The Elephant’s Journey”, based on the ...
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A Comment Worth Repeating
From Fausto in relation to the post about New Directions’s forthcoming Bolano books: “The best one of the lot is Antwerp. He never wrote that well before or after.” My Google searches for info on Antwerp are leading nowhere . . . well, actually they led me to this — Bolano’s astrology and birth ...
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Interview with Translator Michael Stein
The Japanese Literature Publishing Project recently updated their website to include a RSS feed, which, to me, is absolutely fantastic and essential. I live through my Google Reader, rarely checking in on sites that I don’t subscribe to. Now, it’s much, much easier to keep up with the JLPP folks, who are ...
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More Details on Future Bolano Books
In a post about Time Out New York‘s fall books preview, I referenced the forthcoming Roberto Bolano books that New Directions is bringing out over the next few years, but didn’t include many details. Thanks to the incredibly New Directions Newsletter the full list of upcoming Bolano is now ...
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September Issue of Words Without Borders
The new issue of Words Without Borders is now available online, and this month’s theme is “Reversals”: We’re prolonging summer with another month of flip-flops, as international writers contemplate the reversals of various fortunes. On the air in Sarajevo and under the radar in São Paulo, in chilly ...
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Full Interview with Bragi Olafsson
We conducted this interview a few months ago, but thought we’d run it in its entirety today, since his book is now available and will be shipping to bookstores in the very near future. Bragi Ólafsson was born in Reykjavik, and may be most well known for playing bass in The Sugarcubes, Björk’s first band. After ...
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898 Pages Later . . .
2666 is a true masterpiece. I plan on writing something more substantial later, after taking some time to think about the novel, but in the meantime I want to share a couple interesting bits from the “Note to the First Edition” about Bolano’s notes on the novel: In one of his many notes for 2666, Bolano ...
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Next Round of September Translations
This isn’t a reflection on the start of the new school year, or the end of summer, or anything like that, but today’s capsules of forthcoming translations features three fairly bleak books . . . What Can I Do When Everything’s On Fire? by Antonio Lobo Antunes, translated from the Portuguese by Gregory ...
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Per Hojholt in Calque
I first heard of Per Hojholt in 2004, when, shortly after he died, the Literary Saloon posted a short piece about his obituary and about Auricula: Of particular interest: his recent novel, Auricula (not translated into English — yet). As we understand it, the premise of the book is that time very briefly came to a ...
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Bookforum: The Best News . . .
The September/October/November issue of Bookforum went online yesterday, and is absolutely loaded with reviews of great books. Of course, in a somewhat self-serving way, I’m especially excited about this issue since it has a very positive review of the first Open Letter title: Nobody’s Home by Dubravka ...
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Triple Canopy: Better News . . .
The new issue of Triple Canopy is now online. (At least the first few pieces—the rest will be unveiled over the next few weeks.) This particular issue is all about New Orleans, to commemorate the anniversary of Katrina. Not only are the pieces on there pretty interesting, but the design of this web publication is so ...
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NY Sun: The Bad News . . .
From today’s issue of the New York Sun This morning I write to you about the future of The New York Sun, which is in circumstances that may require us to cease publication at the end of September unless we succeed in our efforts to find additional financial backing. The managing editor, Ira Stoll, who is one of the ...
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More September Translations
As an update, at this moment I have records for 314 original translations of adult fiction and poetry coming out in 2008, and 28 for 2009. (I’ve barely started entering 2009 info . . .) As part of our goal to highlight as many of these titles as possible, below are capsules on a few more translations coming out this ...
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Quarterly Conversation: Issue 13
The new issue of Quarterly Conversation is now online, and, as can be expected, filled with great stuff. One of the lead pieces is Scott Esposito’s article about the similarities in the writings of Adolfo Bioy Casares and Franz Kafka: In his Prologue [to The Invention of Morel, Borges calls on writers of the 20th ...
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Yesterday's People
The stories of Yesterday’s People are torn between war and peace, and between Goran Simić‘s native Bosnia (specifically Sarajevo) and his current residence, Canada. The centerpiece of the collection, ‘Minefield’, tells the story of two sides in the Yugoslavian war who are entrenched on either side ...
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Isaac's Torah
Bulgarian filmmaker Angel Wagenstein is the author of three novels, the first of which is Isaac’s Torah, originally published in Bulgarian in 2000 and now available for the first time in English from Handsel Books in a brilliant translation by Elizabeth Frank and Deliana Simeonova. A good indicator that a book is a ...
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September Translations
If I didn’t spend every morning writing about things that bug me, I’d have more time to write about new books . . . Which, in the end, is probably more interesting and useful. So here are three more September titles: The Tsar’s Dwarf by Peter Fogtdal, translated from the Danish by Tiina Nunnally ...
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Publishing Rant
Over the weekend, the Huffington Post published Part 1 of an essay by Richard Laermer called “Why Book Publishing Is Dead.” Now, I’m one of the first people to jump on the bandwagon and criticize the publishing industry (or book industry as a whole) for it’s lack of innovation and odd practices. (As ...
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Mark Athitakis Has Interesting Things to Say
Critical Mass — the official blog of the National Book Critics Circle — always has great (though depressing) coverage about the decline of book reviews in America. And yesterday, they ran a piece by Mark Athitakis (Arts Editor at the Washington City Paper) on book reviewing in alt-weeklies that’s very cogent ...
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Neologisms
This isn’t related to international literature per se, but Erin McKean’s Boston Globe column about what makes a word real is very interesting. And, maybe, tangentially related to issues translators face. (OK, it’s a stretch, although freeing themselves to come up with new words when necessary, could benefit ...
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Comments on Dimissing Translations
Yesterday’s post about how to dismiss translations caused a good deal of discussion in the comments section, ranging from Monica’s question about whether other cultures have this same authenticity/accuracy/I-can’t-judge-without-knowing-the-original language issues (I doubt it, but would love to hear from ...
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Javier Marias's Publishing Venture
Literary Saloon pointed us to this El Pais article entitled “Esta absurda aventura” (This Absurd Adventure) about Javier Marias’s Reino de Redonda publishing house. (For non-Marias fans, here’s a short history of the Kingdom of Redonda and Marias’s ties to it. It really is a fun story and cool ...
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How to Dismiss Translations
I sort of understand what Daniel Green is trying to do in this post in which he explains why he doesn’t focus on translated fiction in his blog. And since it is his blog, I have no complaint about his not wanting to write about international literature (except on rare occasions like the piece about Tulli’s Flaw). ...
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Book Publishing Recommendations
Richard Nash pointed this out on Friday, but Business Week ran an interesting article last week by Sara Lacy about how book publishers should learn from Web 2.0 ideas and revitalize their practices. Publishing is a subject near and dear to me—and not only because for the past two years I have been writing my first ...
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Interview with Peter Pistanek
A couple of months ago, Robert Buckeye reviewed Peter Pistanek’s Rivers of Babylon, a novel about Racz, a stoker in the Hotel Ambassador whose power quickly expands when he realizes that “he who puts the heat on can control things.” Rivers of Babylon was on the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize longlist ...
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Peter Mayer on the Frankfurt Book Fair
To celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Frankfurt Book Fair (the history of which actually dates back hundreds of years, although the modern version started shortly after WWII), the FBF newsletter is focusing each month on another decade of the fair. This month they look at the 1980s and talk to Peter Mayer, who, at the ...
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NPR Goes to Europe! Sort of . . .
It may be irrational, but this Three Books . . . column about doing the “Grand Tour” of Europe via literature just bugs me. Not the idea that “literature takes you places!” but the fact that the three books featured are Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and A Room with a View. This ...
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German Book Award Longlist
The longlist for the 2008 German Book Award was announced yesterday, and as Michael Orthofer points out, there a number of familiar names on the list, including Peter Handke, Karen Duve, Uwe Timm, Ingo Schulze, and Feridun Zaimoglu. Michael’s write-up on the prize is really good, especially since he reads German and ...
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NEA Translation Fellowships
This morning the NEA announced the new round of Translation Fellowships, awarding these gifted translators $10-$20,000 for their projects. Complete descriptions of all the projects, along with translator bios, are available on the NEA site. Congratulations to everyone who received a fellowship—this is one of my favorite ...
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September Translations
Earlier this year, I was trying to write up short overviews of all forthcoming translations. Unfortunately, things got in the way, and this project was sort of pushed to the side. Which is unfortunate. One of the main reasons we started this website was to promote international literature and uncover great books and ...
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Wordsworth Books Update
Edward Nawotka has an update on Wordsworth Books, the Decatur, Ga. bookstore that tried to raise $25,000 to stay afloat, and was poorly profiled by NPR: The two-week blitz enabled Wordsworth to raise nearly $25,000, taking itself out of immediate danger. “We came very close to our fundraising goal,” said owner ...
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Marian Schwartz on World Books Podcast
Over at PRI’s World Books, Bill Marx has a really interesting podcast interview with Marian Schwartz, whose retranslation of Bulgakov’s The White Guard was recently released by Yale University Press. (Bill Marx also put together a special White Guard related Geo Quiz.) The interview is really interesting, ...
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Comic Books and the Digital Revolution
After all the recent Kindle discussions (which are still ongoing in today’s Shelf Awareness), this Publishers Weekly article about comic book publishers embracing the possibilities of digital publishing jumped out at me. In terms of engaging and trying to please their fans, the comic industry seems miles ahead of book ...
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It's Not Surprising
That publishers would employ BzzAgent to generate sales, but I was surprised to find out that a book was behind the first “Bzz” campaign—and that this campaign actually worked. From the fascinating and incredible Buying In by Rob Walker: The first full-fledged Bzz campaign was for a book called The ...
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Calling All Kindle Doubters
Here’s an interesting take on the idea of social marketing. On Amazon’s site there’s a feature to See a Kindle in Your City: We’ve heard feedback that many Kindle owners love their Kindle and like showing it off. Some of you even said you have trouble reading Kindle in public because people always ...
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A Public Space: Issue 6
The new issue of A Public Space arrived a couple days ago and, as always, is filled with interesting pieces. I think it’s pretty cool that “All Foreigners Beep” from Dubravka Ugresic’s new collection Nobody’s Home leads off the issue, especially since this is one of the funniest pieces in the ...
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Open Letter August Newsletter
The August Open Letter Newsletter is now available and was just mailed out to all subscribers. Aside from hoping you’re interested in reading this, I’m also mentioning it here because we ran into some problems getting out subscribers registered with Google Groups. (Google decided that we were ...
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Non-profit Bookstores
The other day NPR ran this segment about Wordsmiths in Decatur, Georgia, and the store’s recent decision to ask for donations from customers in order to stay in business. In its typical middle-of-the-road objective, NPR’s focus is on whether it’s good or bad for people to donate to a for profit business, ...
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More Kindle Quotes
From Levi Asher: If 240,000 units have really sold, then I am flat out wrong. Nobody, not even me, can argue with $75 million in revenue for an innovative tech product’s first year. I do find this figure slightly incredible (especially since I live in New York City and have never yet seen anybody walking around ...
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Niloufar Talebi and Belonging: New Poetry by Iranians Around the World
I had the pleasure of spending a couple of days with Niloufar Talebi at an American Literary Translators Conference in Montreal a few years back, when she was still translating the poems for Belonging and looking for a publisher. (To be frank, I knew immediately that I was going to like Niloufar, when, after an ALTA ...
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Diverse Views on the Kindle
The 240,000 Kindle sales figure has been written about quite a bit over the past few weeks, with everyone speculating on whether this number is strong enough to make the Kindle the next iPod. According to Silicon Alley Insider,- Citi’s Mark Mahaney has doubled his estimate of Kindle sales to 378,000 for this year. ...
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Translation Database Update
It’s been a couple months since I last posted an update to the 2008 Translation Database, and since we have added a number of titles (thanks as always to Michael Orthofer, PW, and all the publishers who send us copies of their catalogs) it seemed like a good time to post an updated Excel file. The Excel file linked to ...
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Sun, Stone, and Shadows: 20 Great Mexican Short Stories
It can be tricky reviewing an anthology. Especially a general anthology that strives to introduce the literature of a particular country or region, since in an attempt to be all-encompassing, these anthologies can seem too diffuse, without anything linking the included pieces. When I first picked up Sun, Stone, and Shadows ...
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Sony eReader vs. Amazon's Kindle
From Financial Times (free registration required—why does anyone do this anymore?): Sony launched the Reader in October 2006 with quite a fanfare. It is a light, book-sized gadget with a screen made by a technology company called E-Ink that is easier and more restful to read than a computer’s and needs no ...
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Two Great New Literary Blogs
It’s always great to uncover (or be told about) great new literary blogs, and last week I found about a couple of really impressive ones. The first is Salonica World Lit which bears the slogan “Exploit. Explore. Examine. A Blog Dedicated to International Literature.” This is done by Monica Carter of ...
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Interview with Gilbert Alter-Gilbert
Over at A Journey Round My Skull, Will Schofield has a fascinating interview with the translator Gilbert Alter-Gilbert. Alter-Gilbert has translated a number of interesting authors, including Miguel Angle Asturias, Vincente Huidobro, Oliverio Girondo, Marie Redonnet, and Leopoldo Lugones. Since Alter-Gilbert is also a ...
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August Issue of Words Without Borders
Another new issue that’s now available is the August version of Words Without Borders, which is dedicated to “Writings on Psychiatry.” Ever since Freud, analysts have decamped in August, leaving their patients to fend for themselves till September. To compensate for this absence, we prescribe a healthy ...
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Strange Harbors
While I was out of the office last week, the new issue of Two Lines arrived. This is the fifteenth volume of Two Lines, which is really impressive, and as always, the production quality and contents are both excellent. The “theme” of this particular issue is “Strange Harbors,” which can be ...
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A Quarter-Million Kindles
Amazon has been keeping a lid on the number of Kindles they’ve sold since it launched, but apparently somebody has finally spilled the beans: Ever since Amazon launched the Kindle last November, we’ve been wondering about just how successful it’s been. The electronic book initially sold out and supplies have ...
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Mercè Rodoreda
Unfortunately for us this is about a year too soon, but Sandra Cisneros is on the Leonard Lopate Show today at 12:00 EST talking about Mercè Rodoreda as a part of their summer reading series: We continue our Underappreciated summer reading series with a look at Mercè Rodoreda, who wrote The Time of the Doves in exile ...
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Nobody's Home: Unboxing
The long-awaited moment—something the three of us have been dreaming about since standing together in a parking lot in Normal, IL nearly two years ago—has finally arrived: the first copies of Open Letter’s first book, Nobody’s Home by Dubravka Ugresic, showed up this morning at Open Letter Plaza on the ...
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More on Michael Emmerich and Calque
The other day, we posted a short piece about an exchange between Michael Emmerich and Daniela Hurezanu that took place on the Calque website and centered around a recent interview with Emmerich the striking differences between his unedited version of The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P and the version edited by Elmer Luke. ...
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TypeCon 2008
This may not seem related to what normally blog about, but trust us, there was at least one translator at the conference: It’s true, a font conference in Buffalo doesn’t exactly sound like a thrilling way to spend a weekend in July, but for those who’ve already joined the Ban Comic Sans campaign, seen ...
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The Editing of Translations
Today on the Calque blog, there’s a fascinating exchange between translators Daniela Hurezanu and Michael Emmerich regarding the editing of Matsuura Rieko’s The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P, which Emmerich translated and is forthcoming from Seven Stories. In the last issue of Calque—one of, if not the, ...
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Interview with Adam Thirlwell
At the Harper’s blog, Wyatt Mason interviews Adam Thirlwell, the author of The Delighted States: A book of novels, romances, & their unknown translators, containing ten languages, set on four continents, & accompanied by maps, portraits, squiggles, illustrations, & a variety of helpful indexes. As a whole, the ...
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Top 10 Books on Beijing
Over at The Guardian the most recent entry to their “Top 10 Book Lists” (which is exactly what it sounds like—top 10 lists selected by famous authors, critics, musicians, etc.) is Catherine Sampson’s list of top 10 books on Beijing. As she mentions, many of these books are “rich in satire, and in ...
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Bookseller Interviews: Karl Pohrt of Shaman Drum
Weeks ago, I mentioned the idea of interviewing a number of booksellers on the state and future of independent bookselling and book culture in general. My goal is to talk from a wide range of booksellers, managers, owners, and buyers, to get as many different viewpoints as possible from the people who are at the “front ...
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L.A. Times Book Review Section — The Folded In Future
According to Rachel Deahl at PW Sam Zell (and presumably the rest of the Tribune Co. employees with their insane capitalization) has finally had his way with the standalone L.A. Times Book Review section and is folding it into the Calendar Section. (Man, that seems like an insult—couldn’t they at least fold the ...
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France Week at Vulpes Libris
Last week Vulpes Libris put together a special week with reviews, interviews, and guest essays all revolving around French literature. (This week is dedicated to ferrets, so don’t be surprised when you click on the above link—just scroll down.) The review of Marguerite Duras’s Summer Rain is definitely worth ...
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One Year of Three Percent
I just noticed that it was one year ago yesterday that Three Percent went live. (E.J. and I “practiced” for a while, but unless you’ve scoured the archives, you probably never saw those posts.) Ironically—well, maybe—the first post was actually a rant about how stupid it was that Grey’s ...
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Reading the World 2008: Unforgiving Years by Victor Serge
This is the eighteenth (almost 3/4 of the way to the end) Reading the World 2008 title we’re covering. Write-ups of the other titles can be found here. And information about the Reading the World program—a special collaboration between publishers and independent booksellers to promote literature in translation ...
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Esterhazy's Revised Edition
Literary Saloon pointed this out over the weekend, but coming on the heels of the bit we wrote about Peter Esterhazy’s Celestial Harmonies Hungarian Literature Online has a long piece on the “sequel” to CE entitled Revised Edition: Revised Edition was published in 2002, shortly after Celestial ...
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Comma's Short Fiction in Translation Series
This is actually old news—like more than a year old—but thanks to Bragi Olafsson I just found out about Comma Press’s Short Fiction in Translation program. Thanks to funding from the European Culture Programme, ‘Culture 2007’ and Arts Council England, the new imprint will include four ...
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Children of Heroes
Every so often, a tiny corner of the world, little seen and little heard in recent times by the rest of the globe, produces an artist whose voice speaks out to all of us, whose work displays such competence and quality as demands immediate attention. Lyonel Trouillot of Haiti is a novelist of such caliber. He is also a poet ...
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CNQ: The Translation Issue
So at times I take a bit of pride in my Canadian heritage and think about how cool parts of Canada are, about all the interesting publishers up there, about how nice everyone is, etc. And I make an internal promise to pay more attention to Canadian publications, presses, and the like. But for whatever reason, although ...
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German Book Office Pick for July
The German Book Office recently chose Eros by Helmut Krausser as its book pick for July. Krausser’s book—which doesn’t actually release until mid-August, though you could pre-order copies now—is coming out from Europa Editions and sounds pretty interesting: Alexander von Brücken, an ageing ...
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Gabriel Josipovici
Why is Gabriel Josipovici not simply the most famous critic working today? Why are so many of his books out of print? How can it be that On Trust is out of print? How can The Book of God be out of print? Did no one read them? Everyone should read them. Everyone should read them. I have to think people don’t ...
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Early Reviews of Dubravka Ugresic and Her Tour
A couple of the early reviews for Dubravka Ugresic’s i>Nobody’s Home came out recently, with Library Journal stating that she “leaves no stone unturned and no thought contained, doing what she does best: writing about the human condition through her own experience” and Kirkus calling this collection ...
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Impact of Free Ebooks
Both of these stories came out last week, but are really interesting bits about the impact of free ebooks on sales. First off, HarperCollins did a special promotion for Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, in which you could, using HC’s Browse Inside program, read the whole book for free. (To the best of my knowledge, ...
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Espresso Book Machine at Northshire Books
Today’s Shelf Awareness points to an interview on Vermont Public Radio with Lucy Gardner Carson of Northshire Books, one of the few places in the country with an Espresso Book Machine. The EBM was hailed as a way of creating an “unlimited backlist” where customers could come and print out any title they ...
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Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Long Lost Film Script
From The Guardian: A story about an ageing pistolero and his much younger partner penned over 40 years ago by a struggling writer called Gabriel García Márquez could soon make it on to the big screen. Mexican actor and producer Rodolfo de Anda says he has just acquired the rights to the long-forgotten screenplay ...
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Interview with Bill Johnston and More on Magdalena Tulli
Someone from Polish Writing posted this in the comments section, and since it’s such a good interview, I thought I’d post about it separately. First off though, if you haven’t seen Polish Writing, it’s definitely worth checking out. Great interviews, info about Polish books and authors, and even a ...
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Counterpath and Von Doderer
One of the fun things about Book Expo America is that it offers a great opportunity to find out about new presses, magazines, bookstores, etc. It can be difficult when you’re blinded by the Random House fortress or the overwhelming Ingram “booth,” but there is a lot going on at the fringes. I’ve been ...
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Cool Idea for a Book Event
Over at The Valve there’s an interesting reading event taking place that could be a really cool model for future online book clubs. The book at the center of this event is Douglas Wolk’s very interesting Reading Comics. But it’s the structure of this “event” that got me intrigued. ...
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Reading the World 2008: Serve the People! by Yan Lianke
This is the seventeenth Reading the World 2008 title we’re covering. Write-ups of the other titles can be found here. And information about the Reading the World program—a special collaboration between publishers and independent booksellers to promote literature in translation throughout the month of June—is ...
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50 Outstanding Translations
To celebrate its 50th anniversary, the Translators Association of the Society of Authors has released a list of 50 outstanding translations from the last 50 years. We love us a good list, and like all top XX compilations, this one should generate some discussion. In the Times comment section, someone points out that Edith ...
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Reading the World 2008: Celestial Harmonies by Peter Esterhazy
This is the sixteenth Reading the World 2008 title we’re covering. Write-ups of the other titles can be found here. And information about the Reading the World program—a special collaboration between publishers and independent booksellers to promote literature in translation throughout the month of June—is ...
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Magdalena Tulli's Flaw
Daniel Green’s post on Magdalena Tulli’s Flaw makes this book sound incredibly intriguing: Flaw relates what happens on this square over the course of a single day. And it is an eventful day. Most dramatically, a large group of “refugees” emerges from the streetcar and crowds into the square, to ...
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Peter Nadas
A number of people are raving about Deborah Eisenberg’s essay on Peter Nadas from the current New York Review of Books, and for good reason. The main occasion for the article is the release of Fire and Knowledge: Fiction and Essays, which came out last year from FSG, and is now available in paperback from Picador. (As ...
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In Contrast to Argentina's Import Problems . .
Yesterday, I wrote a bit about the cost of imported books in Argentina and the impact this has on access. (In case you’re interested, Scott Esposito wrote an interesting piece a while back about the cost of books.) Oddly enough, it seems like Australia has a related, yet different sort of problem—publishers ...
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Not Sure This Is a Good Thing
From Tell Zell here’s an excerpt of a memo from Lee Abrams, Chief Innovation Officer at the Tribune Co.: *Books: Heard a conversation about how Book reporting doesn’t generate revenue and may have to go away. WAIT! Maybe Book reviews and coverage are one of those things that don’t generate revenue ...
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WikiThing
Sara Kramer of NYRB emailed me about my microsite idea this morning, and pointed out something cool that I didn’t know about: WikiThing, which is the Wiki page of LibraryThing. In itself, maybe the WikiThing site isn’t that interesting for you, unless you’re into LibraryThing. However, there are a few ...
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Books in Argentina
Over at the Guardian books blog, Karla Starr has a piece about the cost of books in Argentina: Then it occurred to me that it’s all down to purchasing power. Take Harry Potter – as plenty did both in Argentina and the UK. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows sells for 108 pesos, which corresponds to the ...
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Looking for Chinese Translators
I just got this e-mail from PEN America about their Freedom to Write program and a special event they’re hosting on August 7th in support of jailed Chinese dissidents. All the info is below, but the bottom-line is that PEN is seeking Chinese translators to help work on this project. The date is coming up quick, so ...
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Ben Lytal on Nabokov
I’ve said it before, and will repeat it endlessly—Ben Lytal has one of the sweetest reviewing gigs there is. He has the opportunity to write about the latest works of international fiction, and at the same time, can write pieces like the one today on the recent New Directions reissues of Nabokov’s Laughter ...
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Illinois!
This past weekend, Pat Reardon featured Dalkey Archive Press, Northwestern University Press, University of Illinois Press, and University of Chicago Press in an article for the Chicago Tribune about how the State of Illinois is one of the centers of translation in the country. Translators are unofficial ambassadors, ...
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Latest Review: Senselessness by Horacio Castellanos Moya
Shortly after arriving in Rochester with the goal of creating Open Letter, I was flipping through the Ray-Gude Merlin Agency rights list and came across Horacio Castellanos Moya. I immediately e-mailed Nicole Witt only to find out that New Directions had already purchased the rights to Senselessness. As a publisher I was ...
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Senselessness
The first of El Salvadoran Horacio Castellano Moya’s books to be translated into English, Senselessness is frankly, one of the best books to be published this year. It’s one of those rare books written in a very specific, very stylized fashion that’s simultaneously accessible and captivating. I am not ...
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Reading the World 2008: Yalo by Elias Khoury
This is the fifteenth Reading the World 2008 title we’re covering. Write-ups of the other titles can be found here. And information about the Reading the World program—a special collaboration between publishers and independent booksellers to promote literature in translation throughout the month of June—is ...
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A lecture on Dubravka. Microsites?
I was poking around Dubravka Ugresic’s website today, and I came across something I thought you all might find interesting: Jasmina Lukic of Central European University lectured about Dubravka at UCLA last December, and they’ve been good enough to put the lecture up on their website here. Lukic talks quite a bit ...
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The Translator's Paradox
Jeff Waxman brought my attention to an article in the June issue of Commentary by Hillel Halkin entitled “The Translator’s Paradox.” It’s primarily about the relationship between Hebrew and Jews, about how translation is aided the demise of Hebrew as the primary language of Jews: Matti Megged ...
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As If It's Not Hard Enough Selling Translations
Michael Orthofer has a great rant over at Literary Saloon about “how not to publish translations.” His piece centers around Serbian Classics Press, a press that I’ve personally never heard of (neither had Michael, so I feel like my ignorance is excusable), but one that is bringing out Mansarda, Danilo ...
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Lost Book Club
I think it’s pretty clear that we like to reference Lost whenever possible, and the new Lost Book Club, is a perfect example of why we’re obsessed with this show. This very elegant and slick site is supposed to be the “home to any and all literary references made on the show—from Stephen King to ...
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Jonathan Karp on the Future of Publishing
In last Sunday’s Washington Post, Jonathan Karp makes some interesting statements about the future of publishing in his article Turning the Page on the Disposable Book He starts with an accurate assessment of the immediacy of publishing and its ramifications: Like most publishers, I want multitudes of readers to ...
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July Issue of Words Without Borders
The new issue of Words Without Borders is now online: In the spirit of Independence Day and Bastille Day, we salute freedom fighters of all stripes with writing about revolution. In the pulsing heat of Che’s Havana and the gray chill of Lenin’s Moscow, on ravaged battlefields and blasted domestic fronts, writers ...
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NPR Brings the Serious Book Coverage
Never in my life did I expect to see NPR do something like this: National Public Radio has expanded the book coverage on its website, adding weekly book reviews, and has hired six new book reviewers—including a graphic novel reviewer—and added more features to an already existing lineup of author podcasts, ...
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Reading the World 2008: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
This is the fourteenth Reading the World 2008 title we’re covering. Write-ups of the other titles can be found here. And information about the Reading the World program—a special collaboration between publishers and independent booksellers to promote literature in translation throughout the month of June—is ...
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The Lost Daughter
“I’m an unnatural mother,” the protagonist, Leda, says of herself. In this brave and searing novel by Elena Ferrante, The Lost Daughter explores the psyche of a woman who regrets having children. Leda is a modern Italian woman. She is divorced. She is an accomplished professor. And she is comfortable ...
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Reading the World 2008: I'd Like by Amanda Michalopoulou
This is the thirteenth Reading the World 2008 title we’re covering. Write-ups of the other titles can be found here. And information about the Reading the World program—a special collaboration between publishers and independent booksellers to promote literature in translation throughout the month of June—is ...
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Seven Japanese Authors
I finished reading Contemporary Japanese Writers, Vol. 2 over the weekend, and found seven writers/books that I wish were translated into English: Yoshikichi Furui Asagao (Rose of Sharon) is a masterpiece from Furui’s middle period. In a commentary to the paperback edition, writer Hisaki Matsuura remarks on the ...
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Always Good to End on a Positive Note (Or Not)
Today’s PW Daily has a piece from Rachel Deahl about the possible death of another book review section: Amid the pending real estate sale and newsroom cutbacks, rumors have surfaced about book sections being cut at Tribune-owned papers. One freelance critic told PW that the Tribune Company is planning to slash ...
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New Absinthe
The new issue of Absinthe arrived the other day and looks like another solid issue. According to Dwayne D. Hayes’s editor’s note, this issue could be considered the “humor” issue, with stories such as Jens Blendstrup’s “The New Deceased Member of the Mikkelsen Family.” Wilhelm ...
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Reading the World 2008: The Diving Pool by Yoko Ogawa
This is the twelfth Reading the World 2008 title we’re covering. (Almost half-way!) Write-ups of the other titles can be found here. And information about the Reading the World program—a special collaboration between publishers and independent booksellers to promote literature in translation throughout the month ...
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Bragi Olafsson's The Pets and Open Letter Subscriptions
Yesterday, over at Booksquare there was an interesting post on “Why Publishers Should Blog,” that generated a bit of discussion: Just as authors need to better market themselves and their books, so do publishers. While the audience for a publisher website is diverse — authors, booksellers, journalists, ...
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Reading the World 2008: Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolano
This is the eleventh Reading the World 2008 title we’re covering. Write-ups of the other titles can be found here. And information about the Reading the World program—a special collaboration between publishers and independent booksellers to promote literature in translation throughout the month of June—is ...
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Book Sales Booming in Spain
Not sure how I missed this when it first came out, but this piece in the Independent is fascinating: House sales have plunged, automobiles have tanked, and credit is throttled, but Spain is experiencing an unprecedented boom in books. Once the nation that read fewer books than any other in Europe, Spaniards have become ...
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New Issue of Boldtype
The July issue of Boldtype is now available online and the focus is “Summer Reads.” In addition to a nice review of Sasa Stanisic’s How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, there’s a great write-up by Scott Esposito of Adolfo Bioy Casares’s The Invention of Morel. What do you do when ...
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From the Comments Section
I doubt many people revisit our posts to read the comments—although I check them religiously, so please keep posting!—so I thought it would be worthwhile to highlight some of the really interesting and informative ones that have been submitted over the past week. First off, in relation to the post on Richard ...
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Reading the World 2008: New European Poets
This is the tenth Reading the World 2008 title we’re covering. Write-ups of the other titles can be found here. And information about the Reading the World program—a special collaboration between publishers and independent booksellers to promote literature in translation throughout the month of June—is ...
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2008 Frankfurt Fellows
Congratulations to everyone selected to be a Frankfurt Fellow this year—including our own E.J. Van Lanen. The Frankfurt Fellowship Program is a special opportunity for young publishing people from around the world to spend two weeks in Germany networking and learning about the German (and international) book market. The ...
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Reading the World on The World
Last week, Bill Marx—the mastermind behind the World Books section of PRI’s The World website—was kind enough to interview me about Reading the World for his World Books Podcast. It’s always fun to talk with Bill—he knows more about international literature than almost everyone I know—and ...
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La Follia Improvvisa di Ignazio Rando
Ignazio Rando had been a model employee at the Land Registry Office of Ferrara for 37 years, 5 months and 4 days – a few months short of his pensionable age – when one day he climbs onto the table and walks out, leaving his colleagues and the public staring in open-mouthed amazement. The theme of Dario Franceschini’s ...
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Two Notes on the Future of Books
The first is from The Guardian: Blackwell’s is to become the first high-street bookseller in the UK to offer print-on-demand books while customers wait. The innovation will be delivered by an “Espresso Book Machine” (EBM), which can print and bind any one of a million titles. Set to be piloted ...
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Future of Bookselling–UK Version
Now that I’m going to be in the office until late-July, I’ll finally have a chance to start interviewing booksellers across the country about the future of bookstores and bookselling. Coincidentally, I came across this article yesterday from The Bookseller (essentially the UK’s version of Publishers ...
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The Crux of Literary Translation
One of the fundamental discussions in the world of literary translation is the debate between whether a translator should “retain the foreignness” of a work, or “smooth” it over for the benefit of the target audience. Richard Pevear’s recent letter to the London Review of Books about his ...
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Interview with Michael Emmerich
As I was poking around the JLPP site this morning, I came across this recent interview with translator Michael Emmerich, who has translated more than a dozen books from Japanese, including Asleep, Goodbye Tsugumi, and Hardboiled & Hard Luck, all by Banana Yoshimoto and The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P by Matsuura Rieko, which ...
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Contemporary Japanese Writers Vol. 2
It’s always nice to return to the office (last week I was in NY for a New York State Council on the Arts panel) to a copy of Contemporary Japanese Writers Vol. 2 from the Japanese Literature Publishing and Promotion Center (a.k.a. J-Lit). J-Lit is an organization in Japan dedicated to publishing and promoting ...
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2008 Translation Database: Post-BEA Update
Now that I’ve finally had a chance to enter all the info from the hundreds of catalogs I collected at Book Expo, I thought it would be worthwhile to post a new, updated version of the 2008 translation database. The above spreadsheet has all the relevant information about all the works of adult fiction and poetry in ...
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Contemporary Iraqi Fiction: An Anthology
In today’s globalizing world, solving international conflicts by violence is becoming increasingly impractical and unpopular. Nonviolent methods must be based on mutual understanding, which is an important part of any relationship. It is primarily in this vein that Contemporary Iraqi Fiction (Syracuse University Press, ...
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Nike 2008 Longlist
Earlier this month Gazeta Wyborcza announced the longlist for the 2008 Nike Prize, which is awarded to the best Polish book from last year. The website is less than helpful—every time I click on the “more” button about the prize, I’m brought back to the same opening page and the fragmented ...
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Words Without Borders Book Club: The Assistant by Robert Walser
A few weeks back, I mentioned the Reading the World/Words Without Borders Book Club featuring Robert Walser’s The Assistant. At the time the discussion was just getting underway, and all that was available online was Sam Jones’s excellent introduction and Susan Bernofsky’s translator’s afterword to the ...
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Reading the World 2008: Beijing Coma by Ma Jian
This is the ninth Reading the World 2008 title we’re covering. Write-ups of the other titles can be found here. And information about the Reading the World program—a special collaboration between publishers and independent booksellers to promote literature in translation throughout the month of June—is ...
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Denis Scheck's List
Following up on yesterday’s post about the Helen and Kurt Wolff Symposium I thought I’d pass along the list of works (and publishers) that Denis Scheck recommended in his presentation on contemporary German literature. Denis Scheck is one of Germany’s most respected critics, and has both a radio and a TV ...
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Helen and Kurt Wolff Symposium 2008: The Award and the Grants
So, after thirteen hours of being in transit (thank you, JFK and O’Hare!), I finally made it to Chicago in time to catch the reception part of the Reading and Reception in honor of the thirteenth Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize awarded to the best translation from German into English published in the past year. This year ...
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Helen and Kurt Wolff Symposium
Although it seems like I just got back from Los Angeles, I’m actually about to take off again for Chicago to participate in the Helen and Kurt Wolff symposium. This day of discussions is being held in conjunction with the 13th Annual Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize ceremony, which honors outstanding translation from German ...
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Three Bits Related to E-Commerce
I could link to a dozen great posts from Ron Hogan of GalleyCat about BEA, but there are two in particular that really jumped out at me, in part because we’ve been talking so much about eBooks and Kindles and whatnot . . . The first is about Book Publishing’s 2.0 Business Model panel that took place last week ...
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Reading the World 2008: Knowledge of Hell by Antonio Lobo Antunes
This is the eighth Reading the World 2008 title we’re covering. Write-ups of the other titles can be found here. And information about the Reading the World program—a special collaboration between publishers and independent booksellers to promote literature in translation throughout the month of June—is ...
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Quarterly Conversation on Macedonio Fernandez
As has been mentioned on many other blogs, the new issue of the Quarterly Conversation is now available online. Yet another great issue, especially the article by Dan Green on the reissuing of Donald Barthelme’s books and the reviews of Bolano’s Nazi Literature in the Americas and Antunes’s Knowledge of ...
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Roberto Bolano's "Caracas Speech"
The second issue of the very impressive web magazine Triple Canopy recently went live and features the first English translation of Roberto Bolano’s Caracas Speech, which he gave a few years before his death upon receiving the Rómulo Gallegos prize for The Savage Detectives. It’s an interesting speech ...
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BookExpo America: Business of Bookselling
One of the big events at BEA was the announcement of the new IndieBound program of the American Booksellers Associaton. This will take the place of BookSense, a special marketing program that started ten years ago as a way of helping brand independent bookstores across the country. As mentioned in the Publishers Weekly ...
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BookExpo America: Party People
Everyone loves themselves a little BEA party. Outside of New York—and really, maybe even in NY—there’s rarely a chance for so many diverse book people from across the country to get together to mingle and drink and exchange business cards and all that stuff. Hanging out with so many intelligent, well-read ...
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BookExpo America: Other Round-Ups
To supplement the series of posts we’re writing, here are some other round-ups from people much smarter and funnier: I mentioned this earlier, but it’s definitely worthwhile checking out Karl Pohrt’s There Is No Gap if for no other reason than the picture of Karl kneeling in front of Britney ...
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Life A User’s Manual
1 The life of the Perec family (the family name was originally Peretz) was one of removals. The Perecs moved from one city to another in Poland before leaving Poland for France. Georges was born in France in 1936 and against the background of troubled times the exact details of his early life are lost. His father was one of ...
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BookExpo America: Panels
I participated in two translation panels on Saturday at BEA—one on funding for translations and the other on marketing. The morning session on funding was organized and moderated by Caro Llewellyn from PEN America (and director of the PEN World Voices Festival) and included star translator Michael Henry Heim, Michael ...
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BookExpo America: The Books (and More)
I would title this post “Day Two,” but many, many days have passed since my last entry (who would’ve though Three Percent could be so quiet for so long?) and I’m not sure I can separate what I want to write about into specific days . . . Now that I’m back in Rochester, and my voice is slowly but ...
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BookExpo America: Day One
BEA—at least the exhibition hall part of it—hasn’t even started yet and I’m already dehydrated and losing my voice. And I realize that when I drink, I spend way too much time talking about the recent New Yorker on hang overs. But anyway. Thursday is BEA’s educational day. So throughout the day ...
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Lillehammer Day One
Good news on two fronts from Lillehammer: the internet is free, and they have free coffee in the lobby of the hotel via a Nespresso machine—I’ll have to get one for myself soon. The festival started off for us yesterday with a lecture by Kjell Ivar Skjerdingstad at the Lillehammer Kunstmuseum. The overall theme ...
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BookExpo America and the Reading the World Party
I’m leaving tomorrow morning for BookExpo America (aka BEA, aka ABA, well, OK, ABA is more than a bit outdated, but I think some people still say this), and with E.J. in Norway things might be a little quiet around here for the next few days. This year BEA is in L.A., which is always nice and sunny. And somewhat ...
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The Post-Office Girl
In their usual classy-as-hell manner, New York Review Books delivered a real gem last month in the 2008 Reading the World selection THE POST-OFFICE GIRL, by Stefan Zweig and translated by Joel Rotenberg. Zweig’s posthumously published book is bitter, brutal, and everything I love about post-war literature while still ...
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New Bookforum
As a number of other people have already pointed out, the new issue of Bookforum is now available, both in print and online. This is the summer “Fiction and Politics” issues, which, in addition to a heap of good reviews, has a few features on politics novels and the like. There’s even a reflections section ...
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Nation Spring Books Issue
The “Spring Books” issue of The Nation is now out, with a lot of the content available online including pieces on Stefan Zweig and Imre Kertesz. The Kertesz is a really positive review of both The Pathseeker (out from Melville House) and Detective Story (out from Knopf) by Ruth Scurr. This year Tim ...
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Ledig House
Even though I only skipped two days, it seems like so much time has passed since I last posted anything. One reason it seems so long is due to the weird time fluctuations surrounding the Ledig House. E.J. and I were invited up there this past weekend to meet with the current residents and tell them a bit about Open Letter ...
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Reading the World 2008: The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante
This is the seventh Reading the World 2008 title we’re covering. Write-ups of the other titles can be found here. And information about the Reading the World program—a special collaboration between publishers and independent booksellers to promote literature in translation throughout the month of June—is ...
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Of Course I Have My Eyes Closed
Here’s an article about the editors trip to Buenos Aires that I participated in last month. It’s a nice overview article on a few of the editors who participated in the trip, including Cristiana Costa, Patricia van Daalen, Claudia Stein, Ori Preuss and Gianluca Catalano. Nice background on the program itself ...
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Reading the World 2008: Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
Doubling up on RTW book posts today . . . This is the sixth title we’re covering. Write-ups of the other titles can be found here. And information about the Reading the World program—a special collaboration between publishers and independent booksellers to promote literature in translation throughout the month of ...
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Reading the World 2008: The Corpse Walker by Liao Yiwu
This is the fifth entry in our series covering all twenty-five Reading the World 2008 titles. (We’re 20% of the way there!) Write-ups of the other titles can be found here. And information about the Reading the World program—a special collaboration between publishers and independent booksellers to promote ...
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Book Publishing Manifesto for the 21st Century
Over the past week at The Digitalist — a blog by the digital team at Pan Macmillan — Sara Lloyd has been serializing her forthcoming Library Trends article on “how traditional publishers need to position themselves in the changing media flows of a networked era.” Taken as a whole, this is a really ...
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Center for the Art of Translation "Lit & Lunch"
Ari Messer — who works at Stone Bridge Press and freelances for the San Francisco Bay Guardian — is going to be covering some West Coast translation related events for us. (And possibly some interviews as well.) Here to kick things off is a write-up of a recent “Lit & Lunch” event put on by the Center ...
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Reading the World 2008: The Girl on the Fridge by Etgar Keret
This is the fourth entry in our series covering all twenty-five Reading the World 2008 titles. Write-ups of the other titles can be found here. And information about the Reading the World program—a special collaboration between publishers and independent booksellers to promote literature in translation throughout the ...
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The Millions on Translation and Prizes
Over at The Millions, Garth follows up on his literary prize post of a few days ago: I know next to nothing about the translation business, except that it is vital to my reading habits. And so, earlier this week, I posted a little survey of international awards for fiction, along with the unobjectionable (I think) ...
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Reading the World 2008: The Assistant by Robert Walser
This is the third entry in our series covering all twenty-five Reading the World 2008 titles. Write-ups of the other titles can be found here. And information about the Reading the World program—a special collaboration between publishers and independent booksellers to promote literature in translation throughout the ...
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21st Annual Translation Prizes
I’m sure this has been written about already, but I just received the invitation to the 21st Annual Translation Prize ceremony sponsored by the French-American Foundation and Florence Gould Foundation. Every year these two foundations give out a prize to the best fiction and non-fiction translations from French into ...
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It's Here!
The next few weeks of my life are now totally booked . . . I mentioned this in passing yesterday, but the titles for the five parts are pretty intriguing: “The Part about the Critics,” “The Part about Amalfitano,” “The Part about Fate,” “The Part about the Crimes,” and ...
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Reading the World 2008: The Song of Everlasting Sorrow by Wang Anyi
Since Reading the World 2008 is almost here—it technically runs through the month of June, when bookstores across the country display twenty-five translated titles (warning pdf) from fifteen different presses—I thought it would be worthwhile to highlight each of these books on the site. And there’s no ...
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Guardian World Literature Tour: Hungary
There really should be a RSS feed, or weekly summary, or title list recap, or something for the comments section of this Guardian blog feature. Every month the Guardian and its readers discusses literature from a particular country. Last month it was Germany, this month Hungary. And every month we post about this, make ...
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Red Shifting
Alexandr Skidan’s mentor, Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, describes Red Shifting as “[s]omnambulistic.” Indeed, Skidan creates dream-poems. What is at play in the dream-poem? Incest and GAS! The Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco. Bely and Blok. Vladivostok and St. Petersburg. In this exploration of the inside versus the ...
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The Most Anticipated Galley of the Year?
I’ve been checking my mailbox every 5 minutes, hoping that this strange ritual will result in a ARC of Roberto Bolano’s 2666 mysteriously appearing . . . It’s interesting to see how many posts have popped up about this galley. The most recent is from Michael Orthofer, who recaps some of the others and ...
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Estonian Literary Magazine
This actually arrived a few weeks ago (we’ve been a bit busy . . .), but the new issue of the Estonian Literary Magazine is now available both in print and online. Estonian Literary Magazine is published by the Estonian Literature Information Centre, which, in my opinion, is one of the best cultural organizations in ...
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The Millions breaks it down
Max’s recent post cataloging 13 years of Anglo-American “Prizewinners” got me wondering… what were the most decorated books in foreign-language fiction during the same period? And how many of them are currently available in English? I assumed that, in an Internet age, this information would be easy ...
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More Shatzkin
Ironically, I just got today’s PW Daily and the lead story is about the fourth annual Book Industry Study Group’s “Making Information Pay” conference that took place last Friday, at which Michael Shatzkin (author of the article I just wrote about) and Michael Healy, executive director of BISG, talked about ...
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The Future of Books by Mike Shatzkin
Last week, Idea Logical posted a speech that founder Mike Shatzkin (really, you should read his bio, it’s incredible) gave to the Danish Book Trade. The article, entitled The Future of Books for Publishers and Booksellers is one of the best I’ve ever read about the current publishing situation and what’s to ...
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Congrats to Paul Verhaeghen
Just announced today that Flemish author Paul Verhaeghen has won the Independent foreign fiction prize for his novel Omega Minor. Moving back and forth through the last century, Omega Minor, translated from the Dutch, is a story of love and death on the grandest possible scale. Its whirlwind plot takes in Berlin, Boston, ...
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Hotel Crystal
One need not be a world traveler or international spy to enjoy Olivier Rolin’s Hotel Crystal, but the allure and intrigue of both take center stage in this cleverly crafted antinovel-cum-travelogue. French novelist and journalist Olivier Rolin chooses another “Olivier Rolin” to play the starring role in this collection ...
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Let Us Now Praise the New York Sun
It’s no secret that we’re huge fans of the New York Sun “Arts+” section and most of the reviewers who write for it. (Especially Ben Lytal, who, in my opinion, has the sweetest gig in all book reviewing.) Since the Sun has yet to penetrate the Rochester market, we usually resort to reading this online. ...
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PEN World Voices: Saturday
Well, I didn’t make it to as many PEN events as I had hoped to on Saturday—there are so, so many, and with things starting right after one another it’s really kind of tricky—but the ones I attended were amazing. It actually was an “all German” sort of day . . . First off was a conversation between Ingo Schulze ...
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Scott Esposito on Bolano
Scott Esposito has an excellent essay on Bolaño, and how translations are received in the U.S., up at Hermano Credo. You should go check it out: I love literature because I love it, but also because I derive hope from it. Each time a writer sits herself down to work, she dashes herself up against the impossible ...
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PEN World Voices Festival: Friday
Post-Rusdie/Eco—and post a few celebration drinks—I caught a 6am flight down to New York to attend the rest of the PEN World Voices Festival. (And meet with reviewers and bookstores about our first list, but that’s boring, um, business.) E.J. and I made it to three events yesterday, and have a ton lined ...
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PEN World Voices Festival: Eco/Rushdie
Well, after a couple days of silence, we’re back with a mini-report from the fourth annual PEN World Voices Festival in New York City. Mainly New York City, that is. On Thursday, University of Rochester/Open Letter hosted one of the first festival events to take place outside of NYC when we had a special reading and ...
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Argentine Literature and its Monsters (Part 2/2)
Below is the text of the speech that Carlos Gamerro gave earlier in the week on the history of Argentine literature. I found this really interesting, and am very glad that Carlos is allowing us to publish it here. See the bottom of the article for a list of all the authors and books mentioned in the speech. There were no ...
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America, oh, America
After a week of writing about how much I loved the editors week in Argentina I hate to do this, but I have to go on a bit of a rant about the U.S. Embassy in Argentina. It’s important to provide a bit of background first: Fundacion TyPA supports a number of artistic activities in Argentina, including this ...
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You're Blocking the Culture!
That’s the phrase that attendees of the Guadalajara Book Fair scream when they can’t get into overbooked events . . . Having attended Guadalajara a couple of times, I can attest to the passion for literature among those who go to the book fair. It’s pretty amazing to witness, and completely unlike anything ...
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Argentine Literature and its Monsters (Part 1/2)
Below is the text of the speech that Carlos Gamerro gave earlier in the week on the history of Argentine literature. I found this really interesting, and am very glad that Carlos is allowing us to publish it here. Tomorrow we’ll publish part 2, which includes a list of all the authors and books mentioned in the ...
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Daniel Hahn on Translatedfiction.org.uk
The Literary Saloon pointed out another new UK-based translation site: this time Booktrust’s Translated Ficion. One of the first articles on the site is from Daniel Hahn, translator of one of my favorite authors, Jose Eduardo Agualusa. He has a refreshingly different take on the low number of translations that appear ...
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Couple Quick BsAs Notes
(Now that I’ve cottoned on to the BsAs abbreviation for Buenos Aires, I want to use it as much as possible . . .) I have a number of roundup thoughts to write out over the next few days—and a rant about the U.S. Embassy that includes a picture from the Book Fair that will make any rational American ...
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Susan Sontag Prize for Translation
We posted about the Susan Sontag Prize for Translation when the call for submissions went out, and it was just announced that Kristin Dickinson (who did her undergrad work at the University of Rochester), Robin Ellis, and Priscilla Layne won for their collaborative translation of Koppstoff: Kanaka Sprak vom Rande der ...
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More from Buenos Aires
This city is exhausting. Way more so than New York. Even more than Barcelona. Dinner starts so late, and it’s the perfect setting to linger over a glass of wine chatting for hours . . . Then suddenly it’s two in the morning and the next round of meetings starts in just seven hours . . . Anyway, the past two ...
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Munson on Stanišić
Sam Munson has some not very nice things to say about Saša Stanišić‘s How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone: While the art of catastrophe will tolerate whole constellations of novelistic approaches, it cannot tolerate authorial disingenuousness, which pickles such efforts, turning insights sour, paltry, and ...
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A Brief Overview of Argentine Literature
Today was our first real day of meetings about Argentine literature. Essentially today we were given a history of modern and contemporary Argentine literature. And, of course, today was the first day I realized just how shitty my Spanish really is. Things started pleasant enough—we got a walking tour of literary Buenos ...
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Day One in Buenos Aires
I really like overnight flights within the same hemisphere. So much more civilized to eat dinner, fall asleep, and wake up in another country, without suffering from jet lag at all. (Buenos Aires is one hour ahead of New York . . .) Buenos Aires is a pretty amazing city. Reminds me a bit of Barcelona—although not ...
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Some LBF Coverage from American Booksellers
I just found this roundup from a delegation of American Booksellers who attended the London Book Fair. Not that extensive of a post, but there are a few interesting observations. First about the fair itself: The London Book Fair is an interesting counterpart to America’s Book Expo America. In the most critical ...
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America's Uptight Obsession with Truth and Nonfiction
For me, Kate Foster’s review in the San Francisco Chronicle of Lieve Joris’s The Rebels’ Hour perfectly illustrates some of the ridiculous hangups Americans have when it comes to nonfiction and the representation of “truth.” The Rebels’ Hour is in an interesting postion—it’s ...
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More Kertesz
In contrast to Joshua Cohen’s cranky review in Forward, the review of Kertesz’s Pathseeker in the New York Sun (which, at risk of beating a dead horse, has become the premiere daily newspaper for thoughtful reviews of international lit) is much more positive. Slender though it is, The Pathseeker is a ...
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This Could Be Really Amazing
Literary Saloon wrote about the English PEN Online World Atlas this morning, and I completely agree with Michael—this is a work in progress, but it could be absolutely amazing. The site’s mission is pretty huge, but if this comes to fruition, this would be one of the most valuable sites on the internet for ...
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Kertesz in Forward
Joshua Cohen has a long review of both Kertesz books that have come out so far this year: Detective Story and The Pathseeker. (Before going any further, I think it’s worth pointing out that Cohen rivals Three Percent fave Ben Lytal in the sheer number of literary translations he reviews.) Cohen has mixed feelings ...
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Mishima on Translations
Language Hat points out this interview from 1965 between Yukio Mishima and Robert Trumbull, which has a great bit about translation: Mr. Mishima always writes in Japanese and never changes a translation. “The translator asks me thousands of questions,” he said, “but I don’t mind small ...
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Ironic Twist in Arts Council Story
You may remember a period from a couple months back when almost every day we had a new post about the funding situation with the Arts Council England. In brief, the ACE sent out Christmas letters notifying former grantees that their grants were going to be cut or eliminated entirely. A bunch of theaters and publishers ...
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Great Bookstore in The Netherlands
The Guardian has a great article about a bookstore in central Maastricht, one that Jonathan Glancey refers to as “what must be one of the finest bookshops in the world.” The sheer scale of the black steel bookstack was necessary for two reasons. One was that a spread of shelves along and across the nave ...
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In Case You're Going to Be in the Area
From Amsterdam World Book Capital: On 18 May, 2008, Amsterdam’s historic centre is the location of the world’s biggest book market. No fewer than 1,000 stalls with books will wind through the city centre. The World Book Market is being held in the context of Amsterdam World Book Capital, a title of great distinction ...
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The End of CONTEXT?
I’m not sure if this is accurate or not, but a reader just alerted us to the new Dalkey Archive website pointing out that the “blog” is called the CONTEXT Blog, possibly signaling the end of CONTEXT magazine. This may just be speculation on their part, though it is true that the last issue of which came out ...
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Where's the American Coverage of the LBF?
The London Book Fair has always been one of my favorite conventions. London by itself is always fantastic—although way too expensive these days (thank you depressed American economy for making my dollars completely worthless)—and the fair is a more calm, friendly version of Frankfurt. (And, on a personal sidenote, ...
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Very Cool, Very Useful
Thanks to Literary Saloon (Michael Orthofer is always on top of everything!) for pointing out the New Arabic Books site the British Council recently launched. The paucity of info available about Arabic books has been a frequent complaint of many a publisher, so this site should make an immediate difference. The fiction ...
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Zinio, oh Zinio
PW Daily today pointed us to Zinio, who are giving away more than 100 classics on their site and who “wanted to showcase the most impressive on-screen reading experience while maintaining the integrity and feel of the old classics.” What this means: You can go to their site, and browse their “virtual ...
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New Funding for German Books
Just got a press release about new funding available for the translation of academic German books into English. With Geisteswissenschaften International: Translation Funding for Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, the German Publishers & Booksellers Association (Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels), the ...
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One Last Digital Thing
Following on all the recent posts, here’s an article from The Bookseller about how all of Penguin UK’s books will now be available simultaneously in print and ebook versions. Penguin UK is set to be the first of the major UK trade publishers to put all its new black and white titles simultaneously into print ...
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Harold Augenbraum on the Future of Literary Culture
Harold Augenbraum—Executive Director of the National Book Foundation, whose blog Reading Ahead is one of the most thoughtful, intelligent literary blogs out there—recently gave a very interesting speech at Concordia College about The Future of Literary Culture. Basically, Augenbraum is of the “digital ...
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Translation Database Update and PW Article
It’s not available online, but there’s an article by Rachel Deahl in this week’s Publishers Weekly about Three Percent and the translation database. The Excel file behind the above link is the most up-to-date version of the database, listing 187 works of adult fiction and poetry coming out this year. Some ...
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Languagehat on Nabokov in English and Russian
Having finished Proust, my wife and I have started reading Speak, Memory at bedtime, and I am reading the corresponding section of the Russian version, Drugie berega [Other shores], afterwards; I want to make a post about the amazing Russian tradition of literary autobiographies and memoirs (and autobiographical novels), ...
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Digital Serialization
One of our readers just sent a link to this article in Crain’s about a partnership between DailyLit and Grove/Atlantic to e-serialize Mike Lawson’s House Rules before the book is officially released. DailyLit, an online service that delivers installments of books via email or RSS feeds, announced on Wednesday ...
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Polish Found in Translation Award
Just got a message from the Polish Book Institute that Bill Johnston (translator of numerous Polish authors, including Jerzy Pilch’s The Mighty Angel, another Open Letter book about drunks that we’ll be publishing in Spring 2009) has won the first ever Found in Translation award. He won for his translation of ...
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Literary Gate Keepers
This actually came out in last week’s Time Out New York, but Michael Miller’s piece on how a book goes from writer to reader is pretty interesting and touches on some of the knotty issues surrounding publication and publicity. Miller briefly hits on the various gate keepers of book culture: agents, editors, ...
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World Literature Forum
Mr. Othofer brought this to our attention the other day (and now Mark Thwaite has reminded us again in the comments) and I meant to post about it right away, but it’s still not too late: go check out the World Literature Forum. It looks like its just getting started, so you finally have a chance to get in on the ...
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Latest Review: Secret Weapon
Our latest review is of Romanian poet Eugen Jebeleanu’s Secret Weapon:Selected Late Poems (recently released by Coffee House) and was written by Annie Horanyi, who has been interning with Open Letter and has serving as the managing editor for the review section. This collection sounds really interesting, and if ...
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Perfect RTW Bookstore
Thanks to Literary Rapture for bringing Idlewild Books to our attention. According to its sparse website, Idlewild is a beautiful new store and event space near Union Square, is New York City’s only bookshop specializing in travel and international literature. A bookstore organized by country rather than ...
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Reading the World 2008 Website
The Reading the World website for 2008 is now online, complete with info about all 25 titles (from 15 different presses), info about participating bookstores, how to sign up, how to get on the mailing list, etc. In case you’re not already familiar with this, RTW is an innovative collaboration between publishers and ...
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Association of Asian Studies Conference in Atlanta
This past weekend, I was able to attend the AAS conference in Atlanta and speak on a roundtable about “The Translation and Publication of Contemporary Japanese Literature: Strategies and Resources” put together by the Japanese Literature Publishing and Promotion Center. I’ve written about J-Lit a few times ...
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Barcelona and Merce Rodoreda
Barcelona is celebrating the centenary of the birth of Mercè Rodoreda, author of well-known works like La Plaça del Diamant (The Time of the Doves) and Mirall Trencat (Broken Mirror), with a programme of events that does not focus on the writer we all know but on her less well-known works. As culture councillor ...
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Secret Weapon
Secret Weapon is the final collection from Romanian poet Eugen Jebeleanu (1911-1991). I can’t say that I knew all that much about Romania or Romanian poetry before picking up this book, likely because this is the first time Jebeleanu’s work has appeared in English despite his reputation as one of Romania’s best-known ...
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Knowledge of Hell
Antonio Lobo Antunes’s books contain many of the things that are fantastic about contemporary literature; at the same time, these books exemplify a lot of the traits that scare people off from literature in translation. This may sound stupid, but even his name is a problem. Where to shelve it in the bookstore—under ...
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Bolano, Bolano, Bolano
So, following up on yesterday’s post about the coverage of Bolano in The Nation and at Bookninja, today Michael Orthofer at the Literary Saloon has info about the anxiously awaited 2666, Bolano’s final book, and supposed magnum opus. How very exciting to find that, at least on the American Amazon.com site, ...
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More on IMPAC Shortlist
To follow up on last night’s brief post about the IMPAC Shortlist, be sure to check out the coverage at The Millions to find links to reviews of the books and/or interviews with the authors. (I wanted to do something similar, but this post is better than anything I would’ve come up ...
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More Bolano, More Savage Detectives
For fans of his work, it’s great to see that Bolano continues to get great attention. Nazi Literature in the Americas is on display at every bookstore I’ve been in recently, and has been getting decent review coverage, including a long piece in The Nation by Carmen Boullosa, which concludes with a strong ...
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Africa Reading Challenge
Thanks to Scott Esposito for bringing our attention to the Africa Reading Challenge starting up at Siphoning Off a Few Thoughts. In recent years I’ve become increasingly interested in reading books dealing with Africa, and so I present the Africa Reading Challenge. Participants commit to read – in the ...
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Poetry Magazine and Translations
April is National Poetry Month, so we’ll be highlighting more works of translated poetry over the next few weeks than we normally do. (In case you’re wondering, in the database there are 11 collections of translated poetry scheduled to come out this month.) Interestingly, Poetry magazine’s April issue ...
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Mafeking Road and Other Stories
The stories in Mafeking Road are set in the Transvaal region of what is now South Africa at the turn of the 20th century, when the local Boer population were at war with the British in a conflict that is known as the Boer War. The British were seeking to re-establish that part of southern Africa as a British colony, following ...
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Translations in the New York Times
We mentioned this a couple weeks back, but this morning, the Literary Saloon has a more factual follow-up to Douglas Kibbee’s claim that translations are on the rise, as evidenced by the increase in coverage for translations in the New York Times Book Review. Michael Orthofer—who both questioned the veracity of this ...
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Get your kicks with HermanoCerdo
Although a number of literary blogs populate the web, HermanoCerdo is almost certainly unlike anything else floating around cyberspace. Its “Colaboraciones” page invites the following contributions: “HermanoCerdo acepta colaboraciones de cuentos, reseñas, ensayos, crónicas, traducciones y textos ...
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Graduate Student Translation Conference Recap
This past weekend Columbia University (and the Center for Literary Translation) hosted the Graduate Student Translation Conference. E.J. and I were lucky enough to be there, and with so many great translators attending and events taking place, it’s worth recapping some of the activities. First off, in case ...
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The Have-Nots
At the outset, I didn’t particularly care for this book. Yet, as a work of fiction, The Have-Nots bears no great deficiencies and has, in fact, a certain charm to it. In spite of this, or, perhaps, because of it, I can’t love this book. Perhaps my heart is too small to embrace the multitude of characters, or perhaps my ...
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David Bergelson: From Modernism to Socialist Realism
Literature written in Yiddish has been one of the unluckiest in modern history. The language was regarded for several centuries as a kind of kitchen patois, spoken by people towards the lower end of Jewish society in Eastern and Central Europe. Just as it was emerging as a serious literary language, those writing in it were ...
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2008 Translations: Fiction
Following up on last week’s post about the Translation Database (downloadable version available via that same link), here’s the next set of capsule reviews of recently released and forthcoming literature in translation. (All previous posts and reviews available here.) Oliver VII, Antal Szerb, translated from ...
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Los Angeles Times Festival of Books
The schedule for the upcoming L.A. Times Festival of Books (which takes place April 26th and 27th) is now available online. There are a number of interesting panels scheduled, including: West Coast Publishing: Rethinking the Model Moderator: Mr. David L. Ulin Panelists: Mr. Eli Horowitz, Ms. Elaine ...
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UK Independent Presses in Publishers Weekly
The most recent issue of Publishers Weekly contains an interesting piece on the state and nature of independent publishing in the UK: “Independents,” for these purposes, are U.K. trade publishers that are not one of the Big Four (Hachette, Random House, HarperCollins and Penguin) or the Not-Quite-So-Big Three (Pan ...
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PEN World Voices Festival
The complete schedule for this year’s PEN World Voices Festival is now available online. Taking place from April 29th through May 4th, the festival includes almost 80 events and over 170 participants. Funny to think that this has only been around for four years . . . It’s quickly become the festival to attend, ...
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2008 PEN Translation Grant Recipients
The 2008 PEN Translation Fund is one of the most interesting grants out there for literary translators. Established in 2003 thanks to a gift from an anonymous donor, this fund awards $2,000-$3,000 a year to a small group of projects (usually around 10). Most years about half of the recipients already have publishers lined ...
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Open Letter Forum: The Ecosystem of Translation
Probably should’ve posted this earlier in the week, but for anyone in Rochester, tomorrow afternoon, we’re hosting a special event from 3-5pm in the Rare Books and Special Collections Room of the Rush Rhees Library. This event is a roundtable discussion on “The Ecosystem of Translation,” featuring ...
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Chris Anderson and Giving Things Away
I’m sure a number of other people have already discussed this, but I just got my hands on the new issue of Wired, which has an article by Chris Anderson called Free! Why $0.00 is the Future of Business. Aside from being editor-in-chief of Wired, Anderson is the author of The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is ...
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2008 Translations: Current List and Minor Analysis
In each of the past few posts about our 2008 Translation Database I’ve promised a complete copy of the current list . . . well finally, here’s an Excel version that you can download, manipulate, sort, etc., etc. This current list is very incomplete. I haven’t received many summer/fall catalogs yet, and ...
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Maybe Just a Poor Choice of Words . . .
Not sure how we missed this article by Jane Henderson in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch about how “world literature thrives in translation” (especially considering that Three Percent is listed in the “more information” box), but I have to agree with Michael Orthofer —“thriving” is ...
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National Grad Student Translation Conference
Since I referenced this earlier, and since it’s just a few weeks away, I feel like I should post some information about the National Grad Student Translation Conference that the Center for Literary Translation at Columbia University will be hosting From March 28th through the 30th. As stated in this press release this ...
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FILI Spotlight
I’m not sure when FILI—the organization in charge of promoting Finnish literature abroad—redesigned its website, but the results are pretty impressive and definitely worth checking out. I really like the Spotlight feature, which highlights a few Finnish authors, providing short overviews, excerpts in ...
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International Prize for Arabic Fiction
Although the official announcement isn’t available at the IPAF website (which is surprising and disappointing), it’s being reported elsewhere that Egyptian novelist Baha Taher has received the first International Prize for Arabic Fiction for the novel Sunset Oasis. At least there’s a bit of info about the ...
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German Book Office Pick for March
Each month the GBO selects a German book in translation to feature on their website. This month they selected How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone by Saša Stanišić, which is coming out from Grove in June. The author will be in the States for the PEN World Voices Festival at the end of April, and this is a title ...
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2008 Translations: Dedalus and Peter Owen
In part because of this news about Dedalus being sponsored for the next two years by Routledge Book, and in part because I just received a nice batch of their titles, I’d like to mix things up a bit today and focus on forthcoming translations from two UK presses distributed over here rather than looking at titles from a ...
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My Befuddled Head Just Exploded
I love tournaments in March—especially ones involving screamin’ Gus Johnson—but my love for the Morning News Tournament of Books ended this morning with The Savage Detectives being upset in the first round by Vendela Vida’s Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name. It’s really not the who that ...
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Cervantes Institute TV
A few months back I was on a panel about new technologies (mainly the internet) and translation. The panel was fine, but what was most interesting was a discussion afterwards in which a group of us suddenly realized that none of the day’s events were being taped . . . It seems like such a missed opportunity—here ...
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Nordic Prize and Norwegian Critics Awards
This is kind of old news now, but earlier this month the 2008 Nordic Literature Prize was awarded to Naja Marie Aidt of Denmark for her short story collection Bavian (The Baboon). According to the prize committee: “The 15 short stories in Bavian (Baboon) are based in a world that appears indistinguishable from ...
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Writing in Public: A Celebration of Karl Pohrt
I don’t have a lot to report on this conference that took place last week, except to say that the whole thing was pretty amazing and that it’s wonderful to see such a public celebration for a bookseller and his store. Karl is one of the giants in terms of independent bookselling and one of the most ...
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Routledge to sponsor Dedalus?
We just got the following press release from Dedalus in our inbox: PRESS RELEASE Dedalus is proud to announce that Informa plc through its subsidiary company Routledge Books, an imprint of Taylor & Francis, will sponsor Dedalus for the next two years as part of Informa plc’s corporate responsibility ...
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The Original of Laura
More on Nabokov’s last and maybe-about-to-be-destroyed novel/novel-fragment, The Original of Laura, from Slate: But the essence is this: Dmitri says he reached a decision after an imagined ghostly conversation with his dead father—one in a far different key from Hamlet’s talk with his dead ...
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Where are the Women?
But I’ve realised something: when I think about the great novelists translated into English from other languages, disproportionately few of the names I come up with are women’s. For every Isabel Allende there’s a raft of José Saramagos, Gabriel Garcia Marquezes, Mario Vargas Llosas and Pablo Nerudas. ...
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Book of the Week from El Pais
This week, El Pais features the work of the Palestinian poet Mahmud Darwish. A number of his books of poetry have been translated from Arabic into Spanish, including Menos rosas, Estado de sitio, and Mural. Darwish, born to Muslim parents in Al-Birwa, faced exile to Egypt, France, Lebanon, and Tunisia as a result of his ...
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Book of the Week from El Pais
This week, El Pais features the work of the Palestinian poet Mahmud Darwish. A number of his books of poetry have been translated from Arabic into Spanish, including Menos rosas, Estado de sitio, and Mural. Darwish, born to Muslim parents in Al-Birwa, faced exile to Egypt, France, Lebanon, and Tunisia as a result of his ...
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Nazi Literature in the Americas
To be honest, there isn’t a whole lot that I feel I have to say about Nazi Literature in the Americas, the latest Bolano book to make its way into English except that everyone should run out, buy it, and read it multiple times because it really is that good. Since New Directions published By Night in Chile in 2003, Bolano ...
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Early Titlepage.tv Reviews, Um, Not So Good
We announced the first Titlepage.tv episode yesterday and then watched about 15 minutes before leaving it paused on a goofy Charles Bock grimace for the rest of the day. That’s approximately 10 minutes, 33 seconds more than Jessa from Bookslut watched. And Sarah Weinman has a list of ten ways to improve the show, ...
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Interesting What Someone Else's Success Can Do To You
Penguin’s audio plans circa October 22, 2007 (via PW): In other Penguin news, the New York Times reported today that the publisher has pulled out of its deal with eMusic to sell its audio titles through the online music retailer. Penguin Audio publisher Dick Heffernan told the paper that the issue came down to ...
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Umberto Eco and Salman Rushdie in Rochester for PEN World Voices
We’ve been planning this for the past few months (basically ever since the NYSCA sponsorted Facing Pages retreat last October), but we’re really pleased to finally be able to publicly announce that on May 1st, Open Letter will be hosting a PEN World Voices event here in Rochester featuring Umberto Eco and Salman ...
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Titlepage Goes Live
After a couple months of waiting, Titlepage.tv is finally here. I haven’t had a chance to watch this yet—it’s just over an hour long—and I can’t say that I’m jumping up and down about any of the featured books/authors featured on this episode: Lush Life by Richard Price, The Finder by ...
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One Writer on Digital Rights, or, We All Just Wanna Get Paid
In reference to E.J.‘s post yesterday about Random House giving away a downloadable pdf version of Beautiful Children (for a limited time only, so get yours — oh nevermind, don’t believe the hype, I downloaded it and got through a paragraph before deleting the whole stinking mess), here’s a ...
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Autumn Hill Books
A relatively young press, Autumn Hill Books is one of those impressive indie presses that gets nowhere near the attention it deserves. Autumn Hill Books is a nonprofit based in Iowa and is closely linked to the writing programs at the University of Iowa, especially the International Writing Program. (Which is no surprise, ...
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Serve the People!
Serve the People! is the story of Wu Dawang, a peasant from the countryside who has joined the Red Army, and who, after distinguishing himself in his division as a politically proper soldier, has achieved the relatively privileged rank of Sergeant of the Catering Squad. Wu Dawang is assigned to be General Orderly for the ...
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January/February/March Translations: Poetry
Following on yesterday’s fiction installment, listed below are five forthcoming or recently released poetry collections in translation. All of our 2008 translation overviews can be found by clicking here. I still have 10 works of fiction in translation from February to cover, so expect another update later this week. ...
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Not the Way This Was Supposed to Turn Out
From The Guardian: Literary festivals, inevitably, cannot please all of the people all of the time. But this year’s Kitab festival – held in Mumbai from February 22-24 – was remarkable in pleasing no one. Its founder Pablo Ganguli, the 24-year-old former darling of the literary circuit, now stands ...
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February Translations: Fiction
I’ve fallen a bit behind on these preview capsules of forthcoming translations, but hopefully will be able to catch up in the next week or so. For anyone interested, all the past write ups of 2008 translations can be found here. And I’ll be posting the current version of the complete database later this week. For ...
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El Pais's Book of the Week
Ed Note: Melissa started this series on El Pais‘s book of the week as a way of providing a perspective on what books are currently being featured in other countries. Pretty interesting that the first week features Enrique Vila-Matas—one of my favorite contemporary Spanish authors. -CWP Each week, El País ...
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Differing Fates of Two Independent Bookstores
This is just awful: In Los Angeles, one of that city’s landmark independents, Dutton’s Brentwood Books, will close on April 30. The news comes a little more than one year after Dutton’s closed its Beverly Hills store. Owner Doug Dutton said that he had been trying to save the Brentwood location for months, but ...
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To Be Translated or Not To Be: Case Studies — France
The last case study in the PEN/Ramon Llull To Be Translated or Not To Be report was written by Anne-Sophie Simenel when she was Program Director for the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in New York. Before getting into specifics of the case study, I think it’s worthwhile pointing out some of the oddities of ...
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Library of Congress and Microsoft
The Library of Congress has decided to use Microsoft’s Silverlight to build their new website. LibraryThing has something to say about it: Most disturbingly, users are locked in, too: anybody using an iPhone, an old version of Windows, any version of Linux, or any other operating system or device not supported by ...
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To Be Translated or Not To Be: Case Studies — China
Continuing the ongoing series on the PEN/Ramon Llull To Be Translated or Not To Be report, today we’re covering the case study on China, which contains the most disturbing translation statistic I’ve ever come across: According to the official statistics, China produced about 110,000 new titles in 2003, and ...
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Karl Pohrt's There Is No Gap
A great new addition to the blogging community, Karl Pohrt recently launched There Is No Gap, a site that picks up where the Beijing Book Fair posts he did for Three Percent left off. As can be expected, this is a really smart and interesting website. It doesn’t hurt that Phil Pochoda brings in so many great speakers ...
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To Be Translated or Not To Be: Case Studies — Germany
Germany is the next country covered in the PEN/Ramon Llull To Be Translated or Not To Be report. (For anyone interested, all the earlier posts about this report can be found by clicking here.) This section was written by Riky Stock, who is the director of the admirable and ambitious German Book Office. Putting aside the ...
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To Be Translated or Not To Be: Case Studies — Catalonia
Next up in our ongoing series about the PEN/Ramon Llull To Be Translated or Not To Be report is a look at the case study for Catalonia. Even within the context of this report, Catalonia is in an odd position re: their literary tradition and translation. At a basic level, I’m not sure the general U.S. population is ...
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Obituary: Alain Robbe-Grillet
Alain Robbe-Grillet passed away yesterday at the age of 85. A major force in twentieth-century French literature, here’s part of the obit in “The Guardian“: He was the most prominent of France’s “new novelists,” a group that emerged in the mid-1950s and whose experimental works tossed ...
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Chad Post on WXXI
Chad was recently interviewed by Bob Smith for a local Rochester radio show called 1370 Connection. The interview aired this afternoon, and if you’d like to listen to him talk about translation, the business of books, Open Letter, and Lost, you can download the MP3 here (The file is 44MB and the interview is about 50 ...
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To Be Translated or Not To Be: Case Studies — The Netherlands
Continuing the ongoing series on PEN/Ramon Llull’s To Be Translated or Not To Be report, over the next few days I’m going to post about each of the Case Studies included in Part III. These were written by various experts in their respective countries (frequently associated with the local PEN center) in response to ...
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Open Letter Fall 2008 Catalog
In some ways it’s a bit early to be posting our fall catalog (especially since the launch of the official Open Letter website is a few weeks off), but I recently got a number of requests for information about our first six titles, so I thought it would be easiest just to post a pdf version. Click here for the ...
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To Be Translated or Not To Be: Part III
Continuing our series on the PEN/Ramon Llull To Be Translated or Not To Be report (previous posts can be found here), today I want to write a bit about the second essay in the book—Simona Skrabec’s “Literary Translation: The International Panorama.” Complementing Esther Allen’s introductory ...
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To Be Translated or Not To Be: Part II
Following up on my earlier post I want to summarize the statistics that Esther Allen cites in her essay “Translation, Globalization, and English” that open the To Be Translated or Not To Be report from PEN and the Institut Ramon Llull. One of the things worth pointing out is how shoddy all the data is for ...
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Two or Three Years Later: Forty-Nine Digressions
Two or Three Years Later is a unique collection of short stories, many only half a page long. Each sentence has been distilled down to only the essential words, yet Wolf’s stories retain a very conversational quality. He often speaks directly to the reader, saying he is sure that the reader is curious to hear this or that ...
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To Be Translated or Not To Be: Part I
At Frankfurt last year, PEN and the Institut Ramon Llull released a report entitled To Be Translated or Not To Be regarding the “international situation of literary translation.” This report (which is downloadable in pdf format by clicking the link above) has gotten some decent attention online and is one of the ...
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January/February Translations: Fiction
I’ve got a lot of January and February books to catch up on in these roundups, so I’m going to try and post two or three summaries this week, including an overview of the poetry books coming out this month and next (there are quite few). As always, the current list of all translated fiction and poetry can be found ...
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Ilf & Petrov's Road Trip
Last Friday, the Literary Saloon wrote about a documentary recreating Ilf & Petrov’s trip across America. From The Moscow Times“: In 1935, satirical writers Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov drove from New York to the Mexican border and back in a Ford. They spoke only schoolboy English and couldn’t drive, but ...
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Too Funny Not to Post
Commenting on the Steve Jobs quote I posted about a few days ago, Ed Park posted this hilarious Onion piece that you should definitely read. Area Eccentric Reads Entire BookGREENWOOD,IN—"Instead of spending hours on YouTube every night, Mr. Meyer, unlike most healthy males, looks to books for gratification," ...
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Reading the World 2008
(Today is a day in which I list things . . . ) Hopefully most of you are aware of Reading the World, a unique collaborations between publishers and independent booksellers to promote literature in translations throughout the month of June. This program came out of a series of discussions at BookExpo America five (?!) years ...
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January/February Translations: Fiction
Listed below is the latest addition to the ongoing project of documenting all works of translated fiction and poetry published in the U.S. in 2008. Earlier posts can be found here, and in a couple weeks I’ll post the current spreadsheet of all titles (currently around 150 going through Apr/May for a host of presses) and ...
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Yalo
Elias Khoury’s new novel, Yalo—out earlier this month from Archipelago—is a deep examination of truth and memory set against the gritty backdrop of post-war Lebanon. The book’s premise appears to be simple: in the first pages, it becomes apparent that the title character has been arrested for rape. Rape is ...
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Things Fall Apart
Fifty years after he published Things Fall Apart, his first novel, the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe recalls having modest hopes for the book. At the time, he was a young university graduate who had found a job at the Nigerian Broadcasting Company, in Lagos. “I was alone in my room, scribbling away, and if nobody had ...
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Lawrence Venuti on the Business of Publishing Translations
Literary Saloon pointed this out yesterday, but the new issue of Words Without Borders contains a fantastic article by Lawrence Venuti on the business of publishing translations. He wrote this essay for the Frankfurt Book Fair panel on To Be Translated or Not To Be (warning, that links to the entire report in pdf form), a ...
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NBCC's Good Reads Winter List
The Winter List of the NBCC’s Good Reads program—where NBCC members recommend the best fiction, nonfiction, and poetry they’ve read recently—is now available online. In addition to simply promoting this list, the NBCC is arranging 15 events in 15 cities to discuss this list and the recent NBCC ...
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An Economic Model for the Lack of Translations into English
Esther Allen—director of the Center for Literary Translation, amazing translator, and committee member for Open Letter—recently passed along a fascinating article entitled The Impact of English Dominance on Literature and Welfare by Jacques Melitz, and published in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization ...
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What's Up With Romania?
From Literary Saloon: We missed their announcement from a few weeks ago, but Jennifer Schuessler recently mentioned it at their Paper Cuts weblog: The New York Times Book Review is now available in Romanian, the only international edition of the NYTBR, licensed to Editura Univers and with a print run of 40,000 to start ...
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Karl Pohrt in China: Post-Visit Update (Part 2)
Along with a few other independent booksellers and librarians, Karl Pohrt—owner of the amazing Shaman Drum Bookshop to China to attend the Beijing Book Fair, and give this speech on independent bookselling in America. Additionally, he’s wrote a daily blog about the trip, which can be found in its entirety ...
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The Waitress Was New
The Waitress Was New is the first of French author Dominique Fabre’s novels to be translated into English. The novel is narrated by Pierre, a 56-year-old bartender who has been tending bar his entire adult life, more or less, and has spent the last eight years working at Le Cercle, a typical French café situated ...
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Karl Pohrt in China: Post-Visit Update (Part 1)
Along with a few other independent booksellers and librarians, Karl Pohrt — owner of the amazing Shaman Drum Bookshop — went to China to attend the Beijing Book Fair, and give this speech on independent bookselling in America. Additionally, he’s wrote a daily blog about the trip, which can be found in its ...
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First Steve Jobs and Then Las Vegas
Here are two wonderful, oh so inspiring quotes about reading that are perfect for a Monday morning. The first is from Steve Jobs and actually came out a couple weeks ago. In reference to Amazon’s Kindle: “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore. Forty ...
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One Last (?) ACE Funding Update
Despite the apparent good news that most of the Arts Council England funding would be restored, Dedalus and Centerprise ended up on the cutting block [all quotes via The Guardian: In the face of appeals and threats of legal action, Arts Council England has this morning confirmed it is to cut funding from the independent ...
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Murakami Interview
I’ve never spent $17 on a magazine except once: the January 2007 issue of GQ Korea. I was in a Korean bookstore in Los Angeles, looking for Yi Sang’s fiction (I’ll talk about Yi Sang in detail later, such a weird, beautiful writer) when I saw the magazine, with Matt Damon on the cover. Anyways, I bought the magazine ...
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The Pirate Coelho
This is something I’d like to do, but I don’t know that we’d be able to get everyone to go along with it: But if I had known about The Pirate Coelho, a blog, established by the million-selling author himself, I might not have wasted my money on the Alchemist after all. You see, Coelho has been happily ...
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The Diving Pool
I have to admit right upfront that I was disappointed by this book. I had such high hopes based on all the people involved, the fact that it’s a 2008 Reading the World title, the pretty cover (which Picador is plastering everywhere these days), the blurb from Kenzaburo Oe, etc. In the end though, this just simply ...
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Online Books Program
This sounds rather promising: Daniel Menaker, former Random House executive editor and fiction editor at the New Yorker, will host a new online book show called Titlepage, the first of which appears on March 3 [. . .] Menaker will lead a group of authors in discussions that are modeled in part after Apostrophes, the ...
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February Translations: Fiction
Here’s the next installment in the ongoing project to chronicle all works of fiction and poetry coming out in translation this year. More fiction tomorrow . . . Nazi Literature in the Americas, Roberto Bolano, translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews (New Directions, $23.95, 9780811217057) All that really ...
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Center for the Art of Translation Event
We don’t usually post event info here, but based on the nature of (and Three Percent/Open Letter connection to) this event, I think it’s definitely worth highlighting. All this info is repeated below, but as part of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs conference (a.k.a. AWP), the Center for the Art of ...
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Interview with Eric Lane, Publisher of Dedalus
Aside from feeding my recent obsession, I thought it would be interesting to ask Eric Lane a few questions about Dedalus Books and the impact losing its Arts Council England grant would have on the organization. Eric was kind enough to not only answer all my questions, but to answer them in a refreshingly honest fashion, ...
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ACE Funding Update (a.k.a. My Recent Obsession)
Finally, there’s some good news for the organizations at risk of losing their Arts Council England funding. According to this article, the Arts Council is reconsidering its funding cuts: The Arts Council has been forced into a partial climbdown to reprieve about 25 of the theatres, orchestras and dance groups ...
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And Now, Congrats to Karl Pohrt
This morning is chock full of good news—all via Shelf Awareness: In honor of Karl Pohrt, founder and owner of Shaman Drum Bookshop, Ann Arbor, Mich., the University of Michigan’s department of English is holding a conference March 6-7 called Writing in Public: A Celebration of Karl Pohrt that consists of a ...
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Congrats to Jessica Stockton Bagnulo
During her time at Three Lives, McNally Robinson, and now the wholesaler BookStream, Jessica has become one of the most knowledgeable booksellers out there. She’s the posterchild for the American Booksellers Association’s Emerging Leaders Program (which exists to “retain, develop, and support the ...
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Chinese Literature Online
After all the ACE info of the past few weeks, it was interesting to find out that it is responsible for this fascinating series on the “State of Internet Literature in China” available at Paper Republic. If you’re not familiar with Paper Republic, it’s the best website out there covering Chinese ...
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Minneapolis Book Culture Part II
Meant to post this earlier, but it’s been a crazy day . . . In addition to the presses (Graywolf, Coffee House, and Milkweed), the review publication (Rain Taxi), the literary center (The Loft), and the building for literature (Open Book), the other thing Minn-St. P has are a couple really stellar bookstores. This ...
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A Short Guide to Literary Minneapolis
Early this week I took a trip to Minneapolis-St. Paul to visit the various literary organizations located there (which should explain why I haven’t posted much the past few days). For those who don’t know, MSP is a hotbed of nonprofit literary publishing and literary culture in general. Reservations cast aside, ...
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Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
In today’s Independent, Boyd Tonkin has the complete longlist for the 2007 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. Before getting to the list itself, Tonkin makes a case for the publication of literature in translation: The annual list of the bestselling paperbacks in Britain made, as ever, a more enlightening read than ...
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Sven Birkerts on Hamsun
Sven Birkerts writes about Hamsun’s Growth of the Soil and Hunger in the new Bookforum: A young man’s book, an old man’s book; the former an almost unremitting hallucination, the latter like something carved with patience into an obdurate oak. Hunger unfolds its unbroken inwardness in urban Christiana (now ...
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ACE Funding and Parliament
Today’s update in the ongoing saga of the ACE funding cuts comes from Arcadia and Parliament. First off, a couple of the new people who have signed on in support of Arcadia are Dominick Dunne and Caroline Michel. Which is great in and of itself, but what I find really fun are some of the “Early Day ...
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Politkovskaya's A Russian Diary
Over at Critical Mass, they’re doing a series of blog posts about the NBCC finalists. The first is about Anna Politkovskaya’s A Russian Diary... “A Russian Diary” is a posthumous testimonial to Politkovskaya’s reportorial skills and her despair about what has happening to her country. Drawn ...
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More on the ACE Funding Cuts
There are two interesting developments in the ongoing saga of the Arts Council England funding cuts that are worth reporting about. First off, last Friday The Guardian ran an article by Antonia Byatt claiming that funding for literature is actually increasing: Far from “decimating” the arts, our funding ...
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Wolves of the Crescent Moon
Wolves of the Crescent Moon—the first of Yousef Al-Mohaimeed’s works to be translated into English—tells the stories of three men at the fringes of Saudi Arabian society, all missing a crucial body part. The first is the narrator Turad, a coffee boy at ministry who lost his ear and is taunted mercilessly ...
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50 Greatest Books Ever Written
Over the coming year, an international panel chosen by The Globe and Mail will select the 50 Greatest Books ever written. Each week, a single work will be discussed by an expert or a writer passionate about the work in question. This is the second in the series. This week, they’re talking about In Search of Lost ...
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In a vault, in Switzerland
Here is your chance to weigh in on one of the most troubling dilemmas in contemporary literary culture. I know I’m hopelessly conflicted about it. It’s the question of whether the last unpublished work of Vladimir Nabokov, which is now reposing unread in a Swiss bank vault, should be destroyed—as Nabokov ...
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January/Feburary Translations: Poetry
Continuing our ongoing project to list all works of fiction and poetry in translation coming out this year, here are a list of four new poetry collections coming out over the next month. Secret Weapon: Selected Late Poems, Eugen Jebeleanu, translated from the Romanian by Matthew Zapruder and Radu Ioanid (Coffee House, ...
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Quim Monzo
Scott Esposito of Conversational Reading, reviewed Quim Monzo’s The Enormity of the Tragedy in the Philadelphia Inquirer, hitting upon the fascinating way Monzo takes the setup for a lewd joke (the main character has a permanent erection that’s actually a symptom of a disease leaving him with seven weeks to live) ...
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January Translations: Fiction
Following up on my previous posts, here’s another addition to the list of translated fiction coming out this month. Over the past few weeks—thanks in part to the help of Michael Orthofer—I’ve been creating a fairly detailed spreadsheet of all works of fiction and poetry in translation published this ...
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Chinese Literature Overview
Richard Lea has a two-part [ 1, 2 ] overview of the literary scene in China in The Guardian: The world’s most populous nation, the world’s biggest consumer of raw materials, and now the world’s biggest emitter of carbon dioxide, China strides irresistibly towards its economic and political destiny. But ...
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Karl Pohrt in China: January 14th
Along with a few other independent booksellers and librarians, Karl Pohrt—owner of the amazing Shaman Drum Bookshop —is in China for the Beijing Book Fair, where he’ll be giving this speech on independent bookselling in America. Additionally, he’s writing a daily blog about the trip, which can be ...
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Cool New Blog
The National Book Foundation just launched a blog—“Reading Ahead”:http://readingahead.blogspot.com/— written by Harold Augenbraum. As can be expected, the posts are very thoughtful, literary, and well-written, and the mission is quite admirable: The blog’s purpose is to gather information and ...
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Today's Arts Council England Funding Update
This morning, I received a couple interesting e-mails regarding the ACE funding cuts that we’ve been talking about for the past couple weeks. As most everyone has heard, a number of independent publishers—including Dedalus and Arcadia, two presses that do a lot of work in translations—have had the funding ...
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Sales of Translations
Rachel Deahl’s article for Publishers Weekly on how well translations sell is really interesting (not just because we’re mentioned there) and worth expanding a bit. The main idea comes from Tom Colchie, famous translator and literary agent (and all around nice guy), who thinks that the “doom and gloom ...
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Karl Pohrt in China: January 12, Part 2
Along with a few other independent booksellers and librarians, Karl Pohrt—owner of the amazing Shaman Drum Bookshop in China for the Beijing Book Fair, where he’ll be giving this speech on independent bookselling in America. Additionally, he’s writing a daily blog about the trip, which can be found in its ...
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Karl Pohrt in China: January 12, Part 1
Along with a few other independent booksellers and librarians, Karl Pohrt—owner of the amazing Shaman Drum Bookshop in China for the Beijing Book Fair, where he’ll be giving this speech on independent bookselling in America. Additionally, he’s writing a daily blog about the trip, which can be found in its ...
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The Health of the Bookselling Industry
It’s nice to see independent booksellers stand up for themselves and the health of their business. In the Seattle Times there’s a nice letter from JB Dickey, owner of the Seattle Mystery Bookshop in Seattle, regarding the closure of M Coy Books: While I was sorry to read the article in the Jan. 5 Seattle ...
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Funding Controversy Continues to Rage in England
There have been a few interesting things happen since last week’s post on the Arts Council England funding cuts to almost 200 organizations. First off, I got a message from Arcadia that the protest letter we posted about was signed by over 500 people, including Doris Lessing, John Berger, Alan Hollinghurst, James ...
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Karl Pohrt in China: January 11
Along with a few other independent booksellers and librarians, Karl Pohrt—owner of the amazing Shaman Drum Bookshop in China for the Beijing Book Fair, where he’ll be giving this speech on independent bookselling in America. Additionally, he’s writing a daily blog about the trip, which we’ll be ...
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Karl Pohrt in China: January 10
Along with a few other independent booksellers and librarians, Karl Pohrt—owner of the amazing Shaman Drum Bookshop in China for the Beijing Book Fair, where he’ll be giving this speech on independent bookselling in America. Additionally, he’s writing a daily blog about the trip, which we’ll be ...
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The re-transnationalization of literary criticism
Carl Henrik Fredriksson argues for a re-transnationalization of literary criticism in Eurozine, and recalls the almost-impossible-to-believe, and not-so-distant, past of literary criticism in Europe: In fact, during some periods and in some places, the discussion of foreign literature was so extensive and lively that it ...
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Ariadne Press
One of the fun things about compiling the 2008 Translations list is going through various publishers websites, uncovering books that may otherwise have slipped by unnoticed. A case in point are the books by Kathrin Roggla and Gert Jonke that Ariadne Press is bringing out this year. I first heard of Ariadne when I was in ...
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January Translations: Literary Nonfiction
In the ongoing list of translations coming out in 2008, I have to admit that this category is a bit fuzzy. Not that I came across any, but I wasn’t planning on including translations of technical manuals, cookbooks, etc. By “literary nonfiction,” I’m referring to books for a general trade audience ($60 ...
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Omega Minor in the Independent
As mentioned at the Literary Saloon, Matt Thorne has a review of Omega Minor by Paul Verhaeghen in today’s Independent. As Michael Orthofer—who has been praising this book and its break-out potential for quite some time—points out, the book hasn’t been receiving a lot of attention on this side of the ...
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Believer #50
The fiftieth issue of The Believer is out and has a couple of pieces on international fiction. The review of Havana Noir from Akashic Books is available online in full, and ends with a decent enough recommendation: “In Havana Noir, better than half the stories are truly gripping, and all of them resuscitate a dark ...
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Bonzai and The Private Lives of Trees
There is a series of popular literature in Chile that you can still buy in used book fairs, which color-coded books according to World literature (beige), Spanish Literature (red), and Chilean Literature (brown). There was no Latin American literature. This conception of things made an impression on Alejandro Zambra, who ...
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Censorship of Literature in Iran
This past Sunday, the Guardian ran a very troubling article about a publishing crackdown in Iran: After the 1979 Islamic revolution, the government imposed strict rules on book publishing. Since then, the Ministry of Culture has been charged to vet all books before publication, mainly for erotic and religious ...
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WWB/RTW Book Club: Zbigniew Herbert
The latest Words Without Borders/Reading the World book club is now officially underway. This month James Marcus and Cynthia Haven will be leading a discussion of Zbigniew Herbert’s Collected Poems. They have a lot of interesting things lined up for the next few weeks: The discussion will include contributions from ...
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Karl Pohrt in China: January 9
Along with a few other independent booksellers and librarians, Karl Pohrt—owner of the amazing Shaman Drum Bookshop in China for the Beijing Book Fair, where he’ll be giving this speech on independent bookselling in America. Additionally, he’s writing a daily blog about the trip, which we’ll be ...
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Simone at 100
The Paris Blog salutes the 100th anniversary of the birth of Simone de Beauvoir, collecting several links to some interesting content (mostly in French) about the author, including some excellent old video ...
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Karl Pohrt in China: January 8th
Along with a few other independent booksellers and librarians, Karl Pohrt—owner of the amazing Shaman Drum Bookshop in China for the Beijing Book Fair, where he’ll be giving this speech on independent bookselling in America. Additionally, he’s writing a daily blog about the trip, which we’ll be ...
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Karl Pohrt in China: January 7th
Along with a few other independent booksellers and librarians, Karl Pohrt—owner of the amazing Shaman Drum Bookshop in China for the Beijing Book Fair, where he’ll be giving this speech on independent bookselling in America. Additionally, he’s writing a daily blog about the trip, which we’ll be ...
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The Nature of Counting, or, the Numbers Racket
I stole the title for this post from an e-mail Eliot Weinberger sent me that points out a huge discrepancy between the name of this blog and the list of January translations. As stated on our about us page, a number of studies—from the NEA, Bowker, etc.—have concluded that approx. 3% of all books published in ...
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January Translations: Fiction (Update)
After posting the initial list of January translations yesterday, I got info about three titles I missed (see below). I’m sure there are a few more, so if you know of anything, please feel free to post it here or contact me. Also, I’ll put up the poetry translations later today, and literary nonfiction tomorrow, ...
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Bookslut on Kertesz
Bookslut reviews Imre Kertesz’s Detective Story: As a chronicler of the Holocaust and its aftermath, Nobel Prize-winner Imre Kertesz allows no redemption and no transcendence. If you cry while reading Fatelessness or Kaddish for an Unborn Child, you’ll cry bitter, furious tears, but most likely, you won’t be ...
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January Translations: Fiction
As I mentioned earlier, one of my New Year’s resolutions for 2008 is to create a fairly comprehensive list of new translations published here in the States. (I’ll do my best to exclude reprints and retranslations, instead mentioning those separately.) So, here’s the first post highlighting all the works of ...
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Karl Pohrt in China
That would make a good title for a movie . . . Actually, the title of this post is in reference to the group of independent booksellers attending the Beijing Book Fair right now. As previously mentioned Reed Exhibitions/BookExpo America arranged this cultural exchange and organized a special panel on bookselling to take place ...
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Halldor Laxness in L.A. Times
On the occasion of the rerelease of The Fish Can Sing, Richard Raynor’s monthly Paperback Writers column features a nice overview of Iceland’s best-known writer, Halldor Laxness: This 1957 novel is narrated by the orphan Alfgrimur Hansson, who tells, in a meandering way, of his relationship with the ...
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In Contrast, America Finally Gets Something Right
After reading about the Arts Council England’s troubles, this article in the Louisville Courier-Journal about the recent $20 million dollar increase to the National Endowment for the Arts budget comes as a welcome surprise. The current budget is $144 million, and according to the LCJ, this recent increase is the largest ...
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More on Arts Council England Funding Cuts
Last month we wrote about the announcement from the Arts Council England that nearly 200 arts organizations would have their funding cut. (Personally, I was really disappointed to hear this—the ACE always seemed so progressive in it’s multi-year funding, payments to translators, etc.) For most arts ...
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Missing Soluch
Despite the fact that Mahmoud Dowlatabadi is considered one of Iran’s greatest writers (according to his Wikipedia entry, “He wrote Kalidar novel which is one of the most important significant of Iranian culture.”), it seems like Missing Soluch slipped through the reviewing cracks when Melville House brought ...
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2008 PEN World Voices Festival
PEN announced the first event of the 2008 PEN World Voices Festival. There isn’t any news about other participants, or events, yet, but we’ll keep you posted. The Three Musketeers Reunited: Umberto Eco, Salman Rushdie and Mario Vargas Llosa When: Friday, May 2 bq. Where: 92nd St. Y: New York City bq. ...
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BOMB's Brazilian Issue
Not sure how long this has been available, but the recent issue of BOMB is dedicated to Brazilian art and culture. Looks like a fantastic issue, with articles about Cao Guimarães and Marilá Dardot, Bernardo Carvalho (an excerpt from his most recent novel Nine Nights is also available), Lygia Fagundes Telles and Manuel ...
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Translating Books into Arabic
Following up on earlier announcements, Ed Nawotka writes about Kalima’s ambitious program in today’s International Herald Tribune. Part of the United Arab Emirates’ Authority for Culture and Heritage, Kalima is a nonprofit enterprise with the goal of translating 100 titles a year into Arabic and ...
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Looking Forward to 2008
The Emerging Writers Network has a list of books to look forward to in 2008, including a couple Open Letter titles . . . Lot of interesting books on the horizon, and Dan Wickett has done a great job pulling together info about these titles. ...
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Obituary: Jaan Kross
Eric Dickens—translator of Kross and his fellow countryman Mati Unt, along with many other writers—offered to write an obituary of Jaan Kross for us. As Dickens points out, this is more than just an obituary—it’s also an overview of one of Estonia’s great writers who is hardly known in the ...
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Matvei Yankelevich in Stop Smiling
The latest issue of Stop Smiling has an excellent interview with Matvei Yankelevich about his translation of Daniil Kharms’s Today I Wrote Nothing. A good portion of the interview consists of Yankelevich talking about the process of translation and other translations of Russian literature, including this bit ...
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First Great Saudi Novel?
Included on our list of best translations of 2007, Wolves of the Crescent Moon by Yousef Al-Mohaimeed got a nice review in the NY Sun this. In fact, Ben Lytal goes so far as to point to this as the “First Great Saudi Novel”: Those Saudi novels that do get published — even those that must be published abroad ...
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Top 10 (or 13) Translations of 2007
After consulting with our international literature experts, we finally came up with our list of the top 10 translations of 2007 (see below). Unfortunately, no collections of poetry made the top 10, so I’m listing the three favorites separately to make sure these titles get some attention. I know 2008 is still a week ...
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The plight of independent book publishing
right reading is starting a brief series on the plight of independent book publishing in the US. Today they detail the history of merger and acquisition. It’s easy to get so immersed in a subject that you lose track of how much of it is generally known. alfred a. knopfI’ve been talking about the difficulties of ...
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Indie Booksellers in China
According to PW, Reed Exhibitions/BookExpo America is bringing a number of librarians and independent booksellers to the Beijing Book Fair to participate on a panel on bookselling. I think this sort of exchange is fantastic, and is another example of Reed’s interest in connecting various parts of the publishing ...
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Ben Lytal's Recommendation
From Ben Lytal’s column in the New York Sun But the book that, this year, I have most wanted to recommend is almost totally unknown. “Missing Soluch” (Melville House, 507 pages, $16.95) is Mahmoud Dowlatabadi’s first novel translated into English, and it has hardly been reviewed at all. I’ve ...
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Three Percent Resolution for 2008
Next year, I hope to start the “Best Translations” list a lot earlier in the fall, giving us more time to research, read, recommend, and decide on which to include. One thing that would help though would be a single source of all the original translations published throughout the year. And once again, since this ...
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Best Translations of 2007 — The Analysis
Compiling the list of Best Translations was fascinating to me for a number of reasons. One of the first things that struck me is how paradoxical the situation regarding international literature is. Minutes after putting this first seeds of this list online, I started getting enthusiastic e-mails about books that should be ...
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Final Long-list for Best Translations of 2007
It’s been a very interesting experience putting together this list of the “Best Translations of 2007.” The number and enthusiasm of the responses and suggestions has been overwhelming, and I’m really proud that we were able to put together such an interesting and diverse list. (See my analysis for a ...
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New Robbe-Grillet Novel Pornographic?
In his blog at The Guardian , Maxim Jakubowski writes about the new Alain Robbe-Grillet novel and the rising controversy about its pornographic contents: However, even in France, the recently published novel by Alain Robbe-Grillet—Un Roman Sentimental—is creating something of a stir, with calls from various ...
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The Unlimited Model
Joe Wikert makes a good point about the rise of the “all you can eat” subscription model and how this might play out in the book world: As this BusinessWeek article notes, the pay-per-song model might be living on borrowed time. All you can eat subscription models like Rhapsody are gaining popularity. It ...
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Rodrigo Fresan's Mantra
The most recent issue of The Quarterly Conversation has an excellent article by Javier Moreno on Rodrigo Fresan’s Mantra Mantra is a novel about a Mexico City that doesn’t exist and about a man called Martín Mantra. Martín Mantra, the cursed boy genius, the son of a soap opera star and a pathetic melodic ...
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Sounds Like Dubravka Ugresic
From The Guardian post about singer and songwriter Lily Allen being named a judge for the Orange Prize: Well, fair enough. We will let this one pass. But only because Ms Allen has demonstrated that she has a way with words. Leaving that aside, we note that this is part of an inexorable trend: that in order for any ...
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This Is My Hobby Horse
Don’t ask why, but I’ve always been fascinated by Esperanto. In fact, at the first bookstore I ever worked at — Schuler Books and Music — I helped create a mini Esperanto section. Of course these books didn’t really sell, which I blamed on the fact that Esperanto is pretty much a dead language ...
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Sign and Sight's Books this Season
This is one of my favorite things on the internet (seriously). Every season, signandsight.com puts out a list of the ‘best books’ that have come out in Germany recently. It’s a great resource for us. Even though the list is usually pretty small, there’s always one book that gets me excited. This ...
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George Saunders on Daniil Kharms
It’s a few days old now, but the New York Times review of Daniil Kharms’s Today I Wrote Nothing is worth checking out. Saunders does a good job of explaining how Kharms isn’t simply an “absurdist,” but an author who basically objected to the essential artifice of fiction: All of us who ...
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Bernard Scudder
The Guardian mourns the death of Icelandic-English translator Bernard Scudder… Translators are the neglected stepchildren of literature, considered lucky if they get their names on a book’s title page or receive a small share of an award. This state of affairs was never more apparent than earlier this month, ...
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WWB/RTW Book Club Post
The latest post in this month’s Words Without Borders/Reading the World book club is now online. This month Laila Lalami is directing a discussion of Camara Laye’s The Radiance of the King , which sounds interesting: I want to start our discussion of The Radiance of the King by talking about the story ...
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Valles on Herbert
Alissa Valles on the poet she translated, Zbigniew Herbert: Until recently, visitors to Kraków, Poland, might have easily stumbled across a bit of graffiti on the ancient wall surrounding the Old Town. “We Will Fulfill Herbert’s Testament,” the text read, referring to Zbigniew Herbert, a poet of national pride and ...
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America, Where We're Always Late
Over at the Literary Saloon, Michael Orthofer makes note of the Biblioasis International Translation Series, and Stephen Henighan’s recent speech about translations.. The thing that caught my eye thought was this bit about Angolan author Ondjaki, whose Good Morning Comrades will be the second book in the Biblioasis ...
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One Model Doesn't Fit All
From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer Paperspine is trying to do for books what Netflix did for DVDs. In fact, Dustin Hubbard — the Microsoft Corp. program manager who co-founded the Issaquah startup on a leave of absence this summer — said he was inspired by the online movie rental company when he came up with ...
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Best Translations of 2007 (Update)
Rather than reply in the comments of the earlier post about the idea of a “Best Translations of 2007” list, I thought I’d post a little update and respond to the various questions people have asked about this. First off, I think we should definitely include poetry on this list. At first I was going to list ...
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Biblioasis International Translation Series
Biblioasis a Canadian press based in Windsor, has recently launched an “International Translation Series,” the first book of which is Ryszard Kapuscinski’s I Wrote Stone. To celebrate the series and book, an event was held at the intriguingly named This Ain’t the Rosedale Library in Toronto. All of ...
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Best of 2007 Translations
As anyone reading this blog even on a casual basis can figure out, I’m a big fan of year end lists. (Actually of lists in general. And lists of lists. But whatever, that’s a personal problem.) What I’d personally really like to see though is a “best of literature in translation 2007” list. And ...
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WWB Book Club for December
Now that Michael Orthofer’s discussion of Mandarins has ended, it’s time for the next Words Without Borders/Reading the World book club to start. This month Laila Lalami will be discussing Camara Laye’s The Radiance of the King (NYRB). Her first post is now online and offers an overview of Laye’s ...
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More Barba
The new Words Without Borders “Goodbye to All That: Partings”—includes a translation of the Andres Barba short story Nocturne translated by Lisa Dillman. Lisa’s review of Barba’s Katia’s Sister generated a good deal of interest, but unfortunately this book has yet to find an English ...
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Village Voice Best of 2007
After Ed Park left the Village Voice I inwardly swore to myself that I would never read it again. (No reason to rehash it now, but there were a lot of controversial and somewhat embarrassing things that happened to the Voice at that time.) Although I’ve stuck to my beliefs in terms of avoiding the New York Press for ...
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2008 Susan Sontag Prize for Translation
We actually posted about the Susan Sontag Prize for Translation back before Three Percent went live, but with the deadline approaching, I think it’s worth bringing up again, especially since it’s such a cool prize. One of the first activities of the newly-established Susan Sontag Foundation, this Prize for ...
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Sarcastic Humor v. Technology
From Cracked Do you love to read books but hate reading books? Amazon.com finally has the answer for you. It’s called Kindle and it’s described as a “wireless portable reading device,” where the screen is so realistic and glare-free, it’s almost like reading a book. You can bring Kindle with you on long ...
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Cervantes prize to Juan Gelman
Argentine poet Juan Gelman, who wrote about the pain of loss under his country’s military juntas, has won the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world’s top literary ...
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The Guadalajara International Book Fair
As the Barcelona Book Fair ended this past Sunday, the bigger, better—and according to Jorge Volpi at El Pais—“paradise” that is the Guadalajara International Book Fair (FIL) was just getting started on the other side of the globe. A resident of Mexico City, Volpi writes a very funny article, focusing largely on ...
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Finalists for the 2008 Nordic Literature Prize
The twelve finalists for the Nordic Literature Prize were announced yesterday. Among the nominees are Icelandic author Bragi Olafsson for The Ambassador (Open Letter is publishing his book The Pets next fall), and Norwegian author Carl Frode Tiller for Encircling. (Tiller also recently won the Brage prize for the best ...
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Selfdivider covers a Sebald Panel
Went to the Sebald panel that the Mercantile Library hosted to kick off the publication of The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W. G. Sebald (Seven Stories), edited by Lynne Sharon Schwartz. First of all, the library is beautiful, and I can’t believe I didn’t even know about its existence prior to last night. It ...
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2007 Governor General’s Literary Awards
Yesterday, the Canadian Council for the Arts announced the winners of the 2007 Governor General’s Literary Awards. Awards are given out every year in seven categories—fiction, nonfiction, poetry, drama, children’s literature (text and illustration), and translation(!)—to both a work in English and in ...
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NBCC's "Best Recommended"
This morning, the National Book Critics Circle unveiled its Best Recommended list, a monthly list consisting of five works of fiction, of nonfiction, and of poetry, ranked according to votes by NBCC members. John Freeman e-mailed me about this yesterday, and it’s a really intriguing idea. To come up with this list, ...
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Ummm . . . Yeah
Evan at A Different Stripe points out a rather odd statement made by Daniel J. Kramer about the Espresso Book Machine on On the Media: “Now, instead of spending years tracking down Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, you just print it out, go home with a copy of it in your back pocket and finally read ...
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NYRB's Summer 2008 Titles
One of the most disorienting things about publishing is the time gap between when you first hear about a title and when it actually comes out. It’s really bad from the editing end of things—frequently you first encounter a book two-plus years before it’s published and on bookstore shelves. Even as a pure ...
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Words Without Borders Book Club
In Michael Orthofer’s most recent post on Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s The Mandarins, he focuses on the writer himself: As we slowly wind up the discussion, moving towards The Life of a Fool and Cogwheels (which I figure will be the appropriate notes to end on), I’m still struck by how much a proper (?) sense of the ...
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Read Stanley Elkin
Granted, this is a bit outside of our normal purview, but Stanley Elkin was such an amazing writer that I can’t help but mention the “In Retrospect” look at George Mills currently going on at Critical Mass. The current post is from Abby Frucht about Elkin’s writing classes—which were ...
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War and Peace (again) and the Goal of Translation
I know that E.J. already wrote about James Wood’s review of War and Peace, but in reading the article last night, I had a couple of thoughts that I hope are worth sharing. In evaluating the new translation, Wood lays out the two basic translation camps: Literary translators tend to divide into what one could call ...
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Google and UNAM
UNAM (La Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) has reached an agreement with Google to digitalize all of their publications from 1950 through 2007. The deal was signed this past June and as of late September, Google has uploaded the first group of books, consisting of 718 titles. Google will scan groups of UNAMs ...
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The Future of Reading
Some of the ‘Acts’ are a little meh, and I’m particularly sick of everyone comparing everything to 1984, but there are some goodies about Amazon’s new Kindle, which I expect to have completely forgotten in 6 months time. Act I: The act of buying When someone buys a book, they are also ...
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Amazon Kindle
Amazon launched their sinfully ugly e-book reader, the Kindle, today. Click here to get the complete list of books available for the $400 device, which is saddled, sadly, with DRM. Newsweek was nice enough to allow them to advertise their Kindle on its cover this week, if you want to read about it. I was following the ...
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War & Peace all the time
I know, I know. We’re always on about this War and Peace thing, but in the upcoming New Yorker James Wood writes one of the best reviews of War and Peace I’ve read from the batch that have followed the latest translations. It’s the good kind of review; the kind that makes you want to pick up the book ...
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Eurozine on the Free Press and Publishing Models
Scott Esposito referenced this earlier today, but Eurozine has a fascinating article today by André Schiffrin, former head of Pantheon, and founder and editor-at-large of The New Press. His main focus is on free speech and the need for independent presses that challenge the status quo, but in addition to the political ...
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This is Encouraging
Inside Higher Ed has a piece today about how more students are studying languages: Overall enrollments in languages other than English continue their steady climb, increasing by 12.9 percent from 2002 to 2006, with the most dramatic growth seen in the study of Arabic (up 126.5 percent) and Chinese (up 51 percent), ...
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Howard Goldblatt interview
Full-Tilt, “a journal of East Asian, poetry, translation and the arts”, which is completely new to me (and I guess everyone else, as this is their second issue), has an interview with Howard Goldblatt. The issue features several other interviews with translators as well. Howard Goldblatt has all but ...
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Reviewing Reviews of Translations
As touched upon in the roundup post I did about the Reviewing Translations panel at the Miami Book Fair International, there are a lot of issues involved when reviewing a translation. Especially related to the hows and whys of commenting on the quality of the translation. To many, one of the big problems is the ...
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Two Interesting Blogs
Although neither are all that new, I just found out about two interesting blogs worth pointing out. The first is the Absinthe blog which is connected to the magazine Absinthe: New European Writing. One of the posts that got my attention was this great, and very detailed, write up of bookstores in Copenhagen. The other ...
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Words Without Borders Book Club
Over at WWB, Michael Orthofer has a couple new posts in the month-long discussion of Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s Mandarins. The first is about the title story, and, well, it’s title: When I hear (read) Mandarins, especially in an East Asian context, I think: Chinese wise men. Something along those lines, anyway. ...
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The Colonel Controversy
The biggest hubbub at ALTA this year was about Colonel Gregory Fontenot, director of the University of Foreign Military and Cultural Studies at Fort Leavenworth, KS, who gave a speech entitled, “Translating in Support of Military Operations.” For reasons that probably don’t need to be explained, this ...
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Translation Centers
There’s never a lack of interesting panels at ALTA, but “The Role of Translation Centers” was one of the best that I’ve ever attended. This panel brought together representatives from a number of different programs/centers to talk about the different things they’re doing, and the roles these ...
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"To Be Translated or Not To Be"
Unfortunately, because of my stupid decision to spend two hours taking the “subway” from DFW Airport to the hotel, I missed Steve Wasserman’s keynote speech, which I heard was pretty fantastic. I did make it to Esther Allen’s panel about the recent PEN/Ramon Llull report To Be Translated or Not To Be, ...
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Why I Love ALTA Redux
A couple years back I wrote a blog post about my first ALTA experience for Words Without Borders entitled “Why I Love ALTA.” It was right after the Montreal American Literary Translators Association Conference where I met Niloufar Talebi, Dwayne Hayes, Pam Carmell, Rachel Galvin, Susan Harris, and hosts of other ...
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Preaching to the Choir — AKA Hating on Book-TV
I frequently complain about how far behind the times the publishing field is when it comes to technology. I’m not talking about e-books or single-copy pod machines (although there is that), but simply about the fact that there’s a frickin’ TV station for cats, yet when it comes to books there’s ...
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Suggestions for Next Year
Overall, I think the inaugural Translation Marketplace at the Miami Book Fair International was a huge success. Similar to what happens at fairs like BEA and Frankfurt, I came away re-energized, feeling like what we’re doing is important, vital, and exciting. Aside from Martin Riker’s joke about not wanting his ...
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The Booksellers P.O.V.
This was by far the most uplifting, pragmatic, exciting panel at the Translation Marketplace. Not that the others were uninteresting, but for whatever reason, great independent booksellers have a way of making you feel like change is possible, like the situation isn’t that bad, like it’s really worthwhile to keep ...
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201 Chekhov Stories
Eldritch Press, which is dedicated to putting public domain books online, has a fantastic Checkhov project: About this project: Constance Garnett translated and published 13 volumes of Chekhov stories in the years 1916-1922. Unfortunately, the order of the stories is almost random, and in the last volume Mrs. Garnett ...
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Reviewing Translations
Steve Wasserman—one of my all-time favorite panelists for his great anecdotes and brilliant, witty comments—moderated this discussion, which included Marie Arana (author, book review editor at the Washington Post), Alan Cheuse (author, critic for NPR), Eric Banks (editor of Bookforum), and Carlin Romano (book ...
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Boycotts, Bestsellers, and Banned Books
This was the panel that I was on, which makes it sort of difficult to write about. I do want to say that Michael Moore—the Chair of the PEN Translation Committee—did a fantastic job organizing and moderating this panel. He provided a lot of information about the Office of Foreign Assets Control, the recent ...
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The Opening Session in Miami — Gloomy, Yet Optimistic
For those who aren’t familiar with the Miami Book Fair International, it’s the brainchild of Mitchell Kaplan, one of the smartest booksellers in America, and owner of Books and Books. The fair is one of the largest and liveliest in America and started in 1984 with the mission to “promote reading, encourage ...
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Three Days of Literary Translation Paradise
As I mentioned earlier, I was fortunate enough to attend both The Translation Market at the Miami Book Fair and the American Literary Translators Association Conference last week. I promised to blog about both of these events for PEN America and for Three Percent, but because all three days were chock full of interesting ...
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Gilles Leroy Interview
Here’s video of an interview with a still-basking-in-the-post-Goncourt-glow Gilles Leroy. The interview is in French, which is why I have very little to say about ...
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World bookstore guide
This is a really cool idea. Sonja and Ivan are putting together a guide to bookstores around the world: Hello! We are Sonja and Ivan. And this is our Bookstore Guide. The idea of writing a guide to bookstores all around Europe was conceived while we were on a vacation in Sarajevo, Bosnia. Having a passion for reading and ...
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Off to Miami and Dallas
I’ll be gone for the next few days, first to the Miami Book Fair International for the Translation Market. A complete list of events can be found here and from the Opening Session to the closing reception, I think this will be an amazing day of panels and events. And then I’m off to Dallas for the American ...
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Reimagining the Americas
Last night, Open Letter hosted a panel entitled “Commerce and Culture: The Impact of the Business of Books on the Literature of the Americas.” Moderated by Chad Post, the panel featured Lisa Dillman, who translates from Spanish and Catalan and is a lecturer in Spanish at Emory University; Jack Kirchoff, the book ...
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Why Simenon Isn't Popular in the U.S.
The Guardian has a blog post today about Georges Simenon, praising the roman durs and speculating on his popularity: This relentlessly downbeat canon (the one exception among his straight novels was The Little Saint, which was very loosely based on the life of Marc Chagall) may be one reason why Simenon’s work has ...
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Malvinas Requiem
In selling literature in translation, there’s always a joke/fear that readers won’t pick up a book by an author whose name they can’t pronounce. Or if they do, that they’ll struggle dealing with names and places that are unfamiliar, with too many consonants, that are obviously foreign. Rodolfo Fogwill’s Malvinas ...
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All Lithuania, All This Week
Seems like this week is all about Lithuania . . . First we had an overview of the history of publishing in Lithuania, then the one-legged Lithuanian lesbian debacle, and now, the new issue of Cafe Babel is all about Vilnius. There are a number of interesting articles—nothing about literature per se, although there is ...
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More on Marketing and Descriptive Copy
I totally agree with Scott Esposito’s take on my take on publishers paying more attention to marketing, especially when it comes to writing good jacket copy. Basically, if you can convince in 50 words of less that a book is really “Borgesian,” this will do far more than any amount of trying to convince ...
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What's in the Water?
It seems like today’s posts are filled with people saying dumb stuff when it comes to the arts. Witness this David Cameron’s alleged off-the-cuff remarks about “one-legged Lithuanian lesbians” at a recent arts funding lunch have caused outrage in Lithuania, and a complaint from the country’s ...
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Gonçalo Tavares wins Portugal Telecom Prize
Gonçalo Tavares has been awarded the Portugal Telecom prize for his novel Jerusalem. We found out about Tavares at Frankfurt and got our hands on a few of his ‘Neighborhood’ books—some of which have been translated into English by TransBooks in India (What kind of audience is there is in India for ...
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The Publishing History of Lithuania
At the Frankfurt Book Fair, I picked up a number of “Book Publishing in ____” books from various cultural stands. Personally, I’m really interested in the business of publishing and to see how it developed in other countries is quite interesting. (In other words, this could develop into a series of posts . . ...
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Robert Fagles Translation Prize
The addition of the Robert Fagles Translation Prize to the National Poetry Series was announced over the summer, and today, the Carcanet Press website has info about the winner: The National Poetry Series announced that Marilyn Hacker has been awarded the 2007 Robert Fagles Translation Prize. Ms. Hacker’s ...
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Chinese Literature
The Guardian World Tour is off to China this month, which should be interesting. I assume that there are a lot of great untranslated Chinese books, but over the years I’ve found it more difficult to get info about Chinese lit than any other country. Thankfully, China is scheduled to be the guest of honor at the ...
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Price, Literary Fiction, and the Desire to Buy
Ron Hogan has an interesting quote over at GalleyCat regarding the how to sell more literary fiction. When a potential consumer says “I can’t afford it,” Godin claims, that’s almost always not true. “What they are really trying to say,” he explains, “is, ‘it’s not ...
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More Marai at WWB
The conversation about The Rebels continues today with an interview between Mark Sarvas and Arthur Philips. MS: Perhaps I’m reading too much into your New Yorker review, but the sense that I got was that you were at some pains to say nice things about a lesser work. I’ve mentioned that I think there’s a ...
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Man Asian Literary Prize Shortlist
The shortlist for the 2007 Man Asian Literary Prize has been announced. The five finalists are: Jose Dalisay Jr., Soledad’s Sister Reeti Gadekar, Families at Home Nu Nu Yi Inwa, Smile As They Bow Jiang Rong, Wolf Totem Xu Xi, Habit of a Foreign Sky Is anyone out there familiar with any of these titles? ...
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TV Adaptations of Russian Classics
In writing about the upcoming TV version of Crime and Punishment the Moscow News asks whether all these adaptations of literary classics are a good thing or not. Over the last four years, the TV adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, Boris Pasternak’s Doctor ...
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More Fogwill
I first heard about Fogwill from Javier Molea at McNally Robinson, who insisted that I read him. (I think the phrase Javier kept repeating was “mind-blowing.”) It was a great coincidence to find that Serpent’s Tail had just published Malvinas Requiem (Los Pichiciegos), and an even greater coincidence to find ...
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Germanic Book Quiz
Dispatches from Zembla is running a Germanic literature quiz — Alok provides the excerpt, and you try to figure out the book — if you want to find out, like me, how little you know about German language ...
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Knut Hamsun's Growth of the Soil
Benjamin Ivry has a very interesting piece in today’s New York Sun on the new translation of Knut Hamsun’s Growth of the Soil: “Growth of the Soil,” one of these later works, tells of a peasant, Isak, and his harelipped wife Inger, who strangles her infant daughter after she is born with her own ...
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And I Thought I Was a Bit Disorganized
According to the Washington Post: About one-sixth of the books, monographs and bound periodicals at the Library of Congress weren’t where they were supposed to be because of flaws in the systems for shelving and retrieving materials, according to a survey to be made public at a congressional hearing today. [. . ...
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The Sketchy Side of Publishing
For anyone at the University of Rochester who reads this blog, the subject of this post is the subject of a speech I’ll be giving tomorrow night for the Undergraduate English Council. The event starts at 8pm at the Friel Lounge in Susan B. Anthony. Hopefully my stories about Lost, The Third Policeman. John Calder, ...
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Taking Newspapers to Task
The Literary Saloon has a nice diatribe this morning about the pervasive “lazy-ass reporting” of translation prizes. Specifically, Orthofer takes the Guardian to task for yesterday’s article on Farouk Mustafa winning the Saif Ghobash Banipal prize for his translation of Khairy Shalaby’s novel The ...
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Marai Discussion Continues . . .
It’s never too late to jump into the book group on Marai’s The Rebels that Mark Sarvas of The Elegant Variation is hosting over at Words Without Borders. The most recent post is an interview with David Leavitt, novelist and editor of Subtropics about how he came to excerpt part of The Rebels in his ...
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House of Anansi Turns 40
The Globe and Mail has a nice overview article on indie Canadian press House of Anansi’s fortieth anniversary. The environment says it all about the brightened outlook at Anansi. One British publisher recently called it “the red-hot centre of literary publishing in Canada.” Owned since 2002 by Toronto ...
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Penguin Not as Cool as Radiohead
Just a month after the eMusic shindig announcing the addition of ebooks to their site, Penguin has decided to back out of the arrangement. According to PW In other Penguin news, the New York Times reported today that the publisher has pulled out of its deal with eMusic to sell its audio titles through the online music ...
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"Facing Pages" Conference and Transitions
This past weekend, I attended Facing Pages 2007 a statewide literary conference organized by LitTAP and sponsored by the New York State Council on the Arts. The entire weekend of activities was fantastic, due in part to the natural beauty of the Adirondacks (the conference took place at the Minnowbrook Conference Center ...
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"Facing Pages" Conference and Transitions
This past weekend, I attended Facing Pages 2007 a statewide literary conference organized by LitTAP and sponsored by the New York State Council on the Arts. The entire weekend of activities was fantastic, due in part to the natural beauty of the Adirondacks (the conference took place at the Minnowbrook Conference Center ...
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Esther Allen at the Frankfurt Book Fair
Esther Allen—brilliant translator, champion of international literature, director of the Center for Literary Translation at Columbia, and advisory board member of Open Letter—has an interesting article in the International Herald Tribune about Frankfurt and the To Be Translated of Not To Be report she edited. ...
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Quim Monzo's Opening Speech
The opening speech Quim Monzo gave at the Frankfurt Book Fair is now available as a pdf in German, Catalan, Spanish, and English. It’s a very fun, self-referential speech about a writer trying to write his opening address. . . . Won’t reading the names of all these writers (most of whom are unknown to the ...
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LRB on Life and Fate
The LRB has a review of Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate: Vasily Grossman’s masterpiece Life and Fate is fascinating for many reasons, and one of them is the way in that it is both a pastiche and a personal statement; a conscious, cold-blooded attempt to sum up everything Grossman knew about the Great Patriotic ...
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LitKicks Summarizes the Book Business
For a while now, Levi Asher has been trying to answer the question Does Literary Fiction Suffer from Dysfunctional Pricing? and today posts an interesting summary. There’s a lot to unpack here—whether publishing is profitable as a business (it is), what the book business is (conglomerates, U.S. divisions, ...
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"The Frankfurt Book Fair is Germany's Hollywood."
I met Peter Zilahy at the Canongate party referenced in this article . . . He may well have thought I was some sort of stalker—his flowing locks are pretty remarkable though, and make it easy to pick him out of a crowd. I first encountered his work in the (now defunct?) pages of Orient Express, which was edited and ...
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Amelie Nothomb's Latest
Acide Sulfurique is a book we heard about in Frankfurt, and coincidentally, it’s covered in Cafe Babel. About a TV-reality show called “Concentration”—as in concentration camps—the book sounds dark and disturbing. Critical reaction was mixed: ‘And the moment finally came when the ...
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Motoko Rich on the FBF
I referenced it earlier, but here’s the official link to Motoko Rich’s article on Anna and Lorin Stein and the Frankfurt Book Fair. There’s a lot to say about the fair, and about it’s impact on international publishing, and I’ll try and do more of this over the next couple weeks, but for now, I ...
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Context: Africa from PEN International
Before diving into seven months worth of Frankfurt follow-up (should finish just in time to start making appointments) and probably a dozen or more posts about the fair and the business of publishing international lit, I thought I’d check out the PEN International Newsletter, which turned out to have a lot of great ...
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Frankfurt Day 4
By the final day of Frankfurt, it’s clear that most people are receiving bonus points just for making it to their meeting. I even heard about someone from Dalkey and from the Flemish Literary Fund both falling asleep for a second while talking . . . The public being there was as disturbing as I imagined it would be, ...
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Frankfurt, Day 3 — Only One Day Left
Thankfully we only had one other meeting with a UK publisher, so we were able to avoid Hall 8 for the most part. The one time we did go, we found out that the vigilence of the bag searches had declined drastically, and according to one guy, they hadn’t found a single contraband item during the entire fair. Today was a ...
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Frankfurt, Day 2 — Much Longer than the First
Today was a much livelier day at the fair than yesterday . . . After walking through the field of manure and just missing our train, we had a very active, interesting day of appointments. Looks like we’ll be publishing a number of Catalan books, we met with an amazing Slovenian publisher (if you really want to ...
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Frankfurt Book Fair, Day 1
The Frankfurt Book Fair is officially underway, and E.J. and I have made it through one long day of meetings, with three more to go. The fair itself is enormous beyond description. (We’ll post pictures once we have access to our computers again.) With hall upon hall, exhibitor upon exhibitor, there’s a lot to take ...
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Eurozine on 'Air Raid' Literature
Eurozine has an article which surveys German novels that reflect the effects of the Allied bombing campaign in WWII., and attempts to address the questions Sebald posed in Air War and Literature: No major postwar German novel dealt with the Allied bombing of German cities in World War II: during the Cold War, the echo ...
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Chad Post on KRUI
KRUI, the University of Iowa’s public radio station, held a discussion this morning featuring our own Chad Post; Dedi Felman of Words Without Borders, Matvei Yankelevich of Ugly Duckling Presse, Hugh Ferrer, Associate Director of the International Writers Program, and Keisha Lynn, Project Assistant at the International ...
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Newsweek on War and Peace 'controversy'
As we mentioned earlier, Ecco and Knopf have competing editions of Tolstoy’s War and Peace out now. Newsweek covers the controversy, and even manages to mention a few things about the art of translating. Overall, they favor the Knopf edition: Currently two publishers are feuding over rival editions of a book that ...
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Vargas Llosa in the Times
The New York Times Magazine has an interview with Mario Vargas Llosa about his new book, The Bad
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Borders Redesign
The beta design of the new Borders website is now online and they’re asking for customer feedback to be posted here. The site won’t go live until early next year, and marks Borders re-entry into the online retailing scene. Once upon a time, they managed their own website, but then sold it to Amazon in ...
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A dialogue between two translators
At Words Without Borders, Daniel Hahn and Clifford Landers discuss their two translations of Germano Almeida’s The Best Seller, which both appear on WWB as well: Daniel Hahn: Let me start by asking you a question—or rather, two questions, one quite specific and one quite general. The first is effectively about ...
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Words Without Borders/Reading the World Book Club: The Rebels by Sandor Marai
All this month at Words Without Borders, Mark Sarvas will be leading a book discussion on Sandor Marai’s The Rebels. The Rebels was a Reading the World 2007 title. Mark’s introductory post should be up at the WWB Blog soon, but for now, here’s his post about the club, and his introductory ...
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War, what is it good for?
We mentioned this a while ago, but Ecco and Knopf are at it again over their competing editions of War & Peace. Things appear to have taken a nasty turn. According to Ecco’s publisher, Dan Halpern: “Knopf was evidently so concerned about our competing translation that they had their translators write a response ...
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Miklos Bánffy's Transylvanian Trilogy
Michael Henderson writes an appreciation of Milos Bánffy’s Transylvanian Trilogy in The Telegraph: There are many strands to the story, a lot of politics and many names, but don’t be put off by that. It isn’t necessary to be an expert in Middle European and Balkan affairs at the turn of the last ...
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It's All Frankfurt All the Time
With the Frankfurt Book Fair practically here, we’re rushing around the Open Letter offices desperately preparing for all the parties meetings. So things might be a bit quite online for the next few days. But come next week, we’re hoping to provide some image heavy posts about our first trip to the FBF. ...
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"The Most Antisocial Social-Network"
Paul Constant has an article in the Stranger about Goodreads.com, the “MySpace for book nerds.” I first noticed www.goodreads.com four months ago when a coworker at my bookstore sent me an invitation. The website tore through the Seattle bookselling community like an STD. Soon, every bookseller under 40 was a ...
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American Idol, but For Books!
Sure it’s innovative, fun, and John Freeman is involved, but I just can’t get on-board with the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award sponsored by Penguin, Amazon, and Hewlett Packard. From today through Nov. 5, contestants from 20 countries can submit unpublished manuscripts of English-language novels to Amazon, ...
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The Buenos Aires Archive of Writers
I recently came across this website and it is unlike anything I imagine exists in the US. The Buenos Aires government, along with other European and Latin American cities, has a specific department for the development and preservation of the arts. Part of their work is the creation of The Buenos Aires Audiovisual Archive of ...
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Fall Books from Conversational Reading
Scott Esposito has great taste in literature, and his column today about books fall books is an impressive hitlist of forthcoming books that are definitely worth checking out. His list includes W. G. Sebald’s Unrecounted (which Barbara Epler from ND recently sent me, and which is beautiful), Julio Cortazar’s ...
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Perec's Life as Sub-Genre Exemplar
Thanks to the movie version of The Yacoubian Building (a Reading the World 2008 title) Chris Power has a short post in the Guardian about “Apartment Block Fiction”: What better and more liberating way can there be for an author to explore such a wide range of characters and situations than the randomness of ...
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Andrey Kurkov and the Translators
The Literary Saloon details what went wrong with the recent translation of Andrey Kurkov’s The President’s Last Love. I loved his Death and the Penguin and A Matter of Life and Death, so it’s too bad that something not-so-good seems to have happened to his latest book. Sometimes the translator just gets ...
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Why Translate Poetry?
In James Buchan’s review of Paul Celan’s Snow Part/Schneepart and Other Poems he asks just this: Is there any purpose to translating poetry? A poem does not contain information of importance, like a signpost or a warning notice. If you do not understand what Sereni meant when he wrote “è la mia / sola ...
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Just Plain Frightening
From Wired: International travelers concerned about being labeled a terrorist or drug runner by secret Homeland Security algorithms may want to be careful what books they read on the plane. Newly revealed records show the government is storing such information for years. Privacy advocates obtained database records ...
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Concept Bookstores
Dukou Bookstore in Shanghai sounds like a fun place to browse: Most books here are about urban life, architecture and literature. Unlike most bookstores, books here are not categorized. Instead they are randomly shelved. According to Xiao, there is a bond between the reader and the book, and categorizing the books would ...
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Translating from Scandinavian languages to French
As Danny points out, it’s a bit strange that this is written in English. It’s an older article, from 2005, but it’s a familiar sounding complaint, despite the fact that it’s a French translator talking about Scandinavian books. After over a quarter of a century in the trade, I have been asked to ...
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The Unforeseen
In Small Worlds, Warren Motte categorizes Christian Oster as a “minimalist,” placing him in a group with other young French writers such as Jean Echenoz, Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Marie Redonnet, and Eric Chevillard, who “exploit the principle of formal economy in their writing.” Each does so it his/her ...
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The State of Publishing
Although the actual event took place last fall, Ed Champion pointed out that the Virginia Quarterly Review now has a podcast and transcript online of “The Business of the Book” panel that was part of LWC}NYC. This event featured four major publishing figures (Jonathan Burhnam, publisher of HarperCollins; Morgan ...
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How to Read Elfriede Jelinek
To follow-up on last week’s post, the exchange between Gitta Honegger and Tim Parks about his article on Jelinek is now available at the NYRB ...
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Kiriyama Book Prize
The Kiriyama Book Prize was established in 1996 to recognize outstanding books about the Pacific Rim and South Asia that encourage greater mutual understanding of and among the peoples and nations of this vast and culturally diverse region, and the 2007 winners were just announced. Haruki Murakami’s Blind Willow, ...
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Guardian World Literature Tour in Spain
This month (October I guess . . . seems like the Brits are jumping the gun a bit), the Guardian World Literature Tour will be talking about Spain. So far, the recommendations are pretty straightforward—lot of love for Cela, Javier Marias, Juan Marse, Ramon Lllull, and Juan Goytisolo “if you like sheer ...
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Jelinek's Magnum Opus from Yale?
Literary Saloon has some info about the new issue of the New York Review of Books (not available online yet), including a bit about an exchange between Gitta Honegger and Tim Parks on his piece How to Read Elfriede Jelinek. In arguing her point, Honegger references Die Kinder der Toten (The Children of the Dead), which was ...
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The Vanishing Book Review
This took place a few days ago, but The House of Mirth has a fantastic write up (complete with video!) of the CJR panel on the state of book reviews that took place last week. Sounds like a lively panel—like this exchange between Carlin Romano (on the populist side) and Steve Wasserman (on the intellectual criticism ...
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Metafiction from Sweden
I feel like I’m pretty knowledgeable about international authors, but I have to admit that I’ve never heard of Swedish author Klas Östergren, whose latest novel is reviewed in today’s New York Sun: Klas Östergren is hailed as one of Sweden’s most important living writers. Swedish critics have ...
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Editors Buzz Panel
The one panel from Monday that hasn’t gotten a lot of coverage online is the Editors Buzz Panel. Consisting of French, German, and American editors (and Scott Moyers from Wylie—lot more below), this panel was an opportunity to highlight some really interesting forthcoming books. Paul Otchakovsky-Laurens talked ...
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Promoting International Literature Online
E.J. already posted about this yesterday, but on Monday there were a series of events at the Deutsches Haus in New York about French and German literature and related to the Editors Trip that took place earlier this year. Anyway, I was on the Promoting International Literature Online panel, which was pretty interesting, ...
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Languages Are Dying
According to the New York Times: Of the estimated 7,000 languages spoken in the world today, linguists say, nearly half are in danger of extinction and are likely to disappear in this century. In fact, they are now falling out of use at a rate of about one every two weeks. One every two weeks! That’s ...
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More Editors Exchange Coverage
PW has some coverage of another panel at the Editor’s Exchange, ‘From Contact to Contract: Acquiring Foreign Titles’: The title of the panel may have drawn internationally minded publishing people hoping to learn more about securing the rights to foreign works—but thanks to some heated bickering led ...
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Fiction and Pricing
Litkicks is holding a pretty interesting conversation about pricing and literary books. LitKicks is asking a variety of book industry professionals (including publishers, authors, agents, editors, distributors, sales representatives, booksellers, librarians, critics and bloggers) a question: “Does literary fiction ...
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Google Book Search
Google has just announced some new features for their book search: To start, you can create your own personal collection on Book Search, and use it to help find just the right book from your collection for any occasion. and We’ve been working on ways to help you dive in and explore interesting ideas and ...
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Michael Ondaatje on the Internationalism of English Lit
The complete interview is only available in German, but the preview on signandsight.com is pretty intriguing. “Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children (from 1981) changed English literature. Before it, there was an author by the name of G.V. Desani who wrote a novel called All about H. Hatterr (1948). That ...
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Tallinn in 2011
Cafe Babel has an article about Tallinn’s plans as European Cultural Capital in 2011. The project is entitled “Tallinn: Everlasting Fairytale,” and the impressive program is available online as a pdf. This is a bit concerning though: The EU is a bit stingy – they are donating a mere 1.5 ...
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Book Pricing
Over at LitKicks there’s an interesting discussion going on about whether or not “Literary Fiction Suffers from Dysfunctional Pricing?” Info on the first week of the discussion is available here and the second week’s discussion is here. Lot of interesting people participating, and the motivating ...
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The Process of Reading
Conversational Reading has a post on Carlin Romano’s review of Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid, a book on the “unnatural yet wonderful” process of reading. Because “the act of reading is not natural” in the sense of “genetically organized,” the brain must ...
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Day In Day Out
Day In Day Out was Terézia Mora’s debut novel, and it won the prestigious Leipzig Book Fair Prize in 2004, the year of its release in Germany. At the beginning of the novel, Abel Nema lives with his mother in an unnamed Balkan country. His father has abandoned them, and after a fruitless search, his mother ...
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What's Wrong With the Book Industry?
James Frey’s million dollar advance. Taking into account all personnel, marketing, production, translation expenses, it costs about $35,000 for a publisher to do a work of literature in translation. Using this figure as the base, just the advance for Frey’s new, and I’m sure, uber-craptastic, novel is ...
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Antibooks v. Novels — Just Guess Who's Winning
In the Sydney Morning Herald, Sherman Young argues against buying “antibooks,” those book-like objects that convince us to buy them for their hook. “A hook that contains a life-changing promise, a movie tie-in, a catchy, timely premise or an author who is famous for just about anything except ...
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German Book Prize Shortlist
The shortlist for the German Book Prize has just been announced. The winner (who gets €25,000) will be announced at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October. I’m not familiar with any of these writers, but the exciting thing is that we’ll get a chance to read some English samples on signandsight.com soon. ...
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Genet in Translation
Following on the post about the translations of Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, The Sharp Side has an interesting piece on the English translations of Genet’s work. It all starts from comparing these two translations: Description of Darling: height, 5 ft 9 in, weight 165 lbs, oval face, blond hair, ...
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The Master & Margarita
I stumbled across this site a few years ago and had forgotten about it, but was reminded of it again today by Coudal Partners. It’s a web-based annotation to Bulgakov’s chef-d’oeuvre: These Master & Margarita pages are intended as a web-based multimedia annotation to Bulgakov’s novel. You ...
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Tom McCarthy's Latest
It’s not a translation, but Tom McCarthy is a young British writer I really like. His debut novel Remainder—originally published by Metronome Press before being picked up by Vintage here in the States—is quite impressive, mysterious, and captivating. Scott Esposito at Conversational Reading has more about ...
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Changes at The Nation
According to PW, Adam Shatz, the book review editor at The Nation for the past four years is leaving for the London Review of Books. John Palatella—formerly of Columbia Journalism Review—will be taking over. Sounds like The Nation plans on keeping up its excellent commitment to book coverage. Some changes ...
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Helvetica
We mentioned it Helvetica the movie last month, and today’s NY Sun review has further peaked my interest in seeing this. After watching “Helvetica,” you’ll never look at the world in the same way again. That’s because you’ll suddenly start noticing what this smart, breezy documentary ...
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Weird Searches
The Vertical Weblog is one of my favorites, and today’s post about weird searches that led people to Vertical-Inc.com is hysterical. (For those who don’t know, Vertical publishes contemporary Japanese writers.) And although our list is nowhere near as sexual or strange, there are a few interesting searches that ...
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This Week's PW Reviews
Couple interesting books reviewed in this week’s “Publishers Weekly,” including the latest Lydie Salvayre book, Power of Flies. Salvayre’s fifth novel to be translated into English is a tightly introspective series of first-person confessions by an arrogant murder convict whose life was transformed by ...
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New NYRB
The September 27th issue of the New York Review of Books is now online, and has some interesting articles, including a piece by Christian Caryl on Vladimir Sorokin’s Ice. Over at the Literary Saloon they point out that this issue—the “Fall Books Preview”—is surprisingly lacking in fiction ...
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Coming: The Googlization of Everything
I’m a huge fan of Google—especially of the Google Reader, which has revolutionized the way I use the internet—but even so, am really interested in this project that was just announced on if:book. We’re just a couple of days away from launching what promises to be one of our most important projects ...
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Knopf rejections
The New York Times had a really fantastic article about Knopf’s archives at the University of Texas. It details some of the authors and books they’ve rejected: For almost a century, Knopf has been the gold standard in the book trade, publishing the works of 17 Nobel Prize-winning authors as well as 47 ...
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Hispanic Heritage Month Reading Program
From GalleyCat The Association of American Publishers announced that it has joined forces with Las Comadres Para Las Americas, an informal internet-based group that meets monthly in over 50 US cities and growing, to build connections and community with other Latinas, to launch Reading with Las Comadres. The program is ...
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Steve Wasserman Interview
Critical Mass has a really interesting interview with Steve Wasserman following up on some of the ideas Wasserman wrote about in Goodbye to All That, a long piece on book reviewing he recently published in the Columbia Journalism Review. Both the article and the interview are worth checking out, and although bloggers will ...
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Nobel Prize for Literature
Cafe Babel has a short piece about the history of the Nobel Prize, or to be more specific, a short history of some of the controversies, such as Sartre rejecting the prize, Tolstoy being overlooked, etc. But what caught my eye is this paragraph at the bottom: Today, the Nobel Prize is faced with new accusations of ...
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Quick Follow-Up
This item came out a couple days ago, but in case you were wondering what happened to Polish author Krystian Bala guy who wrote a novel about a murder that was suspiciously similar to an actual unsolved murder—has been found guilty. ...
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Translations of The Master and Margarita
Over at About Last Night there’s an interesting discussion about the merits of the various translations of Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, especially the Mirra Ginzburg one versus the one from Michael Glenny. Seems most people like the Glenny best, although I think both have issues. This follow-up ...
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The End of the Story
Liliana Heker’s El fin de la historia (The End of the Story), is a novel about the Argentine “Dirty War” told through three women: Leonora, a revolutionary in Argentina who is captured, tortured, then sells out her ideals to save herself and her daughter, falling in love with one of her captors and instigating a pr ...
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Israel's Dirty Publishing Secret
The New York Times has a really interesting article today about “Stalags,” “a series of pornographic pocket books called Stalags, based on Nazi themes,” which were best-sellers in the 1960s. The books told perverse tales of captured American or British pilots being abused by sadistic female SS ...
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Vargas Llosa and….Whoopi?
Immediately following an exciting tidbit about Whoopi Goldberg and The View, IHT mentions Mario Vargas Llosa: Mario Vargas Llosa, one of the Spanish-speaking world’s most acclaimed writers, was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of La Rioja in northern Spain. Vargas Llosa, 71, has written more than ...
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A Bit More on the Sony Reader
At The Book Depository, Mark Thwaite has a longish post on the Sony Reader. Most of it is a recap of this review, which E.J. wrote about last week. Mark does make a couple of interesting comments though: I’d like to question why [Google Books and the Sony Reader] dominate publishers’ thoughts so much. ...
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Portugal's Flaubert
The new translation of Eca de Queiros’s The Maias continues to get good coverage, most recently in the International Herald Tribune, which includes a quote from Saramago about how this novel is “the greatest book by Portugal’s greatest ...
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Little More on Calder
The Guardian has a bit more information on the Calder/Oneworld — Gallimard/Minuit conflict. There’s actually not a lot new here, although this story about John Calder illustrates why he’s one of the most interesting individuals in publishing. (Really, there are few more charming people in publishing than ...
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PW on a Couple Translations
This week’s fiction reviews at Publishers Weekly includes a couple reviews of translations worth noting. They gave a starred review to Victor Serge’s The Unforgiving Years, which is forthcoming from New York Review Books, and is a title we’d very much like to review here. The PW reviewer summed it up by ...
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Reminds Me of That Scene from A Heart So White, But Funny
Richard Woolcott, who ran Australia’s foreign service for four years, is publishing a book called Undiplomatic Activities about translation issues in diplomacy. Which sounds potentially boring until you read some of the linguistic screw-ups he cites in the book: Take the Australian diplomat in France who tried ...
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More on Reading in America (And Elsewhere)
Scott Esposito at Conversational Reading took up the recent AP-Ispos findings, comparing the finding that the average American reads 4 books a year to other countries (the U.S. comes out well in this, but there are reasons) and pointing to economics as one of the issues adding to this statistic. If people who read 50 or ...
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Live Online, Jelinek's New Novel
Following on E.J.‘s call to make the texts of books available for free online, comes this announcement today from Serpent’s Tail about Nobel Prize winning author Elfriede Jelinek publishing her latest novel Envy on her website. According to the notice, “Chapters appear on Jelinek’s website as she ...
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E-book follow-on
There were a couple of news items this weekend that are related to my e-book rant of the other day, and which shed a bit more light on the ‘why don’t we give it away’ argument. In The Guardian, Jon Evans tells us why he gives away his books online: Why? Because to quote the publisher Tim ...
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Student Translation Prize
I just found out about this (literally), but for any undergrad or graduate translators from German under the age of 30, here’s some info on the 2008 Susan Sontag Prize for Translation. This $5,000 prize will commission a work of literary translation by a university undergraduate or graduate student under the age ...
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Europe's Coolest Cities
Der Spiegel Online has a fascinating article about the makings of a “cool” city. The six cities listed in the article as “cool” are: Copenhagen, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Dublin, Vienna, and Tallinn. I’ve been to four of the six and agree that there is something special about these places that sets ...
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More Interesting Astrophysical Findings
Although I don’t understand much of anything about physics and astrophysics, there are findings—like the big nothing-- that are fascinating and in some imagistic way, help put our lives in perspective. Here’s another: Supersonic “Rain” Falls on Newborn Star Forming Solar System Deluged ...
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The e-book conundrum
Andrew Hon of Mssv tested out Sony’s e-book reader, and pointed to an article in The Bookseller about the future of digital books. Hon didn’t fancy the Sony reader so much, (“It’s a bit of a mess…and at $350, it’s not worth it”) except that if you ditch the Sony software and load up some ...
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LibraryThing — Two Years Old
LibraryThing,, the online personal book cataloging/social network for readers is celebrating its second birthday, and posted a bunch of interesting statistics about its success. A year ago we had just hit five million books on our birthday, today we’re just a few hours away from 18 million books. We have ...
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NEA's Big Read on XM
From Publishers Weekly: The NEA has partnered with XM Satellite Radio to bring its national community-based reading program, the Big Read, to an even larger audience. An audio version of the program, dubbed The Big Read on XM, will debut September 10 on Sonic Theater, a channel about audiobooks and theater. Hoping ...
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A New Paradiso
The New Yorker tells us about our newest opportunity to get on to the Dante bandwagon: If you haven’t yet read the Divine Comedy—you know who you are—now is the time, because Robert and Jean Hollander have just completed a beautiful translation of the astonishing fourteenth-century poem. The Hollanders’ Inferno ...
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Bookstore Obsolesence?
Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 has an interesting piece today about the future of the bookstores. And according to him, the picture ain’t too rosy: I used to love bookstores — they were magical places where the whole world of information and stories was at your fingertips. But I realized today that the bookstore ...
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Red Lights
In her introduction to this new New York Review Books edition, Anita Brookner nails the Simenon “formula”: The formula is simple but subtle. A life will go wrong, usually because of an element in the protagonist’s make-up which impels him to self-destruct, to willfully seek disgrace, exclusion, ruin in his search ...
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Another Interesting New York Event
Also taking place in New York is a reading and discussion of Mexico: A Traveler’s Literary Companion, which is an anthology of Mexican fiction. The event is Wednesday, September 12, 2007 at 6 pm, at the King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center at NYU and will feature editor CM Mayo, writers Pedro Angel Palou and Monica ...
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My Take on Reading in America
A few days removed from the AP-Ispos survey on reading (or not) in America and John Freeman’s response to this, there are a couple of reactions and ideas that have stuck with me and, I think, are worth fleshing out a bit. First off, John Freeman’s take is not perfect. Obviously, the Reading Room in Las Vegas is a great ...
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Branding for Publishers
Yesterday, Joe Wikert wrote an interesting post about publisher brands in response to a “post by Lissa Warren” on the Huffington Post. Quick, name you favorite book. Now, quick, name who published it. Gotcha, didn’t I? It’s a bit cute, but Warren’s point is ...
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Big Issues at Calder-Oneworld Classics
There’s a lot that could be written about John Calder—both good ad bad. He’s done a lot for world literature, yet has run into issues at various times involving not making royalty payments, going bankrupt, etc. That said, he’s the perfect representative of a classic, old-school publisher who is ...
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Obituary: Edward Seidensticker
As mentioned in the Complete Review, translator from the Japanese Edward Seidensticker passed away at the age of 86. From the obit in The Asahi Shimbun: The professor emeritus at Columbia University in New York translated dozens of Japanese works, but he is perhaps best known for completing a full-length English ...
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Simenon in the Philadelphia Inquirer
Frank Wilson’s review of Simenon’s The Engagement is pretty much just a plot summary, but it does point to the aspect of the book that I found most intriguing: Human beings, as portrayed in this novel, range narrowly from the merely ordinary and banal to the mean-spirited, bitter, and grasping. What makes it ...
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Jose Saramago in the Times Magazine
Fernanda Eberstadt has a lengthly profile of Jose Saramago in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine. Not a lot about his fiction in this piece, but it does present a charming look at the octogenarian Nobel Prize winner, who, apparently, isn’t all that popular: Yet Saramago also often appears to be disliked. ...
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Weekly Roundup — August 24
Highlights from the past week: We ran a bit of the New York Times review of Peter Handke’s latest book, which wasn’t nearly as interesting as the fiction roundup NPR featured Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser as a You Must Read This pick; We found some interesting info about a predecessor to ...
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Nothing To See Here
From AP Astronomers have stumbled upon a tremendous hole in the universe. That’s got them scratching their heads about what’s just not there. The cosmic blank spot has no stray stars, no galaxies, no sucking black holes, not even mysterious dark matter. It is 1 billion light years across of nothing. ...
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Now That's a Bookstore
From Maud Newton’s ongoing series on independent bookstores comes a post from Justine Larbalestier about El Ateneo of Buenos Aires’ Barrio Norte, which looks simply amazing. Their website actually has a short video tour of the store that’s worth drooling over. Why can’t we have stores like this ...
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Stefan Themerson, Amazing Artist
Ready Steady Book just posted an essay by Sophie Lewis—manager of Dalkey Archive’s London operation—on Stefan Themerson—whose books Dalkey reprinted a couple years ago—that’s worth checking out. There’s a lot more about Themerson that can—and should—be said, and there ...
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John Freeman on America's Non-Reading Culture
John Freeman—President of the National Book Critics Circle—has a post at his Guardian books blog about the recent report that 25% of Americans didn’t read a book last year. America has always had one of the lowest literacy rates in the western world. The former book review editor of the LA Times, Steve ...
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Comments: In Case You Missed Them
After seeing how many interesting comments have been posted in the past few weeks, we thought it would be useful to recap these every so often and make sure the useful info gets doesn’t get lost. First off, as Steve Wasserman pointed out, he will be “assigning books for review” at Truthdig and only ...
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Non-return
Set shortly after World War II in London, the book’s narrator is a young man who works as a draughtsman at a prosperous firm, but who dreams of writing poetry about, and for, the working class. His father has simply given up on work following a shipwreck in the Mediterranean in which he was one of the few survivors, and ...
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No Lake Wobegone on BBC Radio 3
Sometimes the cultural divide between the U.S. and UK is staggering: BBC Radio 3 is to air a new play by veteran dramatist Mike Walker, about a Russian journalist arrested by the KGB, as the centrepiece of its autumn drama line-up. The station has given the green light to Walker’s new play ...
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University of Rochester Undergraduate Certificate in Literary Translation
Beginning this fall semester (which is literally upon us), undergraduates at the University of Rochester will be able to receive a Certificate in Literary Translation Studies. This info has been at the bottom of the page since we went live, but for anyone interested, we now have PDFs of the requirements and application ...
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Rentrée Littéraire
For anyone interested in French literature, this is a special time of year. And as cited in Complete Review, here are three overview articles (sorry, all in French) of the 700+ titles about to drop: Le Figaro, Libération, and La République des Lettres. If you find any others of interest, please let us ...
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Bernhard on NPR?
Somewhat surprisingly, Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser is one of NPR’s ‘You Must Read This’ summer picks. Claire Messud (“She has commented, about her current life, ‘Who knew there could be so much poop?’”) picked it. Then I picked up The Loser, and was not only mesmerized, and ...
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Sebald and Bolaño
To continue our wall-to-wall Bolaño coverage: Vertigo, the blog that collects all things Sebald, points us to two new books about Sebald. We already talked about the first one, but the second one may be even more interesting. It’s called The Archimedean Author: Roberto Bolaño, W.G. Sebald, and Narrative After ...
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Pavel Astakhov Update
Following up on yesterday’s post about possible charges being brought against Astakhov for his depiction of Russian police in his novel Raider, the UPI reports that prosecutors have decided not to pursue this. ...
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A reader responds to the Handke review
Michael Roloff responded to our post about the review of Peter Handke’s CROSSING THE SIERRA DE GREDOS in the comments, but I think it deserves to be posted to the front page: It is time readers of the New York Times Book Review were made aware of Handke, the prose writer, having gone through something like half a ...
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Rain Taxi Summer Edition
The second half of Rain Taxi‘s online Summer Issue is now available. Included in this issue is an essay by Clayton Eshleman on “Translating Cesar Vallejo,” which contains a few interesting observations about the challenges of translation: The temptation in Kyoto at this time was to tinker with ...
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The Benefits of Summer Hours?
From the New York Times Moved by claims that it will help the metabolism and productivity of his fellow citizens, President Hugo Chávez said clocks would be moved forward by half an hour at the start of 2008. He announced the change on his Sunday television program, accompanied by his highest-ranking science adviser, ...
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Another Taslima Nasreen Update
The new issue of Outlook India has a comprehensive article (and awesome action pic) by Saba Naqvi Bhaumik on this situation, explaining the political underpinnings of this situation. The origins of the Taslima-bashing episode lie not just in the writer’s image. It is also linked to the politics of Hyderabad. This ...
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Bulgakov in The Guardian
Over the weekend, The Guardian ran James Meek’s intro to the new edition of A Dog’s Heart by Mikhail Bulgakov. Generally overshadowed by The Master and Margarita, A Dog’s Heart sounds really interesting, especially in Meek’s description of an underground reading that was infiltrated by secret police ...
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Another Author in Legal Trouble
Via GalleyCat: In a case that will no doubt be watched around the globe, Russian writer Pavel Astakhov is facing possible libel charges for the contents of his novel Raider, reports RadioFreeEurope. Moscow city prosecutors have already questioned Astakhov at the behest of Ivan Glukhov, head of the city police’s ...
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Predecessor to W. G. Sebald
Scott Esposito brought this interesting post about Georges Rodenbach’s Bruges-la-Morte to our attention. Some of the photographs in the Max Ferber section of W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants harken back to what is probably the earliest work of fiction ever to embed photographs, Georges Rodenbach’s Bruges-la-Morte. ...
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Interesting Approach to Marketing
At The Guardian, Ben Myers has a posting today about Billy Childish’s The Idiocy of Idears, 300 copies of which were hidden in London bookstores: Entitled The Idiocy Of Idears, a book of jottings by “schoolboy Gustav Claudius”, it had no ISBN number and no barcode. Nor was there any indication of who ...
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NY Times Fiction Roundup
There’s a great fiction chronicle Sunday’s New York Times Book Review by Alison McCulloch. A few international writers are featured, including two of my favorites: Jean Echenoz and Robert Walser. Ravel by Jean Echenoz has been getting some decent praise, and Ms. McCulloch calls it a “beautifully musical ...
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Weekly Roundup — August 17
Highlights from this week: The St. Louis Cardinals swept the Milwaukee Brewers, and as of this morning, are only 2.5 games out of first. This has absolutely nothing to do with international literature; We took a look at the Espresso Book Machine (Frankenstein machine prints books!), gave a bit of love to DailyLit ...
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Little Bit of Friday Fun
We’re going off-topic a bit today, but who can blame us? It’s a beautiful 75 degree day, no one in Europe is working this month, our Frankfurt schedule is packed, and the resurgent St. Louis Cardinals are in the thick of pennant race. (Can’t get my hopes up yet . . .) So instead of anything serious about ...
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The Faces and How We Typed Them
It’s not comprehensive. It’s debatable. It’s hardly adequate, really. Nevertheless, if you like font pornography, then this well-illustrated article/list of great typefaces should still be pretty masturbatory. It’s difficult to tell if they are supposed to be ordered by rank (I hope not), ...
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Seasonal Catalogues : Seasonal Catalogs
Who doesn’t enjoy reading through publisher’s new seasonal catalogues? Well, the Design Observer certainly doesn’t not like it. Read this and be reminded why these catalogues are about literature, design, and marketing. In this case, it also happens to be a bit self-serving, but the sentiment ...
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Obituary: Luigi Meneghello
Via The Guardian: Luigi Meneghello, who has died aged 85, was one of the most interesting, and according to some critics, the best contemporary Italian writer. And here’s a bit about his writing: The fascist convictions of his teens disintegrated quickly and Meneghello, who had been called up for military ...
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We're #35!
I’m sure academic offices across the country are abuzz today about the release of the U.S. News and World Report 2008 rankings. I have nothing much to say about this questionable ranking system, except to mention that University of Rochester came in at 35, ahead of University of Wisconsin, University of California-San ...
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VP Book Club
This news is a couple days old, but Viking Penguin recently launched a new online resource for reading groups: Unique features of www.vpbookclub.com include the ability to personalize the site’s homepage, regular posts from authors, editors, and sales and marketing people at Viking and Penguin, as well as a ...
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Latest Review: Isaac Rosa
Our latest review is of Isaac Rosa’s Another Damn Novel about the Spanish Civil War!. Interesting sounding book from an interesting young writer, and besides, anything with an exclamation point in the title must be awesome. ...
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The Ever Impressive J-Lit Center
I just received Contemporary Japanese Writers Vol. 1 from the J-Lit Center and realized that Three Percent has been totally lacking in love for this amazing cultural organization. First off, their website has recently gone through a number of changes, and is quickly becoming an incredibly valuable resource for info on ...
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Peguin UK redesign
Penguin UK has re-designed their website. When Philip asked me to write a short blog post (and it will be short, I promise) about the redesign of the www.penguin.co.uk website, he mentioned a few things he was particularly interested in; the changes to the site, the reasons for those, the challenges faced and the role of ...
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We Await Silent Tristero's Empire
From the San Jose Mercury News: Bob Mayo and Mark Snesrud, solved the San Jose semaphore – a communication mode that uses moving flags or lights to send messages. That’s the public art mystery message being flashed in a series of four changing symbols from atop the Adobe tower on Almaden Boulevard. The ...
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German Book Prize
The longlist for the 2007 German Book Prize was announced yesterday. (See the full list after the jump.) Here’s what spokesperson for the judges, Felicitas von Lovenberg had to say about the selection of these 20 books from the 117 submitted titles: “Without allowing ourselves to be seduced by celebrity or ...
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Obvious Omission
Yesterday there were two reviews of Bruce Watson’s new book Sacco and Vanzetti: The Men, the Murders and the Judgment of Mankind (one appeared in the New York Times, the other in the New York Sun) and both neglected to mention the best book about S&V — Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die! by Mark Binelli. Seriously, this ...
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Typography Documentary
Fade Theory has a post about the documentary Helvetica, which is now available for preorder. Even for someone not fascinated by typography, this sounds like a must see: Helvetica is a feature-length independent film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture. It looks at the proliferation of one ...
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Intriguing New Distribution Method
As reported by Publishers Weekly, DailyLit has both Perseus Books Group and Globe Pequot to its pay service, which will be launching later this fall. Of all the technological innovations impacting the book industry—Espresso Book Machine, Sony’s eReader—this is the one I find most appealing. As a reader, ...
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Mailer and the LongPen?
They got Norman Mailer to use the LongPen. You know how we feel about the LongPen, so it was good to see they got a little dig in at the end of the article: “...even if many of us made a respectful early exit rather than watch the great man submitting to the arcane indignities of the LongPen.” ...
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José Maria Eça de Queirós
Benjamin Lytal is at it again, this time reviewing José Maria Eça de Queirós’ The Maias. He is considered the greatest Portuguese writer, and I was just thinking about checking into him; Agualusa kept bringing him up in The Book of Chameleons. As usual, New Directions is way ahead of me. I wish they weren’t ...
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A Broken Mirror
Although most of Mercè Rodeoreda’s novels have been translated and published in English, and although she’s become one of—if not the—most important Catalan writers of the twentieth century, it still feels like her work is greatly overlooked in this country. Which is a shame, since her writing is fantastic, and ...
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Follow-up to WTF? Article With Louder WTF?
Last week, E.J. posted about poet and novelist Taslima Nasrin, who was attacked at her book launch. Well, according to today’s Arts, Briefly in the New York Times things have gotten even crazier: The Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasreen will face criminal charges for what the authorities called her anti-Islamic ...
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"By Royalties, We Mean Special Discounts on Purchases at Our Stores"
In an interesting move to energize its publishing program, Borders is holding a fiction writing contest for its 30,000 employees, with the winner receiving a book deal to have his/her book published by State Street Press. The deadline for submissions is January 31, 2008, and Borders Group’s executive v-p for ...
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African Writing
Complete Review, which is active every day of the week, posted over the weekend about Afam Akeh and African Writing, the web magazine he’s editing. This is the first I’ve heard of African Writing, but I’m very impressed. There’s a lot of interesting content, including a list of 50 contemporary ...
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Indian Lit, Part III
Maria Misra’s blog at The Guardian today completes our Indian Lit trifecta. The English language itself is the focus of this piece: Nationalists saw English as one of the chains that bound India to servitude and hoped that once the Raj was sent packing its language would quickly follow. And, The success ...
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Peter Esterhazy at the Lucerne Festival
The Lucerne Festival started over the weekend, and Hungarian author Peter Esterhazy gave the opening speech. (Warning—link is to a pdf document.) Like Esterhazy’s books, the speech is playful and intelligent, and engaged with ideas of History. Here’s a sample of an interesting bit from the end: Europe ...
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That's One Way of Doing Business
A number of places are abuzz about Australian bookstore chain Angus & Robertson’s new “pay to play” policy requiring small- and mid-sized Australian publishers and distributors to pay between $2,500 and $100,000 (that’s in Aussie dollars, FYI) in order to have their books stocked. The Sydney Morning ...
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Espresso Book Machine
Fade Theory drew my attention to this promotional video for On Demand Books: It’s not the most exciting of pitches, but it’s interesting after talking about it for the past few weeks to actually see this thing in action. . . . And “this thing” might be the best way to describe it. Much more of a ...
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Weekly Roundup — August 10
Hightlights from this week on Three Percent: Industry-wide, the big news of the week was the Booker longlist, which has been described as “quiet”; Stuff finally came out from Dalkey Archive. Namely, the Spring 2007 D.A. Annual issue of RCF came out (disappointing), as did CONTEXT 20 Speaking of ...
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Still Not a Believer
Despite Bookninja’s report that over 700 people lined up to get books signed by the LongPen at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, I still refuse to believe this thing is going to catch on. For those unfamiliar few, the LongPen is a huge machine that allows readers in one place to “communicate” ...
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Persian Literature
The current Quarterly Feature at ArteEast is It Deserves and Commands Your Attention, a fascinating collection of Persian fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. Here’s editor Richard Jeffrey Newman summary of the contents: I will not pretend that the poems, essays and stories gathered here represent anything other ...
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Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
The Elegant Variation is giving away a copy of Wizard of the Crow by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, the exiled Kenyan author who now teaches at UC-Irvine. Here’s an interview with Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o—talking about Wizard of the Crown—on the Leonard Lopate ...
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The Model
Lars Saabye Christensen’s last novel to be translated into English, The Half Brother, won the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize in 2002 (the year after one of my favorite novelists, Jan Kjaerstad), and was shortlisted for the 2005 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. The epic family saga, which runs to some 700 ...
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The Open Library
Scott McLemee at Inside Higher Ed has a short interview with Aaron Swartz, who in only 21, has already helped create RSS, developed Infogami, and is working on a new project called The Open Library. Open Library is a new online tool for finding information about books – even (perhaps especially) for titles that are ...
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Andrey Kurkov and Language
Today’s SignandSight.com calls attention to this article by Andrey Kurkov from Welt Online (in German) about the language war going on in Ukraine. All these years I have protested against the plans to raise Russian to the second state language. Then finally I understood that everything was just a political game. ...
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Ambitious Slavic Literary Project
We posted about CONTEXT 20 finally being online yesterday, and today, Complete Review points out a really interesting idea mentioned in the Letter from Macedonia: Pen Centers from eleven Slavic countries selected 110 novels from these countries written from 1989 to the present (ten novels from each country), in October ...
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Illegal Translation
I’m not a fan of posting about Harry Potter, but this is pretty funny and tragic all at once: A French teenager suspected of posting his own complete translation of the latest Harry Potter book on the internet has been arrested. And what’s especially interesting: Aix prosecutor Olivier Rothe alleges ...
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More on Sergio Pitol
Following up on an earlier post, I wanted to point out that there’s also a great interview with Sergio Pitol in La Jornada Semanal from July 29. There he talks about his grandmother who he calls “una senora de rancho” who used to sit him down with his brother and tell them tall tales over lunch: her travels ...
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Catalonia at the Frankfurt Book Fair
This story has been around for months, but the International Herald Tribune has a piece on the troubles Catalonia is having getting writers to attend the Frankfurt Book Fair this year, where Catalonia is the Guest of Honor. This is one of the rare times that the FBF chose to honor a region rather than a country, and ...
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CONTEXT #20
Issue number 20 of Dalkey Archive’s CONTEXT is available online now, in part. For some reason, the only items available online are articles about Dalkey’s books, or excerpts from those books. Without the potentially most interesting content—the frustratingly absent “Letter from Macedonia” and ...
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The Literary Translation Situation in Brunei Darussalam
Michael at Complete Review has a great post this morning about the literary scene in Brunei Darussalam. Recently, there was a meeting of high ranking representatives to “express their concern over the future of the literature scenario in Brunei Darussalam.” They proposed for major works of local literary ...
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Antonio Munoz Molina in the NY Sun
Thankfully, Antonio Munoz Molina’s In Her Absence has been getting at least some good attention. Jon Welch, buyer at Talking Leaves, mentioned this book in glowing terms to me a few weeks ago, and today’s review in the NY Sun—the bastion of excellent reviews of international fiction—makes it sound ...
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The Book of Chameleons
Félix Ventura, an albino, is an antique book dealer and a ‘seller of pasts,’ or genealogist as he tells strangers, who fabricates impressive genealogies for those Luandans who feel that their social station demands a more elevated (or more politically correct, given the bloody and recent revolutionary past ...
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This Week's PW Reviews
The August 6th set of Publisher Weekly fiction reviews are now online and feature a couple of interesting books in translation. The first is Cries in the Drizzle (which sounds like a translated title) by Yu Hua “depicts a family’s life in the Zhejiang province of Maoist China during the 1970s.” According ...
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Magical Realism and Lazy Writing
This week’s The Hindu has an article by Tabish Khair about “The Laziness of Magical Realism” that touches on his belief that writers are using elements of magical realism as “shortcuts to narratability.” He doesn’t quite come out and directly say this, but the sentiment behind the piece ...
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Chris Power on Proust in The Guardian
Chris Power has been getting the Proust habit. I have this delusion that I’ll read Proust in French one day. First, I have to move somewhere beyond the passé composé. When I do learn French, however, and when I know it well enough to make more than ‘one-page-per-day’ progress in decoding ...
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Weekly Roundup — August 3
Highlights from this week on Three Percent: We raved about the ever-fascinating UbuWeb, especially UbuWeb Radio and the Dali movie homage to Raymond Roussel; One of my all-time favorite TV shows is Lost, and I gleefully fed my favorite addiction by posting the new Dharma video, which first aired appeared at ...
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Brooklyn Lit Life Series
Written Nerd just launched Brooklyn Lit Life, an ongoing series about, well, literary life in Brooklyn. Her first piece is an interview with Johnny Temple, co-founder and publisher of Akashic Books and a member of Girls Against Boys. It’s an interesting interview (Johnny’s the first person from Brooklyn ...
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Green Apple Books in San Francisco
My old college roommate was the first person to tell me about the general greatness of Green Apple Books, and it’s nice to see the store so wonderfully profiled in Maud Newton’s series on independent bookstores. ...
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Latest Review: Quim Monzo
Quim Monzo is a great name for a writer (and maybe a baseball player), and our latest review is of his novel The Enormity of the Tragedy, which is about a man with a constant erection. (Insert male stereotype joke ...
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The Enormity of the Tragedy
As described in the jacket copy, the plot of The Enormity of the Tragedy reads like a start to a dirty joke: Ramon-Maria, an aging trumpet player, wakes up with an indefatigable erection. Hilarity ensues. But actually it doesn’t. Not to say the book isn’t funny, or that the set-up couldn’t be treated as ...
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Amazon Takes to Advance Marketing
Amazon Vine is a new program that Amazon.com is launching to put free copies of forthcoming books into the hands of their most vocal reviewers. As they put it: Vine helps our vendors generate awareness for new and pre-release products by connecting them with the voice of the Amazon community: our reviewers. Vine ...
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Another Writer Deserving of Translation
Who claims he always thought he’d write comedies for the theater? Who says his real passion has always been the dramatic arts? No one else but Sergio Pitol, the Mexican short story writer and novelist whose most recent bestsellers have included the 2005 Premio Cervantes work of fiction titled El mago de Viena [The ...
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Espresso Book Machine
Back before this blog was live, I posted a couple things about Jason Epstein’s book revolution and the Espresso Book Machine. Well, it’s back in the New York Times today, following a demonstration in a midtown branch of the New York Public Library. The machine, which can “produced a book from digital code ...
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Zimbabwe Book Fair
As Orthofer notes at the Literary Saloon it doesn’t sound like this fair is going all that well: By end of business yesterday, about 102 stands had been taken up by more than 80 exhibitors, mainly Zimbabweans. (Whole article available via The ...
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Guardian World Literature Tour: Ireland
This month the Guardian World Literature Tour focuses on Ireland. Here’s their summary of how the tour works: And, as it’s been a while since the tour last stopped by, here’s a quick reminder of how it works. It goes like this: every few weeks we post asking for suggestions of the best books and authors ...
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Really Shouldn't Get Involved
But man, Robert Olen Butler needs some p.r. intervention asap. In case you haven’t been following this story with baited breath (how could one resist? this is some of the craziest shit I’ve seen in a long time), the other day, Robert Olen Butler sent out a pretty insane e-mail to all his grad students ...
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Melville House Sale
On the heels of this morning’s post about Missing Soluch, I just found out that Melville House is having a special Summer Sale.. So now you can get Mahmoud Dowlatabadi’s book for 30% off . . . (Thanks to Ed Champion for calling this to our attention, and I too wonder if this has anything to do with the ...
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I'm With Ed On This
Like Ed Park, I can’t get enough of the periodic stories about China’s market for counterfeit translations, like the one in today’s New York Times No one can say with any certainty what the full tally is, but there are easily a dozen unauthorized Harry Potter titles on the market here already, and that ...
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New Writing Ventures Awards
The Guardian has an article about the recently announced shortlist for the New Writing Ventures awards. The New Writing Ventures awards, launched two years ago by Booktrust and the New Writing Partnership, are open to all previously unpublished writers of fiction, non-fiction and poetry and are intended to help nurture ...
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Besides Harry Potter . . .
So besides Harry Potter, what are Mexicans reading this summer? Novelist Jorge Volpi’s collection of essays México: Lo que todo ciudadano quisiera (no) saber de su patria (Mexico: What every citizen would [not] like to know about her/his homeland), is hot and number #1 on lists. But the real news is Fernanda Melchor’s ...
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Another Review of Walser
This week’s New Yorker contains a substantial, informed review by Benjamin Kunkel of Robert Walser’s The Assistant. It’s a very interesting piece, from someone who obviously knows a lot about Walser’s life and writing. Great to see this book getting such good attention, especially in a place like the ...
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The Death of Publishers
Mark Thwaite has an interesting post on The Bookseller.com about an ongoing discussion at Mssv about the “Death of Publishers.” The basic sentiment at Mssv is that as soon as it’s as easy to “rip” books (converting them into a digital, transferable format) as it is to rip CDs or movies, ...
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Elias Khoury in the Guardian
Interesting article in The Guardian (one of the best papers for arts and books coverage, in my opinion) on Elias Khoury and his fears about chaos in Lebanon. Khoury is most well-known here for Gate of the Sun, which Archipelago Books published to great acclaim. (The paperback edition —a RTW 2007 book—is now ...
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The Engagement
At least in terms of output, Georges Simenon is a Herculean writer. He makes Joyce Carol Oates look like a slacker, having written over 400 novels and short story collections in his lifetime. And if that weren’t enough, he added to his mythic stature through fun games like this: In 1927, Georges Simenon, the ...
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Village Voice on Robert Walser
I have to admit that I’m hesitant to post anything about the Village Voice on Three Percent, since I’m still pissed about what they did to Ed Park and the books section, and I think that David Blum set the Voice back a decade through his general, overwhelming incompetence. (I mean, really. Check out this article ...
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Everything Thomas Bernhard Wrote Sounds Interesting
Too bad directors aren’t always up to the task. Via signandsight.com: Thomas Bernhard wrote his first full-length play “Ein Fest für Boris” ( A party for Boris) in 1966 for the Salzburg Festival, however the then president considered the grotesque drama about legless cripples “too dreary”: ...
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And Continuing the Self-Indulgent Lost Thread
From Entertainment Weekly‘s ComicCon coverage: Though loath to reveal any more details about season 4, [Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof] did tip off fans to a few, often cryptic, coming attractions. Jack and Claire will likely figure out that they’re brother and sister. We’ll find out why Ben came to ...
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UbuWeb Has Damn Cool Stuff
I regret not exploring UbuWeb more in the past. . . . In addition to their new streaming audio feed, today there’s a post about Salvador Dali’s Impressions de la haute Mongolie. Hommage a Raymond Roussel (1974-75) complete with full video. The “videografía”, written in collaboration with its ...
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The Beauty of History
As a teenager, I watched on TV the crushing of the Prague Spring by Soviet tanks. The year was 1968. The Soviet Union put an end to an attempt by a purportedly sovereign state to introduce a milder brand of Communism. Conscripts from the Baltic republics were also forced to take part in this blatant act of Soviet ...
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Swedish Academy Intrigues
Literary Saloon has an interesting piece about the recent passing of Swedish poet Lars Forssell (1928-2007). The loss of Forssell is one thing, the fact that he was Chair No. 4 on the committee that decides the Nobel Prize for Literature is another . . . All of this is recapped in the article mentioned above, which ...
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Interview with Christian Bok
One of my favorite contemporary experimental poets is Christian Bök (pronounced “Book”), and the recent interview with him in Postmodern Culture about his “Xenotext Experiment” is pretty fascinating. Eunoia is the book that got Bok the most attention. Probably best to let Coach House describe ...
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Crazy Norwegian Poll
Complete Review has an interesting post today about a recent poll in which readers voted on the best Norwegian novel of all time. Ibsen? Hamsun? Undset? Lars Saabye Christensen? Jan Kjaerstad? All losers. The winner was Gert Nygardshaug’s Mengele Zoo, a mystery novel by an author Michael Orthofer hasn’t even ...
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Mijenko Jergovic, "The Ideal Yugoslavian"
Signandsight.com has an interesting article on Balkan identity by Mijenko Jergovic, the author of Sarajevo Marlboro, along with a number of other books. This essay is totally different in tone and style, but it brings to mind a number of things Dubravka Urgresic writes about in her essays. Especially the pieces in ...
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Notebooks of Marguerite Duras
P.O.L. has published an edition of the notebooks of Marguerite Duras, someone who I have only recently begun to read. I feel ambivalent about reading ostensibly private material, although, truthfully, if it’s an author I care about, I invariably seek out their notebooks or journals. I suppose once an author opens up ...
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She Makes a Good Point
This morning, Jennifer Howard posted a nice article about Three Percent and Open Letter on the Chronicle of Higher Education blog. Which is fantastic for us, although this line set me to thinking: In the meantime, maybe someone will come up with a better phrase than “international literature,” which is about as ...
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Curious Idea
In September Vintage UK is relaunching its Vintage Classics line, and to promote this, ten Vintage Twins will be made available. A Vintage Twin—in case you’re wondering—“consists of two books: a specially designed limited edition of one modern classic title and one established classic work. The books ...
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Another Interesting Writer in the Sun
What is it with the books coverage in the NY Sun? Totally makes the daily Times look like a provincial rag . . . Anyway, Benjamin Ivry has a review of Victor Segalen’s Steles, a collection of prose poems just out from Wesleyan University Press in today’s Sun. I personally don’t know much about Segalen, ...
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