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At a press conference earlier this week, AmazonCrossing and Fabulous Iceland announced that Amazon would be publishing ten Icelandic titles in the near future, starting with The Greenhouse (which we featured here).
Here’s the official announcement:
“The Icelandic series from AmazonCrossing will ensure that the guest country will still be present on the international book market once the Book Fair has come and gone,” said Halldór Guðmundsson, director of Fabulous Iceland, at a press conference given to announce that AmazonCrossing, a new imprint of Amazon Publishing dedicated to foreign works in translation, had resolved to publish ten Icelandic titles in the near future.
The series will kick off with The Greenhouse by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir and Hallgrímur Helgason’s The Hitman’s Guide to Iceland. Both authors appeared at the conference. Also slated for publication are works by Viktor Arnar Ingólfsson, Árni Þórarinsson, Vilborg Davíðsdóttir and Steinunn Sigurðardóttir, with more to be announced in early 2012.
Translated books comprise less than three percent of titles published in the United States and United Kingdom. “This figure is too small, by a long shot,” Jon Fine of AmazonCrossing said, adding that the imprint’s aim was to improve the ratio of foreign translation on the English-speaking market. “There are wonderful stories in Iceland and around the world that are not accessible to English speakers. We want to translate these extraordinary international literary works and authors and introduce them to new audiences worldwide.”
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Reviewed by Camila Santos
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“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
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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. . .
Reviewed by Brendan Riley
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. . .
Reviewed by Emily Davis
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”. . .
Three Percent is supported in part by the New York State Council on the Arts.
