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Why This Book Should Win – Street of Thieves by BTBA Judge George Carroll

George Carroll is the World Literature Editor of Shelf Awareness and an independent publishers’ representative based in the Pacific Northwest. Street of Thieves – Mathias Énard, Translated by Charlotte Mandell Open Letter Books Last year, I advanced Mahi Binebine’s Horses of God, tr. from the French by Lulu ...

"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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

"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 ...