Here’s another challenge I can get on board with:
The reading challenge is simple. Read six books in translation over the course of the year. If you post about your selection, comment here on the most recent post with a link so that we can all benefit from your experience and insights or email me and I will either post a link or copy you in as a guest blogger. Check back frequently to read suggestions and reviews. Want to participate? Email Frances of Nonsuch Book at francesevangelista@yahoo.com to be added to participants. Please type “Lost in Translation” in the subject line and include your link info.
Right now, the Lost in Translation blog has a series of possibilities of titles participants could read, ranging from NYRB classics to Jose Saramago’s Blindness to Bolano’s 2666 and Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog (both of which are on the Best Translated Book of 2008 longlist).
Since Open Letter only publishes translations, all of our books are eligible for this challenge. So, as a special offer, if you order any of our books for this challenge, and e-mail me at chad.post at rochester dot edu about your participation in the challenge, we’ll refund you the entire shipping cost. (And yes, this free shipping offer also applies if you order a six month subscription and are participating in the challenge.)
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Reviewed by Rhea Lyons
The innovative works of legends like Borges and Cortázar not only defined a literary movement, they created an exotic and well-known image of Latin America and its people. A key element of works in the tradition of the magical realism. . .
Reviewed by Will Eells
Contemporary Japanese literature is all too easy to stereotype. As far as the American reading public goes, the only books that come out of Japan seem to be under one of three genres. The first is the “bizarre things happening. . .
Reviewed by Jessica LeTourneur
I was born in the final decade of communism’s flailing grasp on the Eastern Bloc, and so what I know of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism has long been relegated to what I learned. . .
Reviewed by Dan Vitale
The short novel is a form in which writers typically exercise great control over their material, accepting the abbreviated length as a kind of challenge, working within that limitation to craft a tight, jewel-like story in which all the elements. . .
Reviewed by Monica Carter
In the most recent translation of Swiss writer Robert Walser’s work, The Tanners, we are reminded once again why Kafka and Musil were fans—his wit. And like everything in Walser’s writing, it is nuanced and subtle. Instead giving us. . .
Reviewed by Grant Barber
Rosa Chacel (1898-1994) sculptor, novelist, poet, essayist, feminist was born and died in Spain, with Brazil as a second home. She was a contemporary with the Generation of ’27, which included Garcia Lorca and Ramon Jaminez, and she was familiar. . .
Reviewed by Timothy Nassau
As frequently occurs, a few days ago I was browsing through a bookstore when something caught my eye. The book was Negative Horizon by Paul Virilio, which “sets out [his] theory of dromoscopy: a means of apprehending speed and its. . .
Reviewed by Chad W. Post
For years now, Melville House has been one of the most exciting independent presses out there. The political books they’ve done are fantastic, the Art of the Novella Series is arguably one of the most genius marketing/editorial publishing projects. . .
Reviewed by Dan Vitale
Anne McLean’s translation of Colombian novelist Evelio Rosero’s The Armies is the winner of this year’s Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, given by Great Britain’s Independent newspaper to honor excellence in translated works of fiction published in the UK. (It’s McLean’s. . .
Reviewed by Chad W. Post
I’m as guilty as anyone for helping hype Roberto Bolaño’s two big books—“big” both in terms of reputation and size—that FSG released over the past two years. I loved both The Savage Detectives and 2666. I loved the heft,. . .
Every month Three Percent features an independent bookstore. This month’s featured bookstore is Brazos Bookstore.
- 23 November 09: Ferguson lecture on Knut Hamsun
- 30 November 09: Saugestad lecture on Knut Hamsun
- 1 December 09: European Book Club: To Siberia
- 3 December 09: Javier Marias in conversation with Paul Holdengräber
- 5 March 10: Babel Series: Azar Nafisi
