Death by Poetry and The Lies about Me
I have a litany of reasons for why I’m combining a few posts here and writing a shorter, more condensed, straightforward post than most of the others. Baby (always an excuse), other obligations—such as the Best Translated Book Award longlists announcement and a bachelor party in which “what happens in Boiceville, stays ...
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“Memoirs of a Polar Bear” by Yoko Tawada [Why This Book Should Win]
Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...
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Polar Bears and Cyborg Turtles: Some Non-Human Narrative Perspectives [BTBA 2017]
This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is by reader, writer, and BTBA judge Rachel Cordasco. For more information on the BTBA, “like” our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter. And check back here each week for a new post by one of the judges. I’ve only come across two books this year that ...
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Susan Bernofsky on The Marketplace of Ideas
This week’s Marketplace of Ideas features an hour-long interview with super-translator Susan Bernofsky about Robert Walser, Yoko Tawada, Kobo Abe, and “the uses of literary hybridity.” Definitely worth listening to (and subscribing to on iTunes—this is a consistently good podcast), and Susan’s ...
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Yoko Tawada on Ideograms and Dostoevsky
For all its noise, Facebook can still be a great way of keeping up with what your friends are working on. For instance, over the weekend, Susan Bernofsky posted about a Yoko Tawada she recently translated for the “Japan Focus” issue of the“Asian-Pacific Journal.”:http://japanfocus.org/ The article ...
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Interview with Susan Bernofsky
Very interesting interview with Susan Bernofsky (“widely considered to be one of the best English translators of German literature today,” who has translated Robert Walser, Jenny Erpenbeck, and Yoko Tawada, among others) in The Brooklyn Rail. Theoretically, this interview is supposed to be about her forthcoming ...
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Bookstore of the Month: The Booksmith (San Francisco)
We’re a couple days behind, but this month’s featured bookstore is The Booksmith in San Francisco’s historic Haight Ashbury neighborhood. The store opened in 1976 by Gary Frank, who recently sold the store to Christin Evans and Praveen Madan. The Booksmith has a long history of hosting great events, and ...
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