This week’s podcast is remarkable both for its complete lack of curse words (not even kidding), and for its very professional discussion about Garth Hallberg’s recent essay Why Write Novels at All? that appeared in the New York Times Magazine. We were fortunate enough to get Garth in on this podcast so that he could expand on some of his ideas and observations about a few contemporary American novelists who tend to get lumped together: Franzen, DFW, Eugenides, Zadie Smith, etc.

Garth’s a very smart thinker, and this is a really interesting conversation about the “point” of writing novels (to make you feel less alone?) and weaves off into discussions about the American character-driven aesthetic, and why we read at all.

(As an entertaining complement to this podcast, you should check out this post describing the very humorous battle I had with Skype just to be able to call Garth’s phone. It’s well worth it. I promise. And further proves that Chloë letter-writing skills are inherited.)

This week’s music is Landline by Oberhofer, which has been getting some play on KCRW.

As always you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes by clicking here. To subscribe with other podcast downloading software, such as Google’s Listen, copy the following link.

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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. She’s graduating this spring and hoping to find a job in publishing. (HINT.)

Black Cat has published three of Ammaniti’s novels, including I’ll Steal You Away, which was longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.

Here’s the opening of Carley’s review:

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 truth—“I retreated in defeat, feeling like I had committed a murder.” Beginning with a twenty-four-year old Lorenzo unfolding a letter from his half-sister Olivia in a coffee-shop, the rest of the novella, gives a flashback account of how, ten years earlier, he took the opportunity provided by the lie to hide out in a neglected cellar attached to his family’s apartment building, where he is temporarily freed from the paranoid judgments of the adult world.

The teen-angst, adolescent narrative is not unchartered territory for Italian author Niccolò Ammaniti, whose past novels include I’m Not Scared, a coming-of-age and suspense hybrid narrative, translated into thirty-five languages, and As God Commands, which received Italy’s most prestigious literary award, the Premio Strega. Born in Rome in 1966 to a professor of developmental psychopathology, Ammaniti is often praised for his psychological lucidity and is known for exploring relationships between generation-gapped characters.

Click here to read the full review.

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This may be thanks to Bolano and his massive appeal, but it seems (to me at least), like Spanish literature is going through a sort of a “Second Boom.” Not so much in terms of a shared aesthetic, but in terms of having captured the imaginations of American publishers. In addition to standards like Javier Marias and Fernando del Paso, over the past few years works from Evelio Rosero, Alejandro Zambra, Eloy Urroz, Jorge Volpi, Cesar Aira, Santiago Roncagliolo, Carlos Gamerro, Sergio Chejfec, and Enrique Vila-Matas have been published in English translation, and have received both great critical attention and a decent-sized readership.

And that’s just in the fiction world . . . Additionally, there have been a number of collections of poetry published, along with Granta’s “Best of the Young Spanish-Language Novelists” issue and the forthcoming The Future Is Not Ours anthology.

All of this is a brief (and rather vague) prelude to talking about Juan Gabriel Vasquez, the author of The Informers and the more recently publishing The Secret History of Costaguana. I’ve had Secret History on my shelf for months, but haven’t had a chance to get to it yet. Well, after exchanging a few emails with Jeremy Osner (who runs this blog) about this book, I think it’s about to move up my “to read” pile . . .

Jeremy was blown away by this novel, in addition to writing a short review (see below), he translated (with Anne McLean’s editorial guidance), a piece by Vasquez on How to Read Novels:

I keep wondering why we do it: why would an adult devote his time, his mental energies, his moral intelligence to reading about things that never happened to people who never existed; how could this activity be so important, so vital, that this person would voluntarily withdraw from real life to carry it out. I’ve come across a few answers over the years, some of them in conversations with other addicted readers, but mostly in books here and there along the way. And indeed, the most recent of these books is truly marvelous: The Naïve and Sentimental Novelist consists of six essays in which Orhan Pamuk seeks to answer one crucial question: What happens to us when we read (and write) novels? This book is the most illuminating, most stimulating, most abundant examination of this difficult topic that I’ve read in years. I can do no less than to offer this urgent call to readers.

“I have learned by experience that there are many ways to read a novel,” says Pamuk. “We read sometimes logically, sometimes with our eyes, sometimes with our imagination, sometimes with a small part of our mind, sometimes the way we want to, sometimes the way the book wants us to, and sometimes with every fiber of our being.” In other words: there are no two identical readers of the same novel; not even two identical readings. And this fact, which seems so obvious, is what can explain the effects, the intimate, unpredictable effects the novel can have on us. What are these effects? Pamuk says we read the way we drive a car, pressing the pedals and shifting gears while watching the signals and traffic and the landscape around us: our intellect moves in a thousand and one directions in every instant. With part of our mind we do the simplest thing: follow the story. But readers of “serious” novels are doing something more: are looking constantly for the secret center of the novel, for that revelation the novel seeks to bring to light, which cannot be summarized, which can only be expressed just as the novel expresses it. Sábato was once asked what he meant to say in On Heroes and Tombs. Sábato replied, “If I could have said it any other way, I would never have written the book.”

You can read the rest of the piece here and all of Vasquez’s weekly columns here.

(I think it’s fitting that I’m posting this today, since that bit above loosely ties into the Very Professional Podcast that we’re posting later today.)

Going back to the book itself, here’s Jeremy’s summary:

The Secret History of Costaguana (2011) is Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s second novel to be translated into English, following 2009’s The Informers. It is a captivating book, the very best kind of historical novel: Vásquez has researched meticulously a corner of history that may be unfamiliar to many readers (as it was to me); he draws connections between that corner and the broader currents of world history and the history of literature; and he does so playfully, inquisitively, accepting none of the strands of historical narrative as immutable fact.

Vásquez’ chosen topic is the first attempt to build a canal in the Panamanian province of Colombia, in the 1880’s. One of the people who was in that corner of the world during those years was Joseph Conrad, a key literary influence for Vásquez, who used his observations of Colombia as the basis for his novel Nostromo, set in the fictional country of Costaguana. Vásquez’ narrator Juan Altamirano crosses paths with Conrad in Colombia, and again many years later in London, and he sets his own South American voice up in opposition to the colonial voice of Conrad.

And so we get a beautifully-drawn picture of Colombia and Panama during a critical point in their history, and in the history of their relationship with the US; and interlaced into this picture we get the novelist’s statement of his influences and his literary education. (For more of the latter, be sure to read Vásquez excellent essay on literary influence, Misconceptions Surrounding Gabriel García Márquez.) Vásquez’ powerful, enchanting prose finds an able translator in Anne McLean.

He also directed my attention to a few things about Vasquez on The Guardian, including this podcast, and this write up by Maya Jaggi.

But of all this, one of the coolest bits from Vasquez in this quote that Jeremy found in his book chat at The Guardian: “I have a tendency to trust translators, mainly because nobody does it for the money.”

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The February newsletter from the Chinese-literature centric Paper Republic has an interesting write-up of the “Future Masters” contest—a competition organized by People’s Literature magazine, Shanda Literature, and a media company from Chengdu, to identify 20 of the best young Chinese writers.

Here’s a link to the Paper Republic news item, and listed below you’ll find the list of the 20 authors along with links to any info about them available on Paper Republic.

• Feng Tang 冯唐

• Zhang Yueran 张悦然

• Di An 笛安

• Qiao Ye 乔叶

• Lu Min 鲁敏

• Sheng Keyi 盛可以

• Wei Hui 卫慧

• Ge Liang 葛亮

• Zhu Wenying 朱文颖

• Li Hao 李浩

• Wang Shiyue 王十月

• Tangjia Sanshao 唐家三少

• Cai Jun 蔡骏

• Yan Ge 颜歌

• Ji Wenjun 计文君

• Teng Xiaolan 滕肖澜

• Lu Kui 吕魁

• Lu Nei 路内

• A Yi 阿乙

• Zhang Chu 张楚

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The latest addition to our “Review Section”: is a piece by Phillip Witte on Javier Marias’s While the Women Are Sleeping, which is translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa and available from New Directions.

Phil is one of our regular reviewers, and one of our former interns. As mentioned in the review, he also interned at New Directions, and is currently working for the Plutzik Foundation, where he’s running their poetry blog, A Fistful of Words. (Definitely check out the blog—Phil’s a great writer and great person and this deserves more attention.)

I believe Marias has a new book coming out in the not-too-distant future, but some unnnamable agent (as in, his name should never be spoken out loud for fear of repercussions sinister and royalty related), sold the rights to this (and some of the ND backlist) to a Big Six publisher. So forget that book and read While the Women Are Sleeping and Your Face Tomorrow. And trade ND editions of his earlier works (Dark Back of Time is a personal favorite) on the black market.

Here’s the opening of Phil’s review:

Javier Marias’s greatness in the world of world literature seems pretty much unquestioned. And I’ve always thought of him as a pretty cool guy—for boycotting the United States for as long as Bush was president, for example, which was one of the first things I learned about him. This was while I was interning at New Directions in the summer of 2009, and everyone at N.D. was abuzz because Marias would soon be making his first visit to the U.S. in nine years. Right about that time, they were getting ready to release the concluding volume of his monolithic trilogy, Your Face Tomorrow, which, in light of recent reading, has risen significantly through the amorphous mass that is my to-read pile.

Yet despite all the excitement, somehow I got through my three months at N.D. without reading a single one of Marias’s many books. It was my summer of Bolano, I suppose—my infatuation with 2666 would give no place whatsoever to another international titan anytime soon. So here I am, two years later, finally reading Marias’s latest collection to appear in English, While the Women are Sleeping, translated by Margaret Jull Costa and published over a year ago. (I admit, I’m generally behind the times.) But if I happen to feel a bit anxious about so belatedly joining the Marias conversation on the basis of a single little collection, there’s a line from Marias’s introductory remarks to the last story in the book, “What the Butler Said,” that knowingly sets my anxieties at ease: “The books we don’t read are full of warnings; we will either never read them or they will arrive too late.” The word “warnings” here doesn’t quite work out of its proper context, but I’ll take it here to mean “things we desperately want and need to know before we die . . .” It might seem to be a remark that should make me more, not less, anxious. But this is a book that probes the dusty corners of whatever we imagine death might be and makes it a symphony of enticing enigmas, where ghosts go on writing love letters, or pursue an education, or persevere in their desire to resign—from friendship, employment, or the weird project of being alive—which, in the worlds that Marias sketches in these stories, is at times quite indistinguishable from being dead.

Click here to read the full review.

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In this week’s podcast, Tom and I talk about the ABA’s Winter Institute, which just took place in New Orleans. We also go on about World Book Night, which you should volunteer for by clicking here.

We also talked about my daughter and her “letter of hate” to the awful Dan Borislow, who, “ruined our summer of fun.”



(And in my defense for encouraging her to write this, there’s no amount of 8-year-old crazy that can approximate Borislow’s 50-year-old detached from all reality crazy. Just read the emails in the link above, and keep in mind that this jag ruined women’s soccer for tens of thousands of young girls in the most egotistical, asinine fashion ever. Chloë is 100% in the right on this.)

To honor the song that conquered soccer, this week’s music is Seven Nation Army by The White Stripes.

As always you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes by clicking here. To subscribe with other podcast downloading software, such as Google’s Listen, copy the following link.

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The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Brian Libgober on Pascal Quignard’s The Roving Shadows, which is coming out this month from Seagull Books in Chris Turner’s translation from the French.

Brian Ligboer is a new reviewer for us. (Jeff Waxman made the introduction.) In his own words, he “is the author of a novel, Memories from Beyond the States, which is currently under consideration by a few agents. Previous reviews of mine have appeared in Pank, The Hypocrite Reader, and The Midway Review. I currently live in Chicago where I am working as a polling analyst for Obama’s reelection campaign.”

Quignard’s book sounds really interesting. Just check out the Seagull Books jacket copy:

The first book in Quignard’s Last Kingdom series, The Roving Shadows can be read as a long meditation on reading and writing that strives to situate these otherwise innocuous activities in a profound relationship to sex and death. Writing and reading can in fact be linked to our animal natures and artistic strivings, to primal forces and culturally persistent fascinations. With dexterity and inventiveness, Quignard weaves together historical anecdotes, folktales from the East and West, fragments of myth, and speculative historical reconstructions. The whole, written in a musical style not far removed from that of Couperin, whose piano composition Les Ombres errantes lends the book its title, coheres into a work of literature that reverberates in the psyche long after one has laid it down.

And here’s the opening of Brian’s review:

In 2002, Les Ombres Errantes won the Prix Goncourt—possibly the most prestigious award a French literary work can receive—despite the fact that it is not a novel. Before considering The Roving Shadows in its own right, it is worth pausing to reflect on the significance of that and its subsequent publication in English. Almost one half of the winners of the Prix Goncourt have yet to appear in English translation and in that sense, this translation by Chris Turner is truly an event.

The Roving Shadows is a remarkable work, primarily because it straddles the line between contemporary French literature, which is vastly under-read in the United States, and French critical theory, which is probably more popular outside of France than it is inside. Indeed, it is difficult to say which genre of writing it actually fits. On the one hand the book contains many examples of sensuous description and personal memoir—you know, the type of thing one expects to find in a literary work. On the other hand it also is full of thought-provoking aphorisms and historical anecdotes, favored modes of expression by the critical theorists. Quignard’s book straddles the divide between critical essay and narrative in a way that is highly idiosyncratic. Instead of segregating the work into discrete, genre-specific parts, as Nabokov did in Pale Fire or The Gift, Quignard treads freely over the border between styles, often alternating within a single paragraph.

Click here to read the entire piece.

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From this PW piece on BookExpo America and changes to the show:

Reed is already looking to bigger changes in 2013. In a blog post yesterday Rosato discussed a move to B2C, enabling publishers to connect directly with consumers. The show would move to Thursday to Saturday with the general public invited to attend author events and go on the show floor on the final day. “Nothing is baked,” he wrote, “and we have a ton of due diligence to conduct to insure that a BEA that includes consumers, is an event that serves the industry.”

Better late than never. And just wait for the Simon & Schuster rant about how “readers don’t belong at our day of books!” I’m sure their reaction will be priceless and as confused as all get out.

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Just received this call for papers for the 2013 Nordic Translation Conference taking place at the University of East Anglia next April and thought I’d share it, since a) some of you might be interested in attending, and b) because this is a quinquennial event, and that sounds awesome.

Deadline is in August, so you have plenty of time, but here’s all the info:

The second Nordic Translation Conference will take place on 4, 5, and 6 April 2013 at the University of East Anglia, in Norwich, England.

This quinquennial event is solely dedicated to the particular challenges and pleasures of translating between and among the Nordic countries, which are often closely related culturally, if not always linguistically. It is open to academics, students, translators, publishers, and others who work with the Nordic languages. The first such conference took place in London at the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies in 2008 and it resulted in the book Northern Lights: Translation in the Nordic Countries (Peter Lang, 2009).

The keynote speakers in 2013 will include Andrew Chesterman, Riitta Oittinen, and Anna Mauranen. As in 2008, there will be workshops, talks, panels, and dual-language readings. Both academics and practising translators are encouraged to attend and present at the conference.

The conference will look at literary and non-literary translation of all kinds, including interpreting and subtitling, both between various Nordic languages and also between English and the Nordic languages. Nordic here includes Danish, Faroese, Finnish, Greenlandic, Icelandic, Norwegian, any of the Sámi dialects, and Swedish. Topics can include, but are not limited to, specific linguistic issues involved in translation/interpretation between two or more languages, analysis of particular texts/genres, professional issues, translating texts by or about minority groups, the translator/interpreter’s role, and the effect of cultural similarities/differences among Nordic countries.

In addition, the conference will include several workshops on relevant topics, such as working with specific languages or kinds of texts, using computer tools, finding reference materials, and so on. Those interested in running workshops are also invited to submit proposals.

Please send proposals (250-400 words) for workshops by 1 June 2012 and for conference papers by 15 August 2012 to B.J. Epstein and Gudrun Rawoens by e-mail at conference@nordictranslation.net or by regular mail to B.J. Epstein at the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing, University of East Anglia, Norwich Research Park, Norwich, England, NR4 7TJ. Along with the proposal, please include a brief biographical note.

Conference details are available online.. For ease of communication, English should be the primary conference language.

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We mentioned the Festival Neue Literatur a few days back, and to add to that post, here’s a promotional video the German Book Office put together:

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