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So, a couple months back, I posted a long look at Riffle, the new “Pinterest for Books.”
The other day, after blowing up on Bookish I went back into Riffle and played around a bit, adding some books I’ve read in recent months, and making a few lists—all with the goal of increasing my “Influence” score.
Yes, that IS how lame I am. But an Influence Score of 6 just seemed damn pathetic. I’ve since gotten it up to 16, mainly by creating lists of books—those I want to read (based on last week’s podcast), and books that I use in the “World Tour” section of my class.1
There’s no way this will replace GoodReads for me, but it can be fun to play with. (And the site is pretty slick looking. Much nicer than that Bookish disaster, the aesthetics of which are designed to appeal to exactly no one.) Although, to be honest, I’m using these in two different ways—I track everything I’ve read and want to read on GoodReads, and am using Riffle to make fun lists of books. (Although Kaija Straumanis’s lists are much more interesting. Especially that “Open Letter Books” one.)
Anyway, I just got a message from Gina Rodriguez, the World Literature editor at Riffle, with a special invitation for readers of Three Percent. Riffle is still in Beta mode, so you need an invite to join. I have a few personal ones that I’ve sent to people, but Gina sent me this link
which will allow 100 people to join.
So if you’re interested in checking this out, click there, then follow me and check out my lists. That way my Influence Score will go up, and I won’t have to cry myself to sleep at night. (At least not every night.)
1 There are three sections to my class: a section about the craft of translation (where we read Clifford Landers’s Literary Translation: An Introduction and David Bellos’s Is That a Fish in Your Ear?, among others), a World Tour in which students read excerpts from influential authors from around the world and present on them, and discussion of six contemporary translations resulting in the class deeming one of them “The Best Translated Book of LTS206/406” (the sexiest title I could come up with). The World Tour usually blows their mind, since today’s college students are exposed to just a sliver of a fraction of a culture’s literature, and very few are well-read in literature from more than one country in the world. They might know a lot about Shakespeare and Latin America, but have never read anything from Scandinavia. So this “World Tour” helps expose them to all the varied greatness that is out there, and helps to build a bit of a mental map of what authors have influenced others, etc., so that they can see that “world” literature constitutes a field not a series of individual authors or literatures bound by language.
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. . .
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. . .
Three Percent is supported in part by the New York State Council on the Arts.
