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Earlier this month I posted about World in Translation Month, and asked everyone to buy one Open Letter book to a) celebrate this special month and b) save our fiscal year (which is Quite Bad).
I want to take a minute to thank all of you who have helped out by buying a book directly from us (a lot of you did!), or from your local bookstore, Amazon, B&N, wherever. If you haven’t participated yet, there’s still fifteen days left to get in on the World in Translation Month fun . . .
(What’s really interesting to me is how many people have contacted me this month about doing interviews/special things to promote World in Translation Month. There’s a HUGE thing coming out next week that I can’t tell you about [yet], but which will likely impress a lot of you. And will likely involve one of my favorite translators ever. . . . I believe this is what is called a “tease.”)
Anyway, if you haven’t purchased an Open Letter title this month, I have a special suggestion for you.
Yesterday—literally—finished copies of Benjamin Stein’s The Canvas arrived in the office. If you’ve talked to me in person in the past few months, you’re probably already familiar with this novel (or novels?).
We first featured The Canvas on Three Percent a couple years ago as the Next German Book I Want to See Translated. That post included this BBC video about Benjamin Stein and his formally interesting novel:
Since that time, I’ve been able to read the novel (obviously) and can tell you that this novel (and Brian Zumhagen’s masterful rendering of it in English) is absolutely amazing. Beyond the fun formal aspect—in which you can start from either side (there is no “back cover”) and flip back-and-forth whenever you want—this pair of narratives is incredibly easy to get sucked into, and is extremely rewarding.
On one side, you get Amnon Zichroni’s story about growing up in an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood in Israel before going to live with his uncle in Switzerland, then eventually coming to the States and learning psychiatric so that he can put his “gift” of being able to see people’s memories to good use.
Other side: Jan Wechsler receives a mysterious suitcase. When he finally opens it, he finds a bunch of materials that call into doubt everything Jan knows about his life, from where he was born to what sort of literary works he’s written.
How do these two narratives connect? You’ll have to read the book to find out . . .
And as a special World in Translation Month offer, NOT ONLY will we give you free shipping, but we’ll send this out as soon as you order (the official pub date is September 26th). You’ll have this book before everyone else, and this fall you can play the “oh, I read The Canvas back in May” card on your friends when EVERYONE is talking about this novel.
Order it now by clicking here.
And thanks again for your support of Open Letter. You’re the reason we do all the things we do—podcasts, reading series, books, blog posts, the BTBA, etc.—and you truly do make it worthwhile.
Reviewed by Jeremy Osner
“The small stone plaza was floating in the midday heat. The Christ of Elqui, kneeling on the ground, his gaze thrown back on high, the part in his hair dark under the Atacaman sun—he felt himself falling into an ecstasy.. . .
Reviewed by Brendan Riley
This slender, uncanny volume—the second, best-selling collection of stories by Russian author Ludmilla Petrushevskaya to appear in the U.S.—has already received considerable, well-deserved praise from many critics and high profile publications. Its seventeen short tales, averaging ten pages each, are. . .
Reviewed by Rachael Daum
The Urdu word basti refers to any space, intimate to worldly, and is often translated as “common place” or “a gathering place.” This book by Intizar Husain, who is widely regarded as one of the most important living Pakistani writers,. . .
Reviewed by Vincent Francone
The Whispering Muse, one of three books by Icelandic writer Sjón just published in North America, is nothing if not inventive. Stories within stories, shifting narration, leaps in time, and characters who transform from men to birds and back again—you’ve. . .
Reviewed by Camila Santos
Luis Negrón’s debut collection Mundo Cruel is a journey through Puerto Rico’s gay world. Published in 2010, the book is already in its fifth Spanish edition. Here in the U.S., the collection has been published by Seven Stories Press and. . .
Reviewed by Grant Barber
“South”
To have watched from one of your patios
the ancient stars
from the bank of shadow to have watched
the scattered lights
my ignorance has learned no names for
nor their places in constellations
to have heard the ring of. . .
Reviewed by Larissa Kyzer
When Icelandic author Andri Snær Magnason first published LoveStar, his darkly comic parable of corporate power and media influence run amok, the world was in a very different place. (This was back before both Facebook and Twitter, if you can. . .
Reviewed by Tiffany Nichols
When starting Hi, This Is Conchita and Other Stories, Santiago Roncagliolo’s second work to be translated into English, I was expecting Roncagliolo to explore the line between evil and religion that was front and center in Red April. Admittedly, I. . .
Reviewed by Josh Billings
Christa Wolf’s newly-translated City of Angels is a novel of atonement, and in this way the work of art that it resembles most to me is not another book, but the 2003 Sophia Coppola film Lost in Translation. Like that. . .
Reviewed by Grant Barber
French author—philosopher, poet, novelist—de Roblès writes something approaching the Great (Latin) American Novel, about Brazilian characters, one of whom is steeped in the life of the seventeenth century polymath (but almost always erroneous) Jesuit Athanasius Kircher. Eleazard von Wogau, a. . .
Three Percent is supported in part by the New York State Council on the Arts.
