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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 ...

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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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 ...

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 ...

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! ...

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 ...

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 ...