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: "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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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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The Passing of a Publishing Great
Barney Rosset, one of the most important publishers of the twentieth century, passed away yesterday. What he did for literature, for free speech, for Grove Press, for any number of young literati that he inspired, can not be summed up in any single post or obituary. I did have the honor (thanks to Margarita Shalina) to meet ...
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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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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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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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