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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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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Stone Upon Stone
It doesn’t take that many pages to figure out that the narrator of Stone Upon Stone is a womanizing, egotistical douche bag. Through a hyperbolic and highly digressive retelling of his life (ironically centered on the construction of a tomb), main man Szymek Pietruszka makes it clear that he is known by all around him ...
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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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Latest Review: "The Chukchi Bible" by Yuri Rytkheu
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Kaija Straumanis on Yuri Rytkheu’s The Chukchi Bible, translated from the Russian by Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse and soon to be available from Archipelago Books. Rytkheu is one of the only (if not the only) Chukchi writers to be translated into English. His A Dream ...
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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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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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