Just so happens I’m going to be in New York for this, and will definitely be attending:
Thursday, January 29
Reading & Launch Party Reception
6:30–8:30pm
Co-sponsored by NYU’s MFA Program in Creative Writing in Spanish
Contributors to BOMB 106 read in both Spanish and English. Featuring the work of two of Chile’s leading poets: Raúl Zurita (in a rare U.S. appearance), his translator Anna Deeny, and Nicanor Parra, as read by his translator Liz Werner.
They are joined by the acclaimed Argentine novelist Sergio Chejfec and his translator, Margaret Carson, reading excerpts from Chejfec’s first work to appear in English, My Two Worlds, and the fresh, new voice of Chilean novelist Lina Meruane.
There are lots of reasons to attend, not the least of which is the fact that Sergio Chejfec and his translator, Margaret Carson, will be there. Scott Esposito brough Chejfec to my attention, after Enrique Vila-Matas named Chejfec’s Los incompletos his book of the year, and compared Chejfec to Walser and Sebald. . . . Coincidentally (in an awesome way), an excerpt of Chejfec’s work is in the BOMB’s latest “First Proof” supplement.
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,. . .
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. . .
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. . .
“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. . .
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. . .
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. . .
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. . .
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. . .
A rich, beautifully written, consistently surprising satire, Yan Lianke’s Lenin’s Kisses boasts an elaborate, engrossing plot with disarming twists and compelling characters both challenged and challenging. It leads the reader on a strange pilgrimage—often melancholy but certainly rewarding—through a China. . .
Maybe I’ve been watching too much Doctor Who lately, and I’m therefore liable to see everything through science-fiction-colored glasses. But when the pages of The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira refer to “the totality of the present and of eternity”. . .