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“You Should Have Left” by Daniel Kehlmann [Why This Book Should Win]

This entry in the “Why This Book Should Win” series is from Jenny Zhao, an undergrad student here at the University of Rochester. You Should Have Left by Daniel Kehlmann, translated from the German by Ross Benjamin (Germany, Pantheon) The premise of You Should Have Left is a familiar one, not all that different ...

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 ...

"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 ...

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, ...

Latest Review: Job by Joseph Roth

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Brady Evan Walker on Joseph Roth’s Job, which was recently retranslated by Ross Benjamin and published by Archipelago Books. Brady Evan Walker is a writer who splits his time unequally between New Orleans and Brooklyn, constantly on the run from the horrors of ...

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, ...

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, ...