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Season 22 of the Two Month Review: “Praiseworthy” by Alexis Wright

It's almost time for the next season of the Two Month Review to get underway! We announced the book—Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright—but here, at long last, is the official schedule and some background information. I'm going to be completely honest here: All I've read by Wright is the first 58 pages of Carpentaria, the ...

Season Twenty of the Two Month Review: “Mulligan Stew” by Gilbert Sorrentino

As mentioned in this Reading the Dalkey Archive post, Mulligan Stew by Gilbert Sorrentino is going to be the next book featured on the Two Month Review podcast. For anyone new to this podcast, episodes drop weekly—recorded live on YouTube, then disseminated as a traditional podcast through Apple, Spotify, etc.—and ...

Season 18 of the Two Month Review: Ann Quin Is the Missing Link

Before we get into this post, I just wanted to congratulate Annie Ernaux and all of her publishers and translators on winning the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature. She's a legend, and I have a special place in my heart for Cleaned Out, since that was a Dalkey book. (And the first of hers I read.) And also want to send a shout ...

Season 17 of the Two Month Review Brings the Fire

It's been a minute, but we're coming back on May 4th with the all new, all fire season of the Two Month Review. Before getting into the books for this season, we have a couple of announcements. First off, we now have a twitter account just for Two Month Review, so please please follow us. Also, following the trend of ...

Season 16 of the Two Month Review: “2666” by Roberto Bolaño

2666 has been a potential TMR title right from the jump and now, years after launching this podcast, we're finally going to tackle one of the most discussed and admired works of Latin American literature of the past century, translated by Natasha Wimmer: "Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolaño's life, 2666 was ...

Season 15 of the Two Month Review: “Vernon Subutex” by Virginie Despentes

Following on the sprawling, propulsive, voice-driven masterpiece J R, we're turning to another amazing assemblage of unforgettable characters in Virginie Despentes's Vernon Subutex trilogy. Here's the description of Volume 1: From the provocative writer and filmmaker Virginie Despentes comes volume one of her acclaimed ...

Season Twelve of the Two Month Review: “Cars on Fire,” “Four by Four,” and “The Book of Anna”

As announced during the last season of the Two Month Review, we're going to try something different this time around. Instead of focusing on a single, long book, we're going to cover three short ones—all written by Spanish female writers, all translated by women, and all released during the lockdown. First up—and ...

Season 11 of the Two Month Review: “The Dreamed Part” by Rodrigo Fresán

After a slightly longer hiatus than expected, the Two Month Review is coming back! In fact, we're coming back TOMORROW, Thursday, March 5th at 1:30pm. We'll be recording an introductory episode in which Chad and Brian combine their weakened, time-ravaged memories to recap The Invented Part, the first volume in Rodrigo ...

Three Percent #172: ALTA 42 Preview

A bit of a disorienting podcast for anyone not attending ALTA, but in this episode, Chad addresses the recent ALTA book fair controversy, and then they go over the general schedule, highlighting a number of interesting-sounding panels, previewing some off-site events, and recommending non-ALTA bars for attendees to hang out ...

Season 10 of the Two Month Review: “Ducks, Newburyport” by Lucy Ellmann

This Thursday (9/26), the final podcast in the ninth season of the Two Month Review will drop, wrapping up our discussion of Kjersti Skomsvold's Monsterhuman, which is translated from the Norwegian by Becky Crook. Which means that it's time for SEASON TEN. (Ten!?!) And for the first time ever, we're going to be focusing ...

Season 9 of the Two Month Review: Monsterhuman by Kjersti Skomsvold

Now that I'm back from a week-long self-imposed retreat, it's time to overwhelm this site with posts about Norwegian literature. There are two special audio interviews in the works, a post about a few female Norwegian writers (and Shirley Jackson) that will go up on Monday, and the kick off of the new season of the Two Month ...

A Guesstimation of a Booklist Review-type Post

I alluded to this in an earlier post, but the main reason Three Percent has been light on this sort of content (and heavy on BTBA content, which is all stellar and worth checking out) isn't due to a lack of desire or interest, but a confluence of other events: deadlines for two pieces (one that should be available shortly, ...

Season Eight of the Two Month Review: CODEX 1962 by Sjón

If you're a long-time listener to the Two Month Review podcast, or even a part-time follower of the Open Letter twitter,  you've probably already heard that the next season of the podcast (it's eighth?!) is going to be all about Sjón's CoDex 1962.  "Spanning eras, continents, and genres, CoDex 1962—twenty years in ...

Two Month Review #7.9: Radiant Terminus (Chapters 39-49/END)

Chad and Brian finish off Radiant Terminus and talk about possible interpretation of the ending, whether anyone came out of this book OK, the balance between humor and horror, written vs. oral culture, possible readings or approaches to the novel, and a desire for a "Post-Exotic" journal. They also revisit Volodine's ...

Two Month Review #7.8: Radiant Terminus (Chapters 27-38)

This is a jam-packed episode as Rachel Crawford joins Brian and Chad to talk about Kronauer's "trial," Hannko and Samiya in the Taiga, the lasting impact of PTSD, the post-post-apocalyptic world, Russian literature and French minimalism, New Jersey, and more. This is the penultimate episode of season seven, and sets up a lot ...

Two Month Review #7.7: Radiant Terminus (Chapters 20-26)

Chad and Brian go it alone through Kronauer's "night of amok" as he attempt to murder Solovyei for his myriad crimes. Then they enter into part four of the book, "Taiga," which is a collection of "narracts" set some seven hundred (or a thousand?) years in the future. Hannko is recreating the feminist post-exotic texts from ...

Two Month Review #7.6: Radiant Terminus (Chapters 17-19)

With just Chad and Brian on this week's episode, the show turns almost full superhero. We get Chad's weirdly specific—and unnerving—Volodine-influenced dream. We get to see Samiya Schmidt transform into a raging version of Captain Marvel/Banshee. We get to see Kronauer assume his role as the one chosen to take down ...

Two Month Review #7.5: Radiant Terminus (Chapters 14-16)

Tobias Carroll (Transitory, Reel) joins Chad and Brian to talk about the latest installment of Radiant Terminus. These three chapters get wild, as Schulhoff (who mysteriously disappeared shortly after his marriage to Hannko, Solovyei's daughter) returns and tries to get Ilyushenko to kill him. And then the never-ending ...

Two Month Review #7.4: Radiant Terminus (Chapters 9-13)

Rhett McNeil joins Chad Post and pinch-hitter Kaija Straumanis to talk about the first half of part two of Radiant Terminus, "Ode to the Camps." From recounting Chad's latest Volodine-inflected dream to a discussion of the ways various ideologies (fairy tales, anarcho-capitalism, Marxism-Leninism) play out in the novel, to ...

Two Month Review #7.3: Radiant Terminus (Chapters 4-8)

This week, former TMR guest Rachel Cardasco returns to talk about speculative fiction in translation, various allegories for Radiant Terminus (current political climate, The Tempest, The Bible), who dreams the dreamer, the patriarchy and Maria Kwoll's feminist post-exotic texts, steampunk technology, spider dreams, and ...

Two Month Review #7.2: Radiant Terminus (Chapters 1-3)

From Tarkovsky to Jessica Jones, this week's episode covers a lot of ground. Anthony and Chad are joined by Hailey Dezort to walk through the first three chapters of Antoine Volodine's Radiant Terminus. There's a lot to unpack, from the plant names, to the nature of men, to horrible fathers, to the humor found in Gramma ...

Two Month Review #7.1: Radiant Terminus (Introduction)

We’re back! . . . And a few days late. Chad explains why on the podcast itself, but suffice it to say that last week was a bit, um, stressful. But Brian and Chad finally got together to talk about Antoine Volodine in general, post-exoticism, Brian Evenson’s introduction to Radiant Terminus, similarities between ...

Why Are Preview Lists [Galician Literature + Positivity]

I've been trying sooooooo hard to be positive in 2019. So hard. Stay optimistic in light of distribution issues. Don't worry about sales too much, because I'm 250% certain Anthony is going to take us to the next level. Ignore the fact that Lit Hub listed Night School as one of the best reviewed "nonfiction" books of the ...

“Radiant Terminus” Two Month Review Reading Schedule

It's almost time for the next season of the Two Month Review—our seventh season. (That's a solid number.) This season we're returning to do an Open Letter title, Antoine Volodine's Radiant Terminus, translated from the French by Jeffrey Zuckerman. The most patently sci-fi work of Antoine Volodine’s to be ...

Two Month Review #6.11: The Book of Disquiet (sections 394-END)

It's all over! After eleven weeks of Pessoa, Chad and Brian have finished The Book of Disquiet. And to celebrate, they each wrote some jacket copy and blurbs and went hard at trying to get BINGO for someone. They also preview the next season of TMR and come up with a very marketable Pessoa-themed product idea . . . As ...

Two Month Review #6.10: The Book of Disquiet (sections 359-393)

Probably the most controversial Two Month Review to date, so buckle up! Are there unhinged rants? You bet! Questions regarding the marketing and "completeness" of the New Directions edition? Yep! A long discussion about the differences in voice between the both excellent Margaret Jull Costa and Richard Zenith translations? ...

Two Month Review #6.9: The Book of Disquiet (sections 316-358)

This week David Smith—former Open Letter intern and current grad student at the University of Iowa—joins Chad and Brian to debate poetry vs. prose, separating the p.o.v. of Pessoa's heteronyms from his own personal viewpoint, Soares's morality and metaphysics, how to judge the quality of a translation, and much more. As a ...

Two Month Review #6.8: The Book of Disquiet (sections 274-315)

Chad and Brian fly solo this week, filling in dozens of TMR Bingo squares, and trying to come up with "rules for writers" based on this particular section of The Book of Disquiet. It's a pretty imprecise set of rules, but whatever, in the words of Pessoa, "perfection is inhuman." They also talk a bit about a "Mount Rushmore ...

Two Month Review #6.7: The Book of Disquiet (sections 222-273)

This week's special guest is Portuguese author and translator João Reis who knows a lot about Pessoa and the writings of his various heteronyms. He also talks about his forthcoming novel, The Translator's Bride, and his work as a translator. There's some of the usual banter as well, including a solid rundown of everyone's ...

Two Month Review #6.6: The Book of Disquiet (sections 174-221)

This week's podcast goes off the rails pretty quickly, and includes a hungover dismissal of this version of The Book of Disquiet, the phrase "reclaim some of the douchery" is spoken, there is a lot of laughter, a discussion about the tensions between trying to read this as poetry vs. the expectations that come from trying to ...

Two Month Review #6.5: The Book of Disquiet (sections 131-173)

This week Chad and Brian come to some conclusions about the Vicente Guedes part of The Book of Disquiet and get very excited about the more "mature, sophisticated" writings of Bernardo Soares. They both love this new voice and dig into what separates the heteronyms and their philosophies on life. And without a guest, Chad ...

Two Month Review #6.4: The Book of Disquiet (sections 82-130)

BINGO! That's the theme of today's episode, which includes a Twin Peaks reference, awkward introduction, LitHub reference, and many other squares on the recently released Two Month Review bingo cards. It's explained in full at that post and on the podcast, but every week, the first person to email Chad with "bingo" in the ...

Two Month Review Bingo

It may have started as a joke, but now we're deadly serious about Two Month Review Bingo. Starting tomorrow (Wednesday, October 24th), the first person each week to listen to the podcast and send a photo of their completed Bingo card will get 30% off any order at openletterbooks.org (excluding subscriptions). New to ...

Two Month Review #6.3: The Book of Disquiet (sections 40-81)

Jerónimo Pizzaro—editor of the "complete edition" of The Book of Disquiet published by New Directions—is the special guest on this week's Two Month Review. He discusses his history with Pessoa, how this volume came to be, the next three volumes in the New Directions project, how to approach The Book of Disquiet and ...

Two Month Review #6.2: The Book of Disquiet (sections 1-39)

This is one of the most Two Month Review podcasts yet. Chad, Brian, and Tom Flynn (Volumes Books in Chicago) come together to discuss the first forty-six pages (sections 1-39) of the complete version of Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet. In addition to breaking down the philosophy and literary style representing ...

Two Month Review #6.1: “The Book of Disquiet” with Declan Spring

The Two Month Review is back! This season we'll be reading the New Directions publication of The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa, translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa, one of the greatest works of literature (or poetry?) from the past century. To kick things off Declan Spring joined Brian Wood and a ...

Season Six of the Two Month Review is Coming and It’s Pessoa [UPDATED]

UPDATE: I'm reposting this with the amended dates. We had to move everything back a week to ensure that our opening conversations are of the quality that you've come to expect from the Two Month Review. The first YouTube broadcast will be Wednesday, October 3 at 10am Eastern Time. The podcast version will be available here, ...

Two Month Review: #5.10: Bonus Episode with Dubravka Ugresic!

Dubravka Ugresic is in Rochester for Open Letter's tenth anniversary celebration, so she got together with Chad and Brian to talk about how she wrote Fox, Melania-related tourism, the two story points that launched the book, her writing process, and more! As always, Fox (and all the previous Two Month Review titles) is ...

Two Month Review: #5.09: FOX by Dubravka Ugresic (“The Fox’s Widow”)

Ryan Chapman (Conversation Sparks, Riots I Have Known) came on this week to talk about the final section of Dubravka Ugresic's Fox. They discuss "business class vs. economy class" writers, authenticity and performing in the role of a writer, Franzen, the overall genius of Ugresic's writing, and much more. It's a very ...

Two Month Review: #5.08: FOX by Dubravka Ugresic (“Little Miss Footnote”)

Caitlin Luce Baker from University Bookstore in Seattle joined Chad and Brian to talk about the "Little Miss Footnote" section of Dubravka Ugresic's Fox. They touch on Dorothy Leuthold, Vladimir Nabokov, and much more, including a very subtle weaving of references that you'll definitely want to tune in to learn ...

Two Month Review: #5.07: FOX by Dubravka Ugresic (“The Theocritus Adventure”)

This episode, Chad and Brian are joined by the newest Open Letter employee--Anthony Blake! He joins in on a really fun episode about Russian avant-garde literature, connections between the fourth part of Fox and the very earliest sections of the book, footnotes, invented novels, how to smuggle like a fox, and more. This ...

Two Month Review: #5.06: FOX by Dubravka Ugresic (“The Devil’s Garden”)

Pete Mitchell—who wrote this great review of Fox for Asymptote—joined Chad and Brian this week to talk about the heartbreaking (and semi-profane) ending to "The Devil's Garden," the third part of Dubrakva Ugresic's latest novel. From the idea of a small ping singling one's eventual crack-up to peeing on the side of the ...

Two Month Review: #5.05: FOX by Dubravka Ugresic (“The Devil’s Garden”)

In this week's Two Month Review, Brian drops some excellent knowledge about why this chapter is called "The Devil's Garden," opening a window into Ugresic's genius, guest George Carroll talks about his time in Kolkata, and Chad says a bunch of mildly entertaining things about camping and landmines. The most stunning moment ...

A Balance of Plot and Place (Two Month Review: #5.03-5.04: FOX by Dubravka Ugresic – Blog Post)

Last week, Chad and Brian were joined by Ellen Elias-Bursác, one of the Fox translators, for an incredible discussion on the second half of “A Balancing Art.” Ellen was enamored with the dynamics between the Widow and Ugresic’s narrator, the former finding success managing the works of her late husband and the latter ...

Two Month Review: #5.04: FOX by Ugresic (“A Balancing Art”)

After a two week hiatus due to technical difficulties trying to record from Dublin, the Two Month Review is back! Chad and Brian are joined by translator Ellen Elias-Bursać to talk about her favorite section of the novel--"A Balancing Art." They discuss the various viewpoints presented in this chapter--especially that of the ...

Two Month Review: #5.03: FOX by Ugresic (“A Balancing Art”)

Tom Flynn from Volumes is back, surprising Brian, who mostly prepared for the podcast by Googling Croatian Fun Facts. World Cup banter and good natured ribbing aside, Chad, Brian, and Tom dig in to the first half or "A Balancing Art," talking about immigration vs. tourism, literary conferences and celebrity, one of the best ...

Is this All Fox-y Enough? (Two Month Review: #5.02: FOX by Dubravka Ugresic – Blog Post)

Last week, Chad, Brian, and returning special guest Tom Flynn of Volumes Bookcafe broke down some of the bigger elements of the introductory section of Dubravka Ugresic’s Fox, including the all-important question: is Ugresic’s fox metaphor fox-y enough? We’ll take our own look at some segments of this opening section ...

Two Month Review: #5.02: FOX by Ugresic (“A Story about How Stories Come to Be Written”)

This week's podcast is pretty fast and loose, with Fortnite disruptions, embarrassing pronunciations, lots of ribbing, and a deep dive into the various games going on in Part I of Dubravka Ugresic's Fox, "A Story about How Stories Come to Be Written." Starting from Pilnyak's story of the same name, this section revolves ...

Videocast of Two Month Review Season 5, Episode 2

The podcast version of this week's Two Month Review will go live on Thursday morning, and will likely correct some of the crazy shit that happened last night during the live recording. Although my inability to pronounce names will remain, as will the various minor harassments suffered by all three participants. This was a ...

Two Month Review: #5.01: An Introduction to Dubravka Ugresic

The new season is here! For the next two months, Chad and Brian will be talking about Dubravka Ugresic's Fox with a wide range of guests. To kick things off this week, Chad talks about Ugresic's writing career and his history of publishing her, and Brian comes up with a great challenge for our listeners and a running gag ...

Video of Two Month Review, Season Five, Episode One: Introducing Dubravka Ugresic

For those of you who missed it live! Bunch of new stuff this season, like, being prepared, and a contest involving the best Amazon reviews. Listen below for all the details. . . . . . . . . . For whatever reason, I can't get this video to embed. Either I'm an idiot (ding! ding! ding!) or the new website is ...

New Two Month Review Season Starts 6/11!

After a bit of a hiatus, we're back! Starting tonight (Monday, June 11th) at 9pm, Brian and I are going to tackle Dubravka Ugresic's latest novel--Fox. Here's what Kirkus Reviews had to say about it in their STARRED review: Another tricky treasure from an internationally renowned author. Ugresic has been in exile from ...

Two Month Review: #4.09: The Physics of Sorrow (Part VIII: “An Elementary Physics of Sorrow”)

This week, Chad and Brian are joined by Stiliana Milkova from Oberlin College to talk about the final sections of The Physics of Sorrow: “An Elementary Physics of Sorrow,” “Endings,” and “Epilogue.” They talk about the structure of the novel as a whole, about Chad’s favorite page in the book, about aging and ...

Catching up on Season Four of the Two Month Review

As you hopefully noticed, earlier this morning the eighth episode of the current season of the Two Month Review went live. This was the seventh straight week of talking about Georgi Gospodinov’s incredible novel, The Physics of Sorrow, which was translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel. And the eighth write-up by ...

Two Month Review: #4.08: The Physics of Sorrow (Part VII: “Global Autumn”)

This week, Rachel Cordasco from Speculative Fiction in Translation and the Wisconsin Historical Society Press joined Chad and Brian for a fun conversation about part VII of Georgi Gospodinov’s The Physics of Sorrow. They talked about how this book invokes a variety of memories, hotel rooms, Eastern European self-deprecating ...

Thinking About Book Reviews

Clarice Lispector is undoubtedly one of the great writers of the past century. Her recent rediscovery—sparked off by the reissuing of The Hour of the Star in Ben Moser’s new translation—is definitely merited, and will hopefully usher in a time in which any number of very deserving female authors from the ...

Two Month Review: #4.06: The Physics of Sorrow (Part V: “The Green House”)

In addition to ripping on Chad and the poor showing by the Michigan State Spartans in the NCAA Tournament, Brian Wood and Tom Flynn (from Volumes Bookcafe) discuss the morality of animals, how this section of The Physics of Sorrow focuses more on the “animal” side of the minotaur, the mixture of lightness and sorrow in ...

Two Month Review: #4.05: The Physics of Sorrow (Part IV, Pgs 119-150)

This week, Patrick Smith joined Chad and Brian to talk about time capsules and their potential danger, nostalgia and the urge to collect, aliens, Chernobyl, and more. It was a very fun part of the book to discuss, and the three of them made the most of it, really digging into how The Physics of Sorrow is constructed, while ...

Two Month Review: #4.04: The Physics of Sorrow (Part III, Pgs 73-118)

To up the Bay Area sports content, we invited Nick Buzanski of Book Culture to come on and talk about one of his favorite sections of Georgi Gospodinov’s The Physics of Sorrow. They talk about community and storytelling, seeing movies in person, Gospodinov’s humor and beautiful writing, Gaustine’s wild ideas, sexy books ...

Two Month Review: #4.03: The Physics of Sorrow (Part II, Pgs 59-72)

Caitlin Baker of the University Book Store in Seattle joined Chad and Brian to talk about this very short section of Georgi Gospodinov’s The Physics of Sorrow. Mostly they talk about the constant conflicts between kids and their parent in myths. And eating children. But it’s not as gruesome as all that! Mostly they have a ...

Two Month Review: #4.02: The Physics of Sorrow (Part I, Pgs 1-58)

Chad and Brian are joined by Tom Roberge of Riffraff (and the Three Percent Podcast) to discuss the first section of Georgi Gospodinov’s The Physics of Sorrow. They talk about the book’s general conceit, the minotaur myth, Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, Eastern European history, fascism and communism, and much ...

Two Month Review: #4.01: The Physics of Sorrow (Introduction)

The new season of the Two Month Review kicks off now with a general overview Georgi Gospodinov’s The Physics of Sorrow, one of the most beloved books Open Letter has ever published. Brian’s on the lam, or in witness protection, or something, so Open Letter senior editor Kaija Straumanis stepped in to talk about one of the ...

Season 4 of the Two Month Review: The Physics of Sorrow

After a bit of a break for the holidays and whatnot, we’re BACK! Or about to be. Starting on February 15th, there will be all new episodes of the Two Month Review, this time focuses on The Physics of Sorrow by Georgi Gospodinov.   Probably the Open Letter title that Tom Roberge likes the best, The Physics of ...

Two Month Review #3.10: Death in Spring (pgs. 119-150)

Here it is, the infamous live recording at McNally Jackson! There was a great turnout to hear Brian, María Christina, and I work our way through our thoughts about Death in Spring, Rodoreda’s overall stature, the banning of the color yellow, and much more. We had a great time doing this, and thanks again to McNally ...

Two Month Review #3.9: Death in Spring (pgs. 69-118)

Mara Faye Lethem joins us this week to talk about Catalonia’s scatological obsession, the challenges of the current political situation, Max Besora’s wild novel, and Rodoreda’s triumphant return to the best-seller list. Then they get into a more autobiographical reading of this section of Death in Spring, a section ...

Breaking Things and Growing Up [Two Month Review]

This post should’ve gone up last Tuesday, December 12th, which happened to be the same day as our recording in front of a live audience at McNally Jackson. Although I did get some work done on the train ride to NYC, the Amtrak WiFi is garbage and crushed my hopes of writing this then. And Wednesday’s train ride ...

Two Month Review #3.8: Death in Spring (pgs. 28-68)

This week, fresh off a publication in the Boston Review, Jess Fenn (JR Fenn) joins Chad, Brian, and Best Translated Book Award judge Patrick Smith (P.T. Smith) to talk about the second part of Death in Spring. They trace a few motifs, talk about dystopias and literary world-building, and much more. Another very informative ...

Two Month Review #3.7: Death in Spring (pgs. 1-27)

Welcome to one of the strangest villages in all of fiction! Now that Chad and Brian have gone through the stories, they turn their attention to Rodoreda’s Death in Spring, which was published posthumously in 1986. They’re joined by Catalan researcher and translator Meg Berkobien and Anastasia Nikolis, who you ...

Two Month Review LIVE at McNally Jackson Next Tuesday (12/12/17)

For our final episode of the Rodoreda season, Brian and I will be taking the early morning train to NYC (seriously, it leaves at 5:41am, which is a time that exists) so that we can talk about Death in Spring in front of a live audience. At 7pm at McNally Jackson (52 Prince St.) we’ll be joined by María Cristina ...

Myths, Rituals, Fears in Death in Spring [Two Month Review]

Coming up on this Thursday’s Two Month Review podcast I join Brian Wood, Meg Berkobien, and Anastasia Nikolis to talk about the opening section of Death in Spring, the first Rodoreda novel that Open Letter ever published. To preface that conversation (which is a lot of gushing over her prose and ideas, along with some ...

Two Month Review #3.6: Selected Stories (pgs. 208-255)

After yelling at Skype a bunch, Chad, Brian, and special guest Tom Flynn of Volumes Bookcafe discuss the merits of some of Rodoreda’s final stories, especially “The Thousand Franc Bill,” “Paralysis,” and “The Salamander.” Then they manage to slightly diss groups upon groups of ...

All the Posts and Podcasts for “The Invented Part” Two Month Review

I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, and here it is: A single Word document collecting all the posts about The Invented Part along with all of the Two Month Review podcasts. What I did was list every single essay with a link to the corresponding podcast, followed by the complete interview that Will Vanderhyden did ...

Everybody Loves a List [Two Month Review]

Coming up on this Thursday’s Two Month Review podcast I join Brian Wood and Tom Flynn to talk about the last six stories in Rodoreda’s Selected Stories. (And mildly insult a bunch of different people. As you do.) I’m not prefacing that conversation at all in the post below. As always, you can get ...

Two Month Review #3.5: Selected Stories (pgs. 144-207)

After doing a bit of a deeper dive into the situation in Catalonia—and discussing the LIVE recording that will take place on December 12th at the new McNally Jackson—Chad and Brian are joined by George Carroll to talk about this batch of Rodoreda’s stories. Although a couple of the stories discussed in this ...

Looking at Some Rodoreda Criticism [Two Month Review]

Coming up on this Thursday’s Two Month Review podcast I join Brian Wood and George Carroll to talk about some of the stranger, more war influenced, Rodoreda stories. Specifically, we talk about “Before I Die,” “Ada Liz,” “On a Dark Night,” “Night and Fog,” and ...

Two Month Review #3.4: Selected Stories (pgs. 103-143)

Things are a bit rough for Chad the morning after the Open Letter gala, but he powers through and talks about this new phase of Rodoreda’s stories. He and Brian break down some of the more challenging of her stories, including “Noctural” and “The Bath,” and talk about what does and doesn’t ...

Trying to Understand "Nocturnal" [Two Month Review]

Coming up on this Thursday’s Two Month Review podcast Brian and I go it alone and talk about six Rodoreda stories: “The Beginning,” “Nocturnal,” “The Red Blouse,” “The Fate of Lisa Sperling,” “The Bath,” and “On the Train.” On that podcast, we ...

Two Month Review #3.3: Selected Stories (pgs. 51-102)

This week, Mark Haber of Brazos Bookstore and the Best Translated Book Award committee joins Chad and Brian to talk about the next seven stories in Mercè Rodoreda’s collection. Although they touch on a number of them, a lot of time is spent focusing on “Carnival” and the literary antecedents to Rodoreda. ...

Tracing Rodoreda's Motifs in "Carnival" [Two Month Review]

Coming up on this Thursday’s Two Month Review podcast Brian and I talk about the next seven stories in Selected Stories by Mercè Rodoreda (with special guest Mark Haber!): “Afternoon at the Cinema,” “Ice Cream,” “Carnival,” “Engaged,” “In a Whisper,” ...

Two Month Review #3.2: Selected Stories (pgs. 1-50)

This week, Chad and Brian dive into the first six stories in Mercè Rodoreda’s Selected Stories and call up Quim Monzó, arguably the most important contemporary Catalan author, to talk about the precision and emotionality in her work. They also talk about Catalan literature as a whole, A Thousand Morons, Catalan ...

Three Observations and One Story [Two Month Review]

Coming up on this Thursday’s Two Month Review podcast Brian and I talk about the first six stories in Mercè Rodoreda’s Selected Stories : “Blood,” “Threaded Needle,” “Summer,” “Guinea Fowls,” “The Mirror,” and “Happiness.” Which is only the ...

Two Month Review #3.1: Reunited! (Intro to Mercè Rodoreda)

Brian Wood is BACK. Complete with a poem he wrote in his time away from the Two Month Review . . . In the introduction to season three, Chad and Brian talk about Catalan literature (briefly), Mercè Rodoreda’s career and comps, possible approaches to discussing Rodoreda’s stories, and more. As noted ...

Introducing Mercè Rodoreda [Two Month Review]

If you prefer, you can also download this post as a PDF document. As you hopefully already know, the third season of the Two Month Review podcast will be dedicated to Mercè Rodoreda. Since most of her books are relatively slim (a.k.a., of readable length unlike the beasts that we’ve worked through in seasons one and ...

Two Month Review #2.10: 17, composition book (Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller, Pages 361-411)

Here it is—the infamous LIVE recording of the Two Month Review! Chad and Lytton travelled all the way to Brooklyn to record this episode as part of the “Taste of Iceland Festivities.” As a result, they recap the book as a whole and reflect on the speech from Iceland’s First Lady that prefaced the ...

Two Month Review #2.9: fourteen, fifteenth book, 16. notebook (Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller, Pages 306-360)

Icelandic novelist and poet Kári Tulinius joins Chad and Lytton this week to talk about three of the darkest sections of Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller and the history of this novel’s reception in Iceland. They also talk about the recent scandal that brought down the Icelandic government—and how it ties into Tómas ...

Third Season of the "Two Month Review" is All About Mercè Rodoreda

The voting is in and . . . Well, The Physics of Sorrow and Maidenhair ended up with the most votes. That said, we’re not going to do those books next. Instead, since we haven’t featured any books by women yet—and since Catalan is undergoing some serious shit right now—we’re going to start by ...

Two Month Review #2.8: this is the eleventh book, my 12th composition book, book 13 (Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller, Pages 282-305)

CORRECTION: Throughout this podcast, we joke about having recorded the final episode of the season live at Spoonbill & Sugartown last weekend. This is a lie! The live event will take place THIS SATURDAY (September 30, 2017) as part of the Taste of Iceland events. Eliza Reid, Iceland’s First Lady, will start things ...

Third Season of Two Month Review

Two Month Review #2.7: tenth composition book (Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller, Pages 238-281)

This week Patrick Smith (Best Translated Book Award judge, The Scofield) joins Chad and Lytton to talk about this incredibly powerful section of the book, which raises all sorts of topical ideas about adhering to national myths and the problems of masculinity. This is also the section where Hitler shows up, and where a ...

Two Month Review #2.6: IX. class A, tenth composition book (Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller, Pages 200-238)

This week Norwegian translator and ALTA Fellowship recipient David Smith joins Chad and Lytton to talk about the next forty pages of Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller. The two sections covered this week are wildly different from one another, opening with a much more fragmented, poetic bit then transitioning through a hilarious, yet ...

Two Month Review LIVE!!!

Over the next couple weeks, you’re going to hear me mess up this announcement on podcast after podcast, but on Saturday, September 30th at 3:30pm Lytton and I will be recording the final episode of the second season of the Two Month Review LIVE at Spoonbill & Sugartown in Brooklyn. This will be part of the ...

Two Month Review #2.5: tómas's seventh composition book, 8. (Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller, Pages 140-199)

This week author and translator Idra Novey joins Chad and Lytton to talk about one of the most challenging sections of the book so far. Not only is there a proliferation of children whose voices constantly interrupt Tómas’s thoughts, but there are a few more unsettling bits that raise questions about what we should ...

Two Month Review #2.4: fifth composition book, VI. (Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller, Pages 69-139)

This week, Jacob Rogers—translator from the Galician and bookseller at Malaprop’s in Asheville, North Carolina—joins Chad and Lytton to talk about Tómas Jónsson’s next two “composition books.” Included in these sections are a long bit about the “board” and the general ...

Two Month Review #2.3: IV composition book (Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller, Pages 32-68)

In this episode—covering Tómas Jónsson’s fourth composition book—a number of the themes of the overall novel are put on display: Tómas’s relationship to his body, the way he tries to create a narrative for himself, possible injustices he’s suffered during his life, the way his lodgers are like ...

Two Month Review #2.2: Biography through Third Composition Book (Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller, Pages 1-31)

This week, Ph.D. candidate Anastasia Nikolis joins Chad and Lytton to talk about the real meat of Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller—chamber pot usage! They also discuss the way our grumpy narrator’s mind works, the way he finds beauty in ambiguity, how Lytton translated a very specific word game, and a couple cues to ...

Two Month Review #2.1: Introduction to Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller

And with this episode, we launch the second season of the Two Month Review! Over a ten-week period, we will be breaking down Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller by Guðbergur Bergsson, helping explain and explore what makes this book (often referred to as “Iceland’s Ulysses”) so influential and interesting. This ...

"Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller" Reading Schedule [Two Month Review]

The first episode in the new season of the Two Month Review will release on Thursday, and in case you haven’t already heard, for the next ten weeks we’ll be discussing Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller by Guðbergur Bergsson. We have a Goodreads group set up to talk about about this, so feel free to join in and ...

Two Month Review #12: The Author Himself!

As a special bonus episode, both Rodrigo Fresán and Will Vanderhyden joined Chad and Brian to talk about The Invented Part as a whole, the first season of the Two Month Review, what’s next in the trilogy, technology’s revenge on Rodrigo, David Lynch, and, how to write jacket copy. Feel free to comment on ...

Two Month Review #11: "The Imaginary Person" (The Invented Part, Pages 441-552)

We did it! After two months, eleven episodes, and a half dozen different guests, Brian and Chad finished their discussion of Rodrigo Fresán’s The Invented Part! Joining them this week to wrap things up is Valerie Miles, translator, publisher, co-founder of Granta en Español, and editor of A Thousand Forests in One ...

Two Month Review #10: "Meanwhile, Once Again, Beside the Museum Stairway, Under a Big Sky" (The Invented Part, Pages 405-440)

It’s another 2MR review with just Chad and Brian! Similar to the last guest-less podcast, this one goes a bit off the rails . . . Although this time around it gets a lot darker, as they talk about Chekov, Girl, Night, Swimming Pool, Etc., a scream descending from the skies, John Cheever’s writing prompt, and much ...

Two Month Review #9: "Life After People, or Notes For a Brief History of Progressive Rock and Science Fiction" (The Invented Part, Pages 361-404)

On this week’s Two Month Review, Tom Roberge from Riffraff and the Three Percent Podcast joins Chad and Brian talk about 2001: A Space Odyssey, Pink Floyd, potential errors and non-errors, cultural touchstones that serve to define friendships, the overall structure of this chapter of The Invented Part, and Tom’s ...

Two Month Review #8: "Many Fêtes, or Study for a Group Portrait with Broken Decalogues" (The Invented Part, Pages 301-360)

On this week’s Two Month Review, Chad and Brian talk about F. Scott Fitzgerald and Tender Is the Night, puzzles, how to properly introduce the show, the Modern Library list of top 100 novels of the twentieth century, Booth Tarkington, and much more more. Feel free to comment on this episode—or on the book in ...

The Inverted Part [Two Month Review: The Invented Part]

On this week’s Two Month Review podcast, we’ll be discussing the fourth part of The Invented Part (“Many Fêtes, or Study for a Group Portrait with Broken Decalogues,” pagest 301-360). As a bit of preparation, below you’ll find some initial thoughts, observations, and quotes. You can also ...

Two Month Review #7: "A Few Things You Happen to Think About When All You Want Is to Think About Nothing" (The Invented Part, Pages 231-300)

This week, Jonathan Lethem (Motherless Brooklyn, Chronic City) joins Chad and Brian to talk about The Writer’s trip to a hospital, where he assumes something horrible is happening, which is countered by a gushing forth of new story ideas. Jonathan tells of his own experience coming up with one of his most famous books ...

Portraits of Rage and Mortality [Two Month Review: The Invented Part]

On this week’s Two Month Review podcast, we’ll be discussing the third part (“A Few Things You Happen to Think About When All You Want Is to Think About Nothing”) of The Invented Part . As a bit of preparation, below you’ll find some initial thoughts, observations, and quotes. You can also ...

Two Month Review #6: "The Place Where the Sea Ends So the Forest Can Begin: Part 3" (The Invented Part, Pages 208-230)

This week, Speculative Fiction in Translation founder and Best Translated Book Award judge Rachel Cordasco joins Chad and Brian to talk about the nature of time, deals with the devil, conflagrations, and writerly desires, or, in other words, the third part of “The Place Where the Sea Ends So the Forest Can Begin” ...

Who Wants to Be a Writer? [Two Month Review: The Invented Part]

On this week’s Two Month Review podcast, we’ll be discussing the third chapter of the second part (“The Place Where the Sea Ends So the Forest Can Begin”) of The Invented Part . As a bit of preparation, below you’ll find some initial thoughts, observations, and quotes. You can also download ...

Two Month Review #5: "The Place Where the Sea Ends So the Forest Can Begin: Part 2" (The Invented Part, Pages 99-207)

This week’s episode is all about Penelope and her experiences with the Karmas. (And a Big Green Cow.) A lot of the Odyssey, Wuthering Heights, and William Burroughs are in this section, which is hilariously dissected by Brian, Chad, and their guest, Tom Flynn, the manager of Volumes Bookcafe in Chicago. One of the ...

Cultural References in "The Invented Part" [Two Month Review: The Invented Part]

Today’s Two Month Review post is a bit unusual. What you’ll find below is the working list of cultural allusions that Jeremy Garber found while preparing for the podcast that he was on. Creating a list of all the allusions found in the entire book is probably too much for any single person to construct, so if you ...

Let's Get Weird [Two Month Review: The Invented Part]

On last Thursday’s Two Month Review podcast we covered the opening to the second section of The Invented Part, and coming up later this week we’ll be covering pages 99-207—the second section of “The Place Where the Sea Ends So the Forest Can Begin.” As a bit of preparation, below you’ll ...

Two Month Review #4: "The Place Where the Sea Ends So the Forest Can Begin: Part 1" (The Invented Part, Pages 46-98)

This week, author and journalist Mark Binelli joins Chad and Brian to discuss the first part of the second section of Rodrigo Fresán’s The Invented Part. In “The Place Where the Seas Ends So the Forest Can Begin,” we meet The Young Man and The Young Woman, who are making a movie about The Writer after his ...

Reflections and Mirrors [Two Month Review: The Invented Part]

On last Thursday’s Two Month Review podcast we covered the first forty-five pages of The Invented Part, and coming up later this week we’ll be covering pages 46-98—the first section of “The Place Where the Sea Ends So the Forest Can Begin.” As a bit of preparation, below you’ll find some ...

Two Month Review #3: "The Real Character" (The Invented Part, Pages 1-45)

This week, Jeremy Garber from Powells Books joins Chad and Brian to discuss the first section of Rodrigo Fresán’s The Invented Part. This section, entitled “The Real Character,” introduces us to the main character of the book—known here as The Boy, and later as The Writer—as well as some of the ...

Three Openings [Two Month Review: The Invented Part]

Here are the first few paragraphs of Rodrigo Fresán’s Kensington Gardens, translated by Natasha Wimmer: It begins with a boy who was never a man and ends with a man who was never a boy. Something like that. Or better: it begins with a man’s suicide and a boy’s death, and ...

Some Notes on "The Real Character" [Two Month Review: The Invented Part]

The first Two Month Review podcast went up just over a week ago, and the next one—covering the first section of the book, “The Real Character” (pages 1-45)—will be posted next Thursday, June 1st. Prior to each week’s podcast, we hope to have at least some sort of overview post that offers some ...

Two Month Review #2: Introducing Rodrigo Fresán's "The Invented Part"

Translator Will Vanderhyden joins Chad and Brian to provide an overview of Rodrigo Fresán’s work—especially The Invented Part. They discuss some of his earlier works (including Kensington Gardens, which is available in an English translation), different pop culture touchstones running throughout his oeuvre, ...

Two Month Review #1: General Introduction

Punctuated by toddler Isak’s comments about Barney, Chad Post, Brian Wood, and Lytton Smith discuss the main motivations behind the upcoming “Two Month Review” podcasts, which will be released weekly starting in later this month, and will focus on a single book for a eight or nine week period. As noted ...

Three Percent Podcast Launches "Two Month Review"

After six years and almost one hundred and thirty episodes, the Three Percent Podcast is expanding to include new weekly “Two Month Review” mini-episodes. Each “season” of the Two Month Review podcasts will highlight a different Open Letter book, reading it slowly over the course of eight to nine episodes. ...

“Frontier” Receives a Starred Review in Kirkus!

It’s always fun to share really positive reviews of our books, such as this starred review from Kirkus for Frontier by Can Xue: Things are strange out there on the fringes, as the always adventurous Xue’s latest novel illustrates. There is magical realism aplenty in the pages of Xue’s beguiling story, but magical ...

Call for Reviewers!

Three Percent is once again looking to expand its team of reviewers! If you’re interested in reviewing for Three Percent, please contact us at: submissions [at] openletterbooks.org. We’ve put together a quick list of titles we’d like to have reviewed at this time. Reviewers are not strictly limited to the books ...

Chronicle of the Murdered House by Lucio Cardoso [Early Reviews]

  The pub date for Chronicle of the Murdered House by Lúcio Cardoso, which is translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson, with a biographical note from Ben Moser officially came out on Tuesday, December 13th. To celebrate the release of this Brazilian masterpiece, we’ll be running a ...

Latest Review: "Twenty-One Cardinals" by Jocelyne Saucier

The latest addition to our Reviews section is a piece by Natalya Tausanovitch on Twenty-One Cardinals by Jocelyne Saucier, published by Coach House Books. Natalya was a student of Chad’s last school year, and is in her final year of studies at the university. This summer, she did an internship with the press and ...

Latest Review: "One of Us Is Sleeping" by Josefine Klougart

The latest addition to our Reviews section is a piece by Jeremy Garber on Josefine Klougart’s One of Us Is Sleeping, out from Open Letter last month. What can be said about a book like this? It’s one of those books that can make you feel like you’re reading it for the first time in the middle of winter, ...

Latest Review: "Bye Bye Blondie" by Virginie Despentes

The latest addition to our Reviews section is a by Emma Ramadan on Virginie Despentes’s Bye Bye Blondie, published by The Feminist Press. In addition to being a translator from the French (you may recognize her name from Anne F. Garréta’s Sphinx), Emma is one of two co-founders (along with Tom Roberge) of the ...

Latest Review: "La Superba" by Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer

The latest addition to our Reviews section is a piece by Anna Alden on La Superba by Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer, published this March by Deep Vellum Publishing. Summer is in full hazy swing here in Rochester, but luckily we have a handful of great interns at Open Letter/Three Percent this summer, who are going to be helping ...

Latest Review: "Intervenir/Intervene" by Dolores Dorantes and Rodrigo Flores Sánchez

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Vincent Francone on Intervenir/Intervene by Dolores Dorantes and Rodrigo Flores Sánchez, published by Ugly Duckling Presse. It’s been slow on the review and post end this summer, while we’ve been busy around the offices here and elsewhere, but we hope ...

Alejandro Zambra & The White Review

Author Alejandro Zambra will be speaking at New York’s Center for Fiction with Sophie Seita on Thursday, May 26 at 7pm. This event is in celebration of the launch of The White Review No. 16. When: Thursday, May 26 at 6 p.m. Where: Center for Fiction, 17 E 47th St, New York, NY 10017 For more information and to RSVP, go ...

Latest Review: "All Days Are Night" by Peter Stamm

The latest addition to our Reviews section is a piece by Lori Feathers on Peter Stamm’s All Days are Night, published last year by Other Press. Here’s the beginning of Lori’s review: As presaged by its title, contradiction is the theme of Peter Stamm’s novel, All Days Are Night. Gillian, a ...

Latest Review: "The Seven Good Years" by Etgar Keret

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Vincent Francone on The Seven Good Years by Etgar Kerert, on the edition published by Granta Books. Here’s the beginning of Vince’s review: It’s a rare and wonderful book that begins and ends with violence and humor. At the start of Etgar Keret’s The ...

Latest Review: "Human Acts" by Han Kang

The latest addition to our Reviews section is a piece by J. C. Sutcliffe on Han Kang’s Human Acts, published by Portobello Books. Here’s the beginning of the review: Last year, Han Kang’s The Vegetarian was an unexpected critical hit. Now, it’s just been published in the U.S. and has already received a ...

Latest Review: "Nowhere to Be Found" by Bae Suah

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Pierce Alquist on Nowhere to Be Found by Bae Suah, published in 2014 by AmazonCrossing. Just a side note, that if you’ve been itching for more from Bae Suah since this one came out, there are THREE more forthcoming titles of hers making their way into English: A Greater ...

Latest review: "La paz de los vencidos" by Jorge Eduardo Benavides

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Brendan Riley on La paz de los vencidos by Jorge Eduardo Benavides, published in 2014 by Nocturna Ediciones. Here’s the beginning of Brendan’s review—which is long overdue in being posted, for which I apologize—and which can be seen over at New Spanish Books ...

Latest Review: "Souffles-Anfas: A Critical Anthology from the Moroccan Journal of Culture and Politics" ed. by Olivia C. Harrison and Teresa Villa-Ignacio

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Emma Ramadan on Souffles-Anfas: A Critical Anthology from the Moroccan Journal of Culture and Politics, ed. by Olivia C. Harrison and Teresa Villa-Ignacio. Emma herself is a literary translator from French. She has a BA in Comparative Literature and Literary Translation from ...

Latest Review: "Berlin" by Aleš Šteger

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Vincent Francone on Berlin by Aleš Šteger, translated by Brian Henry, Forrest Gander & Aljaž Kovac and published by Counterpath Press. Vince has brought up a lot of interesting points in this “review,” and questions the relationship of the reader’s ...

Latest Review: "The Gun" by Fuminori Nakamura

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Will Eells on The Gun by Fuminori Nakamura, translated by Allison Markin Powell and out from Soho Crime. Here’s the beginning of Will’s review: Like any good potboiler worth its salt, Fuminori Nakamura’s The Gun wastes no time setting up its premise: ...

Latest Review: "This Place Holds No Fear" by Monika Held

The latest addition to our Reviews section is a piece by Lori Feathers on Monika Held’s This Place Holds No Fear, translated by Anne Posten and published by Haus Publishing. Lori Feathers is a freelance book critic. Follow her on Twitter @LoriFeathers. (And Anne, if you’re reading this, THIS is why I gave you a ...

Latest Review: "The Room" by Jonas Karlsson

The latest addition to our Reviews section is a piece by Peter Biello on The Room by Jonas Karlsson, translated by Neil Smith and out from Hogarth. Peter Biello is the host of All Things Considered at New Hampshire Public Radio. He has served as a producer/announcer/host of Weekend Edition Saturday at Vermont Public Radio ...

Latest Review: "Thérèse and Isabelle" by Violette Leduc

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Kaija Straumanis on Thérèse and Isabelle by Violette Leduc, translated by Sophie Lewis and published by Feminist Press. Here’s the beginning of the review: I recently listened to Three Percent Podcast #99, which had guest speaker Julia Berner-Tobin from Feminist ...

Latest Review: "On the Edge" by Rafael Chirbes

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Jeremy Garber on On the Edge by Rafael Chirbes, translated by Margaret Jull Costa, and coming out from New Directions next January. Jeremy Garber is the events coordinator for Powell’s Books and also a freelance reviewer. He is also currently serving on the BTBA judging ...

Latest Review: "Rambling Jack" by Micheál Ó Conghaile

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Vincent Francone on Rambling Jack by Micheál Ó Conghaile, translated by Katherine Duffy, and published by Dalkey Archive Press. Vince went for a non-standard review format for this bilingual edition, favoring a flowing dialogue-style, and it’s pretty awesome. ...

Latest Review: "The Things We Don't Do" by Andrés Neuman

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Tiffany Nichols on The Things We Don’t Do by Andrés Neuman, translated by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia, and published by Open Letter Books. Here’s a part of of Tiffany’s review: Many authors are compared to Roberto Bolaño. However, very few authors ...

Latest Review: "Private Life" by Josep Maria de Sagarra

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Chris Iacono on Private Life by Josep Maria de Sagarra, translated by Mary Ann Newman and published by Archipelago Books. Here’s a part of of Chris’s review: In Private Life, Sagarra follows the footsteps of the speaker and his associates, and he certainly ...

Latest Review: "Dinner" by César Aira

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Lori Feathers on Dinner by César Aira, translated by Katherine Silver and out from New Directions. The first time I read César Aira was four years ago: Ghosts and The Literary Conference. At the time I had my opinions about both, but in retrospect—and this surprises ...

Latest Review: "We're Not Here to Disappear" by Olivia Rosenthal

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Megan C. Ferguson on We’re Not Here to Disappear by Olivia Rosenthal, translated by Béatrice Mousli and published by Otis/Seismicity Editions. The books we get from Otis/Seismicity are always this beautiful matte black, with a simple title heading and author listing. ...

Latest Review: "The Queen's Caprice" by Jean Echenoz

The latest addition to our Reviews section is a piece by Christopher Iacono on The Queen’s Caprice by Jean Echenoz, translated by Linda Coverdale and published by The New Press. What I particularly liked about this review is the last paragraph. I’m one of those people who has a lot of peeves over readers ...

Open Letter Review Roundup!

Over the past few weeks, our books have received a bunch of great reviews. Each time this happens, I plan on posting about it on the blog, then I start answering emails, or teaching a class, or doing some mundane publishing related task (sales reports! metadata!) and don’t get around to it. So, here’s a huge ...

Latest Review: "French Concession" by Xiao Bai

The latest addition to our Reviews section by Emily Goedde on French Concession by Xiao Bai, translated by Chenxin Jiang and published by Harper Collins. Emily Goedde received an MFA in literary translation from the University of Iowa. She is now a PhD candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University ...

Latest Review: "Anna Karenina" by Leo Tolstoy

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Christopher Iacono on one of the great Russian classics, Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, translated by Marian Schwartz and published by Yale University Press. I recently had a brief correspondence with Marian about [epic] classic literature and the mediums in which one can ...

Latest Review: "The Cold Song" by Linn Ullmann

The latest addition to our Reviews section is a piece by David Richardson on The Cold Song by Linn Ullmann, translated by Barbara J. Haveland and published by Other Press. David Richardson is a writer, editor, and teacher based in New York. Here’s the beginning of his review: Linn Ullmann’s The Cold Song, her ...

Latest Review: "This Life" by Karel Schoeman

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by P. T. Smith on Karel Schoeman’s This Life, translated by Else Silke, and out from Archipelago Books. Here’s the beginning of Patrick’s review: Karel Schoeman’s Afrikaans novel, This Life, translated by Else Silke, falls into a genre maybe only noticed ...

Latest Review: "A Dilemma" by Joris-Karl Hyusmans

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Christopher Iacono on A Dilemma by Joris-Karl Hyusmans, translated by Justin Vicari, and out from Wakefield Press. (We love you, Wakefield!!!) Here’s the beginning of Chris’s piece: In Joris-Karl Hyusmans’s most popular novel, À rebours (Against Nature ...

Latest Review: "Walker on Water" by Kristiina Ehin

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by P. T. Smith on Kristiina Ehin’s Walker on Water, translated by lmar Lehtpere and out from Unnamed Press. Here’s the beginning of Patrick’s review: There are books that can only wisely be recommended to specific types of readers, where it is easy to know ...

Latest Review: "The Nightwatches of Bonaventura" by Bonaventura

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by J. T. Mahany on The Nightwatches of Bonaventura by Bonaventura, translated by Gerald Gillespie, and published by University of Chicago Press. J. T. is a graduate of the University of Rochester’s MALTS program, and is currently in the MFA program at Arkansas. He’s ...

Latest Review: "Pavane for a Dead Princess" by Park Min-Gyu

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Christopher Iacono on Pavane for a Dead Princess by Park Min-Gyu, translated by Amber Hyun Jung Kim, and published by Dalkey Archive Press. Here’s the beginning of Chris’s review: In 1899, Maurice Ravel wrote “Pavane pour une infante défunte” (“Pavane ...

Latest Review: "Tram 83" by Fiston Mwanza Mujila

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Caitlin Thomas on Tram 83 by Fiston Mwanza Mujila, translated by Robert Glasser, and published by Deep Vellum. Caitlin is one of our interns at Open Letter this summer—which, effectively, is the first summer in a long time that 2/3 of our interns haven’t been named ...

A Brilliant Review of Georgi Gospodinov's "The Physics of Sorrow"

We already did one post about Asymptote today, but this review by Pete Mitchell of Georgi Gospodinov’s The Physics of Sorrow is so wonderfully complete and serious that I just have to share it. I’ll start by giving you the money shot from the review (at least in my opinion): But Gospodinov is playing for ...

Antoine Volodine in the Paris Review

It’s been a nice couple of months for Antoine Volodine, publicity-wise. First, he had this long essay appear in The New Inquiry. Then Music & Literature honored the publication of Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven with a week of Volodine-related content. And now, the Paris Review has an interview with ...

Latest Review: "Twenty-One Days of a Neurasthenic" by Octave Mirbeau

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Lori Feathers on Twenty-One Days of a Neurasthenic by Octave Mirbeau, translated by Justin Vicari and published by Dalkey Archive Press. Now that the Women’s World Cup of Literature is nearing the final results, we’re resuming a less competitive path for reviews. ...

Latest Review: "Sphinx" by Anne Garréta

The latest addition to our reviews section, is a piece by BTBA judge Monica Carter on Anne Garréta’s Sphinx, the first novel by a female Oulipian to appear in English translation. This book just came out from Deep Vellum and has been getting a lot of good praise, in part because no female Oulipian has appeared in ...

Latest Review: "Morse, My Deaf Friend" by Miloš Djurdjević

The latest addition to our Reviews section is a piece by Vincent Francone on Miloš Djurdjević’s Morse, My Deaf Friend, translated by the author and published by Ugly Duckling Presse. The chapbook itself is short—clocking in at 32 pages—and is yet another beautiful work of print done by Ugly Duckling. ...

Latest Review: "The Crimson Thread of Abandon" by Terayama Shūji

The latest addition to our Reviews section is a piece by Robert Anthony Siegel on Terayama Shūji’s The Crimson Thread of Abandon, translated by Elizabeth L. Armstrong and published by the University of Hawai’i Press. Robert Anthony Siegel is the author of two novels, All Will Be Revealed and All the Money in ...

Latest Review: "Life Embitters" by Josep Pla

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Christopher Iacono on Life Embitters by Josep Pla, translated by Peter Bush and published by Archipelago Books. Here’s the beginning of Chris’s review: Last year, NYRB Classics introduced English-language readers to Catalan writer Josep Pla with Peter ...

Latest Review: "The Physics of Sorrow" by Georgi Gospodinov

The latest addition to our Reviews section is a piece by Izidora Angel on The Physics of Sorrow by Georgi Gospodinov, translated by Angela Rodel and out last month from Open Letter Books. This book—and call it a shameless plug all you want—is by far one of the best books I’ve read in the last year, and has been on ...

Latest Review: "Vano and Niko" by Erlom Akhvlediani

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Vincent Francone on Vano and Niko by Erlom Akhvlediani, translated by Mikheil Kakabadze and published by Dalkey Archive earlier this year. I know everyone is still reeling from not being able to correctly guess all the finalists for the 2015 BTBA fiction and poetry shortlists ...

Latest Review: "The Indian" by Jón Gnarr

The latest addition to our Reviews section is a piece by P. T. Smith on Jón Gnarr’s The Indian, translated by Lytton Smith and out this month from Deep Vellum. Jón Gnarr is an actor, punk rocker, comedian, and author who created the satirical “Best Party” in Iceland and, against all odds, rose to become major of ...

Latest Review: "Mother of 1084," "Old Women," and "Breast Stories" by Mahasweta Devi

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Christopher Iacono on three works by Mahasweta Devi, and published by Seagull Books: Mother of 1084 (trans. by Samik Bandyopadhyay), Old Women (trans. by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak), and Breast Stories (trans. by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak). Is everyone back on two feet after ...

Latest Review: "Tristana" by Benito Pérez Galdós

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Lori Feathers on Tristana by Benito Pérez Galdós, translated by Margaret Jull Costa, and published by New York Review Books. Here’s the beginning of Lori’s review: The prolific Spanish author Benito Pérez Galdós wrote his short novel, Tristana, during the ...

Latest Review: "The History of Silence" by Pedro Zarraluki

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by P. T. Smith on The History of Silence by Pedro Zarraluki, translated by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia, and published by Hispabooks Publishing. Here’s the beginning of Patrick’s review: Pedro Zarraluki’s The History of Silence (trans. Nick Caistor and ...

Latest Review: "Flesh-Coloured Dominoes" by Zigmunds Skujiņš

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by P. T. Smith on Flesh-Coloured Dominoes by Zigmunds Skujiņš, translated by Kaija Straumanis and published by Arcadia Books. Patrick has been a powerhouse of reviews this past month—and this isn’t even the last from him! Here’s the beginning of his ...

Latest Review: "Iraqi Nights" by Dunya Mikhail

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Vincent Francone on Iraqi Nights by Dunya Mikhail, translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid and published by New Directions. Here’s the beginning of Vince’s review: In a culture that privileges prose, reviewing poetry is fairly pointless. And I’ve long since ...

Latest Review: "Three-Light Years" by Andrea Canobbio

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Tiffany Nichols on Andrea Cannobio’s Three Light-Years, translated by Anne Milano Appel and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Friday the 13th! Go catch some black cats before the weekend! Here’s the beginning of Tiffany’s review: I would like to ...

Latest Review: "The Little Horse" by Torvald Steen

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by P. T. Smith on Torvald Steen’s The Little Horse, translated by James Anderson and published by Seagull Books. Here’s the beginning of Patrick’s review: The last five days of the eleventh-century Icelandic politician, writer of sagas, and famous murder ...

Latest Review: "Guys Like Me" by Dominique Fabre

The latest addition to our Reviews section is a piece by Peter Biello on Guys Like Me by Dominique Fabre, translated by Howard Curtis and out from New Vessel Press. Here’s the beginning of Peter’s review: We all know Paris, or at least we think we know it. The Eiffel Tower. The Latin Quarter. The ...

Latest Review: "Birth of a Bridge" by Maylis de Kerangal

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Christopher Iacono on Birth of a Bridge by Maylis de Kerangal, translated by Jessica Moore and published by Talonbooks. Snow day! We’re still recovering, mentally as much as with street parking. Hope everyone’s staying warm. Here’s the beginning of ...

Latest Review: "Faces in the Crowd" by Valeria Luiselli

The latest addition to our Reviews section is a by Valerie Miles on Faces in the Crowd by Valeria Luiselli, translated by Christina MacSweeney and published by Coffee House Press. (For those who don’t remember, Faces in the Crowd was the runner-up to the 2014 World Cup of Literature Championship Game, beat out only by ...

Latest Review: "Fantomas Versus the Multinational Vampires: An Attainable Utopia"

The latest addition to our Reviews section is a piece by Cameron Rowe on Julio Cortázar’s Fantomas Versus the Multinational Vampires: An Attainable Utopia, translated by David Kurnick and published by Semiotext(e). Cameron (some of you may have met her at ALTA last fall) is a current student in the MA in Literary ...

Daniel Medin on The White Review and BTBAs Past, Present and Future

Daniel Medin teaches at the American University of Paris, where he helps direct the Center for Writers and Translators and is Associate Series Editor of The Cahiers Series. The January 2015 Translation Issue that I edited for The White Review recently went live. Nearly a year in the making, it gathers various kinds of ...

Latest Review: "Self-Portrait in Green" by Marie NDiaye

The latest addition to our Reviews section is a piece by Lori Feathers on Marie NDiaye’s Self-Portrait in Green, translated by Jordan Stump, and out from Two Lines Press. Lori is an attorney who lives in Dallas, Texas, and is a member of the Board of Deep Vellum Publishing in Dallas. Hope everyone is having a great ...

Latest Review: "The Madmen of Benghazi" by Gerard de Villiers

The latest addition to our Reviews section is a piece by P.T. Smith on The Madmen of Benghazi by Gerard de Villiers, translated by William Rodarmor and out from Vintage/Black Lizard. Sometimes you want a book to be good. You want it to be amazing, mind-blowing, and one of the best things you’ll have read in months. ...

Latest Review: "The Four Corners of Palermo" by Giuseppe Di Piazza

The latest addition to our Reviews section is a piece by Patience Haggin on Giuseppe Di Piazza’s The Four Corners of Palermo, translated by Antony Shugaar and published by Other Press. Patience is a graduate of Princeton University, where she majored in comparative literature, focusing on translation. As her senior ...

Latest Review: "Writers" by Antoine Volodine

The latest addition. to our Reviews section is a piece by P. T. Smith on Antoine Volodine’s Writers, translated by Katina Rogers and published earlier this year by Dalkey Archive Press. For those who don’t know, it was announced this week that Volodine had been awarded the Prix Médicis for his latest book, ...

Latest Review: "My Brilliant Friend" by Elena Ferrante

The latest addition to our Reviews section is a piece by Acacia O’Connor on Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, translated by Ann Goldstein and published by Europa Editions. This book was published in English in 2012, but considering the attention Ferrante has been getting for her work since then, this is a ...

Latest Review: "Stealth" by Sonallah Ibrahim

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Christopher Iacono on Stealth by Sonallah Ibrahim, translated by Hosam Aboul-Ela and published by New Directions. Chris is a regular reviewer for Three Percent, and happens to be taking the next month off to participate in NaNoWriMo. We wish him endurance and good writing ...

Latest Review: "Miruna, a Tale" by Bogdan Suceavă

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Alta Ifland on Miruna, a Tale by Bogdan Suceavă, translated by Alistair Ian Blyth and out from Twisted Spoon Press. Fun fact! Bogdan and Chad were at MSU during the same time, where they became friends. Here’s the beginning of Alta’s review: Miruna is a ...

Latest Review: "Kamal Jann" by Dominique Eddé

The latest addition to our Reviews section is a by Lori Feathers on Kamal Jann by Dominique Eddé, translated by Ros Schwartz and published by Seagull Books. Lori helped us out in the World Cup of Literature round for the U.S. vs. Belgium, and is also a member of the Board of Dallas-based Deep Vellum ...

Latest Review: "I Called Him Necktie" by Milena Michiko Flašar

The latest addition to our Reviews section is a by Christopher Iacono on Milena Michiko Flašar’s I Called Him Necktie, translated by Sheila Dickie and published by New Vessel Press. Here’s the beginning of Chris’s review: While looking back at an episode in his life, twenty-year-old Taguchi Hiro ...

Latest Review: "Return to Killybegs" by Sorj Chalandon

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Vincent Francone on Return to Killybegs by Sorj Chalandon, translated by Ursula Meany Scott and published by The Lilliput Press. All I have to say before we get to Vince’s review is that “Killybegs” sounds like something one might yell after a pint too many ...

Latest Review: "Last Days" by Laurent Seksik

The latest addition to our Reviews section is a by Peter Biello on Laurent Seksik’s The Last Days translated by Andre Naffis-Sahely and published by Pushkin Press. Peter is a producer and announcer at Vermont Public Radio, and is the organizer of the Burlington Writers Workshop. He’s also going to be helping us ...

Latest Review: "Selected Stories" by Kjell Askildsen

The latest addition to our Reviews section is a piece by P. T. Smith on Kjell Askildsen’s Selected Stories translated by Seán Kinsella and out from Dalkey Archive Press. Welcome back from the weekend, everyone! Kjell Askildsen has a neato name. That is all. Here’s the beginning of Patrick’s ...

Latest Review: "Letter from an Unknown Woman and Other Stories" by Stefan Zweig

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Christopher Iacono on Letter from an Unknown Woman by Stefan Zweig, translated by Anthea Bell and published by Pushkin Press. In case you’ve forgotten, Chris is a writer, copy editor, and proofreader from Methuen, MA; he’s also a regular reviewer for Three ...

Latest Review: "Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage" by Haruki Murakami

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Will Eells on Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami, translated by Philip Gabriel and published by Knopf. While I can’t claim to know whether I may be the editor Will refers to in the opening to his review (which: HAHA OH SO FUNNY WILL ...

Latest Review: "The Matiushin Case" by Oleg Pavlov

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Brandy Harrison on Oleg Pavlov’s The Matiushin Case, translated by Andrew Bromfield, and published by And Other Stories. A lover of foreign literature (particularly from Eastern Europe and Russia) Brandy—a new addition to our reviewer pool—recently finished a BA in ...

Latest Review: "Fear: A Novel of World War I" by Gabriel Chevallier

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Paul Doyle on Gabriel Chevallier’s Fear: A Novel on World War I, translated by Malcolm Imrie, and published by New York Review Books. Here’s the beginning of Paul’s review: One hundred years have passed since the start of World War I and it is ...

Latest Review: "Little Grey Lies" by Hédi Kaddour

The latest addition to our Reviews section is a piece by P. T. Smith on Little Grey Lies by Hédi Kaddour, translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan, and published by Seagull Books. Here’s the beginning of Patrick’s review: In the London of Hédi Kaddour’s Little Grey Lies, translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan, ...

Buenos Aires Review #2

The new issue of the Buenos Aires Review is now online, and features the following: BAR#2 features new fiction by Liliana Colanzi (Bolivia) and Thibault de Montaigu (France), as well as poetry by PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award-winning Ishion Hutchinson (Jamaica). Reviews and essays by Sam Rutter, Ernesto Hernández Busto and ...

A Few Good Reviews

Over the past few days, a few great reviews for Open Letter authors popped up online, all of which are worth sharing and reading. First up is P.T. Smith’s review for Full Stop of Sölvi Björn Sigurðsson’s The Last Days of My Mother, translated from the Icelandic by Helga Soffía Einarsdóttir: As a ...

Latest Review: "Autobiography of a Corpse" by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

The latest addition to our Reviews section is a piece by Simon Collinson on Autobiography of a Corpse by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, translated by Joanne Turnbull and Nikolai Formozov), and published by New York Review Books. Simon is a bookseller and freelance reviewer based in Adelaide, Australia, and has written reviews ...

Latest Review: "A Musical Hell" by Alejandra Pizarnik

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Vincent Francone on A Musical Hell by Alejandra Pizarnik, translated by Yvette Siegert and published by New Directions as part of their Poetry Pamphlet series. Here’s the beginning of Vince’s review: The best way to review Alejandra Pizarnik’s slim ...

Latest Review: "Astragal" by Albertine Sarrazin

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Tiffany Nichols on Astragal by Albertine Sarrazin, translated by Patsy Southgate, published by New Directions. There’s some kind of summer flu-plague bug going around at the office here, so we’re short on humor and personal anecdotes. Also, Rochester is a city of ...

Latest Review: "Live Bait" by Fabio Genovesi

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Megan Berkobien on Live Bait by Fabio Genovesi, translated by Michael Moore and out from Other Press. Meg is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan, a writer, and a translator from Spanish. Her translations have appeared on Words without Borders ...

Latest Review: "The Skin" by Curzio Malaparte

The latest addition to our Reviews section is a piece by Peter Biello on The Skin by Curzio Malaparte, translated by David Moore and out last year from New York Review Books. If you’re looking for some post-WWII-themed, summer reading with disturbing imagery that would blow Jane Yolen and her time-traveling YA hit out ...

Latest Review: "Love Sonnets & Elegies" by Louise Labé

The latest addition to our Reviews section is a piece by Brandy Harrison on Love Sonnets & Elegies by Louise Labé, translated by Richard Sieburth and published by New York Review Books. Brandy is a new contributor to our band of reviewers, and is currently finishing an Honors BA degree in English Language and ...

Le Translation Preview [Some July Translations]

Now that the World Cup of Literature is officially over, with Roberto Bolaño’s By Night in Chile taking home the prize, it’s time to get back to writing normal blog posts, starting with this much overdue “preview” of forthcoming July translations. My initial plan with this post was to write it ...

Latest Review: "Conversations" by César Aira

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Tiffany Nichols on César Aira’s Conversations, translated by Katherine Silver and out from New Directions. After a wild World Cup of Literature ride, what better way to wind down or frustrations or victorious cries than to talk about them (or bite each other over ...

Latest Review: "Nothing Ever Happens" by José Ovejero

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Juan Carlos Postigo on Nothing Ever Happens by José Ovejero, translated by Philip H. D. Smith and Graziella de Luis, and published by Hispabooks Publishing. If you’re still not familiar with Hispabooks, they were founded in 2011 and brought their first books to light ...

Latest Review: "The Pendragon Legend" by Antal Szerb

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by P.T. Smith on The Pendragon Legend by Antal Szerb, translated by Len Rix, and published by Pushkin Press. If there’s one thing you should know immediately about Pushkin Press, it’s that their latest Pushkin Series covers are some of the coolest things I’ve ...

Latest Review: "Mr. Gwyn" by Alessandro Baricco

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Paul Doyle on Mr. Gwyn, translated by Ann Goldstein, out next month from McSweeny’s. Paul Doyle is a writer, teacher, and web developer based in Seattle. In addition to writing reviews for Three Percent, he also writes about literature and film—especially Spanish and ...

Latest Review: "Bombay Stories" by Saadat Hasan Manto

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Will Eells on Bombay Stories, translated by Matt Reeck and Aftab Ahmad, and out from Vintage International. For those of you who are regulars, you may remember Will’s name—he’s a former student of Chad’s at the University of Rochester, budding translator ...

Latest Review: "The Gray Notebook" by Joseph Pla

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Christopher Iacono on The Gray Notebook translated by Peter Bush, and out from New York Review Books. This is another 600+ page book that screams to be read—Pla’s tome describes life and observations in Barcelona, entries written by his twenty-year-old self in the ...

Latest Review: "I am the Beggar of the World: Landays from Contemporary Afghanistan"

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Grant Barber on I am the Beggar of the World: Landays from Contemporary Afghanistan translated by Eliza Griswold, and out last month from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Because I don’t know much about the tradition of Afghan landays, though I do find it both fascinating ...

Latest Review: "The Guest Cat" by Takashi Hiraide

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Robyn Kaufman on The Guest Cat by Takashi Hiraide, translated by Eric Selland, out earlier this year from New Directions. Robyn was one of Chad’s interns this past semester, and helped us out greatly in terms of proofing and editing texts, as well as evaluating ...

Latest Review: "The Oasis of Now: Selected Poems" by Sohrab Sepehri

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Heath Mayhew on The Oasis of Now: Selected Poems by Sohrab Sepehri, translated by Kazim Ali and Mohammad Jafar Mahallati, published by BOA Editions. Heath is not only a loyal Open Letter subscriber, but has also previously reviewed for Three Percent. And to tote Open Letter ...

Latest Review: "Shiki Nagaoka: A Nose For Fiction" by Mario Bellatin

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Christopher Iacono on Shiki Nagaoka: A Nose for Fiction by Mario Bellatin, translated by David Shook, and out from Phoneme Media. Most people can appreciate high-quality writing with a good (literary) prank, and most people can appreciate a finely cultivated mustache. And ...

Latest Review: "Masters and Servants" by Pierre Michon

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Tiffany Nichols on Masters and Servants by Pierre Michon, translated (illustrated, and with an introduction) by Wyatt Mason, and out from Yale University Press. When’s the last time you read a book, and were so moved or inspired by what you read that you immediately ...

Latest Review: "Towards the One & Only Metaphor" by Miklós Szentkuthy

The latest addition to our Reviews section is a piece by P.T. Smith on Towards the One & Only Metaphor by Miklós Szentkuthy, translated by Tim Wilkinson, and out from Contra Mundum Press. Patrick is a regular reviewer of ours by now, and a huge, massive, supportive fan of all literature in translation. Here’s ...

Latest Review: "In Times of Fading Light" by Eugen Ruge

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Phillip Koyoumjian on In Times of Fading Light by Eugen Ruge, from Graywolf Press. Because I’m setting this post up while on a moderate amount (one tablet, just one for beginners) of pain relievers for a sore neck, there is no clever intro for this piece of ...

Latest Review: "The Antiquarian" by Gustavo Faverón Patriau

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by P.T. Smith on The Antiquarian by Gustavo Faverón Patriau, forthcoming from Black Cat/Grove Press in June of this year. All I can think about after reading this review is all the books that, to me, are scary enough that I get the thrill I want out of them—but aren’t ...

Latest Review: "Elsewhere" by Eliot Weinberger (ed.)

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Grant Barber on Elsewhere, an anthology of poetry edited by Eliot Weinberger, and out from Open Letter Books and co-published by the Poetry Foundation. If you’re a fan of Eliot’s essays and commentary (such as 19 Ways), a fan of poetry, or both, this is a slim ...

Latest Review: "The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly" by Sun-mi Hwang

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Chris Iacono on Sun-mi Hwang’s The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly, translated by Chi-Young Kim, and out last fall from Penguin. This is a review I’ve been sitting on a while and I apologize for that—but after a quick trip to NYC for a fantastic evening with Bulgarian ...

Latest Review: "Sankya" by Zakhar Prilepin

The latest addition to our Reviews section is a piece by Kseniya Melnik on Zakhar Prilepin’s Sankya, translated by Mariya Gusev and Jeff Parker, out from Dzanc Books. In addition to being a new name in our reviewer pool, Kseniya was one of Granta’s “New Voices” ...

Latest Review: "Stalin is Dead" by Rachel Shihor

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Tiffany Nichols on Rachel Shihor’s Stalin is Dead, translated by Ornan Rotem, and out from Sylph Editions. If you’re into short, sweet, and messed up crazy-type flash fiction bits, this book would be right up your alley. The jacket copy alone is a great hook, ...

Latest Review: "Paradises" by Iosi Havilio

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Andrea Reece on Iosi Havilio’s Paradises, translated by Beth Fowler, and out from And Other Stories. Here’s the beginning of Andrea’s review: Paradises by cult Argentinian author Iosi Havilio is the continuation of his earlier novel, Open Door, and ...

Latest Review: "Two Crocodiles" by Fyodor Dostoevsky and Felisberto Hernández

The latest addition to our Reviews section is a piece by Sara Shuman on Two Crocodiles by Fyodor Dostoevsky and Felisberto Hernández, translated (respectively) by Constance Garnett and Esther Allen, and out from New Directions. Two Crocodiles, as the review also explains, is a short book comprised of two stories—one from ...

Latest Review: "Navidad & Matanza" by Carlos Labbé

The latest addition to our Reviews section is a piece by J.T. Mahany on Navidad & Matanza by Carlos Labbé, translated by Will Vanderhyden, and out next month from Open Letter. Carlos Labbé was one of Granta’s The Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists, and has quickly become a Name to Know in the world ...

Latest Review: "Zbinden's Progress" by Christoph Simon

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Emily Davis on Zbinden’s Progress by Christoph Simon, translated by Donal McLaughlin (and with an introduction by Barbara Trapido), recently out from And Other Stories. Due to some schedule hiccups (prep for AWP, AWP, post-AWP) and other interference (Scranton, PA, ...

Latest Review: "Commentary" by Marcelle Sauvageot

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Peter Biello on Commentary by Marcelle Sauvageot, translated by Anna Moschovakis (and introduction from Jennifer Moxley), published by Ugly Duckling Presse. Peter not only runs the Burlington Writers Workshop, but is also a friend to Open Letter—we had the pleasure of ...

Latest Review: "My Fathers' Ghost Is Climbing in the Rain" by Patricio Pron

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by P. T. Smith on My Fathers’ Ghost Is Climbing in the Rain by Patricio Pron, translated by Mara Faye Lethem, and forthcoming from Knopf. Pron was one of Granta’s Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists, and has already made an impression with this, his American debut. And ...

Latest Review: "Flowers & Mishima’s Illustrated Biography" by Mario Bellatin

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Vincent Francone on Flower & Mishima’s Illustrated Biography by Mario Bellatin, translated by Kolin Jordan, and out from 7Vientos. Since the site is about a week behind in posting reviews, I thought we’d start back in with a short and sweet one by Vince. We were ...

Latest Review: "To the Spring, by Night" by Seyhmus Dagtekin

This latest addition to our Reviews Section is by Allison Charette on Seyhmus Dagtekin’s To the Spring, by Night, translated by Donald Winkler, and from McGill-Queen’s University Press. Allison is another of the students at the University of Rochester in our lovely MA in Literary Translation Studies program, and ...

Latest Review: "Ten White Geese" by Gerbrand Bakker

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Christopher Iacono on Ten White Geese by Gerbrand Bakker, translated by David Colmer, and out from Penguin Books. Chris is a writer, copy editor, and proofreader from Methuen, MA; he also runs the Good Coffee Book Blog. Here’s an excerpt from his review: Before ...

Latest Review: "A Handbook for the Perfect Adventurer" by Pierre Mac Orlan

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Kaija Straumanis on A Handbook for the Perfect Adventurer by Pierre Mac Orlan, translated by Napoleon Jeffries, and out from Wakefield Press. Based on the above paragraph and all the awesome that it contains, this book really shouldn’t need much more introduction: ...

Latest Review: "Shantytown" by César Aira

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is the continuation of a larger piece by Owen Rowe, today on César Aira’s Shantytown, translated by Chris Andrews, out from New Directions. Owen (Matt) Rowe is a writer, editor, and translator (from Portuguese and Italian) based in Port Townsend, Washington. Stay tuned for ...

Latest Review: "The Mongolian Conspiracy" by Rafael Bernal

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Owen Rowe on The Mongolian Conspiracy by Rafael Bernai, translated by Katherine Silver, and out from New Directions. Owen (Matt) Rowe is a writer, editor, and translator (from Portuguese and Italian) based in Port Townsend, Washington. Stay tuned for his upcoming ...

Latest Review: "The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra" by Pedro Mairal

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Katherine Rucker on The Missing Years of Juan Salvatierra by Pedro Mairal, translated by Nick Caistor, from New Vessel Press. Katherine is another of the students in the University of Rochester’s MA in Literary Translation Studies program, whose name you may ...

Latest Review: "Kopenhaga" by Grzegorz Wróblewski

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Vincent Francone on Kopenhaga by Grzegorz Wróblewski, translated by Piotr Gwiazda, from Zephyr Press. Chad had previously mentioned this book of poetry in a Poland-Love post; his enthusiasm wasn’t misplaced. Wróblewski has a delightfully and “casually ...

Latest Review: "Talking to Ourselves" by Andrés Neuman

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Jeremy Garber on Talking to Ourselves by Andrés Neuman, translated by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia, out from FSG. Andrés Neuman has quickly become an in-house name here at Open Letter/Three Percent, and, as Jeremy hints at in his review, everyone either ...

Latest Review: "A Fairy Tale" by Jonas T. Bengtsson

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Tiffany Nichols on A Fairy Tale by Jonas T. Bengtsson, translated by Charlotte Barslund and out from Other Press. This is Bengtsson’s third novel, though his first published in English—the book is actually already available from House of Anansi Press in ...

Latest Review: "Relocations: 3 Contemporary Russian Women Poets" by Polina Barskova, Anna Glazova, and Maria Stepanova

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is by Will Evans on Relocations: 3 Contemporary Russian Women Poets, a collection of poems from Zephyr Press by Polina Barskova, Anna Glazova, and Maria Stepanova, translated by Catherine Ciepiela, Anna Khasin, and Sibelan Forrester. For those who don’t know, Will is the face ...

Latest Review: "Passionate Nomads" by María Rosa Lojo

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is by Jan Pytalski on María Rosa Lojo’s Passionate Nomads, translated by Brett Alan Sanders, published by Aliform Publishing. Jan (a.k.a. Janek) is a current student in the MA in Literary Translation Studies at the University of Rochester, and hails from Great Poland (where ...

Latest Review: "fungus skull eye wing" by Alfonso D’Aquino

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Grant Barber on Alfonso D’Aquino’s fungus skull eye wing, translated by Forrest Gander and out from Copper Canyon Press. One cool factoid and product from the process of this bilingual volume of poetry coming to be, as Grant points out, is that D’Aquino ...

Latest Review: "All My Friends" by Marie NDiaye

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is by Andrea Reece on Marie NDiaye’s All My Friends, translated by Jordan Stump and out from Two Lines Press. Andrea has worked as a professional translator for many years and recently completed an MA in literary translation at the University of Exeter. Here’s a part of ...

Latest Review: "The Black Spider" by Jeremias Gotthelf

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is SUPER EFFING CREEPY, and is by Phillip Koyoumjian on Jeremias Gotthelf’s The Black Spider, newly translated by Susan Bernofsky, who god only knows how didn’t need therapy after translating this, and out from New York Review Books, who will be responsible for my ...

Latest Review: "The Thaw" by Ólafur Gunnarsson

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is by P.T. Smith on Ólafur Gunnarsson’s The Thaw, translated by the author, and out from New American Press. Patrick is one of our regular reviewers, fellow literature enthusiast, and a patient person to boot (I’ve had this review in-hand since before ...

Latest Review: "On Leave" by Daniel Anselme

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is by Paul Doyle on Daniel Anselme’s On Leave, translated by David Bellos, from Faber & Faber. Here’s the beginning of Paul’s review: In 1957, Daniel Anselme published On Leave, a novel about three soldiers on leave from the Algerian War. At that point ...

Latest Review: "Pierre Reverdy" by Pierre Reverdy

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is by Catherine Partin on Pierre Reverdy’s Pierre Reverdy, a collection of the poet’s works translated by various authors, edited by Mary Ann Caws, and out from New York Review Books. Catherine is an avid reader with interests in French and Francophone literature, ...

The White Review: Excellent Print and Online Only Content!

The new issue of The White Review is incredibly stacked. There’s an interview with Vladimir Sorokin. A piece by Enrique Vila-Matas. Poems by Gerður Kristný. Art by Mark Mulroney (we used to drink together and go to Rochester Red Wings games!). But if that’s not enough, or, if you’re too cheap to spend ...

Latest Review: "The Faint-hearted Bolshevik" by Lorenzo Silva

Because we love books and love to talk about them SO MUCH (and because we fell behind a bit over the holidays AND because we’re all snowed in today after last nights semi-blizzard), here’s another review for all y’all before the weekend hits. This latest addition to our “Reviews”: section in a ...

Latest Review: "The Expedition to the Baobab Tree" by Wilma Stockenström

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is by Christopher Iacono on Wilma Stockenström’s The Expedition to the Baobab Tree, forthcoming in April from Archipelago Books. Chris is a writer, copy editor, and proofreader from Methuen, MA; he also runs the Good Coffee Book Blog, and has a new coffee mug that aptly ...

Latest Review: "The Hare" by César Aira

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is by Emily Davis on César Aira’s The Hare, from New Directions. Emily is a graduate of the University of Rochester’s MA in Literary Translation Studies program, and now lives in India, rubbing elbows with other awesome translators, and is also one of the contributing ...

Latest Review: "My Poems Won't Change the World" by Patrizia Cavalli

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Vincent Francone on Patrizia Cavalli’s My Poems Won’t Change the World, out from FSG. Vincent is a regular contributor here, and I can guarantee that his review will give you some great poet-poetry insight and a few laughs for this chilly Monday morning ...

Latest Review: "The Bridge of Beyond" by Simone Schwarz-Bart

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Christopher Iacono on Simone Schwarz-Bart’s The Bridge of Beyond, out from New York Review Books. Chris is a new addition to our reviewers, and is a writer, copy editor, and proofreader from Methuen, MA; he also runs the Good Coffee Book Blog. Here’s ...

Latest Review: "A Burnt Child" by Stig Dagerman

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Phillip Koyoumjian on Stig Dagerman’s A Burnt Child, from Zephyr Press. Phillip is a Rochester native with a background in European history and literature. He has an MS In Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois and is looking forward to ...

Latest Review: "Paul Klee's Boat" by Anzhelina Polonskaya

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Will Evans on Anzhelina Polonskaya’s Paul Klee’s Boat, Zephyr Press. Formerly an Open Letter apprentice and now his Own Man, Will is the mustache director behind Deep Vellum Publishing, a soon-to-be year-old literature in translation house based in Dallas ...

Giving Thanks for This Review of "The Dark" by Sergio Chejfec

Yesterday, P. T. Smith’s insightful review of Chejfec’s new novel The Dark was published on BOMB’s website: Much of the response to Sergio Chejfec’s English-language debut, My Two Worlds, published in 2011 by Open Letter, placed him squarely in a Sebaldian camp. The narrator is on a walk, reminiscing ...

Latest Review: "Seiobo There Below" by László Krasznahorkai

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a review by P.T. Smith on László Krasznahorkai’s Seiobo There Below, from New Directions. Here’s the beginning of Patrick’s review: In Seiobo There Below, Lázló Krasznahorkai is able to succeed at a task at which many writers fail: to dedicate an ...

The First Buenos Aires Review Quarterly Issue

The Buenos Aires Review, which, over the past few months, has been posting really interesting works of fiction and poetry, info about kick-ass bookstores, interviews, translator’s notes, and more, has just released its first quarterly issue entitled “Tongue Ties”: This first quarterly issue of the ...

2013 ALTA Conference Micro-Review: Reading Out Loud

A current MALTS student here at the University of Rochester, Allison M. Charette is also a translator from the French who recently helped launch the Emerging Literary Translators’ Network in America. After attending this year’s American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) conference, she wanted to write up a ...

Latest Review: "Blood Curse" and "I Will Have Vengeance" by Maurizio de Giovanni

The latest addition to our reviews section is a piece by George Carroll on two Maurizio de Giovanni books that Europa Editions recently released: Blood Curse and I Will Have Vengeance. I’ve been hoping to cover more crime books on the site—mainly because there are so many, lots of people, including Tom Roberge, ...

Latest Review: Every Good Heart is a Telescope

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is by Tiffany Nichols on Victor Rodríguez Núñez’s Every Heart is a Telescope, from Toad Press. Here’s a bit about Toad Press from their blog site: “The Toad Press International Chapbook Series publishes contemporary, exciting, beautiful, odd, and avant-garde ...

Latest Review: "Our Lady of the Flowers, Echoic" by Chris Tysh

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by J.T. Mahany on Chris Tysh’s Our Lady of the Flowers, Echoic, which is available from Les Figues Press. This is a strange book to review, since it’s less a “translation” and more of a “transformation,” but it’s also incredibly ...

Latest Review: "Under this Terrible Sun" by Carlos Busqued

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is by Will Evans on Carlos Busqued’s Under This Terrible Sun, from e-book publisher Frisch & Co. Will Evans—known to many as The Apprentice of Summer 2012 here at Open Letter—is the publisher behind the still-relatively-new Deep Vellum, a translated literature press ...

Latest Review: "Wigrum" by Daniel Canty

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by P. T. Smith on Daniel Canty’s Wigrum, from Talonbooks. Patrick, who is one of our regular reviewers, not only has a heightened interest in) and geographical proximity to) Montreal and its literature scene, but also shares the amusement and probable giggles at ...

Latest Review: "Between Friends" by Amos Oz

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is by Dan Vitale on Amos Oz’s Between Friends, from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and which incidentally comes out today. Dan is a contributing reviewer of ours who is making his first appearance in a while on Three Percent—and with a piece on an author I understand to be one ...

Reviews in Translation

This post is courtesy of BTBA judge, Scott Esposito. Scott Esposito blogs at Conversational Reading and tweets. So here are some things that I’ve reviewed, will review, or will do something with in some way at some point that I think are strong contenders for the 2013 BTBA. First up: The Ingenious Gentleman and Poet ...

Latest Review: "The Corpse Washer" by Sinan Antoon

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is from Grant Barber on Sinan Antoon’s The Corpse Washer, from Yale University Press. Grant is not only a keen bibliophile, and an Episcopal priest living on the south shore of Boston, but has reviewed for Three Percent for forever, basically, and sometimes also performs as ...

Latest Review: "Starlite Terrace" by Patrick Roth

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is from Tiffany Nichols on Patrick Roth’s Starlite Terrace, from Seagull Books. Tiffany also reviews literature in translation for the San Francisco and Sacramento Book Reviews and runs the mouthwatering food porn and book-geeking Tumblr blog tiffany ist. Here’s the ...

Latest Review: "The Bridge Over the Neroch & Other Works" by Leonid Tsypkin

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is from Vincent Francone on Leonid Tsypkin’s The Bridge Over the Neroch & Other Works, from New Directions. My apologies to Vincent for posting this so late—he had it ready for us almost a month ago—but it’s never too late for a Russian classic. Great Russian ...

Latest Review: "What Darkness Was" by Inka Parei

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is from P. T. Smith on Inka Parei’s What Darkness Was, from Seagull Books. This book was another one several of our reviewers jumped at, and yet another strong and insanely fascinating sounding piece of German literature, and German literature in translation. That, and Inka ...

Latest Review: "The Infatuations" by Javier Marías

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece from Jeremy Garber on Javier Marías’s The Infatuations, translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa and available from Knopf. I could take a year off of work just to read, and at the end of that year, my “to read” bookshelves would still be ...

Latest Review: "Dark Company: A Novel in Ten Rainy Nights" by Gert Loschütz

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is by Rachael Daum on Dark Company: A Novel in Ten Rainy Nights by Gert Loschütz, from Seagull Books. Rachael (with an “A-E”, thankyouverymuch) I believe it’s been mentioned before, is a former intern-student of Open Letter, and a great friend to and advocate for ...

Latest Review: "A True Novel" by Minae Mizumura

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is by Hannah Vose on A True Novel by Minae Mizumura, from Other Press. To go against the grain of prologues and intros (more on that from This Hannah in a bit), here’s the beginning of her review: If you’re one of those people who habitually skim the prologue to a ...

Latest Review: "The Art of Joy" by Goliarda Sapienza

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is by Vincent Francone on The Art of Joy by Goliarda Sapienza, from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book is by definition and appearances a tome. At just over 700 pages (and hardcover) it’s a doorstop for a doorstop. But I will be one of the first people in line to champion ...

Preview of Brazilian Literature at Frankfurt

You may have already read this, but last week, Publishing Perspectives ran a piece I wrote about Brazil being the Guest of Honor at the Frankfurt Book Fair this fall. Below is that article in full with extra links to all the books mentioned. (And as a sidenote, in addition to the review of João Almino’s The Book of ...

Latest Review: "The Book of Emotions" by João Almino

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is by Chad W. Post on The Book of Emotions by João Almino, from Dalkey Archive Press. Here’s the beginning of the review: João Almino’s The Book of Emotions is the prototypical Dalkey Archive book. Not that all of Dalkey’s books are the same, but there is a certain ...

Latest Review: "Amsterdam Stories" by Nescio

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is by Hannah Chute on Amsterdam Stories by Nescio, from New York Review Books. Hannah is one of two Hannahs interning at Open Letter this summer. We’re still working on a good nickname for her—for now, depending on the situation, we (read: I) have been referring to the ...

Latest Review: "Trafalgar" by Angélica Gorodischer

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is by Chad W. Post on Trafalgar by Angélica Gorodischer, from Small Beer Press. Here’s the beginning of Chad’s review: The author of more than twenty works of science fiction—both story collections and novels—Angélica Gorodischer was first introduced to ...

Latest Review: "The Goddess Chronicle" by Natsuo Kirino

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is by Hannah Vose on The Goddess Chronicle by Natsuo Kirino, from Grove Atlantic. The interns have been getting marginally scandalous book assignments to review: Hannah had this one, with the nudie woman on the cover, while another of our interns is working on a review of a ...

Latest Review: "Kafka's Hat" by Patrice Martin

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is by P.T. Smith on Kafka’s Hat by Patrice Martin, from Talon. Patrick is pumping out these book reviews for us, and has much to say about Kafka’s Hat, the title of which, I’ll admit, makes me want to giggle. As does Wigrum. I don’t think I can explain why. ...

Latest Review: "For a Song and a Hundred Songs: A Poet's Journey through a Chinese Prison"

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is by P. T. Smith on For a Song and a Hundred Songs by Liao Yiwu, from New Harvest. Straying for a moment from fiction and poetry reviews, we asked Patrick to contribute re this translated memoir from poet Liao Yiwu, who—let’s just keep it simple—has been through a hell ...

Latest Review: "The Neighborhood" by Gonçalo Tavares

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is by Hannah Vose on The Neighborhood by Gonçalo Tavares, from Texas Tech University Press. Hannah is one of our Open Letter interns this summer (and a recent student of Chad’s), and in addition to helping copy edit manuscripts, keeping the mail situation in check, reading ...

Latest Review: "And the Hippies Came (Llegaron los Hippies)" by Manuel Abreu Adorno

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is by Vincent Francone on And the Hippies Came (Llegaron los Hippies) by Manuel Abreu Adorno, from 7Vientos. Vincent is a frequent reviewer for Three Percent, and recently discovered and fell in love with 7Vientos, a brand-new press based in Chicago specializing in Latin-American ...

A Second Review of "Traveler of the Century"

I’ve been meaning to read Andrés Neuman’s Traveler of the Century ever since we ran Jeremy Garber’s review back in April 2012. And then it made the Best Translated Book Award longlist, which further peaked my interest. But man, it’s a 500+ page book—something that’s never easy to fit into ...

Latest Review: "Anatomy of a Night" by Anna Kim

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is by Jennifer Marquart on Anatomy of a Night by Anna Kim, from Frisch & Co. Jen is a former University of Rochester student, and a translator from German. Her first book-length translation, Ror Wolf’s Two or Three Years Later (Open Letter Books), comes out next ...

Latest Review: "Les aigles puent" by Lutz Bassmann

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is by John Thomas Mahany on Les aigles puent by Lutz Bassman, from Éditions Verdier. JT—as we know him—is an MA in Literary Translation Studies student at the University of Rochester, and a recent addition to the superfandom of Volodine’s work. He’s also working on ...

Latest Review: "Red Spectres" by V. Bryusov/M. Bulgakov/S. Krzhizhanovsky et al.

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is by Aleksandra Fazlipour on Red Spectres, a kind-of-creepy collection of Russian short stories by authors including Valery Bryusov, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Aleksandr Grin, from Angel Classics. Aleksandra is a former independent-study student of Chad’s, and contributes pretty ...

Latest Review: "El arte de la resurrección" ("The Art of Resurrection")

The latest piece in our Reviews Section comes to us from Jeremy Osner, and is on Hernán Rivera Letelier’s El arte de la resurrección (The Art of Resurrection) from Alfaguara. Jeremy Osner blogs about reading and translation at READIN. He is currently working on a translation of El arte de la resurrecctión (and the ...

Latest Review: "There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories" by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is by Brendan Riley on There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, from Penguin. Brendan has written reviews for Three Percent in the past, and has worked for many years as a teacher, translator, ...

The Buenos Aires Review [New Cool Things, Part I]

I’ve been a bit checked out the past few weeks with event upon event, travels to London and L.A. and New York (twice), final papers to grade, illnesses to overcome, soccer to geek out about, etc., etc. But now that it’s summertime (I only have one grade left to enter), it’s about time to get back into ...

Latest Review: "Basti" by Intizar Husain

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Rachael Daum on Intizar Husain’s Basti, which is available from New York Review Books. Each semester, Chad has students in both his Introduction to Publishing course and the World Literature in Translation course write book reviews as part of an ...

Latest Review: "The Whispering Muse" by Sjón

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is by Vincent Francone on The Whispering Muse by Sjón, from Farrar Straus and Giroux. The first time I saw The Whispering Muse was in a bookstore in Riga, Latvia, misplaced somewhere on the D-F shelf. Taking this as a sign of meant-to-be, I bought it, and promptly placed it on my ...

Latest Review: "Mundo Cruel" by Luis Negrón

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is by Camila Santos on Mundo Cruel by Luis Negrón, from Seven Stories Press. Camila is a Brazilian translator, and has written for Three Percent before—way back in 2010. Here’s a bit of her review: Luis Negrón’s debut collection Mundo Cruel is a journey through ...

Latest Review: "Selected Translations" by W. S. Merwin

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is by Grant Barber on Selected Translations by W. S. Merwin, from Copper Canyon Press. Selected Translations is a collection of Merwin’s greatest translations, representing authors from all over the world and languages from almost every corner. Grant Barber is a regular ...

Latest Review: "LoveStar" by Andri Snær Magnason

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is by Larissa Kyzer on LoveStar by Andri Snær Magnason, translated from the Icelandic by Victoria Cribb and published by Seven Stories Press. Larissa is a regular contributor to Three Percent, and with this continues her streak of Nordic lit reviews. LoveStar is a book I’ve ...

Latest review: "Hi, This Is Conchita and Other Stories" by Santiago Roncagliolo

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is by Tiffany Nichols on Hi, This Is Conchita and Other Stories by Santiago Roncagliolo, translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman and published by Two Lines Press. Tiffany, who is relatively new to the Three Percent contributors’ club, is an avid reader of literature in ...

Latest Review: "City of Angels, or, The Overcoat of Dr. Freud" by Christa Wolf

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is by Josh Billings on City of Angels, or, The Overcoat of Dr. Freud by Christa Wolf, translated from the German by Damion Searls and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Josh Billings has reviewed for The Literary Review in the past, and is also a writer and a translator from ...

Latest Review: "Where Tigers Are at Home" by Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Grant Barber on the mammoth Where Tigers Are at Home by Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès, which is translated from the French by Mike Mitchell and published by Other Press. Grant Barber is a regular reviewer for Three Percent, a keen bibliophile, and an Episcopal priest ...

Latest Review: "Lenin's Kisses" by Yan Lianke

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Brendan Riley on Yan Lianke’s Lenin’s Kisses, translated from the Chinese by Carlos Rojas and published by Grove Press. This is Yan Lianke’s third book to come out in English translation, the first two being Serve the People! and Dream of Ding ...

Latest Review: "The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira" by César Aira

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Emily Davis on The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira, the most recent Aira book to come out from New Directions, and which is translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver. Emily is a graduate of the University of Rochester’s Master of Arts in Literary Translation, ...

Latest Review: "The Diesel" by Thani Al-Suwaidi

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Lili Sarayrah on Thani Al-Suwaidi’s The Diesel, which is translated from the Arabic by William Maynard Hutchins and available from ANTIBOOKCLUB. Lili was in my publishing class last semester, studies at the Eastman School, and is working towards her certificate ...

Latest Review: "It's No Good" by Kirill Medvedev

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Will Evans (aka Bromance Will) on Kirill Medvedev’s It’s No Good, which is translated from the Russian by Keith Gessen, Mark Krotov, Corry Merrill, and Bela Shayevich and published by n+1/Ugly Duckling Presse. By now, most of you know who Bromance Will is, ...

Latest Review: "Mama Leone" by Miljenko Jergović

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Josh Billings on Miljenko Jergović’s Mama Leone, translated from the Croatian by David Williams and published by Archipelago Books. Josh Billings has reviewed for The Literary Review in the past, and is also a writer and a translator from Russian. His two ...

Latest Review: "Blindly" by Claudio Magris

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Vincent Francone on Claudio Magris’s Blindly, which is translated from the Italian by Anne Milano Appel and published by Yale University Press as part of their Margellos World Republic of Letters Series. Yale’s World Republic of Letters Series deserves a ...

Latest Review: "How Literature Saved My Life" by David Shields

The latest addition to our Reviews Section isn’t a translation. It’s a review I wrote for GoodReads about David Shields’s new book, How Literature Saved My Life, which dropped last week. It’s also a book that I love and that I’ve been talking about on “the podcast”: and elsewhere for ...

Latest Review: "Revenge" by Yoko Ogawa

This is the week of Will Eells reviews. In addition to writing about Persona on Tuesday, today he has a piece on Yoko Ogawa’s Revenge, translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder and published by Picador. Here’s a bit from his review: One of the most pleasant surprises of the literary world in the past ...

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The 2013 Preview Podcast Book List

Following Friday’s posting of our latest podcast, I received a number of requests for the full list of books that we talked about. And thanks to Tom’s diligent pre-podcast preparation (seriously, I’m not even joking), I have that complete list—in the order in which they were discussed: Javier ...

Latest Review: "Persona" by Naoki Inose with Hiroaki Sato

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Will Eells on Persona, a biography of Yukio Mishima available from Stone Bridge Press. Mishima is a huge figure in Japanese literature, and this is a huge biography, so let’s just let Will get into it: ukio Mishima is about as famous as he is infamous. The ...

Latest Review: "Sin" by Zakhar Prilepin

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Will Evans (aka Bromance Will) on Zakhar Prilepin’s Sin, translated from the Russian by Simon Patterson and Nina Chordas and published by the quasi-mysterious Glagoslav Publications. This has been an angry week at Three Percent. First, I dissed Alejandro ...

Latest Review: "Ways of Going Home" by Alejandro Zambra

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a book that I talk about on our yet-unpublished “2013 Preview Podcast.” Which hopefully will be up in a few days, once our podcasting computer is fixed. So when you hear me talk about Ways of Going Home by Alejandro Zambra, translated from the Spanish by Megan ...

Latest Review: "The Weight of Temptation" by Ana Maria Shua

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Allie Levick on Ana Maria Shua’s The Weight of Temptation, translated from the Spanish by Andrea Labinger and available from University of Nebraska Press. Allie is another of my students from last semester. Few more of these to run over the next couple weeks . . ...

Latest Review: "The Story of My Purity" by Francesco Pacifico

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Vincent Francone on the forthcoming novel The Story of My Purity, written by Francesco Pacifico, translated from the Italian by Stephen Twilley, and published by FSG. The Story of My Purity is the first of Pacifico’s books to make its way into English. ...

Latest Review: "The Camera Killer" by Thomas Glavinic

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Lisa Boscov-Ellen on Thomas Glavinic’s The Camera Killer, which is translated from the German by John Brownjohn and published by AmazonCrossing. Lisa Boscov-Ellen is another MA student here at the University of Rochester, and translates from Spanish. She was ...

More 2013 Previewing!

We’re having some catastrophic minor computer issues preventing us from being able to upload the new Three Percent podcast, but as soon as the website computer stops restarting every three seconds and every three seconds and every three seconds, you’ll be able to hear an hour of Tom and I chatting up the 2013 ...

Latest Review: "Firefly" by Severo Sarduy

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Will Vanderhyden on Severo Sarduy’s Firefly, which is translated from the Spanish by Mark Fried, and published by Archipelago Books. Will Vanderhyden (aka “Willsconsin,” which separates him from “Bromance Will” and “Will ...

Latest Review: We Monks & Soldiers

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by J.T. Mahany—a grad student here in the University of Rochester literary translation program—on Lutz Bassmann’s, or rather, “Lutz Bassmann’s” We Monks & Soldiers, which is translated from the French by Jordan Stump, and available ...

The Millions 2013 (Although Mostly Spring) Book Preview

The Millions just released it’s Most Anticipated: The Great 2013 Book Preview, and although there’s not a single Open Letter book included on this list, which, honestly makes it pretty damn suspect in my mind, since, if they’re skipping books like Tirza and the never-before translated L’Amour by ...

Latest Review: "Amerika: The Missing Person" by Franz Kafka

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is something I wrote about Mark Harman’s translation of Amerika by Franz Kafka, which is the book we’re discussion at the first ever Writers & Books/Plüb Book Club. (Which my iPhone autocorrected to “Book Clüb,” so fuck and yes.) Anyway, I’m not ...

Latest Review: "Pow!" by Mo Yan

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece I wrote (after a very long travel experience, so forgive me) about Mo Yan’s Pow!, which is coming out from Seagull in Howard Goldblatt’s translation. Here’s the opening: The first book by recent Nobel Laureate, Mo Yan, to come out in English ...

Latest Review: "Raised from the Ground" by José Saramago

The lastest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by frequent contributor Jeremy Garber on José Saramago’s Raised from the Ground, which just recently came out from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in Margaret Jull Costa’s translation from the Portuguese. I assume that Saramago needs no introduction, but in case ...

Quarterly Conversation #30 [The Reviews]

The reviews are one of the standard features in every issue of Quarterly Conversation. and there’s a ton of great pieces in this new issue. These are just a few of the highlights. Taylor Davis-Van Atta on Stig Sæterbakken’s Siamese, translated from the Norwegian by Sean Kinsella and Self-Control, translated ...

Latest Review: "Brenner and God" by Wolf Haas

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece that I wrote about Wolf Haas’s Brenner and God, which is translated from the German by Annie Janusch and available from Melville House. This is the first Brenner book to come out in English, but actually the seventh in the series. I believe that Melville House has ...

Latest Review: "The Poems of Octavio Paz"

The latest addition to our “Reviews Section”: is a piece by Grant Barber on The Poems of Octavio Paz, edited and mostly translated by Eliot Weinberger, and available from New Directions. Grant’s review is really solid, so I’m just going to jump right to it and give you a sample: One critical ...

Latest Review: "Down the Rabbit Hole" by Juan Pablo Villalobos

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Vincent Francone on Juan Pablo Villalobos’s Down the Rabbit Hole, which is translated from the Spanish by Rosalind Harvey and available from FSG. This is a book I first heard about a while back when the innovative and amazing And Other Stories announced that ...

New Review: "The Book of Emotions" by João Almino

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece written by Camila Santos on The Book of Emotions, by João Almino, translated from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Jackson and published by Dalkey Archive Press. The Book of Emotions is Almino’s second novel translated into English, the first being The Five Seasons of ...

Latest Review: "It's Fine By Me" by Per Petterson

The latest addition to our Review Section is a piece by Larissa Kyzer on Per Petterson’s It’s Fine By Me, translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett and published by Graywolf Press. This is the fifth book of Petterson’s to be published in English translation, the most famous being Out Stealing Horses, ...

ALTA 2012 Preview: Friday Afternoon, October 5th

And now here’s the second half of Friday’s events. Remember, you can read the whole ALTA preview by clicking here. Friday, October 5th 3:15 – 4:30 pm Humor & Speculative Fiction What are some of the challenges specific to translating humor in speculative fiction? Panelists will discuss examples ...

ALTA 2012 Preview: Friday Morning, October 5th

Couple more days of ALTA to preview, to help all of you decide which panels you might want to attend. Today we’ll highlight all of Friday’s events, cover Saturday on Monday, and then do all the special events and readings on Tuesday. It’s unbelievable that after a year of preparing for this conference, ...

ALTA 2012 Preview: Thursday Afternoon, October 4th

Continuing the series of ALTA preview posts (for those of you who are coming, or who wish you could be here), here’s a list of choice events from Thursday afternoon (which is only one week from now!). Also, just as a reminder, we’ll be videotaping a bunch of these events, so if you see one that intrigues you, stay ...

Latest Review: "Seven Houses in France" by Bernardo Atxaga

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a thing I wrote about Bernardo Atxaga’s Seven Houses in France, which just came out from Graywolf Press in Margaret Jull Costa’s translation. This is the third Atxaga book that Graywolf has published, the other two being Obabakoak and The Accordionist’s Son. ...

ALTA 2012 Preview: Thursday Morning, October 4th

This year’s ALTA kicks off officially on Wednesday night with the special opening event celebrating Open Letter’s poetry series—in particular Eduardo Chirinos’s Smoke of Distant Fires, translated by Gary Racz, and Juan Gelman’s Dark Times Filled with Light, translated by Hardie St. ...

ALTA Preview: "A Thousand Morons"

One of the fall Open Letter titles that I’m most jacked about is Quim Monzó’s A Thousand Morons. I’ve been a huge fan of Monzó’s for a while now (maybe since I read, The Enormity of the Tragedy, I guess) and am so proud that we have him on our list. (If you want to check him out, I STRONGLY recommend ...

Latest Review: "We're Flying" by Peter Stamm

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Quantum Sarah on Peter Stamm’s new collection of stories, We’re Flying, which came out from Other Press in Michael Hofmann’s translation earlier this year. Peter Stamm has a number of books available in English translation, including Seven Years, ...

Latest Review: "A Muslim Suicide" by Bensalem Himmich

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Sarah Two, on Bensalem Himmich’s A Muslim Suicide, which is translated from the Arabic by Roger Allen and is available from Syracuse University Press. Here is part of her review: It is a well-known phenomenon that widespread condemnation of a book will only ...

Latest Review: "Doña Barbara" by Rómulo Gallegos

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Pierce Alquist on Rómulo Gallegos’s Doña Barbara, which is translated from the Spanish by Robert Malloy and is available from The University of Chicago Press Books. Any author who has been both nominated for a Nobel Prize in literature and exiled from his ...

Latest Review: "Life is Short and Desire Endless" by Peter Lapeyre

The latest review to our Reviews Section is a piece by me— Aleksandra Fazlipour — on Peter Lapeyre’s Life is Short and Desire Endless, which is available from Random House. Here’s a bit of my review: The endearingly (and intentionally) peculiar tone of Patrick Lapeyre’s Life is Short and ...

Latest Review: "As Though She Were Sleeping" by Elias Khoury

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Quantum Sarah on Elias Khoury’s As Though She Were Sleeping, which is translated from the Arabic by Marilyn Booth and is available from Archipelago Books. Here is part of her review: Elias Khoury’s As Though She Were Sleeping (Archipelago, 2012) is a love ...

Latest Review: "The Elephant Keepers' Children" by Peter Hoeg

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Hilary Wermers on Peter Hoeg’s The Elephant Keepers’ Children, which is translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken. The Elephant Keepers’ Children will be released from Other Press on October 23, 2012. Hilary Wermers is a senior at the University of ...

Spring 2012 issue of The Literary Review

WHAT: Live readings from the Spring 2012 issue of The Literary Review, “Encyclopedia Britannica” WHO: Cindy Cruz, Geoffrey Nutter, Tanya Paperny, Martha Witt WHERE: Unnameable Books at 600 Vanderbilt Avenue, Brooklyn, NY (near the B, Q, 2, 3, and C trains) WHY: Because you love literature and you enjoy free ...

Latest Review: "Maidenhair" by Mikhail Shishkin

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Will Evans on Mikhail Shishkin’s Maidenhair, which is translated from the Russian by Marian Schwartz. Maidenhair will be available to purchase from our very own Open Letter Books on October 23, 2012. Here’s part of Will’s review: Contemporary ...

Latest Review: "Daughter of Silence" by Manuela Fingueret

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Pierce Alquist on Manuela Fingueret’s Daughter of Silence, which is translated from the Spanish by Darrell B. Lockhart and is available from Texas Tech University Press. This is Pierce’s first review for threepercent. Pierce is a student at the University ...

Latest Review: "Confusion" by Stefan Zweig

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Rachel Crawford-Fisher on Stefan Zweig’s Confusion, which is translated from the German by Anthea Bell and is available from New York Review Books. Rachel is a student at the University of Rochester majoring in English Literature, minoring in Philosophy and ...

Latest Review: "The Lives of Things" by José Saramago

The latest review to our Reviews Section is a piece by me— Aleksandra Fazlipour — on José Saramago’s The Lives of Things, which is available from Verso Books. Here’s a bit of my review: Imagine a world where objects, utensils, machines, or installations (OUMIs) take on lives of their own, ...

Latest Review: "Satantango" by László Krasznahorkai

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Will Evans on László Krasznahorkai’s Satantango, which is translated from the Hungarian by George Szirtes and is available from New Directions. Here’s part of his review: Susan Sontag called László Krasznahorkai the “Hungarian master of the ...

Latest Review: "Near to the Wild Heart" by Clarice Lispector

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Quantum Sarah on Clarice Lispector’s Near to the Wild Heart, which is translated from the Portuguese by Alison Entrekin and is available from New Directions. Here is part of her review: “He was alone. He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of ...

Latest Review: "Inventing the Enemy" by Umberto Eco

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Kathryn Longenbach on Umberto Eco’s Inventing the Enemy, which is translated from the Italian by Richard Dixon and is available from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kathryn Longenbach is a rising senior at Hamilton College. She is pursuing a double major in English ...

Latest Review: "Emmaus" by Alessandro Baricco

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is joint review by Sarah Two and Quantum Sarah on Alessandro Baricco’s Emmaus, which is translated from the Italian by Mitch Ginsburg and is available from McSweeney’s. Here is an excerpt from their review: Alessandro Baricco’s latest novel, Emmaus, centers on ...

Latest Review: "Second Person Singular" by Sayed Kashua

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Sarah Young, aka Sarah Two, on Sayed Kashua’s Second Person Singular, which is translated from the Hebrew by Mitch Ginsburg and is available from Grove Press. This is Sarah Two’s first review for threepercent. Her introduction can be found here. Later this ...

Latest Review: "The End of the Story" by Liliana Heker

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Sarah Winstein-Hibbs on Liliana Heker’s The End of the Story, which is translated from the Spanish by Andrea G. Labinger and is available from Biblioasis. As Sarah states in her introduction, this is her first book review for threepercent! Here is part of her ...

Latest Review: "The Deleted World" by Tomas Tranströmer

The latest review to our Reviews Section is a piece by Tim Nassau on Tomas Tranströmer’s The Deleted World, which is available from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book promises to be an interesting read. Take a look at Tim’s review to see why: Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer’s winning the Nobel Prize ...

Latest Review: "True" by Riikka Pulkkinen

The latest review to our Reviews Section is a piece by Aleksandra Fazlipour on Riikka Pulkkinen’s True, which is available from Other Press. Riikka Pulkkinen studied literature and philosophy at the University of Helsinki. Her debut novel, The Border, sparked international interest when it was published in 2006. Her ...

Latest Review: "The Zafarani Files" by Gamal al-Ghitani

The latest review to our Reviews Section is a piece by Rachael Daum on Gamal al-Ghitani’s The Zafarani Files, which Farouk Abdel Wahab translated from the Arabic and is available from The American University in Cairo Press. Gamal Al-Ghitani was born in 1945 and educated in Cairo. He has written 13 novels and 6 ...

Latest Review: "Dublinesque" by Enrique Vila-Matas

The latest review to our Reviews Section is a piece by Jeremy Garber on Enrique Vila-Matas’s Dublinesque, which Anne McLean and Rosalind Harvey translated from the Spanish and is available from New Directions. Enrique Vila-Matas was born in Barcelona in 1948. His novels have been translated into eleven languages and ...

Latest Review: "The Letter Killers Club" by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

The latest review to our Reviews Section is a piece by Aleksandra Fazlipour on Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s The Letter Killers Club, which is available from NYRB Classics. Here is part of her review: The Letter Killers Club, by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, follows the meetings of a secret society of men who believe ...

Latest Review: "Yingelishi: Sinophonic English Poetry and Poetics" by Jonathan Stalling

The latest review to our Reviews Section is a piece by Lucas Klein on Jonathan Stalling’s Yingelishi: Sinophonic English Poetry and Poetics, which is available from Counterpath Press. Jonathan Stalling is an Assistant Professor of English Literature at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of Poetics of ...

Latest Review: "The Russian Affair" by Michael Wallner

The latest review to our Reviews Section is a piece by Brian Libgober on Michael Wallner’s The Russian Affair, which John Cullen translated from German and is available from Nan A. Talese Books. Here is part of his review: Michael Wallner’s second novel opens with its female protagonist watching as a ...

Latest Review: "The Legend of Pradeep Mathew" by Shehan Karunatilaka

The latest review to our Reviews Section is a piece by Aleksandra Fazlipour on Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Legend of Pradeep Mathew, which is available from Graywolf Press. Here is part of the review: WG (Wije) Karunasena is a Sri Lankan sportswriter who has been forced into retirement because he is a drunk. He is ...

Latest Review: "HHhH" by Laurent Binet

The latest review to our Reviews Section is a piece by Vincent Francone on Laurent Binet’s HHhH, which Sam Taylor translated from the French and is available from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Laurent Binet was born in Paris, France, in 1972. He is the author of La Vie professionnelle de Laurent B., a memoir of his ...

Latest Review: "From the Mouth of the Whale" by Sjón

The latest review to our Reviews Section is a piece by Brian Libgober on Sjón’s From the Mouth of the Whale, which Victoria Cribb translated from the Icelandic and is available from Telegram Books. Sjón was born in Reykjavik in 1962. He won the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize (the equivalent of the Man Booker ...

Latest Review: "Children in Reindeer Woods" by Kristín Ómarsdóttir

The latest review to our Reviews Section is a piece by Aleksandra Fazlipour on Kristín Ómarsdóttir’s Children in Reindeer Woods, which Lytton Smith translated from the Icelandic and is available from Open Letter. This is the first book of Kristín Ómarsdóttir’s to be translated into English, and it received ...

Latest Review: "The Walk" by Robert Walser

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Phillip Witte on Robert Walser’s The Walk, which comes out from New Directions next week, and was translated from the German by Christopher Middleton and Susan Bernofsky. (The joint translation set-up is explained in Phil’s review.) Phil was an intern ...

Latest Review: "The Brummstein" by Peter Adolphsen

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Larissa Kyzer on Peter Adolphsen’s The Brummstein, which is translated from the Danish by Charlotte Barslund and available from AmazonCrossing. Apparently, this is the week of Larissa and AmazonCrossing books . . . As with her review of The Hitman’s Guide ...

Latest Review: "The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning" by Hallgrímur Helgason

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Larissa Kyzer on Hallgrímur Helgason’s The Hitman’s Guide to Housecleaning, which AmazonCrossing brought out this past January. It may be due to my Icelandic Crush, but of all the books AmazonCrossing has brought out so far, this is the one that most ...

Latest Review: "An Open Secret" by Carlos Gamerro

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Aleksandra Fazlipour on Carlos Gamerro’s An Open Secret, which is translated from the Spanish by Ian Barnett and available from Pushkin Press. Aleksandra Fazlipour is the student I introduced last week who just completed a semester long independent study on ...

Latest Review: "My Little War" by Louis Paul Boon

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Jacob M. Appel on Louis Paul Boon’s My Little War, which is translated from the Dutch by Paul Vincent and available from Dalkey Archive Press. Jacob M. Appel is a physician in New York City and the author of more than two hundred published short stories. His ...

Latest Review: "The Secret of Evil" by Roberto Bolaño

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Jeremy Garber on Roberto Bolaño’s The Secret of Evil, which is translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews and Natasha Wimmer, and was recently released by New Directions. Jeremy Garber is a used book buyer for a large independent bookstore. (And a GoodReads ...

Latest Review: "Purgatory" by Tomás Eloy Martínez

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Aleksandra Fazlipour on Tomás Eloy Martínez’s Purgatory, which is translated from the Spanish by Frank Wynne and available from Bloomsbury USA. Aleksandra did an independent study with me last semester to learn about writing book reviewing. She read a bunch of ...

Latest Review: "Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex" by Oksana Zabuzhko

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by regular reviewer Vincent Francone on Oksana Zabuzhko’s Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex, which is translated from the Ukrainian by Halyna Hryn and available from Amazon Crossings. Here’s the opening of Vince’s not-entirely-positive review: Reading ...

Latest Review: "Copenhagen Noir" edited by Bo Tao Michaelis

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by regular reviewer Larissa Kyzer on Copenhagen Noir, edited by Bo Tao Michaelis and translated by Mark Kline (with one lone translation from the Swedish by Lone Thygesen) and published by Akashic Books. As Larissa notes at the start of her review, this is one of the ...

Overview/Review of Daniel Levin Becker's "Many Subtle Channels"

To supplement this week’s podcast, I thought I would post the review I wrote of Daniel Levin Becker’s Many Subtle Channels on GoodReads. Matt Rowe is planning on writing up a full review of this book for Three Percent, but for the time being, here you go: In reading this charming book, I tried to recall how I ...

Latest Review: Why Is the Child Cooking in the Polenta

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Heather Simon on Aglaja Veteranyi’s Why the Child Is Cooking in the Polenta, which is translated from the German by Vincent Kling and published by Dalkey Archive Press. Heather Simon is another of Susan Bernofsky’s students who kindly offered to write a ...

Latest Review: "Traveler of the Century" by Andres Neuman

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Jeremy Garber on Andres Neuman’s Traveler of the Century, which is just coming out from FSG in Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia’s translation. Jeremy Garber is a used book buyer for a large independent bookstore. (And one of my GoodReads friends, where I ...

Latest Review: "The Truth about Marie" by Jean-Philippe Toussaint

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Katie Assef on Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s The Truth about Marie, translated from the French by Matthew B. Smith and available from Dalkey Archive Press. Katie Assef is another of Susan Bernofsky’s students who very kindly offered to write reviews for Three ...

Latest Review: "Dukla" by Andrej Stasiuk

The lastest addition to our Review Section is a piece by Claire Van Winkle on Andrej Stasiuk’s Dukla, which is translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston and available from Dalkey Archive Press. Claire is the first of three students (so far) of Susan Bernofsky’s who have written reviews for Three Percent. ...

Blue Metropolis Preview

On Thursday morning, I’ll be taking off to attend (and participate in) this year’s Blue Metropolis festival in Montreal. In case you haven’t heard of it, the Blue Met is one of the (or maybe just the?) largest literary festivals in Quebec. It runs from April 18th through the 23rd, and features a ton of ...

Latest Review: "Dream of Ding Village" by Yan Lianke

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Sharon Rhodes on Yan Lianke’s Dream of Ding Village, which is translated from the Chinese by Cindy Carter, and available from Grove Press. Sharon Rhodes is a Ph.D. candidate here at the University of Rochester who wrote this as part of an assignment so far back ...

Latest Review: "Of Flies and Monkeys" by Jacques Dupin

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Vincent Francone on Jacques Dupin’s Of Flies and Monkeys, which is translated from the French by John Taylor and available from Bitter Oleander Press. (Probably easiest to order this directly from SPD.) “Vincent Francone” is one of our regular ...

Latest Review: "So You May See" by Mona Prince

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Elizabeth “Six” Mullins on Mona Prince’s So You May See, which is translated from the Arabic by Raphael Cohen and available from the American University in Cairo Press. For those of you interested in knowing more about the novel and its translation, ...

"Watchword" Review and Interview with Forrest Gander

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is an extremely well-written and well-crafted piece by Grant Barber on Watchword by Pura López Colomé, which is translated from the Spanish by Forrest Gander and available from Wesleyan Press. In addition to writing such a fantastic review, Grant decided to interview Forrest ...

Latest Review: "Kamchatka" by Marcelo Figueras

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Lian Law on Marcelo Figueras’s Kamchatka that came out from Black Cat/Grove Press back last year. Lian Law was an intern and in my “Intro to Literary Publishing” class last semester, which is when she wrote this review. (And yes, we are that far ...

Latest Review: "In Spite of the Dark Silence" by Jorge Volpi

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Kaitlyn Brady on Jorge Volpi’s In Spite of the Dark Silence, which is translated from the Spanish by Olivia Maciel and available from Swan Isle Press. Kaitlyn was in my “Introduction to Literary Publishing/Open Letter Internship” class last ...

Latest Review: "The Prague Cemetery" by Umberto Eco

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Monica Carter on Umberto Eco’s latest novel, The Prague Cemetery, which is translated from the Italian by Richard Dixon and available from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Monica is one of our contributing reviewers, is a writer in her own right, and runs Salonica ...

Latest Review: "Me and You" by Niccolo Ammaniti

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Carley Parsons on Niccolo Ammaniti’s Me and You, which is translated from the Italian by Kylee Doust and available from Black Cat. Carley Parsons was one of my interns last semester, and has previously interned at Syracuse University Press and Random House. ...

Latest Review: "While the Women Are Sleeping" by Javier Marias

The latest addition to our “Review Section”: is a piece by Phillip Witte on Javier Marias’s While the Women Are Sleeping, which is translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa and available from New Directions. Phil is one of our regular reviewers, and one of our former interns. As mentioned in the ...

Latest Review: "The Roving Shadows" by Pascal Quignard

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Brian Libgober on Pascal Quignard’s The Roving Shadows, which is coming out this month from Seagull Books in Chris Turner’s translation from the French. Brian Ligboer is a new reviewer for us. (Jeff Waxman made the introduction.) In his own words, he ...

Latest Review: "Mister Blue" by Jacques Poulin

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by contributing reviewer Larissa Kyzer on Jacques Poulin’s Mister Blue, which just came out from Archipelago Books in Sheila Fischman’s translation. Larissa Kyzer is a regular reviewer for us who has a great interest in all things Scandinavian and Icelandic. ...

Latest Review: "Empire of Dreams" by Giannini Braschi

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Vincent Francone on Giannini Braschi’s Empire of Dreams, which is available from AmazonCrossing in Tess O’Dwyer’s translation. Vincent Francone is one of our regular reviewers, and a writer, and a reader for TriQuarterly Online. AmazonCrossing ...

Latest Review: "Leeches" by David Albahari

The latest addition to our “Reviews Section”: is a piece by contributing reviewer Monica Carter on David Albahari’s Leeches, which came out last year from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt1 in Ellen Elias-Bursac’s translation. Monica Carter is a regular reviewer for Three Percent. She also runs Salonica ...

Latest Review: "The Shadow-Boxing Woman" by Inka Parei

The latest addition to our Book Reviews section is a piece by Monica Carter on Inka Parei’s The Shadow-Boxing Woman, which is available from Seagull Books and translated from the German by Katy Derbyshire. Monica Carter is a regular reviewer for Three Percent. She also runs Salonica World Lit and, as part of her ...

Latest Review: "The Perpetual Motion Machine" by Paul Scheerbart

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by regular contributor Will Eells on Paul Scheerbart’s The Perpetual Motion Machine, which is translated from the German by Andrew Joron and available from Wakefield Press. Speaking of Wakefield Press, I truly believe that it is one of—if not the—most ...

Excellent Review of Karaoke Culture

In the L.A. Times, Carolyn Kellogg has an excellent review of Dubravka Ugresic’s Karaoke Culture — one of the best books I read last year. (And which you can purchase here.) Here are a few highlights from Carolyn’s review: Dubravka Ugresic does not like karaoke. That doesn’t stop her from ...

Latest Review: "The Secret of Wilhelm Storitz" by Jules Verne

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Kaija Straumanis on Jules Verne’s The Secret of Wilhelm Storitz, which came out earlier this year from the University of Nebraska Press in Peter Schulman’s translation. Kaija is an about-to-graduate MA student in Literary Translation here at the ...

Latest Review: "Thirst" by Andrei Gelasimov

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is Fr. Grant Barber’s piece on Thirst by Andrei Gelasimov, which is translated from the Russian by Marian Schwartz and published by AmazonCrossing. Grant Barber is a regular reviewer for us, as well as being a keen bibliophile, and an Episcopal priest living on the south ...

Latest Review: "IQ84" by Haruki Murakami

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by contributing reviewer Will Eells on 1Q84, Haruki Murakami’s “total novel” that is pretty much the only work of international literature making its way onto the year-end lists at the “big” review outlets. It’s a huge book, and in order ...

Latest Review: "The Hall of the Singing Caryatids" by Victor Pelevin

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Vincent Francone on Victor Pelevin’s The Hall of the Singing Caryatids, which is just out from New Directions in Andrew Bromfield’s translation. Coincidentally, I just finished reading this last night. And I completely agree with Vince’s review: ...

Latest Review: "The Greenhouse" by Audur Ava Olafsdottir

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Larissa Kyzer on Audur Ava Olafsdottir’s The Greenhouse, which is available from AmazonCrossing in Brian FitzGibbon’s translation from the Icelandic. As Larissa—one of our excellent contributing reviewers, who loves the Scandinavian and is starting ...

Latest Review: "Zeina" by Nawal El Saadawi

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Monica Carter on Nawal El Saadawi’s Zeina, which is available from Saqi Books in Amira Nowaira’s translation. Monica is one of our contributing reviewers, and runs the wonderful Saloncia World Literature. She lives in L.A., and you can read all of her ...

Latest Review: "I Am a Japanese Writer" by Dany LaFerrière

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Will Eells on Dany LaFerrière’s I Am a Japanese Writer, which is translated from the French by David Hormel and available from Douglas & MacIntyre. Will—who got a certificate in literary translation from the U of R and focuses on Japanese ...

Latest Review: "Until the Dawn's Light" by Aharon Appelfeld

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Dan Vitale on Aharon Appelfeld’s Until the Dawn’s Light, which is translated from the Hebrew by Jeffrey M. Green, and available from Schocken Books. Dan is one of our contributing reviewers, and has written a ton of great pieces for us. Most recently, he ...

Latest Review: "Death as a Side Effect" by Ana Maria Shua

The latest addition to our Book Review section is a piece by Emily Davis on Ana Maria Shua’s Death as a Side Effect, which is translated from the Spanish by Andrea G. Labinger and available from the University of Nebraska Press. Emily Davis a MALTS student here, and translates from Spanish. As you might be able to ...

Latest Review: "Fame" by Daniel Kehlmann

The latest addition to our Book Review section is a piece by Monica Carter on Daniel Kehlmann’s latest novel, Fame, which is available from Pantheon in Carol Brown Janeway’s translation from the German. Monica Carter is a regular contributor to Three Percent, and a member of the Best Translated Book Award ...

Latest Review: "Three Messages and a Warning"

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Sara Cohen about Three Messages and a Warning, an anthology of Mexican short stories of the fantastic, edited by Eduardo Jimenez Mayo and Chris Brown and forthcoming from Small Beer Press. Sara “Number Four” Cohen was one of our summer interns, who ...

Latest Review: "Scenes from Village Life" by Amos Oz

The latest addition to our “Book Reviews” section is a piece by Dan Vitale on Amos Oz’s Scenes from Village Life, which is translated from the Hebrew by Nicholas de Lange and just came out from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Dan Vitale is one of our contributing reviewers, and as such, has written a number of ...

The Iowa Review Forum on Literature and Translation

The Iowa Review is up to a lot of cool things . . . First off, as you can see in the ad below, they’re sponsoring a writing contest for poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, with the winners each receiving $1,500 and the first runners-up getting $750. That’s pretty solid. But more to the point of this website, ...

Latest Review: "Lunar Savings Time" by Alex Epstein

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Daniela Hurezanu about Alex Epstein’s Lunar Savings Time, which is translated from the Hebrew by Becka Mara McKay and available from Clockroot Books. Daniela Hurezanu has reviewed for us several times in the past, and here’s her official bio, courtesy of ...

Richard Nash in the Boston Review

The new issue of the Boston Review has an interesting interview with publishing visionary Richard Nash about the state of publishing and Revaluing the Book: Matt Runkle: There’s a lot of worrying about the disappearance of the book as an object. Do you see the printed book in the same state of flux as the publishing ...

Latest Review: "Lives Other Than My Own" by Emmanuel Carrere

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Monica Carter on this week’s Read This Next title, Lives Other Than My Own by Emmanuel Carrere, which is translated from the French by Linda Coverdale and forthcoming from Metropolitan Books. Monica Carter is a contributing reviewer to Three Percent, and a ...

Latest Review: "Daniel Stein, Interpreter" by Ludmila Ulitskaya

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Julianna Romanazzi on Ludmila Ulitskaya’s Daniel Stein, Interpreter, translated from the Russian by Arch Tait and available from Overlook Press. Ludmila Ulitskaya is one of a handful of contemporary Russian writers to have a number of their works translated ...

Latest Review: "My Two Worlds" by Sergio Chejfec

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a short review by Julianna Romanazzi of Sergio Chejfec’s My Two Worlds, translated from the Spanish by Margaret Carson and coming out this month from Open Letter. My Two Worlds was a Read This Next selection a couple months back, so please click here to read an extended ...

Latest Review: "Learning to Pray in the Age of Technique" by Goncalo Tavares

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Lily Ye on this week’s Read This Next title, Learning to Pray in the Age of Technique by Goncalo Tavares, which is translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn and forthcoming from Dalkey Archive Press. Here’s the opening of Lily’s review: In ...

Latest Review: "Cain" by Jose Saramago

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Fr. Grant Barber on Cain, the latest Jose Saramago novel, available from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in Margaret Jull Costa’s translation. Grant Barber is a regular reviewer for Three Percent, a keen bibliophile, and an Episcopal priest living on the south shore ...

Latest Review: "Kafka's Leopards" by Moacyr Scliar

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Lily Ye on Moacyr Scliar’s Kafka’s Leopards forthcoming from Texas Tech University Press in Thomas Beebee’s translation from the Brazilian Portuguese. As Lily recommends in her review, you should definitely read this piece by Thomas Beebee and then ...

Latest Review: "The Fish Child" by Lucia Puenzo

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Sara Cohen on Lucia Puenzo’s The Fish Child, which is translated from the Spanish by David William Foster and available from Texas Tech as part of The Americas series. We’ve written about The Americas series before, but if you’re not already ...

Latest Review: "Vertical Motion" by Can Xue

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is Lily Ye’s review of Vertical Motion, this week’s Read This Next title. Vertical Motion is coming out next month from Open Letter, and is translated from the Chinese by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping. For an “experimental” Chinese writer, Can Xue has ...

Latest Review: "The Demon at Agi Bridge and Other Japanese Tales" Edited by Hauro Shirane

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Sasha Miller on The Demon at Agi Bridge and Other Japanese Tales, a collection edited by Hauro Shirane, translated by Burton Watson, and available from Columbia University Press. This book is part of Columbia’s Translations from the Asian Classics series, which ...

Latest Review: "'There Are Things I Want You to Know' About Stieg and Me" by Eva Gabrielsson

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Julianna Romanazzi on the punctuation-confused “There Are Things I Want You to Know” About Stieg and Me by Eva Gabrielsson, translated by Linda Coverdale and published by Seven Stories. Julianna’s been posting here for the past few months during her ...

Latest Review: "The Ermine in Czernopol" by Gregor Von Rezzori

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Lily Ye on this week’s Read This Next book, The Ermine in Czernopol by Gregor Von Rezzori. This novel is translated by Philip Boehm and forthcoming from New York Review Books. This is the first book in the Von Rezzori trilogy, which also includes The Snows of ...

Latest Review: Job by Joseph Roth

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Brady Evan Walker on Joseph Roth’s Job, which was recently retranslated by Ross Benjamin and published by Archipelago Books. Brady Evan Walker is a writer who splits his time unequally between New Orleans and Brooklyn, constantly on the run from the horrors of ...

Latest Review: "Two Friends" by Alberto Moravia

This week’s Read This Next title is Alberto Moravia’s Two Friends, which is forthcoming from Other Press, and which Acacia O’Connor reviewed for us. Translated from the Italian by Marina Harss, Two Friends is a collection of three posthumously discovered Moravia novellas. You can read a sample here. And ...

Latest Review: "The Last Brother" by Nathacha Appanah

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Taylor McCabe on The Last Brother by Nathacha Appanah, which is translated from the French by Geoffrey Strachan and available from Graywolf Press. Taylor McCabe (aka “Intern #1”) is a student here at the University of Rochester where she’s majoring ...

Latest Review: "The Days of the King" by Filip Florian

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Lily Ye on this week’s RTN title The Days of the King by Filip Florian. This was translated from the Romanian by Alistair Ian Blyth and will be coming out from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt next month. See this post for more info on Florian, and click here for an ...

Latest Review: "Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion?" by Johan Harstad

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Kelsey Burritt on Johan Harstad’s Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion?, which is translated from the Norwegian by Deborah Dawkin and published by Seven Stories Press. Johan Harstad is a pretty prolific young Norwegian writer. Buzz Aldrin, ...

Latest Review: "In Red" by Magdalena Tulli

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Lily Ye on Magdalena Tulli’s In Red, this week’s Read This Next book, which is translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston and coming out in September from Archipelago Books. Lily comes to us from the University of Chicago by way of Jeff Waxman’s ...

Latest Review: "The Last Reader" by David Toscana

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Sara Cohen on David Toscana’s The Last Reader, which is translated from the Spanish by Asa Zatz and available from Texas Tech University Press. Sara—a summer intern and student here at the University of Rochester—is working on reviews of a few books ...

Latest Review: "From the Observatory" by Julio Cortazar

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece I wrote about Julio Cortazar’s From the Observatory, which is translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean and forthcoming from Archipelago Books. It also happens to be this week’s Read This Next title. Here’s the opening of the review: It’s ...

Latest Review: "The Land at the End of the World" by António Lobo Antunes

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Grant Barber on António Lobo Antunes’s The Land at the End of the World, translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa and available from W.W. Norton. Antunes is a long-time favorite of mine. I really love his novel Act of the Damned. And Fado ...

Latest Review: "The Lake" by Banana Yoshimoto

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Will Eells on Banana Yoshimoto’s The Lake, translated from the Japanese by Michael Emmerich and available from Melville House Publishing. This is Will’s second review in a row, so I’m not sure how much of an introduction he really needs . . . ...

Latest Review: "An Empty Room: Stories" by Mu Xin

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Will Eells on An Empty Room: Stories by Mu Xin, translated from the Chinese by Toming Jun Liu, and available from New Directions. Will has become a regular contributor for Three Percent, and is likely to be reviewing even more for us now that he’s graduated with ...

Latest Review: "Lightning" by Jean Echenoz

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is my review of this week’s Read This Next book, Lightning by Jean Echneoz, which is translated from the French by Linda Coverdale and coming out from The New Press. Lightning is the third of Echenoz’s “Eccentric Genius Suite,” which also includes the ...

Antonio Lobo Antunes Review

I somehow missed it when this first appeared online, but here’s a link to my review of Antonio Lobo Antunes’s The Land at the End of the World, which has been newly translated by Margaret Jull Costa and brought out by W.W. Norton. Antunes is one of my favorite authors, so expect Grant Barber’s full length ...

Latest Review: "Stone Upon Stone" by Wiesław Myśliwski

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Kaija Straumanis on Wiesław Myśliwski’s Stone Upon Stone, translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston, and available from Archipelago Books. Kaija Straumanis is a grad student in the MA translation program (MALTS for short) here at the University of ...

Chicago Review's New Italian Writing Issue

Over the year, the Chicago Review has put together some brilliant—and lasting—“new writing” issues. The one that jumps to mind is the Polish Fiction issue that Bill Martin guest edited, and which contains a number of Polish authors who have gone on to have full-length books published in English ...

Latest Review: "Tyrant Memory" by Horacio Castellanos Moya

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Julia Haav on Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Tyrant Memory, which is translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver, and will be available later this month from New Directions. It’s also this week’s Read This Next title. Julia is is a publicist for ...

Latest Review: "A Life on Paper: Stories" by Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Catherine Bailey on A Life on Paper: Stories by Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud, translated from the French by Edward Gauvin, and available from Small Beer Press. Catherine Bailey is an English grad student here at the University of Rochester. (Or maybe was . . . I ...

Latest Review: "Manazuru" by Hiromi Kawakami

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Tananaugh Espinoza on Hiromi Kawakami’s Manazuru, which is translated from the Japanese by Michael Emmerich and available from Counterpoint. Tananaugh Espinoza was a student in my “World Literature & Translation” class this past spring. She ...

Latest Review: "Ice Trilogy" by Vladimir Sorokin

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is an insane piece that I wrote about Vladimir Sorokin’s Ice Trilogy, which is translated from the Russian by Jamey Gambrell and available from New York Review Books. I am aware of how crazily self-indulgent and odd this review is, but after writing about Sorokin so many ...

Latest Review: "The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine" by Alina Bronsky

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Adelaide Kuehn on Alina Bronsky’s The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine, which is translated from the German by Tim Mohr and available from Europa Editions. Adelaide is a former intern and translation student, who has written for Three Percent a couple times ...

Latest Review: "In the Train" by Christian Oster

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Emily Davis on Christian Oster’s In the Train, which is translated from the French by Adriana Hunter and available from the stylish Object Press. Emily Davis is a grad student in Literary Translation here at the University of Rochester, and is currently working ...

Latest Review: "Simon Wiesenthal: Life and Legends" by Tom Segev

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Jessica LeTourneur on Tom Segev’s Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends, which is available from Doubleday. We don’t review a ton of nonfiction or biographies or untranslated titles here, but Jessica (who is one of our regular reviewers) was interested in ...

Latest Review: "Hocus Bogus" by Romain Gary (writing as Emile Ajar)

The latest addition to our Book Reviews section is a piece by Stephen Weiner (who runs the Suspicious Humanist newsletter) about Emile Ajar/Romain Gary’s Hocus Bogus, translated from the French by David Bellos and published by Yale University Press. Hocus Bogus was one of my favorite books from the 2011 BTBA ...

Celebration of The Hudson Review’s Spanish Issue

Where: Queen Sofía Spanish Insitute 684 Park Avenue, New York, New York 10065 Please join us for an evening of readings and discussion featuring: Antonio Muñoz Molina “A Double Education” Coming-of-age as a writer as Spain itself emerged in the post-Franco years Edith Grossman “The Solitudes” From the ...

Latest Review: "With Dance Shoes in Siberian Snows" by Sandra Kalniete

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Jessica LeTourneur on Sandra Kalniete’s With Dance Shoes in Siberian Snows, translated from the Latvian by Margita Gailitis and available from Dalkey Archive Press. This book is part of Dalkey’s “Baltic Literature Series,” and is one of the ...

Latest Review: "Funeral for a Dog" by Thomas Pletzinger

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is Jennifer Bratovich’s piece on Thomas Pletzinger’s Funeral for a Dog, available from W. W. Norton in Ross Benjamin’s translation. I’ve been holding onto this review for months, waiting first for the book to come out, then for Ross and Thomas to come here, ...

Latest Review: "Never Any End to Paris" by Enrique Vila-Matas

Following on yesterday’s podcast (after the posting of which, the Cardinals pounded the Cubs 9-1), the latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Jeremy Garber on the forthcoming Enrique Vila-Matas novel, Never Any End to Paris, which New Directions is bringing out later this month in Anne McLean’s ...

Latest Review: "Adonis Selected Poems"

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Vincent Francone on Adonis’ Selected Poems, which Yale brought out not too long ago in Khaled Mattawa’s translation. Vincent Francone has written for us a few times in the past and is a reader for TriQuarterly Online, a site that should probably be on our ...

The Future of Book Reviewing?

Hopefully (probably) not. But because no one ever seems to believe me when I mention this, attached below is an email I just received, one that brings up a lot of questions for me. (More after the letter.) From: Editors at ForeWord Reviews <editors@forewordreviews.com> Subject: You’ve Been Approved for a Digital ...

Latest Review: "Stigmata" by Lorenzo Mattotti and Claudio Piersanti

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Grant Barber on Stigmata, a new graphic novel from Fantagraphics by Lorenzo Mattotti and Claudio Piersanti, translated from the Italian by Kim Thompson. Unless I’m totally forgetting something, this is the first review of a translated graphic novel that ...

Latest Review: "Day of the Oprichnik" by Vladimir Sorokin

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece that I wrote on Vladimir Sorokin’s Day of the Oprichnik, which just came out from FSG in Jamey Gambrell’s translation. Since this is a day of Sorokin (the event write-up, the discussion in the podcast), I’m going to skip all the normal author and ...

Latest Review: "The Book of Things" by Aleš Šteger

For the second time this week, we’re running a review of a BTBA Poetry Finalist. Up today is Aleš Šteger’s The Book of Things, which is translated from the Slovenian by Brian Henry and published by BOA Editions. David Shook review this for us. He’s a poet and translator in Los Angeles, where he edits ...

Latest Review: "Flash Cards" by Yu Jian

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Tim Nassau on Yu Jian’s Flash Cards, translated from the Chinese by Wang Ping and Ron Padgett, and published by Zephyr Press last year. Most notably, Flash Cards is a finalist for this year’s BTBA for poetry. I’ll try to handicap the poetry titles ...

Latest Review: "In Europe" by Geert Mak

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Jessica LeTourneur on Geert Mak’s In Europe, which came out a few years back in Sam Garrett’s translation from the Dutch. In Europe is a book that’s been on my “to read” pile since 2007 or so. As Jessica mentions, it’s a huge book, ...

Latest Review: "We, the Drowned" by Carsten Jensen

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by K.E. Semmel on Carsten Jensen’s We, the Drowned, now available from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in Charlotte Barslund and Emma Ryder’s translation from the Danish. Jensen’s book has been getting a lot of good attention—especially from ...

Iowa Review Interview with Thomas Pletzinger

Thomas Pletzinger’s Funeral for a Dog (translated from the German by Ross Benjamin) has been getting a ton of great attention recently. It was praised in the New York Times and a Powells.com Review-a-Day. The mysterious forces behind the iBookstore chose it as the “Book of the Week.” We’re going to be ...

Latest Review: "The Leg of Lamb: Its Life and Works" by Benjamin Péret

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Andrew Barrett on Benjamin Péret’s The Leg of Lamb: Its Life and Works, translated from the French by Marc Lowenthal and published by Wakefield Press. If we haven’t sang the praises of Wakefield Press yet, it’s because I’m a forgetful idiot. ...

Latest Review: "The Chukchi Bible" by Yuri Rytkheu

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Kaija Straumanis on Yuri Rytkheu’s The Chukchi Bible, translated from the Russian by Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse and soon to be available from Archipelago Books. Rytkheu is one of the only (if not the only) Chukchi writers to be translated into English. His A Dream ...

Latest Review: "The Life of Irene Nemirovsky"

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Jessica LeTourneur on The Life of Irene Nemirovsky, a relatively new biography on the author of Suite Francaise by Olivier Philipponnat and Patrick Lienhardt. This originally came out in France a few years back, but is now available from Knopf in Euan Cameron’s ...

Latest Review: "An Answer from the Silence" by Max Frisch

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Grant Barber on Max Frisch’s An Answer from the Silence: A Story from the Mountains, an early work of Frisch’s just now translated into English for the first time by Mike Mitchell, and published this month by Seagull Books. Along with Robert Walser, Max ...

Latest Review: "Remote Control" by Kotaro Isaka

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Will Eells on Kotaro Isaka’s Remote Control, translated from the Japanese and published by Kodansha International. (Quick side-note: the closing of Kodansha International sucks. That’s all I have to say about that. I’m out of witty attacks for ...

Latest Review: "Between Parentheses" by Roberto Bolaño

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a review by Jeremy Garber on Roberto Bolaño’s forthcoming collection of non-fiction pieces entitled Between Parentheses. This is translated by Natasha Wimmer, and will be available from New Directions in late May. I’m 99.9% there’s no need to explain who ...

Latest Review: "Pornografia" by Witold Gombrowicz

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a review by Jennifer Marquart of Witold Gombrowicz’s Pornografia in Danuta Borchardt’s new translation, which is available from Grove Press. Jennifer Marquart has contributed to Three Percent in the past and is an aspiring German translator and recent University of ...

Latest Review: "Zift" by Vladislav Todorov

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Stiliana Milkova on Vladislav Todorov’s Zift, which was translated from the Bulgarian by Joseph Benatov and published last year by Paul Dry Books. Zift1 is Todorov’s debut novel, which was actually made into a movie that was praised by Variety as ...

Latest Review: "Fair Play" by Tove Jansson

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Larissa Kyzer on Tove Jansson’s Fair Play, which was translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal and officially comes out from NYRB Classics next Tuesday. (Or in NCAA time: The day of the “first” round of the tournament, which for once, could be cool. ...

Latest Review: "engulf–enkindle" by Anja Utler

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Erica Mena on Anja Utler’s engulf—enkindle, which is translated by Kurt Beals and came out in December from the admirable Burning Deck. The best source for info on German poet Anja Utler seems to be this site (which, for those of you into poetry of the ...

Latest Review: "One Hundred Bottles" by Ena Lucia Portela

The latest addition to our Review Section is a piece by Julia Haav on Ena Lucia Portela’s One Hundred Bottles. Julia Haav is a publicist for Europa Editions and is completing a master’s degree in the humanities, with a focus on contemporary Latin American literature, at NYU. I also believe she’s one of my ...

Latest Review: "Vita Nuova" by Bohumil Hrabal

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Dan Vitale on Bohumil Hrabal’s Vita Nuova, which is translated from the Czech by Tony Liman and available from Northwestern University Press. Dan Vitale is a regular contributor to Three Percent—a program sponsored in party through a grant from ...

Latest Review: "The Book of Things" by Ales Steger

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Tim Nassau on Ales Steger’s The Book of Things, which is available from BOA Editions in Brian Henry’s translation from the Slovenian. If you don’t know BOA Editions, they’re one of the premiere publishers of poetry in the U.S. and do a number ...

Latest Review: "The Insufferable Gaucho" by Roberto Bolano

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Will Eells on Roberto Bolano’s The Insufferable Gaucho, translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews and available from New Directions. Will is one of our “contributing editors” (which are sponsored by the New York State Council on the Arts) and a ...

Latest Review: "The Sixty-Five Years of Washington" by Juan Jose Saer

The latest addition to our “Reviews Section”: is a piece by Emily Davis on Juan Jose Saer’s The Sixty-Five Years of Washington, which is translated from the Spanish by Steve Dolph and was published by Open Letter earlier this year. As noted in the past, we don’t run a lot of reviews of our own books ...

The Good of Dalkey's Catalog [Spring/Summer 2011 Preview]

Now that the University of Rochester’s mail services is back from break, I’m swimming in a sea of books, catalogs, and mailed in donations from our annual campaign. (Well, OK, maybe not swimming in a sea of donations, but thanks to all of you who did donate. And if you haven’t donated, you can by clicking ...

Latest Review: "Hotel Europa" by Dumitru Tsepeneag

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Monica Carter on Dumitru Tsepeneag’s Hotel Europa, which was recently published by Dalkey Archive Press in Patrick Camiller’s translation from the Romanian. Dalkey has published several Tsepeneag novels, including the wonderfully complex Vain Art of the ...

Latest Review: "For Grace Received" by Valeria Parrella

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Acacia O’Connor on Valeria Parrella’s For Grace Received, which was published by Europa Editions last fall (which is approximately 7 catalogs in “Publishing Time”) in Antony Shugaar’s translation. Acacia is one of the MALTS (Masters in ...

Latest Review: "Birds for a Demolition" by Manoel de Barros

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by BTBA judge Erica Mena on fellow BTBA judge Idra Novey’s translation from the Portuguese of Manoel de Barros’s Birds for a Demolition, which came out from Carnegie Mellon University Press earlier this year. Erica Mena is a poet, a translator, and visible. ...

Latest Review: "Visitation" by Jenny Erpenbeck

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Phillip Witte on Jenny Erpenbeck’s Visitation, translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky and published earlier this year by New Directions. Phillip Witte was an intern for Open Letter way back in the day, and also had a summer internship at New Directions. ...

Latest Review: "The Museum of Eterna's Novel (The First Good Novel)" by Macedonio Fernandez

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Heath Mayhew on Macedonio Fernandez’s The Museum of Eterna’s Novel (The First Good Novel), which came out from Open Letter earlier this year in Margaret Schwartz’s translation. As you may or may not know, we generally don’t run reviews of our ...

Latest Review: "The Princess, the King, and the Anarchist" by Robert Pagani

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a sharp critique by Adelaide Kuehn of Robert Pagani’s The Princess, the King, and the Anarchist, which was translated from the French by Helen Marx and published by Helen Marx Books. Adelaide Kuehn is one of our interns this semester (and will be next semester as well, so ...

Latest Review: "The Jokers" by Albert Cossery

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is something I wrote on Albert Cossery’s The Jokers, which was translated from the French by Anna Moschovakis and published by NYRB earlier this year. For a long time I was planning a post called “Albert Cossery is $%^&ing Amazing,” after reading A Splendid ...

Latest Review: "The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry" edited by Ilya Kaminsky and Susan Harris

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Tim Nassau on the Ecco Anthology of International Poetry that was edited by Ilya Kaminsky and Susan Harris and came out earlier this year. (Most probably around April, seeing that April is National Poetry Month, which leads to a huge number of poetry collections coming ...

Latest Review: "Am I a Redundant Human Being?" by Mela Hartwig

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Dan Vitale on Mela Hartwig’s Am I a Redundant Human Being?, which was translated from the German by Kerri A. Pierce and published earlier this year by Dalkey Archive Press. I remember first hearing about this book while on an editorial trip with John ...

Six Words: More. Reviews. Of. Open. Letter. Books.

NPR is going all nationalist and public and polling their listeners on what they’d like to hear in terms of book reviews and book coverage: What makes a book review worth reading? What type of books should NPR cover more? What do we write about too much? Who are you people, and what do you want? As editors ...

Latest Review: "The Wrong Blood" by Manuel de Lope

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Erika Howard on Manuel de Lope’s The Wrong Blood, which was translated from the Spanish by John Cullen and available from Other Press. Manuel de Lope has published fourteen books in his native Spain, but this is the first of his works to be translated into ...

Latest Review: "Homesick" by Eshkol Nevo

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Monica Carter on Eshkol Nevo’s Homesick, translated from the Hebrew by Sondra Silverston and published earlier this year by Dalkey Archive. Monica is a regular contributor to Three Percent, and runs her own excellent website, Salonica. Eshkol Nevo’s ...

Latest Review: "Popular Hits of the Showa Era" by Ryu Murakami

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Will Eells on Ryu Murakami’s Popular Hits of the Showa Era, which is forthcoming from Norton in Ralph McCarthy’s translation. As Will points out, in America, Ryu is the “other Murakami,” but he’s quite popular in Japan, and a good number ...

Latest Review: "Song for His Disappeared Love" by Raul Zurita

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Vincent Francone on Raul Zurita’s collection Song for His Disappeared Love, which was translated from the Spanish by Daniel Borzutzky and published by Action Books. I don’t read much poetry, so I wasn’t familiar with Zurita until Vincent Francone ...

Latest Review: "Broken Glass Park" by Alina Bronsky

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Catherine Bailey on Alina Bronsky’s Broken Glass Park, which was published by Europa Editions in Tim Mohr’s translation. Catherine Bailey is a new reviewer for us—she’s a writer, artist, and activist from Seattle, WA who is currently pursuing a ...

Latest Review: A Novel Bookstore

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Larissa Kyzer on Laurence Cosse’s A Novel Bookstore, which is available from Europa Editions in Alison Anderson’s translation. Larissa reviews for us on a regular basis, when she’s not learning various languages, writing for L Magazine, or reading ...

Latest Review: "The Year 3000: A Dream" by Paolo Mantegazza

The latest addition to our Reviews section is a piece by Acacia O’Connor on Paolo Mantegazza’s The Year 3000: A Dream, translated from the Italian by David Jacobson and published by the University of Nebraska Press. Acacia O’Connor is one of the first group of students to enroll in the University of ...

Latest Review: "Comedy in a Minor Key" and "The Death of the Adversary" by Hans Keilson

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Dan Vitale on both Hans Keilson books that FSG recently brought out: The Death of the Adversary (translated by Ivo Jarosy and originally published in 1962) and Comedy in a Minor Key (translated into English for the first time ever by Damion Searls). This rediscovery ...

Latest Review: "The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P." by Rieko Matsuura

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Monica Carter on Rieko Matsuura’s The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P., which was translated from the Japanese by Michael Emmerich and published by Kodansha International. We’ve already mentioned this book on Three Percent several times, including in this ...

Latest Review: "The Sexual Life of an Islamist in Paris" by Leïla Marouane

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Erin O’Rourke on Leïla Marouane’s The Sexual Life of an Islamist in Paris, which was translated from the French by Alison Anderson and published by Europa Editions earlier this year. Erin O’Rourke has been interning with us all summer, reading a ...

Latest Review: "The Homecoming Party" by Carmine Abate

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Grant Barber on Carmine Abate’s The Homecoming Party, translated from the Italian by Antony Shugaar and published by Europa Editions. In his own words, Grant Barber is “an Episcopal priest living on the south shore of Boston and a keen bibliophile. Maybe by ...

Latest Review: "The Rest Is Jungle and Other Stories" by Mario Benedetti

I’m sort of on vacation this week (and will literally be out of town on Thursday and Friday), so instead of writing a lot of new posts, I’m instead going to run a bunch of reviews that I’ve been storing up. First in the queue is David Krinick’s piece on Mario Benedetti’s The Rest Is Jungle and ...

Latest Review: "Prose" by Thomas Bernhard

The most recent addition to our Reviews Section is a review by Stephen Sparks of Thomas Bernhard’s Prose, translated from the German by Martin Chalmers and published by Seagull Books. Stephen Sparks is currently on his second go-round as a bookseller at Green Apple Books in San Francisco, after having spent a year as ...

Latest Review: "The Autobiography of Fidel Castro" by Noberto Fuentes

I know, I know, it’s been a while, but the latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Erik Sean Estep on Noberto Fuentes’s The Autobiography of Fidel Castro, translated from the Spanish by Anna Kushner and published late last year by W. W. Norton. (FYI, the paperback edition will be available in ...

New York Review Books Has an Amazing Forthcoming List

I’ve been a huge fan of NYRB for years. I think I even have copies of the first twelve/thirteen books in those very unfortunately designed covers. Every season I drool when their catalog arrives. I’ve been planning a post for weeks entitled “Albert Cossery is Effing Awesome,” which is due in part to ...

Translation Preview: September 2010

Following up on last week’s post about the various summer/fall 2010 previews that came out from The Millions and elsewhere, I thought that over the next few days, we’d highlight some forthcoming titles that sound pretty interesting to me. Sure I’m missing things and whatnot, so feel free to overload the ...

Translation Preview: August 2010

Following up on last week’s post about the various summer/fall 2010 previews that came out from The Millions and elsewhere, I thought that over the next few days, we’d highlight some forthcoming titles that sound pretty interesting to me. Sure I’m missing things and whatnot, so feel free to overload the ...

Translation Preview: July 2010

Following up on last week’s post about the various summer/fall 2010 previews that came out from The Millions and elsewhere, I thought that over the next few days, we’d highlight some forthcoming titles that sound pretty interesting to me. Sure I’m missing things and whatnot, so feel free to overload the ...

Summer/Fall Previews

One of the best literary blogs out there has be The Millions. Consistently good features. Excellent writing. Interesting aesthetic taste. Et cetera. As proof, here’s a link to their Great 2010 Book Preview column that highlights a lot of interesting books coming out this summer and beyond. And although these ...

Latest Review: "Self-Portrait Abroad" by Jean-Philippe Toussaint

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Matthew Weiss on Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s Self-Portrait Abroad, which is translated from the French by John Lambert and was published by Dalkey Archive Press earlier this year. On a random note, assuming I finish writing my review of Patrik Ourednik’s ...

Latest Review: "The Passport" by Herta Müller

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Monica Carter on Herta Müller’s The Passport, which was translated from the German by Martin Chalmers and rapidly reprinted by Serpent’s Tail last fall when she won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Monica Carter is one of our top reviewers and a great ...

Latest Review: "The Collaborators" by Pierre Siniac

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is Tim Nassau’s piece on Pierre Siniac’s The Collaborators, which is translated from the French by Jordan Stump and came out earlier this year from Dalkey Archive Press. This is kicking off a few weeks of Dalkey reviews . . . We already have a piece on Toussaint’s ...

Latest Review: "Heartbreak Tango" by Manuel Puig

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Larissa Kyzer on Manuel Puig’s Heartbreak Tango, translated from the Spanish by Suzanne Jill Levine and reissued by Dalkey Archive Press earlier this year with a new introduction by Francisco Goldman. Puig’s an all-time favorite of mine, and in my opinion, ...

Latest Review: "Selected Prose of Heinrich von Kleist"

The latest addition to our Review Section is a piece by Monica Carter on the Selected Prose of Heinrich von Kleist, which was translated from the German by Peter Wortsman and published by Archipelago Books. Monica Carter is a very steady reviewer for us, who also serves on the fiction panel for the Best Translated Book ...

Latest Review: "Purge" by Sofi Oksanen

The latest addition to our Review Section is a piece by Larissa Kyzer on Sofi Oksanen’s Purge, which was translated from the Finnish by Lola Rogers and published earlier this year by Grove/Black Cat. Since this was one of the books I recommended on “Here on Earth,” I’ll save my comments for another ...

Latest Review: "The Misadventures of the New Satan" by A. H. Tammsaare

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Dan Vitale on A. H. Tammsaare’s The Misadventures of the New Satan, which was translated by Olga Shartze, revised by Christopher Moseley and published by Norvik/Dufour. Although the title would be well suited to a mediocre sit-com, this novel sounds pretty ...

Latest Review: "Almost Dead" by Assaf Gavron

The latest addition to our Review Section is a piece by Jeff Waxman on Assaf Gavron’s Almost Dead, which was translated from the Hebrew by the author and James Lever and published by HarperCollins. I’m really glad Jeff brought this book to my attention . . . It was one that I had missed in entering info into ...

Latest Review: "The Subversive Scribe" by Suzanne Jill Levine

The latest addition to our Review Section is a piece by Jessica LeTourneur on the reissue of Suzanne Jill Levine’s classic The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction. This book has had a huge impact on translators ever since it was first published, and there was even a huge celebration of Jill at the ...

PEN World Voices Festival (Preview of Thursday Events)

I’ve been meaning to write a bunch of things about the PEN World Voices events, but, well, life has sort of gotten in the way. Instead, what I think I’ll do is simply preview some of tomorrow’s events, and then tomorrow I’ll write up stuff about Friday and weekend. I’m flying down early (like ...

Review of "Why Translation Matters"

I know I had a week off (more or less, and thanks again to Edward Gauvin for kicking such ass last week), but all I’ve really got right now is this review I wrote of Edie Grossman’s Why Translation Matters. Honestly, this is one of the only things I’ve ever written that I’m pretty proud of. (And all ...

Latest Review: "The Bridge of the Golden Horn" by Emine Sevgi Ozdamar

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Jessica LeTourneur on Emine Sevgi Ozdamar’s The Bridge of the Golden Horn, which is translated from the German by Martin Chalmers and published by Serpent’s Tail. Ozdamar was born in Turkey and moved to Berlin because of her interest in German theater. ...

Latest Review: "Fado" by Andrzej Stasiuk

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Dan Vitale on Andrzej Stasiuk’s Fado, which was translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston and published by Dalkey Archive Press. The book’s gotten a lot of nice attention already, and Stasiuk is considered one of the most interesting contemporary Polish ...

Latest Review: "Baba Yaga Laid an Egg" by Dubravka Ugresic

The latest addition to our Review Section is a piece on Dubravka Ugresic’s Baba Yaga Laid an Egg. This was published by Grove as part of the “Myths” series, and was translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursac, Celia Hawkesworth, and Mark Thompson. (Each of the three translators did a different ...

Latest Review: "Siamese" by Stig Sæterbakken

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece Larissa Kyzer wrote on Stig Sæterbakken’s Siamese, translated from the Norwegian by Stokes Schwartz and published earlier this year by Dalkey Archive Press. Larissa Kyzer is one of our regular reviewers, in part because of her great interest in Scandinavian lit. ...

Latest Review: "Hotel Iris" by Yoko Ogawa

The “latest addition”: to our “Reviews Section” is a piece by Will Eells on Yoko Ogawa’s Hotel Iris, which is translated from the Japanese by superstar Stephen Snyder and published by Picador. This is the third Ogawa book available in English, and we’ve actually reviewed all three. (I ...

Happy Birthday, Complete Review!

As noted in the Literary Saloon today is the 11-year-anniversary of the Complete Review. In internet years, I believe that translates into approximately a millennium. Having been at this for almost three years myself, I’m astounded by Michael Orthofer’s ability to keep writing such quality posts and reviews for ...

Latest Review: "Don Juan: His Own Version" by Peter Handke

The latest addition to our Review Section is a piece on Peter Handke’s latest novella, Don Juan: His Own Version, which is translated from the German by Krishna Winston and published by FSG. Dan Vitale—one of our new “contributing reviewers,” which is sponsored by a grant from the New York State ...

Preview of the 2010 International Prize for Arabic Fiction

I hate reposting Abu Dhabi blog entries while the fair is still going on (or, to be more accurate, just starting), since everyone should be visiting the official ADIBF blog for info about all the goings on. That said, since I will be attending the award ceremony for this year’s Arab Booker later tonight, and since with ...

Latest Review: "World's End" by Pablo Neruda

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is Erica Mena’s examination of Pablo Neruda’s World’s End, which came out last year from Copper Canyon, and is translated from the Spanish by William O’Daly. In case anyone’s keeping track, that makes two—count ‘em, two—poetry reviews ...

Latest Review: "The Changeling" by Kenzaburo Oe

The “latest addition” to our Reviews Section is a piece on Nobel Prize winning author Kenzaburo Oe’s The Changeling, which was translated from the Japanese by Deborah Boliver Boehm and comes out from Grove Press in March. Will Eells—who is a former Open Letter intern and did a fantastic job ...

Latest Review: "Tales of a Finnish Tupa" adapted by James Cloyd Bowman and Margery Bianco

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Larissa Kyzer on Tales of a Finnish Tupa, adapted by James Cloyd Bowman and Margery Bianco from a translation by Aili Kolehmainen with illustrations by Laura Bannon. I know we’ve been a bit slow about getting new reviews online, but now that the BTBA fiction ...

Indie Bookstores, Google Preview, and the Interwebs

Below is a special guest post from Jeff Waxman, bookseller at Seminary Co-op in Chicago (one of the five greatest indie bookstores in America) and managing editor of The Front Table. As someone who loves independent bookstores—and worked in them for years—I really want to see them survive, but Jeff’s post ...

Latest Review: "Monsieur Pain" by Roberto Bolaño

The latest addition to our Review Section is a piece on Roberto Bolaño’s first novel to come out in 2010: Monsieur Pain, translated by Chris Andrews and published by New Directions. This review is by Dan Vitale, a writer and editor who has written a number of pieces for Three Percent. And he definitely makes this ...

Latest Review: "Desert" by J.M.G. Le Clézio

The latest addition to our Review Section is a piece on Nobel Prize winner J.M.G. Le Clézio’s Desert, translated from the French by C. Dickson and published by David R. Godine as part of the amazing Verba Mundi series. Timothy Nassau, an intern here last summer and current student at Brown, wrote this review. ...

Latest Review: "Edward Hopper" by Ernest Farrés

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Erica Mena on Edward Hopper, a poetry collection by Catalan author Ernest Farrés, translated by Lawrence Venuti and published by Graywolf Press. I’ve been interested in this collection for a while—partly because I love Catalan lit, but also because Quim ...

Latest Review: "Plants Don't Drink Coffee" by Unai Elorriaga

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Larissa Kyzer on Unai Elorriaga’s Plants Don’t Drink Coffee, which was translated from the Basque by Amaia Gabantxo and published by Archipelago earlier this year. Elorriaga is one of only a handful (or maybe only two?) contemporary Basque authors to have ...

Latest Review: "The She-Devil in the Mirror" by Horacio Castellanos Moya

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece on Horacio Castellanos Moya’s The She-Devil in the Mirror that I wrote. Katherine Silver translated this, and New Directions published it a couple months ago. Senselessness was one of my favorite books from last year, and She-Devil is up there on my Best of 2009 ...

Latest Review: "Running" by Jean Echenoz

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by our own E.J. Van Lanen on Jean Echenoz’s Running, which was recently released by The New Press in Linda Coverdale’s translation. Personally, I’m a big Echenoz fan—especially of his earlier noir-detective books like Cherokee—and this is ...

Kirkus Reviews, Out!

As was announced yesterday, Kirkus Reviews (and Editor & Publisher) is shutting down. Which kind of has people a bit worked up. It’s not every day that you see such a palpable sign of your industry’s troubles as when one of the few pure trade publications just ceases to be. When I was at Dalkey, a Kirkus ...

Latest Review: "Europes" by Jacques Reda

The latest addition to our Review Section is a piece by Daniela Hurezanu on Jacques Reda’s Europes, which was translated from the French by Aaron Prevots and published by Host Publications. Daniela Hurezanu—a translator and author who wrote a great review for us of Memory Glyphs—makes this book sound ...

Latest Review: "Anonymous Celebrity" by Ignacio de Loyola Brandao

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece that I wrote on Ignacio de Loyola Brandao’s Anonymous Celebrity. It’s a great book—one of my favorites of 2009 (so far)—and worth reading (especially if you liked Zero . . . all four hundred of you out there who bought it, that is). Here’s ...

Latest Review: "Translation Is a Love Affair" by Jacques Poulin

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece that I wrote on Jacques Poulin’s Translation Is a Love Affair, which was recently published by Archipelago Books. (A Three Percent favorite.) I wasn’t overwhelmed by the novel itself, but translator Sheila Fischman deserves a ton of credit for all ...

Latest Review: "The Housekeeper and the Professor" by Yoko Ogawa

Before she left Picador to be an editor at Free Press, Amber Quereshi acquired a few books by Japanese author Yoko Ogawa. The first, The Diving Pool came out last year, The Housekeeper and the Professor is the second and released earlier this spring, and there’s one more in the works. (Can’t remember the title, ...

Best Review Ever

From Okla Elliott’s review of Season of Ash in Inside Higher Ed: Jorge Volpi’s Season of Ash is the kind of novel that reminds me why I read novels in the first place, but it’s also the kind that makes me wonder why I bother to write. Before the end of this review, I am going to try to convince you that Volpi ...

Latest Review: "The Wall in My Head" by Words Without Borders (eds.)

I know we’ve been pretty quiet on the book reviewing front (but soon—I really want to recommend the new Brandao book . . .), but at long last, we’ve added a piece on The Wall in My Head to our Review section. I would be tempted to apologize for the self-promotional nature of posting a review of one of our ...

Starred review from PW

Our release of The Golden Calf by Ilf & Petrov is only a few weeks away, and Publishers Weekly has already run a splendid and starred review (and our first starred review in PW, at that): A hilarious blend of absurdist, futurist and surrealist sensibilities, this new (and only complete) translation of Ilf and ...

Latest Review: "Rhyming Life & Death" by Amos Oz

We’re really not trying to kick Amos Oz while he’s down, but in addition to not winning the Nobel Prize for Literature yesterday (there had been rampant speculation, and he was the odds-on favorite for a while), it sounds like his new novel is as messy as the new Houghton Mifflin Harcourt website1 . . . At least ...

Latest Review: "The Tanners" by Robert Walser

The latest addition to our Reviews section is a piece by Monica Carter on Robert Walser’s The Tanners, which was recently released by New Directions in Susan Bernofsky’s translation. (This is overly personal, but this review is a confluence of four of my favorite people, publishers, and authors. Monica + Susan + ...

Latest Review: "Dream of Reason" by Rosa Chacel

The latest addition to our review section is a piece on Dream of Reason by Rosa Chacel, translated from the Spanish by Carol Maier and recently published by the University of Nebraska Press as part of their European Women Writers Series. I’ve written about this book on a few occasions, mainly because of the Javier ...

Latest Review: "Hoppla! 1 2 3" by Gerard Gavarry

Looks like this is going to be a week of Dalkey Archive reviews, with my piece on Anonymous Celebrity by Ignacio de Loyola Brandao coming out on Thursday or Friday . . . And not to give away too much, but my review is much more positive than what Timothy Nassau (former Open Letter intern who’s actually back in school ...

Latest Review: "The Confessions of Noa Weber" by Gail Hareven

The latest addition to our review section is a review of Gail Hareven’s The Confessions of Noa Weber, which came out from Melville House Press earlier this year in Dalya Bilu’s stunning translation. (I didn’t mention her translation in the actual review, but wow, to capture this voice so convincingly, so ...

Latest Review: "The Armies" by Evelio Rosero

Over the past few years, New Directions has put together what is arguably the best collection of contemporary Latin American literature available from any single publisher. Sure, there’s the heaps of Bolano titles. But there’s also Cesar Aira. And Horacio Castellanos Moya. There’s Guillermo Rosales’s ...

Latest Review: "The Skating Rink" by Roberto Bolano

The latest addition to our review section is a piece that I wrote about Roberto Bolano’s The Skating Rink. Bolano is a personal favorite, and I think this latest translation is very charming: I’m as guilty as anyone for helping hype Roberto Bolaño’s two big books—“big” both in ...

Rupert in the B&N Review

Every week, I’m more and more impressed with the B&N Review. And I swear, it’s not just because our books turn up in there on a rather regular basis . . . The latest to be reviewed there is Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer’s Rupert. Great piece by Christopher Byrd that opens: Scout’s honor: On a ...

Latest Review: "Normance" by Louis-Ferdinand Céline

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Monica Carter on Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Normance, which was translated by Marlon Jones and published earlier this year by Dalkey Archive Press. Monica is one of our long-time reviewers and runs the always excellent Salonica World Lit website. She also works ...

Latest Review: "Friendly Fire" by A. B. Yehoshua

The latest addition to our Reviews section is a piece by Dan Vitale on A. B. Yehoshua’s Friendly Fire. In addition to reviewing for Three Percent (he recently reviewed Aharon Appelfeld’s Laish for us), Dan is a writer, editor, and book reviewer. Yehoshua is considered to be one of the greatest Israeli writers ...

Latest Review: Beauty Salon by Mario Bellatin

The latest addition to our review section is a piece by Larissa Kyzer on Mario Bellatin’s Beauty Salon. Bellatin’s a pretty interesting author (see this post about the recent NY Times profile) and hopefully a bunch more of his books (especially Flores) will come out in the near future. ...

Latest Review: Landscape in Concrete by Jakov Lind

The latest addition to our review section is a piece by Nigel Beale on Jakov Lind’s Landscape in Concrete. Usually we don’t run reviews of our own books (which initially seemed like a good idea, but sort of doesn’t make sense, since Open Letter books are as interesting as a lot of the titles we do review, ...

Latest Review: "Laish" by Aharon Appelfeld

The latest addition to our book review section is Dan Vitale’s piece on Aharon Appelfeld’s Laish, which was translated from the Hebrew by Aloma Halter and published by Shocken Books earlier this year. Appelfeld has had a number of titles translated into English, including Badenheim 1939 and The Story of a ...

Latest Review: "Cliffs" by Olivier Adam

The latest addition to our review section, is a piece by summer intern Adam Witzel on Olivier Adam’s Cliffs, which came out from Pushkin Press a couple years back. Olivier Adam is the author of many novels and children’s books, several of which have been adapted for film, including his debut Je vais bien, ne ...

First Review of Murakami's 1Q84

The new Murakami book — 1Q84 — is now available in Japan, and this review at Neojaponisme is the first comprehensive take on the book that I’ve come across. Long review for a long book that sounds pretty intriguing (if not in need of a bit of editing): 1Q84 sprawls 1055 pages in the hardback version and ...

Review of Bolano's The Skating Rink

The Abu Dhabi-based The National has one of the first reviews of Bolano’s The Skating Rink, which is coming out from New Directions later this year. Giles Harvey’s raview spends a lot of time on Borges and Poe, detective fiction, and the creation of the reader of detective fiction, which is all quite ...

Latest Review: "The Unit" by Ninni Holmqvist

Our latest review is of Ninni Holmqvist’s The Unit, which was translated from the Swedish by Marlaine Delargy and published by Other Press. Pretty interesting book (at least for the first two-thirds) about a future Sweden where those who are unwed and childless at the age of 50 have to live the rest of their lives in ...

Latest Review: "The Possession" by Annie Ernaux

The latest addition to our reviews section is a piece by Timothy Jourdan on Annie Ernaux’s The Possession, which is translated from the French by Anna Moschovakis and recently published by Seven Stories. Here’s the start of the review: Over the past decade, Seven Stories has brought out a number of Annie ...

Latest Review: "The Vampire of Ropraz" by Jacques Chessex

The latest addition to our review section is a piece on Jacques Chessex’s The Vampire of Ropraz, a curious little book from one of Switzerland’s most revered authors. Here’s the opening of the review: If it weren’t for Michael Orthofer of Complete Review, I don’t think I would’ve ...

Latest Review: "Azorno" by Inger Christensen

I’m planning on writing a post next week with the current list of books that have been nominated for the 2010 Best Translated Book Award longlist. (It’s an era of transparency, no? And besides, wouldn’t you like a bit of time to be able to read some of these titles before the longlist announcement?) I ...

Latest Review: "The Sacred Book of the Werewolf" by Victor Pelevin

The latest addition to our review section is a piece by Margarita Shalina (bookseller at St. Mark’s, translator, reviewer, all around multi-talented person) on Victor Pelevin’s The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, which actually came out last year (hey, no one said we had to be timely). Here’s the opening of her ...

Latest Review: "Curriculum Vitae" by Yoel Hoffmann

The latest addition to our review section is a piece by Phillip Witte (former Open Letter intern, current New Directions intern) on Yoel Hoffmann’s Curriculum Vitae, the sixth of Hoffmann’s books to be published by ND. I think this is the only work of fiction I’ve ever come across with no page numbers . . . ...

Latest Review: "Op Oloop" by Juan Filloy

The latest addition to our review section is a piece on Juan Filloy’s Op Oloop, which was translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman and is forthcoming from Dalkey Archive Press. Pretty interesting book from a very interesting author: The first time I heard of Juan Filloy was during an editorial trip to ...

Latest Review: "Kahn & Engelmann" by Hans Eichner

The latest addition to our review section is a piece by Lara Ericson (one of our summer interns) on Hans Eichner’s Kahn & Engelmann, which was published earlier this year by Biblioasis in Canada (Windsor to be more specific), and translated from the German by Jean M. Snook. Biblioasis is one of the most ...

Latest Review: The Twin by Gerbrand Bakker

Our latest review is of The Twin by Gerbrand Bakker, translated from the Dutch by David Colmer, and published earlier this year by Archipelago Books. Larissa Kyzer—who has reviewed a number of books for us—wrote this piece, which makes the book sound both quiet and compelling: Penetrating, beautifully sparse, ...

Latest Review: Memory Glyphs: 3 Prose Poets from Romania

The most recent addition to our review section is a piece by Daniela Hurezanu on Memory Glyphs: 3 Prose Poets from Romania, which was recently released in the U.S. by Twisted Spoon Press and is translated from the Romanian by Adam J. Sorkin with Radu Andriescu, Mircea Ivanescu, and Bogdan Stefanescu. Like all TSP books, the ...

Latest Review: That Mad Ache by Francoise Sagan

Our latest review is Monica Carter’s piece on Francoise Sagan’s That Mad Ache, recently published by Basic Books and translated from the French by Douglas Hofstadter. Monica — who works at Skylight Books and runs the excellent Salonica — isn’t especially keen on this novel, or, to be more ...

Latest Review: A Mind at Peace by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar

The latest addition to our review section is a piece by Emily Shannon on Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar’s A Mind at Peace, which was translated from the Turkish by Erdag Göknar, published by Archipelago Books late last year, and most famously given as a gift to President Obama by Deniz Baykal, a member of the Turkish ...

A Few Good Reviews for Open Letter Titles

This was a great week for Open Letter books, with three of our recent releases getting some nice coverage: First up was Hannah Manshel’s review of Death in Spring for The Front Table: In English for the first time in Martha Tennent’s translation, Death in Spring is about a society that finds highly elaborate ...

Latest Review: The Ninth by Ferenc Barnas

As you may remember, Hungarian lit dominated last year’s Best Translated Book Award with three titles on the longlist, including Attila Bartis’s Tranquility, the eventual winner. Not sure that’s ever going to happen again, but the literary buzz around Ferenc Barnas’s The Ninth proves that Hungarian ...

Nigle Beale, John Metcalf, and Negative Reviewing

In the third of today’s three Canadian-centric posts, I thought I’d highlight this interview Nigel Beale did recently with John Metcalf, a Canadian book critic and fiction editor at Biblioasis. The focus of the interview is on “negative reviewing,” and I have to admit, Metcalf’s defense of ...

Latest Review: The Naked Eye by Yoko Tawada

I believe that The Naked Eye (translated by Susan Bernofsky from the German and published by New Directions) is the fourth of Yoko Tawada’s works to make their way into English. Kodandsha did The Bridegroom Was a Dog back in 1998 (this was translated just from the Japanese), and New Directions did Where Europe Begins in ...

Latest Review: The Class by Francois Begaudeau

The latest addition to our review section is Jessica Cobb’s review of Francois Begaudeau’s The Class, which is one of the few examples I can think of where the movie has been getting much more praise than the novel. (See this Complete Review review.) The Class is a novel about the everyday life of a Paris ...

Latest Review: The Zafarani Files by Gamal al-Ghitani

The latest addition to our review section is a piece on Gamal al-Ghitani’s The Zafarani Files. Al-Ghitani has a couple other books available in English translation from the American University of Cairo Press, including Pyramid Texts and The Mahfouz Dialogs. Based on the strength of this particular novel, I have the ...

Latest Review: Brothers by Yu Hua

If things go right, I think we’ll be running five reviews this week—which definitely makes up for the one we skipped last week. Up first is Yu Hua’s Brothers, a very long novel, very ambitious novel about two boys growing up in China during the period of the Cultural Revolution and the economic boom that ...

Latest Review: Zubaida's Window by Iqbal Al-Qazwini

Jessica Cobb (whose internship at Open Letter just ended) has added a review of Iqbal Al-Qazwini’s Zubaida’s Window, which came out last year from The Feminist Press, translated by Azza El Kholy and Amira Nowaira. According to The Feminist Press, this novel the first in English by an Iraqi to focus on the 2003 ...

Latest Review: Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada

Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone, translated from the German by Michael Hoffmann and published by Melville House earlier this year, has been receiving a ton of good attention, such as this review in the New Yorker and this bit for the daily Very Short List e-mail. Never before published in English, this novel is a ...

Latest Review: Ghosts by Cesar Aira

Our latest review is of Ghosts by Cesar Aira, translated by Chris Andrews and published by New Directions. Ghosts is a very interesting book, and one of the front-runners for my personal 2010 Best Translated Book longlist . . . Here’s the opening of the review: The entire plot of Ghosts, Cesar Aira’s third ...

Latest Review: Rex

Our latest review is of Rex by Jose Manuel Prieto, translated from the Spanish by Esther Allen and published this month by Grove. This is the second book of Prieto’s that Grove has published—Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire came out a few years ago—and hopefully isn’t the last. As you can ...

Cavafy reviewed in the Times

U of R’s own James Longenbach reviewed a new translation of Cavafy in the Times this weekend: “A Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe.” With this sentence the novelist E. M. Forster introduced the Alexandrian Greek poet Constantine Cavafy to the ...

Latest Review: Pluriverse by Ernesto Cardenal

In honor of today’s Ernesto Cardenal event in Ann Arbor, we thought we’d post a review of Pluriverse that Vincent Francone wrote for us. The collection—which came out from New Directions earlier this year—covers Cardenal’s entire career, and Vincent has nothing but positive things to say about ...

Latest Review: Doghead

Larissa Kyzer’s look at Morten Ramslund’s Doghead is the latest addition to our review section. Ramslund’s going to be in New York for the upcoming PEN World Voices Festival, and in fact, he’ll be participating in a Scandinavian reception with Jan Kjaerstad at Idlewild Books on May 2nd from 6-8pm. ...

Latest Review: Gods and Soldiers

The latest addition to our review section is a look at Gods and Soldiers, an anthology of contemporary African writing edited by Rob Spillman. Jessica Cobb—a current intern at Open Letter—wrote this review, which begins: This anthology of both fiction and non-fiction features thirty pieces from a wide ...

Latest Review: Laundry

The most recent addition to our review section is Jenna Furman’s piece on Suzane Adam’s Laundry, a recent release from Autumn Hill Books translated by Becka Mara McKay. Jenna is an intern with Open Letter, a former intern for literary agent Meredith Bernstein, and an incredibly good proofreader. Her review ...

Happy Birthday to the Complete Review

Back on April 5, 1999, the Complete Review published its first review, giving Nicholson Baker’s The Everlasting Story of Nory a “C” for being “too cute for its own good.” Well, 2,250 reviews and ten years later and CR is still going strong. Michael Orthofer has a nice write up about his first ...

Latest Review: The Halfway House by Guillermo Rosales

Our latest review is of Guillermo Rosales’s The Halfway House, which is coming out from New Directions next month. Rosales was a Cuban exile who was misdiagnosed as a schizophrenic and ended up committing suicide. Before taking his own life, he destroyed most of his writings, leaving behind only two works: The ...

Death in Spring: Review and Event

Death in Spring by Merce Rodoreda is probably our biggest book of the spring. I was planning on giving away a few copies of the galley, but the response from reviewers was so overwhelming that we quite literally ran out (we don’t even have a copy in our archive) and even had to send out a few unbound copies. This ...

Vilnius Poker Review

Over at The Quarterly Conversation, Paul Doyle reviews Vilnius Poker. Ričardas Gavelis wrote to intimidate and attack, and his novel Vilnius Poker, seldom subtle in its language, demands attention. It is a masterwork of bitterness and sarcasm, one that descends into the self-destructive impulses of those who, though ...

Discussion of Review of Brothers

Thanks to Literary Saloon for bringing this to our attention. Over at Paper Republic there’s an ongoing discussion of the recent New York Times review by Jess Row of Yu Hua’s Brothers. It all starts when Bruce Humes raises a few questions about the review: —-Does Jess Row know Chinese? This is never ...

Latest Review: Five Spice Street

Our latest review is of Can Xue’s Five Spice Street (click here to order from Harvard Book Store; click here for the review), which was recently released by Yale University Press as part of the Margellos World Republic of Letters Series. Before getting into the review itself, I want to mention that Can Xue and Isabel ...

Latest Review: The Queue

Our latest review is of Vladimir Sorokin’s The Queue, which came out from New York Review Books last fall. NYRB has also published Sorokin’s Ice, and have plans to do a few of his other titles as well. That, plus FSG’s publication of A Day in the Life of an Oprichnik might lead to a Sorokin moment . . . One ...

Sunday's NY Times Book Review is Filthy with Translations

Hard to say that the New York Times doesn’t review translations after this week . . . In addition to Kakutani’s possibly insane review of The Kindly Ones, this weekend’s Book Review includes articles on four works of literature in translation. First off, Liesl Schillinger reviews the Melville House ...

Zone reviewed in The Quarterly Conversation

We’re publishing Mathias Énard’s Zone next year, and I couldn’t be more excited. There’s a review of it up now at The Quarterly Conversation, and while it’s not a wholly positive review, the review just makes me happier to be publishing it. Zone is definitely an Open Letter book: Zone ...

Kindle Review

In case you’re dying for more Kindle news, the New York Times has finally run their review: But as traditionalists always point out, an e-book reader is a delicate piece of electronics. It can be lost, dropped or fried in the tub. You’d have to buy an awful lot of $10 best sellers to recoup the purchase price. If ...

Latest Review: Noir

Our latest review is of Olivier Pauvert’s Noir, and was written by Monica Carter, who works at Skylight Books, runs Salonica, and serves on the Best Translated Book judging panel. Here’s the opening of her review: Olivier Pauvert’s Noir — his first and only novel to date — brings nihilism, amorality, ...

Latest Review: In the United States of Africa

Our latest review is of Abdourahman A. Waberi’s In the United States of Africa. It’s a pretty interesting and strange book. Here’s the opening of my review: As Percival Everett states in his introduction, Djibouti author Abdourahman Waberi’s first novel to be translated into English is particularly ...

Mabanckou review

Laila Lalami reviews Alain Mabanckou’s Broken Glass in The National “In Africa, when an old person dies, a library burns.” When the Malian writer and ethnologist Amadou Hampâté Bâ uttered these words at a Unesco assembly in 1960, he was attempting to draw attention to Africa’s tradition of oral ...

Latest Review: Machine by Peter Adolphsen

Our latest review is of Danish author Peter Adolphsen’s Machine, which came out last year from MacAdam/Cage. Larissa Kyzer—who’s reviewed a number of Danish and Scandinavian books for us—makes Adolphsen (and his work) sound really interesting, and, for lack of a better word, condensed: Although ...

Recent Reviews of The Pets

Bragi Olafsson’s The Pets came out a few months ago, but with Iceland and its overturned government in the news these days, it’s a pretty good time for reviews to be appearing . . . Just this week two new reviews came out, the first being Lara Tupper’s piece in The Believer, which puts Olafsson’s novel ...

Latest Review: The Blue Fox by Sjon

Our latest review is of Sjon’s The Blue Fox, which was translated from the Icelandic by Victoria Cribb and published last year by Telegram Books. Sounds interesting, even if our reviewer Phillip Witte has some mixed feelings: I picked up The Blue Fox on a continuing kick for Icelandic literature having recently ...

Latest Review: Metropole by Ferenc Karinthy

It’s an all-Hungarian, all-Karinthy day . . . Our latest review (already referenced in my earlier post) is of Ferenc Karinthy’s Metropole. Monica Carter—who runs Salonica World Lit, sells books at Skylight in L.A., and is on the Best Translated Book Award committee—wrote the review of this ...

Latest Review: Bad Blood by Borisav Stankovic

Our latest review is of Serbian Classics Press’s second 2008 offering, Bad Blood by Borisav Stankovic. As noted on the book’s publicity page, “Bad Blood is regarded as the first Serbian psychological novel, and it left a profound influence on writers as diverse as Meša Selimovć, Ivo Andrić, Dobrica ...

Complete Review and International Literature

I don’t think there’s a reviewer, or publication, in America that’s as diverse as Michael Orthofer’s Complete Review. Nor as meticulous about record keeping and self-aware about its reviewing trends. Back in 2004, Michael started the How International Are We? report to find out how good of a job he ...

Latest Review: Close to Jedenew

We’re all about Melville House . . . in addition to the forthcoming post about Alejandro Zambra’s Bonsai, we also just posted this new review of Kevin Vennemann’s Close to Jedenew another book from Melville House’s Contemporary Art of the Novella Series. This review was written by Douglas Carlsen, ...

Bloomsbury Review and Syracuse University Press

It’s not available on The Bloomsbury Review website1, but Syracuse University Press was named as the Publisher of the Year, due in great part, to its Middle East Literature in Translation Series. In the write-up, Jeff Biggers cites both Taghi Modarressi’s The Virgin of Solitude: A Novel and Contemporary Iraqi ...

Latest Review: Pushkin's Second Wife and Other Micronovels

An import from Peter Owen, Pushkin’s Second Wife and Other Micronovels is Yuri Druzhnikov’s latest book to be published in English and the latest addition to our review section. It was translated from the Russian by Thomas Moore and came out earlier this year. The review is written by Irene Minkina, a student ...

Latest Review: The Elegance of the Hedgehog

We just posted a review by Monica Carter of Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog (Europa Editions), translated from the French by Alison Anderson. Monica works at Skylight Books in Los Angeles, and runs the phenomenal blog Salonica — Exploit. Explore. Examine., which is dedicated to international ...

Latest Review: Skunk

Our latest review is of Skunk: A Life by Peter Aleshkovsky. This book was published by Glas years ago, but since Glas books generally don’t get the attention they deserve, we thought it would be a good idea to cover it. Jennifer Cunningham, a language student here at the University of Rochester wrote this piece. ...

Latest Review: Belonging

Our latest review is of Belonging: New Poetry by Iranians Around the World, edited and translated by Niloufar Talebi. Niloufar is an extremely talented translator and performer, and runs the very impressive Translation Project, which promotes contemporary Iranian literature through a variety of media. A great example of ...

Two More Taker Reviews

Rubem Fonseca’s The Taker and Other Stories continues to get some really good coverage, including two recent reviews at The Front Table and The National. The Front Table is Seminary Co-op’s online newsletter/review magazine. It’s been around in one form or another for almost two decades, and the current ...

Latest Review: The Tsar's Dwarf

Larissa Kyzer’s write-up of Danish author Peter Fogtdal’s The Tsar’s Dwarf is the latest addition to our review section. It’s fitting that Larissa would be the one to review this—in addition to reviewing for The L Magazine and working towards her Master’s in Library Science, she’s ...

Latest Review: Customer Service

Our latest review is a piece I wrote about Benoit Duteurtre’s Customer Service (translated from the French by Bruce Benderson), which is part of Melville House Press’s fantastic Contemporary Art of the Novella series. It’s a pretty funny book that a lot of people will be able to relate to: The novella ...

Latest Review: Twelve Loops

The latest addition to our review section is a piece by Nina Shevchuk-Murray on Yuri Andrukhovych’s untranslated novel Twelve Loops. Andrukhovych does have a couple of books out in English — Recreations (Canadian Institute of Ukranian Study Press) and Perverzion (Northwestern University Press). (I believe ...

2666: The NY Times Review

On the same day as the 2666 Launch Party (which, thanks to the d-bags curators of myopenbar.com was crowded with non-literary folk [seriously, we should all prank them by submitting hundreds of fake events featuring free booze], although Zadie Smith, Natasha Wimmer, Michael Miller, Craig Teicher, Mark Binelli, and many more ...

Latest Review: The Howling Miller

Our latest review is of Arto Paasilinna’s The Howling Miller, which was recently published by Canongate. The Howling Miller tells the story of Gunnar Huttunen, a mysterious miller who shows up in the remote northern Finnish province of Lapland and buys and repairs a run-down mill that the locals had all but ...

Latest Review: New European Poets

Our latest review is Margarita Shalina’s piece on New European Poets, a mammoth, important anthology recently released by Graywolf and edited by Wayne Miller and Kevin Prufer. As Margarita (who works at St. Mark’s Bookshop and translates from Russian) writes: It is difficult to get beyond the novelty ...

Latest Review: Of Kids & Parents

Our latest review is of Emil Hakl’s Of Kids & Parents, published by the admirable Twisted Spoon Press in

Latest Review: Small Lives by Pierre Michon

Our latest review is of Pierre Michon’s Small Lives, which was recently published by Archipelago Books. Frequent reviewer Monica Carter wrote this piece, which opens: One of the signs of a great book is that the reader feels like she is reading a great book. From the very first sentence, she knows a question has ...

More Nobody's Home Reviews

As Dubravka Ugresic’s reading tour winds down—her final event is a conversation with Brigid Hughes on Tuesday at 7pm at Melville House Press—her review coverage continues to expand. Most recently Booklit gave the book a long, thoughtful, positive review, my favorite part of which is the ...

Latest Review: The Great Weaver from Kashmir

It seems fitting that we run this review of Iceland’s only Nobel Prize winner right after the Le Clezio announcement, and while Bragi Olafsson (our Icelandic author) is on his reading tour. Larissa Kyzer—who reviewed The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo for us last month—wrote this review of the first Halldor ...

Latest Review: Mansarda

We wrote about Kis’s Mansarda when we first heard about it a while back when we first heard about Serbian Classics Press, thanks to Michael Orthofer. At long last, we now have a review written by Erik Estep, a librarian at East Carolina University. ...

Recent Reviews of Literature in Translation

There are a couple of decent reviews of works in translation from the Sunday papers that are worth mentioning. The first is a review of Carlos Fuentes’s Happy Families that appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle: In his latest short-story collection, “Happy Families,” Mexican author Carlos Fuentes ...

Latest Review: Tranquility by Attila Bartis 


Our latest review is of Tranquility by Attila Bartis and was written by Jeff Waxman. (Who’s compiling a nice list of reviews for us.) This is a dumb joke, but when I read the first line of Jeff’s review — “In the world of Hungarian literature, of Kertész and Krúdy, of Konrád and Krasznahorkai, how ...

Latest Review: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Our latest review is of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the first book in the “Millennium Series.” (The other two titles—The Girl Who Played with Fire and Castles in the Sky—will be available from MacLehose Press in the UK in January 2009 and January 2010 respectively. Not sure ...

Review: I Love Dollars by Zhu Wen

Our latest review is of I Love Dollars by Chinese author Zhu Wen, and translated by Julia Lovell. This first came out in hardcover from Columbia University Press in 2006, and more recently was published in paperback by Penguin. We’ve been meaning to review it for ages—anything tagged as “a Chinese Larry ...

More Open Letter Early Reviewer Books

This month there are two Open Letter books available through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program: The Pets by Bragi Olafsson and The Taker and Other Stories by Rubem Fonseca. So any and all LibraryThing users should request a copy. ...

Latest Review: Yesterday's People

It’s a really slow day around here . . . I’m still out of the office, and E.J. just left for his summer vacation. But right before leaving he wrote this review of Yesterday’s People by Goran Simic, a book that he liked quite a bit, and which came out recently from Biblioasis, my new favorite Canadian ...

Latest Review: Isaac's Torah

Our latest review is of Isaac’s Torah by Angel Wagenstein and was written by Phil Witte. And now the long weekend officially starts . . . See ya’ll on ...

Latest Review: I'd Like by Amanda Michalopoulou

Our latest review is of Amanda Michalopoulou’s I’d Like, a collection of intertwined short stories translated from the Greek by Karen Emmerich that was part of this year’s Reading the World program. The review is by Monica Carter—bookseller at Sklyight Books and proprietor of Salonica World ...

Latest Review: Sun, Stone, and Shadows

Our latest review is of Sun, Stone, and Shadows: 20 Great Mexican Short Stories edited by Jorge F. Hernandez and published in collaboration with the NEA’s Big Read program. ...

L.A. Times Book Review Section — The Folded In Future

According to Rachel Deahl at PW Sam Zell (and presumably the rest of the Tribune Co. employees with their insane capitalization) has finally had his way with the standalone L.A. Times Book Review section and is folding it into the Calendar Section. (Man, that seems like an insult—couldn’t they at least fold the ...

Latest Review: Children of Heroes

Our latest review is of Children of Heroes by Lyonel Trouillot and translated from the French by Linda Coverdale. Phillip Witte, a University of Rochester student, Open Letter intern, and employee of the UR Bookstore wrote this piece. ...

Early Reviews of Dubravka Ugresic and Her Tour

A couple of the early reviews for Dubravka Ugresic’s i>Nobody’s Home came out recently, with Library Journal stating that she “leaves no stone unturned and no thought contained, doing what she does best: writing about the human condition through her own experience” and Kirkus calling this collection ...

Latest Review: Senselessness by Horacio Castellanos Moya

Shortly after arriving in Rochester with the goal of creating Open Letter, I was flipping through the Ray-Gude Merlin Agency rights list and came across Horacio Castellanos Moya. I immediately e-mailed Nicole Witt only to find out that New Directions had already purchased the rights to Senselessness. As a publisher I was ...

Latest Review: The Lost Daughter

Our latest review is of Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter. This is the third Ferrante book Europa has published. The first—The Days of Abandonment—is part of this year’s Reading the World program and helped launch Europa Editions a few years back. This review is written by Monica Carter, who works ...

Latest Review: La Follia Improvvisa di Ignazio Rando

Our latest review is of Dario Franceschini’s La Follia Improvvisa di Ignazio Rando, which is available in Italian from Bompiani, but has yet to be translated into English. As reviewer Lucinda Byatt notes, Franceschini’s first novel, Nelle vene quell’acqua d’argento received several prizes, including the ...

Danish Issue of The Literary Review

Over at Absinthe’s blog, Thomas Kennedy introduces the latest issue of The Literary Review, which he edited and which focuses on new Danish writing. Unfortunately, there isn’t a lot of content online, but it’s worth a look. (Beware! The content that is online is in what a good friend of ours appropriately ...

Review of To Be Translated or Not To Be

This is a bit self-promotional, but I’m proud to announce that my review of To Be Translated or Not To Be is available in the new issue of Publishing Research Quarterly. Having not published a print review in a while (I can barely find the time to sleep), I’m pretty ...

Latest Review: The Post-Office Girl

Our latest review is of Stefan Zweig’s The Post-Office Girl, one of this year’s Reading the World titles. Jeff Waxman of Seminary Co-op Bookstore in Chicago provides the ...

Latest Review: Rivers of Babylon

Robert Buckeye provides us with our latest review, a look at Peter Pistanek’s Rivers of

Latest Review: Red Shifting

Our latest review is by Margarita Shalina, who reviews Alexandr Skidan’s Red Shifting, a collection of poems which won the Andrei Bely Prize in ...

Latest Review: Hotel Crystal

Our latest review is by Kelly Amabile—of the fantastic Book Culture book store in NYC. She takes a look at Olivier Rolin’s Hotel ...

Latest Review: Night Wraps the Sky: Writings By and About Mayakovsky

Our latest review is by Margarita Shalina, who reviews a collection of writings by and about Vladimir Mayakovsky, Night Wraps the Sky, which was edited by Michael Almereyda. ...

Latest Review: Nettles by Venus Khoury-Ghata

Our latest review is by Liam Powell, who reviews a collection of poems, Nettles, by the Lebanese poet and novelist Venus ...

Latest Review: Secret Weapon

Our latest review is of Romanian poet Eugen Jebeleanu’s Secret Weapon:Selected Late Poems (recently released by Coffee House) and was written by Annie Horanyi, who has been interning with Open Letter and has serving as the managing editor for the review section. This collection sounds really interesting, and if ...

Latest Review: Knowledge of Hell

Our latest review is the first of two Antonio Lobo Antunes reviews we’ll be posting over the next couple months. (The other being What Can I Do When Everything’s on Fire? forthcoming from W.W. Norton.) I’ve been a fan of Antunes’s for years, and since this review is a bit mixed (it really is a great ...

Latest Review: Mafeking Road and Other Stories

E. J.‘s latest review is of Herman Charles Bosman’s Mafeking Road and Other Stories, which will be available in June from Archipelago. Bosman is widely regarded as “South Africa’s greatest short story writer” (see Wikipedia), although I don’t think he’s very well known here. ...

Latest Review: The Have-Nots

Our latest review is of Katharina Hacker’s The Have-Nots, which won the German Book Prize for 2006 and was recently published by Europa Editions. Jeff Waxman—who also reviewed Elias Khoury’s Yalo at Seminary Co-op Bookstore in Chicago and is currently very obsessed with Lost. (Who ...

Latest Review: David Bergelson: From Modernism to Socialist Realism

Our latest review is Eric Dickens’ examination of David Bergelson: From Modernism to Socialist

Latest Review: Nazi Literature in the Americas

Our latest review is of Roberto Bolano’s Nazi Literature in the Americas, the fourth Reading the World 2008 title to be reviewed on Three Percent. This was highly anticipated and totally lives up to the hype. ...

Early Titlepage.tv Reviews, Um, Not So Good

We announced the first Titlepage.tv episode yesterday and then watched about 15 minutes before leaving it paused on a goofy Charles Bock grimace for the rest of the day. That’s approximately 10 minutes, 33 seconds more than Jessa from Bookslut watched. And Sarah Weinman has a list of ten ways to improve the show, ...

Latest Review: Serve the People!

Our latest review is E.J.‘s piece on Yan Lianke’s Serve the People!, which is translated from the Chinese by Julia Lovell and is a Reading the World 2008 title. Sounds pretty interesting. And ...

Times Bolaño Review

The NYT reviews the newest Bolaño: “Nazi Literature in the Americas,” a wicked, invented encyclopedia of imaginary fascist writers and literary tastemakers, is Bolaño playing with sharp, twisting knives. As if he were Borges’s wisecracking, sardonic son, Bolaño has meticulously created a tightly woven ...

Latest Review: Two or Three Years Later

Our latest review is of Ror Wolf’s Two or Three Years Later: Forty-Nine Digressions by Hannah Johnson. Hannah works at the German Book Office and runs the blog Literary Rapture. And she’s a big fan of Lost. Aside from the fantastically odd sample that Schoffling & Co. sent us, I’m intrigued by the fact ...

Two New Reviews

This week we posted two new reviews, both of titles published by Archipelago. The first is a review by E.J. of The Waitress Was New by Dominique Fabre. (Fabre will be touring throughout the U.S. starting later this month. All the current dates can be found at Archipelago’s site.) Jeff Waxman gives Yalo by Elias ...

Latest Review: The Diving Pool

Our latest review is a not entirely positive piece on Yoko Ogawa’s The Diving

Latest Review: Wolves of the Crescent Moon

Our latest review is of Wolves of the Crescent Moon by Yousef

Naguib Mahfouz review

Financial Times reviews Naguib Mahfouz’s final novel, Morning and Evening Talk: In Morning and Evening Talk, his last novel, he sets the bar high, refusing all the classical unities. Instead of rooting his story in one place, he flits between Cairo and the countryside. Instead of following a chronology, he races ...

Danny Yee reviews The Melancholy of Resistance

In the face of unbridled lust for power, withdrawal from the world will fail, whether to the bourgeois’ fortified home, the philosopher’s intellectual retreat, or the dreamer’s imaginative world. Krasznahorkai doesn’t offer this as a political or moral lesson, however, but rather explores the ...

Latest Review: Alejandro Zambra

Our latest review is an overview of two books by Alejandro Zambra—Bonzai (forthcoming from Melville House), and La vida privada de los arboles (untranslated)—by Megan McDowell, a young translator at the University of Texas, Dallas and former Dalkey Archive employee. ...

Review of Bolano's Nazi Literature in the Americas

Joshua Cohen has one of the first (hopefully of many) reviews of Roberto Bolano’s Nazi Literature in the Americas in yesterday’s Jewish Daily Forward. A surprise to probably no one, the book sounds awesome: Nazi Literature in the Americas, first published in Spanish in 1996, is not a work of nonfiction, ...

Review of Missing Soluch

Our latest review is of Mahmoud Dowlatabadi’s Missing Soluch, which was one of our Top 10 Best Translations of 2007.

PW Review of Bolano

Galleys of Bolano’s Nazi Literature in the Americas have been circulating for a few months now, and everyone I’ve talked with absolutely loves the book. Publishers Weekly has the first actual review I’ve seen of this, and the reviewer tends to agree: The title chosen by Bolaño (1953–2003) for this ...

The Ethics of Book Reviewing

Earlier this year Carlin Romano conducted a follow-up survey to his 1987 study on the ethics of book reviewing, the results of which are now available online.. (The data from the 1987 survey should be available shortly, and since it sounds like certain attitudes have changed over the past twenty years, we’ll definitely ...

Review of Andres Barba's Katia's Sister

Our latest review is of Andres Barba’s Katia’s Sister, a novel which was published in Spain by Anagrama back in 2001. Lisa Dillman—a translator from Spanish and Catalan and lecturer at Emory University who wrote the review—actually contacted me from the Guadalajara Book Fair with the news that Barba ...

European Literary Critics on the Future of Reviewing

The complete article is only available in German, but last week literary critics from several European countries met in Munich to discuss the future of their profession. This English excerpt (from Courrier International) sounds vaguely similar to what’s going on here in the States: As Roman Bucheli reports, the ...

Reviewing Reviews of Translations

As touched upon in the roundup post I did about the Reviewing Translations panel at the Miami Book Fair International, there are a lot of issues involved when reviewing a translation. Especially related to the hows and whys of commenting on the quality of the translation. To many, one of the big problems is the ...

Reviewing Translations

Steve Wasserman—one of my all-time favorite panelists for his great anecdotes and brilliant, witty comments—moderated this discussion, which included Marie Arana (author, book review editor at the Washington Post), Alan Cheuse (author, critic for NPR), Eric Banks (editor of Bookforum), and Carlin Romano (book ...

Review: Malvinas Requiem by Rodolfo Fogwill

Our latest review is of Rodolfo Fogwill’s Malvinas Requiem, a book that we’ve mentioned a few times recently, in terms of the Guardian coverage and the jacket ...

PW Reviews — More about Priorities

Publishers Weekly is one of my favorite review sources, providing a slew of brief, intelligent reviews every week. I especially like the fact that they cover a higher percentage of independent, small press, and university presses than most newspapers or magazines. In this week’s reviews there’s a nice write-up ...

Félix Fénéon in the New York Review of Books

The new issue of the New York Review of Books is out, with a couple of the articles available online, including Luc Sante’s piece on Félix Fénéon’s Novels in Three Lines. The original French title of Félix Fénéon’s book, Nouvelles en trois lignes, can mean either “the news in three ...

The Vanishing Book Review

This took place a few days ago, but The House of Mirth has a fantastic write up (complete with video!) of the CJR panel on the state of book reviews that took place last week. Sounds like a lively panel—like this exchange between Carlin Romano (on the populist side) and Steve Wasserman (on the intellectual criticism ...

This Week's PW Reviews

Couple interesting books reviewed in this week’s “Publishers Weekly,” including the latest Lydie Salvayre book, Power of Flies. Salvayre’s fifth novel to be translated into English is a tightly introspective series of first-person confessions by an arrogant murder convict whose life was transformed by ...

Latest Review: Georges Simenon

Our latest review is of Simenon’s Red Lights.

The Future of Book Reviewing

For anyone in the New York area, the National Book Critics Circle will be hosting a week-long symposium on the Future of Book Reviewing. Officially entitled “The Age of Infinite Margins: Book Critics Face the 21st Century,” panel discussions will take place at Housing Works on Thursday, September 13th and ...

Latest Review: Dai Vaughan

Our latest review is of Welsh writer Dai Vaughan’s

A reader responds to the Handke review

Michael Roloff responded to our post about the review of Peter Handke’s CROSSING THE SIERRA DE GREDOS in the comments, but I think it deserves to be posted to the front page: It is time readers of the New York Times Book Review were made aware of Handke, the prose writer, having gone through something like half a ...

New Boston Review

Thanks to the Complete Review for pointing out that the new issue of the Boston Review is now available online. Number of interesting articles in this issue, in particular the late Aura Estrada has a fantastic piece on Cesar Aira and Roberto Bolano. Thanks to Susan Sontag, FSG, and great writing, Roberto Bolano has ...

Latest Review: Isaac Rosa

Our latest review is of Isaac Rosa’s Another Damn Novel about the Spanish Civil War!. Interesting sounding book from an interesting young writer, and besides, anything with an exclamation point in the title must be awesome. ...

Latest Review: Mercè Rodoreda

Following on the Catalan theme, our latest review is of Mercè Rodoreda’s A Broken Mirror, which is available from University of Nebraska Press as part of the European Women Writers Series. ...

Latest Review: Lars Saabye Christensen

Our latest review is of Lars Saabye Christensen’s The Model, his latest book to be translated into English.

Steve Wasserman Back to Reviewing (At Least In Part)

Steve Wasserman, the former book review editor of the L.A. Times and current literary agent, has been appointed book review editor for Truthdig, the 2007 Webby award winner for best political blog. According to GalleyCat he will begin writing a weekly review column in October. Wasserman has excellent taste in literature, ...

Latest Review: Jose Eduardo Agualusa

Our latest review is of Jose Eduardo Agualusa’s The Book of Chameleons, which won this year’s Independent Foreign Fiction ...

This Week's PW Reviews

The August 6th set of Publisher Weekly fiction reviews are now online and feature a couple of interesting books in translation. The first is Cries in the Drizzle (which sounds like a translated title) by Yu Hua “depicts a family’s life in the Zhejiang province of Maoist China during the 1970s.” According ...

Latest Review: Quim Monzo

Quim Monzo is a great name for a writer (and maybe a baseball player), and our latest review is of his novel The Enormity of the Tragedy, which is about a man with a constant erection. (Insert male stereotype joke ...

Iranian Author Mahmoud Dowlatabadi Reviewed in the Sun

The only other place that I’ve come across a reference to Mahmoud Dowlatabadi’s Missing Soluch was in the Literary Saloon where Orthofer commented on how it’s gotten basically no attention. Thankfully, Ben Lytal of the New York Sun somewhat rectified the situation. The book sounds pretty interesting in ...

Another Review of Walser

This week’s New Yorker contains a substantial, informed review by Benjamin Kunkel of Robert Walser’s The Assistant. It’s a very interesting piece, from someone who obviously knows a lot about Walser’s life and writing. Great to see this book getting such good attention, especially in a place like the ...

A review of Zsófia Bán's Evening School

Hungarian Literature Online has a review of Zsófia Bán’s Evening School: The book seems to be an ironic game in which the didactic function of literature and its place in the power structure of society are questioned. Yet the situation is more complicated than that: Zsófia Bán seems to inscribe her own ...

Review of Simenon's The Engagement

Our latest review is of Georges Simenon’s The Engagement, translated from the French by Anna Moschovakis. This book will be the featured book in the September Words Without Borders/Reading the World Book Club. I will help moderate this discussion along with Mark Binelli, the author of the amazing Sacco and Vanzetti ...

New Review Added

Our latest review is of Viivi Luik’s The Beauty of History translated from the Estonian by Hildi Hawkins. This review is written by Eric Dickens, who has done his fair share of translating from Estonian. Most recently he did Mati Unt’s Things in the Night for Dalkey Archive Press, and will be doing Unt’s ...

New London Review of Books Online

The new issue of the LRB is now available

TMR 22.2: “God Donkey” [Praiseworthy]

From discussion of Ohio and disturbing news about everyone's favorite Australian export, this episode skirts talking too deeply about Alexis Wright's Praiseworthy  (New Directions, And Other Stories, Giramondo) to discuss challenges of getting into particular books, what the purpose of this podcast is in trying to assist ...

TMR 22.1: “Kick the Haze in its Guts” [Praiseworthy]

The first episode of the new season of the Two Month Review—covering Alexis Wright's Praiseworthy (New Directions, And Other Stories, Giramondo)—start off with Chad crapping on golf, then rolls on into book design and books as objects, the pacing and rhythms of Wright's work, its humor, its orality, what ancillary ...

A Venn Diagram of Not Reading

“If I actually finish a book, I feel like I deserve a Nobel Prize.” “I can't even guess when I last read a book. But I'd watch movies all day if I could. Especially Marvel ones.” Overheard on a University of Rochester Shuttle “In the last decade, she says, history has toppled from the king of disciplines to a ...

TMR 21.8: “MOON IS A MENACE” [Same Bed Different Dreams]

We've reached the end which, in Chad and Brian's opinion, Ed Park totally lands. There's Friday the 13th talk. Reagan makes an appearance. The structure of the book is revisited. As are all the ideas of mirrors and patrimony, assassins and conspiracy theories. Note: Information about the "Opening the Channel" translation ...

TMR 21.7: “Taro Tsujimoto” [Same Bed Different Dreams]

The threads all come together in this week's section as the book barrels toward its conclusion. On this episode, Chad describes his visualization of the book's structure, Tim Hortons and Dunkin Donuts get crapped on, 2333 gets a new meaning, the Moonies make an appearance, as does Ronald Reagan (boo, hiss), Philip Roth, and ...

TMR 21.6: “Interview with a Mirror” [Same Bed Different Dreams]

Korean food, Grocery Games, VCR tapes, screenplays, gazebos, a thumb drive, Amsterdam, and the statement, "TRANSLATION IS A LONG CON." This week's music is "I'll Be Your Mirror" by Velvet Underground. You can find all previous seasons of TMR on our YouTube channel and you can support us at Patreon and get bonus ...

TMR 21.5: “A-Bomb Destroys Downtown Buffalo” [Same Bed Different Dreams]

The connections proliferate and the threading together of the three sections continues. Interactive rights to 2333 are finally, properly sold; the mystery surrounding Echo grows; and The Buffalo Evening News brings the concept of "fake news" to a whole new level. That and more in this week's episode. This week's music ...

TMR 21.4: “The Second Bae” [Same Bed Different Dreams]

Brian's back and everyone is (mostly) healthy. They talk about Korean history, double (or triple) agents, the idea of history as coincidence or plot, North and South Korea, and more. This week's music is "Two States" by Pavement. You can find all previous seasons of TMR on our YouTube channel and you can support us at ...

TMR 21.3: “Wildwording” [Same Bed Different Dreams]

Protect yourself: There's a chance you'll catch Chad's illness simply by listening to this episode. An episode in which he tries to recap a number of elements of the book—the 2333 game, the louse, wildwording—to Kaija Straumanis amid coughing fits and a dissolving brain. He also shares the most bizarre dream he's ever ...

TMR 21.2: “2333” [Same Bed Different Dreams]

From their respective hotel rooms, Chad and Brian talk about science fiction, 2/3/33 (and 2/6/66??), conspiracy vs. coincidence, Ohtani and Lee, the ASS black satchel, the assassinations we don't learn much about in high school, Hegemon, more KPG connections, and the (not great) alt-newspaper of the week. This week's music ...

Eleven Books, Selected

My parents are straight-up hoarders. Not of foodstuffs or other animal attractant stuff; nothing that will quite land them on a nightmare HGTV show (one that airs right after Flipanthropy), but hoarders nonetheless. Of paper, mostly. Checklists from the early 80s show up on the regular. I currently have a gym bag ca. 1993 ...

TMR 21.1: “What Is History?” [Same Bed Different Dreams]

Season 21 of the Two Month Review kicks off with a discussion of Taylor Swift and the demise of alt-weeklies, then segues into a long discussion about the opening party scene in Same Bed Different Dreams. Chad and Brian talk about what's real and not in both the party scene and the "Dream One" section about the Korean ...

TMR Season 21: Ed Park’s SAME BED DIFFERENT DREAMS

We're back! Due to a change in how one logs into University of Rochester hosted websites and services, I've been blocked from accessing this website for over a month now . . . But it's all resolved (still can't submit course adoptions to B&N College Stores—who happen to be on credit hold with our distributor 🙄—but ...

TMR 20.5: “Bubble in My Fizziness” [MULLIGAN STEW]

Wacky Aphorisms vs. Cowboy Clichés. A title change that indicates a change in attitude. A bizarre publisher's catalog. The Red Swan. More letters! This section of Mulligan Stew is jam packed with fun riffs, more evidence of the intricate construction underlying this book, paranoia, puzzle pieces, and anger. This week's ...

TMR 20.4: “The Sweat of Love” [MULLIGAN STEW]

"I SUCK!" Kicking off with an "erotic" "poem," this week's episode is nuts from the very start. There is a very serious explanation for the "Flawless Play Restored: The Masque of Fungo" (thanks to Tyrus Miller's piece in the Review of Contemporary Fiction), but this is surrounded by Nobel Prize talk, a breakdown of Lamont's ...

TMR 20.3: “Drunken Condition of Both Teams” [MULLIGAN STEW]

This section of Mulligan Stew is particularly wild, featuring a western populated by Irishmen speaking in bad accents (and worse accents in The Club Zap), a long rambling set of hypotheticals about why the police haven't arrived to find Ned's body (spoiler: Halpin hasn't called them), a drunken baseball game featuring ...

TMR 20.2: “THE ULTIMATE IN BIZARRE BEAUTY!!” [MULLIGAN STEW]

Loveletters galore! Lists without context! Repurposing life for fiction! More puzzles! Terrible book reviews! An insufferable, pretentious elementary school essay! This episode has it all—and more! (As Lamont would say.) This week's music is "All Your Fails" by Kevin Drew. You can find all previous seasons of TMR on ...

TMR 20.1: “Then You Do Not Approve of Nabokov?” [MULLIGAN STEW]

Chad and Brian kick off the new season in near hysterics over the first little chunk of Gilbert Sorrentino's Mulligan Stew. From talking about the rejection letters—and near batshit reader's report—prefacing the book, to all the bad writing about the "flawless blue" sky, to the ever-changing dialog tags in Anthony ...

Revisiting the “Summer of Spanish-Language Women Writers”

As part of Women in Translation Month—and to shine a spotlight on some of our best Two Month Review seasons—I thought I would repost information about a few relevant TMR seasons that might be of interest. Today, we're going to revisit a wild TMR season in which we featured three books originally written in Spanish, all ...

Revisiting “Monsterhuman” by Kjersti Skomsvold

As part of Women in Translation Month—and to shine a spotlight on some of our best Two Month Review seasons—I thought I would repost information about a few relevant TMR seasons that might be of interest. First up is Monsterhuman by Kjersti Skomsvold, translated from the Norwegian by B. L. Crook. Here's the jacket ...

“The River” by Laura Vinogradova and Kaija Straumanis [Excerpt]

Today's #WITMonth post is a preview for an Open Letter title coming out next summer, which isn't even available for sale anywhere yet. It's River by Laura Vinogradova, translated by Kaija Straumanis, and part of Straumanis's "Translator Triptych" coming next summer. The novel was the Latvian representative for the European ...

TMR 19.12: “Fill Up with Karmas” [THE REMEMBERED PART]

Brian returns to help breakdown the ending to Rodrigo Fresán's "Part Triptych." Is it earned? Is it sincere?? Is this all a Jacob's Ladder scenario??? Chad and Brian debate that along with concepts of time in fiction, the Karmas, the wetness of Latvian meat, Melvill and Mulligan Stew. Fun is had as this long, amazing ...

The Visual Success of Women in Translation Month [Translation Database]

Women in Translation Month is EVERYWHERE. Whenever I open Twitter (or X?), my feed is wall-to-wall WIT Month. Tweets with pictures of books to read for WIT Month, links to articles about WIT Month and various sub-genre lists of books to read during WIT Month, general celebratory tweets in praise of Meytal Radzinski for ...

“Year After Year” by Hwang Jungeun and Janet Hong [Excerpt]

To celebrate Women in Translation Month, we will be posting excerpts, readings, summaries from the Translation Database, former Two Month Review seasons, and various special offers—so stay tuned! Today's excerpt is from Year After Year by Hwang Jungeun, translated by Janet Hong as part of her Translator Triptych. ...

Women in Translation Month: The Open Letter 40% Off Sale

So, if it's not clear already, it will be soon: there are Women in Translation Month posts plotted out for every day of this month. We have excerpts of past and forthcoming titles, four related "Reading the Dalkey Archive" posts, weekly Translation Database updates centered on WIT, recaps of WIT seasons of the Two Month ...

“Flame Trees in May” by Karla Marrufo and Allison A. deFreese [Excerpt]

To celebrate Women in Translation Month, we will be posting excerpts, readings, summaries from the Translation Database, former Two Month Review seasons, and various special offers—so stay tuned! And to kick things off (technically a day before the start of #WITMonth, but whatever, time is a construct), here is an ...

TMR 19.11 “Exit and No Return and Gone Forever” [THE REMEMBERED PART]

Kaija Straumanis guest stars on this episode in which we discuss brain tumors, memory loss, the true story behind the story of The Impossible Story sending the exwriter into exile, whether of not Saint George is a saint (and dragons), paternity, and the next Fresán book to come out from Open Letter, Melvill. This ...

Re-Reading David Markson’s “Wittgenstein’s Mistress”

This piece by Philip Coleman first appeared in CONTEXT #23. To celebrate the recent release of Wittgenstein's Mistress as part of the Dalkey Archive Essentials series, it seems like the perfect time to revisit this re-reading of David Markson's classic novel about language, memory, grief, and possibly the end of the ...

“Not Even the Dead” by Juan Gómez Bárcena [Excerpt]

Officially out last Tuesday, Not Even the Dead is a throwback—an ambitious, philosophical, grand novel taking on nothing less than the history of progress over the past four hundred years. In it, Juan—at the bequest of the Spanish government—pursues "Juan the Indian" across time and Mexico, almost catching up to him ...

TMR 19.10: “The Fine Art of Leaving Something Out” [THE REMEMBERED PART]

For the first time in the history of the Two Month Review, Chad had to go it alone. He stuck in there, didn't get too crazy, and covered the last chunk of Part II of The Remembered Part. Illness, heartbreak, mental anguish, suicide, Ella, and a mission. It's all in this episode. This week's music is "Bloodletting (The ...

Mulligan Stew [Reading the Dalkey Archive]

Mulligan Stew Gilbert Sorrentino   Original Publication: 1979 Original Publisher: Grove Press First Dalkey Archive Edition: 1996   "Cheers!" So this may be the first—but definitely not the last—entry in this series that is kind of weird. First off, unlike the earlier posts, which try to say ...

TMR 19.9: “The Dream of the Invention of the Memory, Etc.” [THE REMEMBERED PART]

Veeeeekingdor!!!!! This week's episode is pretty wild, with stories of Riga FC, stoic faces, Fresán's visit to the University of Rochester, Kurt Vonnegut, Andrei The Untranslated (follow his blog!, support his Patreon!), the purpose of book readings and the most uncomfortable ones, time and fiction, and much more! And ...

The Book of Jokes [Reading the Dalkey Archive]

  The Book of Jokes Momus   Original publication: 2009 Original publisher: Dalkey Archive   The Book of Jokes is first original Dalkey Archive  title to be part of this series, and woo-boy is it a doozy. If you're playing “Offensive Dalkey Archive Content Bingo," you're all set! There are ...

TMR 19.8: “Notes for a Theory of the Fabric of Memory” [THE REMEMBERED PART]

Brian is back and Chad flubs the intro, so things are basically as they should be . . . They talk about fragmentation, big flawed double albums (and why they're so intriguing), how comedy works, Hey Uncle Walrus vs. Uncle Hey Walrus, memory and the losing of it, and much more. This week's music is "1979"  and 'Tonight, ...

Ryder [Reading the Dalkey Archive]

  Ryder Djuna Barnes   Original Publication: 1928 Original Publisher: Boni & Liveright First Dalkey Archive Edition: 1990   This is a baggy novel of excess, and as someone who finds it nearly impossible to keep the thread—or develop a coherent thesis (any and all AI grading systems ...

TMR 19.7: “The Good Rememberer (A How-To Guide)” [THE REMEMBERED PART]

Former TMR guest Patrick Smith returns to discuss his reread of the first two volumes of the trilogy, how Fresán's writing inspires him, hanging on to flights of prose, all of the wind in this book, what it means to fall, dogs, and much much more. It's a comprehensive, deep look into what it takes to be a good reader, ...

TMR 19.6: “The Impossibility of Painting with Watercolors in the Rain” [THE REMEMBERED PART]

Chad and Kaija break down the final bit of the first part of the third volume in Fresán's trilogy (phew), revisit the "is this difficult to read?" discussion, and talk about the articles about Fresán in the new issue of Latin American Literature Today. And at the very, very end, Chad makes a startling admission. This ...

TMR 19.5: “The Burning Gaze of Vladimir Nabokov” [THE REMEMBERED PART]

Separated by 10 hours—like podcasting jet lag?—Chad and Brian work through some observations and rants (specifically about a shitty NY Times list of the best American books between 1981 and 2006, which consists almost entirely of Philip Roth and John Updike and only two books by women), about this section of The ...

TMR 19.4: “Read like Dracula and write like Frankenstein!” [THE REMEMBERED PART]

From Nobel Prize favorites to Proust to competitive cliques on the mountain, this week's episodes is almost as sprawling as the ex-writer's airplane thoughts. Bit more plot dropped into this section of Fresán/Vanderhyden's book, but there's also a lot about IKEA, his death and rebirth, his insincerity, and his loathsome ...

TMR 19.3: “DREAM + MEMORY = INVENTION” [THE REMEMBERED PART]

Kaija Straumanis pinch hits this week for a discussion about Lost, airplanes, the past and nostalgia, writers vs. narrators, autofiction, how hard it is to sustain a rant, ghosts, pop culture references, where we are in Fresán's trilogy, and much more. The Remembered Part keeps gathering steam, and you'll want to catch up ...

TMR 19.2: “Now That Everything That Has To Happen Has Happened” [THE REMEMBERED PART]

And they're off! Brian and Chad start remembering all that they're supposed to remember about the first two volumes of the trilogy (green cows!) and get oriented with the ex-Writer on the plane (and in the desert reading and burning Ada, or Ardor), fall right back into Fresan's humor, cynicism, bits on love, and everything ...

TMR 19.1: Where Are We At? [THE REMEMBERED PART]

Maybe not the most informative of recaps, but Brian and Chad discuss what the love about Fresán's writing, things they recall from the first two volumes of the trilogy, ideas about what to maybe expect (Dracula + Proust), peppered with the usual amount of jokes and antics. This week's music is "Pontius Pilate's Home ...

TMR Fresán Relisten Ep. 22: “The Dream Ends” [THE DREAMED PART]

Welcome to the Great Fresan Relisten of 2023! Over the next four weeks, we'll be reissuing an episode a day from the The Invented Part and The Dreamed Part seasons of TMR so that you can catch-up, refresh your memory, have a few laughs, etc., before the May 10th launch of Season 19 on The Remembered Part. Here are the ...

TMR Fresán Relisten Ep. 21: “IKEA” [THE DREAMED PART]

Welcome to the Great Fresan Relisten of 2023! Over the next four weeks, we'll be reissuing an episode a day from the The Invented Part and The Dreamed Part seasons of TMR so that you can catch-up, refresh your memory, have a few laughs, etc., before the May 10th launch of Season 19 on The Remembered Part. Here are the ...

TMR Fresán Relisten Ep. 20: “Living in Pandemica” [THE DREAMED PART]

Welcome to the Great Fresan Relisten of 2023! Over the next four weeks, we'll be reissuing an episode a day from the The Invented Part and The Dreamed Part seasons of TMR so that you can catch-up, refresh your memory, have a few laughs, etc., before the May 10th launch of Season 19 on The Remembered Part. Here are the ...

TMR Fresán Relisten Ep. 19: “This Is a Bullshot” [THE DREAMED PART]

Welcome to the Great Fresan Relisten of 2023! Over the next four weeks, we'll be reissuing an episode a day from the The Invented Part and The Dreamed Part seasons of TMR so that you can catch-up, refresh your memory, have a few laughs, etc., before the May 10th launch of Season 19 on The Remembered Part. Here are the ...

TMR Fresán Relisten Ep. 18: “The Past Is a Broken Toy That Everyone Fixes in His Own Way” [THE DREAMED PART]

Welcome to the Great Fresan Relisten of 2023! Over the next four weeks, we'll be reissuing an episode a day from the The Invented Part and The Dreamed Part seasons of TMR so that you can catch-up, refresh your memory, have a few laughs, etc., before the May 10th launch of Season 19 on The Remembered Part. Here are the ...

TMR Fresán Relisten Ep. 17: “Adaptations” [THE DREAMED PART]

Welcome to the Great Fresan Relisten of 2023! Over the next four weeks, we'll be reissuing an episode a day from the The Invented Part and The Dreamed Part seasons of TMR so that you can catch-up, refresh your memory, have a few laughs, etc., before the May 10th launch of Season 19 on The Remembered Part. Here are the ...

TMR Fresán Relisten Ep. 16: “Wuthering Heights Is Weird” [THE DREAMED PART]

Welcome to the Great Fresan Relisten of 2023! Over the next four weeks, we'll be reissuing an episode a day from the The Invented Part and The Dreamed Part seasons of TMR so that you can catch-up, refresh your memory, have a few laughs, etc., before the May 10th launch of Season 19 on The Remembered Part. Here are the ...

TMR Fresán Relisten Ep. 15: “Tulpas” [THE DREAMED PART]

Welcome to the Great Fresan Relisten of 2023! Over the next four weeks, we'll be reissuing an episode a day from the The Invented Part and The Dreamed Part seasons of TMR so that you can catch-up, refresh your memory, have a few laughs, etc., before the May 10th launch of Season 19 on The Remembered Part. Here are the ...

TMR Fresán Relisten Ep. 14: “What We Talk About When We Talk About Dreaming” [THE DREAMED PART]

Welcome to the Great Fresan Relisten of 2023! Over the next four weeks, we'll be reissuing an episode a day from the The Invented Part and The Dreamed Part seasons of TMR so that you can catch-up, refresh your memory, have a few laughs, etc., before the May 10th launch of Season 19 on The Remembered Part. Here are the ...

TMR Fresán Relisten Ep. 13: “Who Dreams the Dreamer” [THE DREAMED PART]

Welcome to the Great Fresan Relisten of 2023! Over the next four weeks, we'll be reissuing an episode a day from the The Invented Part and The Dreamed Part seasons of TMR so that you can catch-up, refresh your memory, have a few laughs, etc., before the May 10th launch of Season 19 on The Remembered Part. Here are the ...

TMR Fresán Relisten Ep. 12: “We Remember Everything” [THE DREAMED PART]

Welcome to the Great Fresan Relisten of 2023! Over the next four weeks, we'll be reissuing an episode a day from the The Invented Part and The Dreamed Part seasons of TMR so that you can catch-up, refresh your memory, have a few laughs, etc., before the May 10th launch of Season 19 on The Remembered Part. Here are the ...

TMR Fresán Relisten Ep. 11: The Author Himself!

Welcome to the Great Fresan Relisten of 2023! Over the next four weeks, we'll be reissuing an episode a day from the The Invented Part and The Dreamed Part seasons of TMR so that you can catch-up, refresh your memory, have a few laughs, etc., before the May 10th launch of Season 19 on The Remembered Part. Here are the ...

TMR Fresán Relisten Ep. 10: THE INVENTED PART [Pgs. 441-552]

Welcome to the Great Fresan Relisten of 2023! Over the next four weeks, we'll be reissuing an episode a day from the The Invented Part and The Dreamed Part seasons of TMR so that you can catch-up, refresh your memory, have a few laughs, etc., before the May 10th launch of Season 19 on The Remembered Part. Here are the ...

TMR Fresán Relisten Ep. 9: THE INVENTED PART [Pgs. 405-440]

Welcome to the Great Fresan Relisten of 2023! Over the next four weeks, we'll be reissuing an episode a day from the The Invented Part and The Dreamed Part seasons of TMR so that you can catch-up, refresh your memory, have a few laughs, etc., before the May 10th launch of Season 19 on The Remembered Part. Here are the ...

TMR Fresán Relisten Ep. 8: THE INVENTED PART [Pgs. 361-404]

Welcome to the Great Fresan Relisten of 2023! Over the next four weeks, we'll be reissuing an episode a day from the The Invented Part and The Dreamed Part seasons of TMR so that you can catch-up, refresh your memory, have a few laughs, etc., before the May 10th launch of Season 19 on The Remembered Part. Here are the ...

TMR Fresán Relisten Ep. 7: THE INVENTED PART [Pgs. 301-360]

Welcome to the Great Fresan Relisten of 2023! Over the next four weeks, we'll be reissuing an episode a day from the The Invented Part and The Dreamed Part seasons of TMR so that you can catch-up, refresh your memory, have a few laughs, etc., before the May 10th launch of Season 19 on The Remembered Part. Here are the ...

TMR Fresán Relisten Ep. 6: THE INVENTED PART [Pgs. 231-300]

Welcome to the Great Fresan Relisten of 2023! Over the next four weeks, we'll be reissuing an episode a day from the The Invented Part and The Dreamed Part seasons of TMR so that you can catch-up, refresh your memory, have a few laughs, etc., before the May 10th launch of Season 19 on The Remembered Part. Here are the ...

TMR Fresán Relisten Ep. 5: THE INVENTED PART [Pgs. 208-230]

Welcome to the Great Fresan Relisten of 2023! Over the next four weeks, we'll be reissuing an episode a day from the The Invented Part and The Dreamed Part seasons of TMR so that you can catch-up, refresh your memory, have a few laughs, etc., before the May 10th launch of Season 19 on The Remembered Part. Here are the ...

TMR Fresán Relisten Ep. 4: THE INVENTED PART [Pgs. 99-207]

Welcome to the Great Fresan Relisten of 2023! Over the next four weeks, we'll be reissuing an episode a day from the The Invented Part and The Dreamed Part seasons of TMR so that you can catch-up, refresh your memory, have a few laughs, etc., before the May 10th launch of Season 19 on The Remembered Part. Here are the ...

TMR Fresán Relisten Ep. 3: THE INVENTED PART [Pgs. 46-98]

Welcome to the Great Fresan Relisten of 2023! Over the next four weeks, we'll be reissuing an episode a day from the The Invented Part and The Dreamed Part seasons of TMR so that you can catch-up, refresh your memory, have a few laughs, etc., before the May 10th launch of Season 19 on The Remembered Part. Here are the ...

TMR Fresán Relisten Ep. 2: THE INVENTED PART [Pgs. 1-45]

Welcome to the Great Fresan Relisten of 2023! Over the next four weeks, we'll be reissuing an episode a day from the The Invented Part and The Dreamed Part seasons of TMR so that you can catch-up, refresh your memory, have a few laughs, etc., before the May 10th launch of Season 19 on The Remembered Part. Here are the ...

TMR Fresán Relisten Ep. 1: THE INVENTED PART [Introduction]

Welcome to the Great Fresan Relisten of 2023! Over the next four weeks, we'll be reissuing an episode a day from the The Invented Part and The Dreamed Part seasons of TMR so that you can catch-up, refresh your memory, have a few laughs, etc., before the May 10th launch of Season 19 on The Remembered Part. This was our ...

Season 19 of TMR: “The Remembered Part” by Rodrigo Fresán & Will Vanderhyden

Are you ready? Like, really, ARE YOU READY? We announced this months ago, but given the size of this book and all of the various reading obligations Brian and I have respectively had (writing, editing, teaching for him; editing, teaching, and Iceland prep for me), we wanted to wait until we could give this book the attention ...

To All the Posts I Didn’t Write Last Year

If I could control space-time (a resolution for 2023 that's about as likely as the others I've made), I would have put in an additional 10 hours of research and data entry into the Translation Database before posting this. But knowing that I'll surely be crunched for time all this week, and next, and the week after, I figure ...

TMR 18.10: “Looks Like a Lump of Shit to Me” [Ann Quin]

The final episode of this season focuses on The Unmapped Country: Stories and Fragments, focusing on the titular story/unfinished novel, along with a few other shorter pieces. The gang looks back at all of Ann Quin's books, speculate on what her career might have been had she lived another couple decades, whether of not she ...

TMR 18.9: “Your Name? Your Trauma?” [Ann Quin]

Chad, Brian, and Kaija finish up their discussion of Tripticks, which basically devolves into reading out the funniest lines they can find from the this trippy-dippy, wild-ass ending. Some analysis is made of the deconstruction of male narratives, the Beats, the Dashiell Hammett of it all, and more, but come prepared for ...

TMR 18.8: “No. 1 X-Wife” [Ann Quin]

NIGHTRIPPER!!!!!!!!! This week's music is "Dirty Boots" by Sonic Youth. You can watch next week's discussion of Tripticks live on YouTube. (Reading schedule can be found here.) And you can find all previous seasons of TMR on our YouTube channel. And you can support us at Patreon and get bonus content before anyone ...

TMR 18.7: “I Would Like To Exhaust the Limits of the Possible” [Ann Quin]

Kaija Straumanis filled in for a domestically distressed Brian, and Chad went all psych0-philosophical on this week's episode, talking about schizoid personality splits, R. D. Laing, reading the various parts of Passages simultaneously, postulating wild hot takes, and saying "fuck off" to a wide swath of bad actors. (Looking ...

TMR 18.6: “Forms Forming Themselves” [Ann Quin]

This week, Brian, Chad, and Kaija discuss the first half of Passages, arguable Quin's most poetic book, and definitely most experimental one to date. They talk about the way the two characters try to define themselves and create their identities, flow versus points, geometry and parallax, masks and threesomes, and more. It's ...

TMR 18.5: “Reads Without Turning a Page” [Ann Quin]

Kaija Straumanis joins Chad and Brian this week to talk about orchids, hot takes (did S. sleep with L.?? how exactly did she die?), creepy British dudes, symmetry in Three, Ann Quin's statement on threesomes, the ambiguity of the text, and much more. This week's music is "What Went Down" by Foals. You can watch next ...

TMR 18.4: “Pursuit to the Point of Indiscretion” [Ann Quin]

Chad and Bria dive into Three, discussing the humor of the dialogue, the poetic-cinematic techniques Quin employs, monogamy and marriage, whether or not L was a collaborationist or worse, the importance of the number three, the play-like elements of the books, anti-mimetic writing, and much more. It's a fun episode complete ...

TMR 18.3: “Why This Eternal Escaping?” [Ann Quin]

Dead dummies, drowned tramps, resolving the Oedipal complex, the forever incompleteness of the number "3," sex, the sea, slapstick comedy, irony, competing desires of domesticity versus the desire to escape, the beautiful ending and the reverse coda, and much more is discussed on this episode covering the whole of Ann Quin's ...

TMR 18.2: “BUY BERG’S BEST HAIR TONIC” [Ann Quin]

Chad and Brian dive into the first half of Berg this episode, mispronouncing words, talking about the literary scene Quin came out of, whether or not Berg/Greb is an incel, the humor found in the book, and more. (Inevitably there's a dig at Ohio somewhere in this recording.) This week's music is "When a Woman Is Around" ...

TMR 18.1: Who Was Ann Quin?

The eighteenth season of the Two Month Review is all about Ann Quin's books—all four novels and her collected stories and fragments—and starts off with an overview of who she was, the context of experimental British writing in the 1960s, how/why Quin has been underappreciated, some info on supplementary critical ...

TMR 17.8: “On This Bed, On This Same Mattress” [Eltit + Hahn]

In the final episode of this season of the Two Month Review, Brian, Chad, and Katie debate whether or not our narrator is in limbo, whether or not this book has a point, what revolution looks like today, and much more. (Chad checks out about 1/2 way through, which, to be honest, makes the episode smarter.) If you're a ...

TMR 17.7: “I Erased Your Face” [Eltit + Hahn]

Katie and Chad tackle this section alone, discussing the revolutionary background of the main characters, going off into Bernadine Dohrn, the SDS, the Weather Underground, and direct action. They also talk about the timeline—as far as they understand it—the challenges of translating legal terms, Danny's multiple read ...

TMR 17.6: “The Letters Defeated You” [Eltit + Hahn]

In addition to talking about the Trump/Tesla/Lockwood conspiracy theory, our hosts this week discuss "bone avalanches," how translators are paid, the global literary network available for "experimental" books translated into English, "runts," Lativa's obsession with MILF graffiti, "catching fire," and driving a convertible ...

TMR 17.5: “Our Organicity” [Eltit + Hahn]

Chad and Brian go it alone and discuss "navel gazing" novels, books that entertain vs. ones about the prose, where Eltit's novel resides on that spectrum, Tommy Pham slapping Joc Peterson, shit in the bed, and much more. This week's music is "It Was Us" by Arms and Sleepers. If you like what you hear, review, rate, and ...

TMR 17.4: “I Watched the Death Machine” [Eltit + Hahn]

Technical difficulties are kept to a minimum on this week's episode, as Chad, Brian, and Katie talk about the advancement of plot, the French New Novel, the title and its translation, the body, trauma, touching eyeballs, and more. This week's music is "Monday" by The Regrettes. If you like what you hear, review, rate, ...

TMR 17.3: “Mónica & Carlos & Tony” [Eltit + Hahn]

In lieu of a live episode, this week's TMR features interviews with Mónica Ramón Ríos and Carlos Labbé about their relationship with Diamela Eltit and her role in Chilean letters. That's followed by a conversation with Tony Malone (of Tony's Reading List) about the two books under discussion this season and the Shadow Man ...

TMR 17.2: “Pure Hatred” [Eltit + Hahn]

Technical difficulties abound as Chad struggles to find reliable Wifi in Latvia. (While being recruited by the Russian mafia?)  Katie and Brian take the lead this episode, discussing the next few chapters of Never Did the Fire, gendered adjectives and information, Marxist groups and analysis, and much more. Also: Stay tuned ...

TMR 17.1: “You Behaved Like a Dog” [Eltit + Hahn]

TMR is back, breaking down Daniel Hahn's translation diary, Catching Fire, alongside his translation of Never Did the Fire by Diamela Eltit. In this episode, they contextualize Eltit and this particular book, talk about intentional ambiguity, Franco and Pinochet, action vs. analysis, bad and hard to eat rice, and ...

Time Must Have a Stop

I haven't been feeling much like myself lately. Doubt anyone has, what with COVID time making everything take twice as long and be four times as frustrating, with Putin being, well, a massive, invasive dick, with inflation the highest it's been since I was five years old, and with no spring baseball. [UPDATE: Baseball is ...

TMR 16.1: “Roberto Bolaño Overview” [2666]

Season 16 is here! At long last, Bolaño's 2666 takes center stage, and Chad and Brian are joined by translator and Bolaño enthusiast, Katie Whittemore. In this opening episode, they discuss the myth-making of Bolaño's biography, they talk about sudden fame, the grind of the artist, and of the way that everything is ...

TMR 15.14: “And Then Evil Showed Its Face” [Vernon Subutex]

Covering what's probably the most disturbing section of Vernon Subutex, this is an intense, fairly dark episode of the Two Month Review. They discuss how the most evil character is a manager/agent, about how men are everywhere, ready to ruin things, and much more. On the upside, Chad and Brian recorded early in the morning, ...

Edith Bruck: Recounting the Holocaust Until She Can’t

Il Pane Perduto by Edith Bruck (La Nave di Teseo, 2021) Review by Jeanne Bonner When Edith Bruck was 12 years old, she was deported to Auschwitz, and was immediately separated from her mother in a brutal scene. In her new memoir, Bruck writes that later, after being yanked away, another prisoner who had been at the camp ...

TMR 15.13: “Gangland Shooting” [Vernon Subutex]

Chad almost had to do this episode solo, but all of you were spared that catastrophe by Kaija Straumanis and David Smith (whose delay makes for some funny moments). The talk about what you would do for $100 million dollars, what most terrifies them, fear in general, Max as Lex Luthor, and much more. This week's music is ...

TMR 15.12: “New Age Bullshit” [Vernon Subutex]

Kate Sherrod joined Chad and Brian on this episode to talk about the TV show version of Vernon Subutex, about which characters she's missing the most, and why this section dragged a bit. A very fun—and fruitful—discussion that lead to a better understanding of how this volume is constructed. This week's music is ...

TMR 15.11: “Everyone’s Been Talking to Me About You” [Vernon Subutex]

Following up on last week's catastrophic technical difficulties, Brian recaps some of his conversation with Frank Wynne before he and Chad dive into volume three of Despentes's Vernon Subutex. They talk about hippies, Dan Deacon, cults, Cultish, Vernon's purity, and much more. This week's music is "The Crystal Cat" by ...

TMR 15.9: “You Shouldn’t Have Hurt My Mother” [Vernon Subutex]

Chad and Brian get into some fun and vengeful parts of Vernon Subutex 2 this week, talking about Gaëll, the proliferation of diereses in this section, getting revenge, Vernon's magical music, and more. This week's music is "The Modern World" by The Jam. If you'd prefer to watch the conversation, you can find it on ...

TMR 15.8: “Bourgeois Shitdick!” [Vernon Subutex]

Kaija Straumanis pinch hits this week to talk about Céleste, about spray painting insults, the best forms of revenge, how to upend a system, and whether of not a good dad can be an alcoholic. This episode is a great prelude to one of the major plot points of the trilogy, so listen to this and get ready for next week . . ...

TMR 15.7: “You Don’t Look Your Best” [Vernon Subutex]

Derek Maine returns for his second appearance this season to talk about Alex Bleach's tapes, Vodka Satana's death, how the system is rigged, horrible men, the complications of passing judgement, Motörhead, mushroom powder, and much more. This is a pretty key episode, as the trilogy veers into detective novel territory, and ...

Three Percent #185: More Granta!

Veronica Esposito joined Chad and Valerie Miles to continue talking about Granta's second list of "Best Young Spanish-language Novelists." They talk about some of the recent Spanish reviews—and criticisms—of the list, about writing the periphery, about science-fiction and the differences between the 2010 list and the ...

TMR 15.6: “Looking for Subutex” [Vernon Subutex]

Chad and Brian go it alone this week to talk about whether this is one book or three (or three "seasons" of one book), or how Xavier and Patrice are both awful people but in entirely different ways, the breadth of characterization in Despentes's writing, all the jokes you can make knowing "Subutex" is Methadone, how to ...

TMR 15.5: “I Am a Hobo Perched on a Hill” [Vernon Subutex]

Translator Frank Wynne joins Chad and Brian to talk about slang, about yummy mummies, about why Vernon's pseudonym is so weird, and much much more. This is an episode as much about translating and reading as it is about the book proper, and is definitely worth listening to. This week's music is "Waiting Room" by ...

TMR 15.4: “Marxist Hells Angel” [VERNON SUBUTEX]

Translator Katie Whittemore (Four by Four, The Communist's Daughter, World's Best Mother, Last Words on Earth) joins Chad and Brian to talk about the horrible actions of Patrice, and whether he could be redeemed, about childbirth, about Aïcha and Hyena, and about Disney. Funny and cutting, this episode explores the book's ...

TMR 15.3: “Vodka Satana” [VERNON SUBUTEX]

Caitlin Luce Baker of Island Books joins Chad and Brian to talk about a very nicely framed section of Vernon Subutex. We get introduced to Aïcha, who has, through Pamela Kant, just found out that her mom was a porn star before her death. (And had a fling with Alex Bleach.) We also get to see how the Hyena works (kind of), ...

TMR 15.2: “Yummy Mummy or MILF” [VERNON SUBUTEX]

Emma Ramadan—translator of Despentes's Pretty Things and Anne Garreta (among many others), and recent winner of the PEN Translation Prize—joins Brian and Chad to talk about how cool Despentes is, and how much slang she uses in her work. They also discuss the conflict that will drive the plot (Laurent Dopalet vs. ...

TMR 15.1: “Alexandre Bleach Is Dead” [VERNON SUBUTEX]

The fifteenth iteration of the Two Month Review kicks off in a big way, giving a quick overview of Virginie Despentes's life and work for Brian, and then launching into the wonderful world Despentes constructs filled with characters who are past their prime, who are flawed and don't hide their warts. The subtle ways in which ...

TMR 14.11: “Hey . . . You Listening?” [J R]

The final episode of the season! First off, Chad and Brian wrap things up, and preview season 15 (Virginie Despentes's Vernon Subutex trilogy, coming in April!), then Nick Sullivan talks to Chad about recording the audiobook, how he got into that business in the first place, the challenges of recording a book like this, and ...

Christmas Eve at Dixie Truck Stop [Dear Editor]

In the early 2000s, a number of issues of the Review of Contemporary Fiction featured "Letters to the Editor." It was a poorly kept secret that all of these—the letters and responses—were written by John O'Brien. Obsessed with failing marriages and sad sack lives, these letters are wonderful bits of satire and voice, ...

TMR Season Fourteen: “J R” by William Gaddis

To celebrate the NYRB reissue of J R by William Gaddis—one of my all-time favorite books—we're going to feature it as the next title in the Two Month Review.  The full schedule is below, but in short, the first live episode will be on Wednesday, December 16th at 3pm eastern (available as a podcast the next ...

The Hole vs. The Hole vs. Algorithms vs. Booksellers

Although it's still hard to get truly excited about writing—and harder to imagine anyone reading this, given all that's going on in the world—it was pretty fun working on that last post about October titles that I wish I had the time and attention to read. So, why not do it again? Even if these posts are shambolic and ...

Why I Haven’t Written Any of My Posts

The other night, when I first attempted to write this post, I was shocked to find that the last "real" post I'd written (the nutty Baudrillard in the Time of COVID/Baseball is Back! experiment), posted on July 29th. July! That was almost three months ago. Where did the time go? And why haven't I written anything since ...

Five Questions with Michael Holtmann about HOME

As part of our ongoing series of short interviews featuring the people who helped bring great new translations to the reading public, we talked to Michael Holtmann, the executive director and publisher of the Center for the Art of Translation and Two Lines.  Before getting into the interview, I wanted to point out ...

Death and Afterlife in September 2020

Dead Girls by Selva Almada, translated from the Spanish by Annie McDermott (Charco Press) Yesterday, on Twitter, I promised that the rest of this month's posts on new books in translation would be way more positive, but, well, sorry everyone—I momentarily forgot which books I was planning on writing about today (and ...

2020 Has Been Rather Suboptimal

I can't imagine I'm the only person who feels like they haven't been their best work self over the course of the past six months. We all have acedia. Some days are foggy, others start out fine and then you find out that your local police department killed a black man in MARCH and just released the information about it. I ...

Let’s Try This Instead

Now that I've taught a few hybrid sessions of my "Intro to Literary Publishing" class, I can confirm that teaching during COVID is WEIRD. So weird. (And not just because I couldn't figure out the technology on day one, or because I can't hear the students very well without being able to see their faces. Although both of those ...

TMR Season Thirteen: “Ada, or Ardor” by Vladimir Nabokov

The public has spoken, and the next book to be featured in the Two Month Review is Ada, or Ardor by Vladimir Nabokov! Which is kind of perfect. We follow the thread of Anna Karenina from The Book of Anna by Carmen Boullosa to this novel, originally written in 1969, which opens: "All happy families are more or less ...

Spanish-Language Speculative Fiction by Women in Translation. [#WITMonth]

Today's post is by Rachel Cordasco, founder and curator of Speculative Fiction in Translation, co-translator of Creative Surgery by Clelia Farris, and is working on a book about speculative fiction from around the world.  Despite 2020 being a downright awful year, it has given us several excellent works of ...

A Very Incomplete List of Books by Women in Translation in 2020 [#WITMonth]

I know that I'm a day behind—trying to make up for that right now—but my goal for Women in Translation Month 2020 is to post something each and every day of the month related to this topic. I'm inviting any and all readers, translators, publishers to contribute to this and, with a lot of luck a bit of work, we should have ...

Baudrillard in the Time of COVID / Baseball Is Back!

There are two types of people who read these posts: people into international literature who like baseball, and those who don’t. What follows is an experiment—one that might not work at all. Before you get started, you have a choice: 1) if you hate genuine writing about baseball, then click here, where I’ve edited ...

Baudrillard in the Time of COVID

There’s never been a better time to read Baudrillard. There’s also never been a worse. Thanks to quarantine, the unprecedented nature of this situation, Trump, government response to the protests—everything feels like an illusion. Not an illusion in the sense that “nothing is physically realm,” although one could ...

TMR 12.4: “Never More Than Two Hundred” [FOUR BY FOUR]

This week's episode kicks off the four-week discussion of Four by Four by Sara Mesa, translated from the Spanish by Katie Whittemore. A great book for our time (for all times) in relationship to power structures and their systems. And whether it's better to be "free and vulnerable or protected but under control." In this ...

TMR 12.3 “Scenes from the Spectral Zone” [CARS ON FIRE]

On this episode of the Two Month Review, translator Robin Myers joins Chad and Brian to talk about her translation, Mexican and Argentine poetry, what was most challenging/liberating about the text, ALTA 2009, and much much more. Very insightful conversation for anyone interested in professional translators, or starting out ...

“La vita bugiarda degli adulti” by Elena Ferrante

La vita bugiarda degli adulti by Elena Ferrante 283 pgs. | pb | 9788833571683 | €19,00 edizioni e/o Review by Jeanne Bonner If all had gone as planned—which is to say if a global pandemic hadn’t bulldozed our normal lives—this summer, you might have been reading Ann Goldstein’s English translation of La vita ...

TMR 12.1 “Obituary” [CARS ON FIRE]

Season 12 of the Two Month Review kicked off with Cristina Rodriguez from Deep Vellum Bookstore joining Chad and Brian to talk about the first section of Mónica Ramón Ríos and Robin Myers's Cars on Fire. They talk about The Gits, "Dead Men Don't Rape," the connections between academy and power structures, how "timely" ...

“The Erotics of Restraint: Essays on Literary Form” by Douglas Glover

The Erotics of Restraint: Essays on Literary Form by Douglas Glover 203 pgs. | pb | 9781771962919 | $21.95 Biblioasis Review by Brendan Riley   The Erotics of Restraint is an excellent companion—with a no less provocative title—to Mr. Glover’s previous collection, Attack of the Copula Spiders, published in ...

“The Cheffe: A Cook’s Novel” by Marie NDiaye [Why This Book Should Win]

Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2020 Best Translated Book Awards.  Marcel Inhoff is completing a doctoral dissertation at the University of Bonn. He is the author of the collection Prosopopeia (Editions Mantel, 2015), and Our Church Is Here (Pen and ...

Three Percent #182: BTBA 2020 Readings

On this special edition of the Three Percent Podcast, you can hear short readings of all fifteen finalists for this year's Best Translated Book Awards. You can find all of the titles here on Bookshop.org (fiction, poetry), and you can still RSVP to see the live awards ceremony on Friday, May 29th at 6pm eastern. This ...

“Aviva-No” by Shimon Adaf [Why This Book Should Win]

Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2020 Best Translated Book Awards.  Adriana X. Jacobs is the author of Strange Cocktail: Translation and the Making of Modern Hebrew Literature (University of Michigan, 2018) and associate professor of modern Hebrew ...

“The Boy” by Marcus Malte [Why This Book Should Win]

Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2020 Best Translated Book Awards.  Lara Vergnaud is a literary translator from the French. She was the recipient of the 2019 French Voices Grand Prize and a finalist for the 2019 BTBA. Her work has appeared in The ...

TMR 11.10: “IKEA” [THE DREAMED PART]

This week's episode is quite possibly the wildest one yet . . . Chad paid a BookTuber for some promotional love and, well, you'll have to watch/listen to see how that went. Then they talk about outsiders, Franco Moretti, autofiction, HE-IKEA (the Writer's nemesis), overblown rants about reading and phones, and much ...

. . . The Underappreciated Masses . . .

Half of this post is inspired by comments Sam Miller made about this article he wrote about the mystery surrounding Don Mattingly's birthdate and his Topps 1987 baseball card. I'm not sure if these are immutable truths per se, but if you talk to enough people in the book industry, you're likely to encounter two strains of ...

We’re Still Here . . .

"We live in a world of randomness." —William Poundstone, The Doomsday Calculation It probably goes without saying, but publishing international literature is a precarious business in the best of times. On average, sales for translated works of fiction tend to be about one-third of the average sales for a mid-list author ...

Three Percent #181: Unraveling Women and Hard-Working Peasants

A bit of an experimental episode, Chad is joined by five indie booksellers to talk about the "new normal," fears of reopening, what booksellers are doing now, and—most importantly—actual books. The complete rundown of recommendations is below, but one note: please buy these titles from the bookseller who recommended them. ...

TMR 11.9: “Living in Pandemica” [THE DREAMED PART]

This week, Chad and Brian talk about the desires of readers, the "middle mind," writing without a hook, Nabokov's "The Vane Sisters," the one contribution Chad made to this book, vocal tics, cocaine, and much more. They both came in high energy on this episode, so sit back and enjoy all the jokes and enthusiasm. This ...

“The Way Through the Woods” by Long Litt Woon

The Way Through the Woods by Long Litt Woon Translated from the Norwegian by Barbara J. Haveland 320 pgs. | hc | 9781984801036 | $26.00 Spiegel & Grau Review by Hana Kallen   How does one heal after the death of a loved one? How does define oneself again after tragedy? Author and anthropologist Long Litt ...

“The Book of Collateral Damage” by Sinan Antoon [Why This Book Should Win]

Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2020 Best Translated Book Awards.  Tara Cheesman is a freelance book critic, National Book Critics Circle member & 2018-2019 Best Translated Book Award Fiction Judge. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review ...

The Winter Garden Photograph by Reina María Rodríguez [Why This Book Should Win]

Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2020 Best Translated Book Awards.  Anastasia Nikolis recently received her PhD in twentieth and twenty-first century poetry and poetics from the University of Rochester. She is the Poetry Editor for Open Letter Books ...

TMR 11.8: “This Is a Bullshot” [THE DREAMED PART]

In his most dangerous gag to date, Chad drinks a giant bullshot as he, Brian Wood, and special guest Carlos Labbé talk about Nabokov's Transparent Things, transparency as a concept, the wild bed that The Writer is insomniacing in, Uncle Hey Walrus's hypnosis gone awry, why quarantine time is so crazy yet our dreams are ...

“Vernon Subutex 1” by Virginie Despentes [Why This Book Should Win]

Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2020 Best Translated Book Awards.  Dorian Stuber teaches at Hendrix College and blogs about books at www.eigermonchjungfrau.blog. His work has appeared in Numéro Cinq, Open Letters Monthly, and Words without ...

“God’s Wife” by Amanda Michalopoulou

God's Wife by Amanda Michalopoulou Translated from the Greek by Patricia Felisa Barbeito 144 pgs. | pb | 9781628973372 | $16.95 Dalkey Archive Press Review by Soti Triantafyllou Why do people get married? Maybe because they need a witness to their lives, someone to watch them do whatever it is that they do. In Amanda ...

There Are Worse Timelines [An April 2020—Is It Still 2020?—Reading Journal]

Following the [Chernobyl] accident, physicists calculated that there was a ten percent risk that a nuclear explosion on an unimaginable scale would take pace within a fortnight. Such an explosion [. . .] would have been equivalent to forty Hiroshima bombs going off at the same time, and would have rendered Europe ...

Three Percent #180: Bookfinity Is the Dumbest Name

Stacie Williams joins Chad and Tom this week to talk about the role of sales reps at this moment in time and then, after she bolts, Chad and Tom poke fun at Bookfinity (which, really, WOW), the confused messaging of #BooksAreEssential as a hashtag, why bookshops shouldn't open, and how Publishers Weakly is funny AND NOT RUN ...

TMR 11.7: “The Past Is a Broken Toy That Everyone Fixes in His Own Way” [THE DREAMED PART]

This week's episode brings us back to The Writer, unable to sleep, living near where Penelope's house burned down (see: The Invented Part), and living off the fortunes of Penelope's writings (RIP). There's a great bit in this section about FBI agent Johnny Dancer and Vladimir Nabokov, there's a horrifying (yet funny!) death ...

Three Percent #179: “Hey! What’s New?”

How is COVID-19 impacting bookstores, publishers, translators, and our general sanity? These are the questions Tom and Chad talk about on this episode—the first in a while, but also the longest ever—along with minor jokes, an appeal to authors and publishers to "read the room," a rant that will likely get Chad in ...

TMR 11.6: “Adaptations” [THE DREAMED PART]

Chad and Brian go deep into the underlying structure of the second section of Fresan's The Dreamed Part, talking about Penelope's story, her relationship to her parents and the Karmas, and the moment in which she lost her son. We finally get to read about her wrecking house (literally) and see how everything circles back to ...

“Death Is Hard Work” by Khaled Khalifa [Why This Book Should Win]

Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2020 Best Translated Book Awards.  Tony Messenger is an Australian writer, critic and interviewer who has had works published in many places including Overland Literary Journal, Southerly, Mascara Literary ...

Lola Rogers on “The Colonel’s Wife” by Rosa Liksom [The Book That Never Was, Pt. 2]

You can find part one here. Finnish Literature LR: As you know, Finnish literature is just like the language. It's different. It's more different from English literature than, say, German literature is. CWP: What kind of things mark Finnish literature as “different”? LR: Well, I think The Colonel’s Wife is a ...

Lola Rogers on “The Colonel’s Wife” by Rosa Liksom [The Book That Never Was, Pt. 1]

The Colonel's Wife by Rosa Liksom, translated from the Finnish by Lola Rogers (Graywolf Press) BookMarks Reviews: Five total—Four Positive, One Mixed Awards: None Number of Finnish Works of Fiction Published in Translation from 2008-2019: 65 (5.42/year) Number of Those Translations Written by Women: 40 of the ...

“Tentacle” by Rita Indiana [Why This Book Should Win]

Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2020 Best Translated Book Awards.  Tobias Carroll is the author of the books Reel, Transitory, and the forthcoming Political Sign.   Tentacle by Rita Indiana, translated from the Spanish by Achy ...

TMR 11.5: “Wuthering Heights Is Weird” [THE DREAMED PART}

Chad reaches a new quarantine low at the beginning of this week's episode (highly recommend checking out the video version), but after a lot of banter and deep dives into international speculative fiction, The Invention of Morel, Lost, and more, Chad and special guest Rachel Cordasco break down the first part of the ...

“Book of Minutes” by Gemma Gorga [Why This Book Should Win]

Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2020 Best Translated Book Awards.  Nancy Naomi Carlson is a poet, translator, and editor, whose latest book was called "new & noteworthy" by the New York Times. Recipient of two NEA literature translation grants ...

“The Memory Police” by Yoko Ogawa [Why This Book Should Win]

Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2020 Best Translated Book Awards.  Tony Malone is an Australian reviewer of fiction in translation, whose site, Tony’s Reading List, has been providing reviews continuously since 2009. His main focus is on Japanese ...

“Die, My Love” by Ariana Harwicz [Why This Book Should Win]

Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2020 Best Translated Book Awards.  Josh Cook is the author of the novel An Exaggerated Murder, published by Melville House in March 2015. His fiction and other work has appeared in The Coe Review, Epicenter ...

TMR 11.4: “Tulpas” [THE DREAMED PART]

This episode got off to a rough start, with Chad losing his shit over the May IndieNext list [ed. note: he still has not recovered] before Streamyard crashed and the whole episode had to be recorded. In the new, much calmer episode, Chad, Brian, and special guest Patrick Smith talk about tulpas, the night, Fresán writing in ...

TMR 11.3: “”What We Talk About When We Talk About Dreaming” [THE DREAMED PART]

Aside from talking about how we're all about five days away from becoming Howard Hughes, Chad, Brian, and special guest Derek Maine talk about dreams vs. rationality, Nabokov and Bob Dylan, dream lovers and MTV videos, Twin Peaks and fantasy baseball. (OK, not the last one.) It's a fun podcast, a minor distraction that ...

TMR 11.2: “Who Dreams the Dreamer” [THE DREAMED PART]

Chad, Brian, and special guest Mark Haber tried their damnedest to bring some levity to our current crisis on this week's episode. They laughed a lot while discussing Chad's surprisingly dull dream city, the way The Dreamed Part just drops you right into the flow, dream logic, how Fresan is the exception that proves the ...

TMR 11.1: “We Remember Everything” [THE DREAMED PART]

In this week's preview episode for Season 11 of the Two Month Review--featuring The Dreamed Part by Rodrigo Fresán and Will Vanderhyden--Chad and Brian try their best to recall details from the plot of The Invented Part, the first book in the trilogy. They do . . . well, question mark? As cracked out as their descriptions ...

Three Percent #178: This Podcast Is Not Contagious

Today's episode is all about small presses. Chad and Tom breakdown, discuss, elaborate on, and praise, Matvei Yankelevich's recent Poetry post 'The New Normal: How We Gave Up the Small Press." This is a rather wide-ranging conversation about grant applications, distribution for small presses, AWP, professionalization, how ...

Three Percent #177: Eight Books

After a bit of banter about how baseball front offices might be as bad at naming things as book people, and a plug for Paul Vidich's The Coldest Warrior, Chad and Tom each draft four forthcoming books from a total of eight different presses that they've both agreed to read and discuss in future episodes. How could this ...

Is It Real? [A January 2020 Reading Diary with Charts & Observations]

It's been sooooo long since I actually wrote something for here . . . I'm not entirely sure how to start! Chad 1.0 would open with something like "$%*# agents" and then go off on a couple individuals who are currently driving me INSANE. Chad 2.0 would come up with some wacky premise that blends ideas behind sabermetrics ...

Three Percent #176: Dirty Bookshop

After a bit of a hiatus, Chad and Tom return to talk about the two biggest things to happen during Winter Institute: The American Dirt controversy and the launch of Bookshop.org. If you haven't been following the American Dirt debacle, here are a couple pieces to read: Laura Miller's piece in Slate, Rebecca Alter's ...

Three Percent #175: Biggest News Stories of 2019

On this week's episode, Chad and Tom discuss Tom's recent piece on Jean-Patrick Manchette for LARB  and talk about which of his books are best to start with, and why there haven't been more breakout international noir authors. Then they pivot to this Publishers Weekly article on the "Top News Stories of 2019," discussing ...

TMR 10.14: “We Made it to the End” [DUCKS, NEWBURYPORT]

We did it! Chad and Brian reflect on the somewhat surprising ending to Ducks, Newburyport and reflect on all 1,000+ of its glorious pages in the season finale to this Two Month Review. They debate whether the book is hopeful or pessimistic, the way in which its solipsism infects the reader's way of seeing the world, and they ...

“Italian Short Stories” ed. by Jhumpa Lahiri

Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories ed. Jhumpa Lahiri Translated from the Italian by Various 528 pgs. | hc | 9780241299838 | $30.00 Penguin Random House Review by Jeanne Bonner   Novels and memoirs often become labors of love for the authors who birth them. But what about an anthology? How often do we imagine ...

“Ghachar Ghochar” by Vivek Shanbhag

Ghachar Ghochar by Vivek Shanbhag Translated from the Kannada by Srinath Perur 117 pgs. | pb | 9789352775057 | $15.00 Penguin Random House Review by Kira Baran   What purpose does a book serve if its content can be neatly condensed onto, and thereby extracted from, its book jacket? Intentionally or not, author ...

TMR 10.13: “Dogs” [DUCKS, NEWBURYPORT]

Elizabeth DeMeo (assistant book editor at Tin House) joins Chad and Brian in the penultimate episode of this season of the Two Month Review. They talk family therapy. They talk about the Jim's encounter with the lioness. They make predictions about how the book will end. They debate whether it's better to read the book in a ...

TMR 10.12: “Gone Missing” [DUCKS, NEWBURYPORT]

Chad and Brian go it alone on pages 777-862, talking about Galley Beggar's "go fund me" campaign, hardcovers vs. paperbacks, Stacy, what makes something Kafkaesque, the narrator's stasis, and much more. This week's music is "The Surprise Knock" by The New Pornographers. If you'd prefer to watch the conversation, you can ...

“Seeing People Off” by Jana Beňová

Seeing People Off by Jana Beňová Translated from Slovak by Janet Livingstone 126 pgs. | pb | 9781937512590 | $14.99 Two Dollar Radio Review by David DeGusta   Jana Beňová’s novel Seeing People Off, translated from the Slovak by Janet Livingstone, exists between clarity and confusion. Set in the Petržalka ...

“The Book of Disappearance: A Novel” by Ibtisam Azem

The Book of Disappearance: A Novel by Ibtisam Azem Translated from the Arabic by Sinan Antoon 256 pgs. | pb | 9780815611110 | $19.95 Syracuse University Press Review by Grant Barber   This wonderful, important second novel by Ibtisam Azem in English translation came out just in time for the observance of Women ...

TMR 10.11: “Establish Justice” [DUCKS, NEWBURYPORT]

This week, Chad is joined by Rebecca Hussey (BookRiot) and Josh Cook (Porter Square Books, An Exaggerated Murder) to talk about pages 700-776 of Ducks, Newburyport. They make comparisons to any number of modernist authors (Proust, Woolf, Joyce), discuss mother-daughter relationships, "mom shaming," Stace's general sense of ...

TMR 10.10: “A List of Definites” [DUCKS, NEWBURYPORT]

Jeremy Kitchen (Chicago Public Library, Eye 94) joins Chad and Brian to talk about "a list of definites" about the future, the (pretty silly) controversy surrounding Lucy Ellmann's recent Guardian interview, the way the themes of Duck, Newburyport make it difficult for some people to read, the ways in which this novel is ...

Dark, Strange Books by Women in Translation [BTBA 2020]

This week's Best Translated Book Award post is from Pierce Alquist, who has a MA in Publishing and Writing from Emerson College and currently works in publishing in Boston. She is a freelance book critic, writer, and Book Riot contributor. She is also the Communications Coordinator for the Transnational Literature Series ...

Three Percent #174: Devil’s Bargains

Chad and Tom play a short game on this podcast—when Tom isn't ranting about Amazon. They also discuss Bookshop, when the decade officially ends, favorite translations of the past ten years, Chad's upcoming hiatus from writing for Three Percent, and much more. Next episode Chad and Tom will discuss Tom's recent article on ...

TMR 10.9: “Pattern Recognition” [DUCKS, NEWBURYPORT]

Chad and Brian deliver a true Thanksgiving treat in this episode, digging in deep to the narrative patterns in the book, the way Ellmann constructs the narrator's subjectivity, how the novel is a radical call to action, how some facts aren't really facts, terrible new slang terms, save the turtles, and much much more. This ...

Book 6 [The No Context Project]

If you want the context for the "no context project," check out this post, which lays everything out and applies a 20-80 grading scale to "Book 7." Since I really want to get through these mystery books sooner rather than later--so that I can find out what they are and grade myself--I put aside my Charco reading for a bit ...

A Couple Turkish Authors [BTBA 2020]

This week's Best Translated Book Award pose is from Louisa Ermelino, who is the author of three novels; Joey Dee Gets Wise; The Black Madonna (Simon and Schuster); The Sisters Mallone (St. Martin’s Press) and a story collection, Malafemmina (Sarabande). She has worked atPeople, Time International, and InStyle magazines ...

TMR 10.8: “Real Life Is Sad” [DUCKS, NEWBURYPORT]

Another late night conversation about Ducks, Newburyport! This week, P.T. Smith joins to discuss illness, the verbal virtuosity in this novel, sadness, relationships between parents and kids, and much more. Lots of quotes are read throughout this episode, and in honor of Lucy Ellmann's stated like of whisky, some of that ...

“Beasts Head for Home” by Abe Kōbō

Beasts Head for Home by Abe Kōbō Translated from the Japanese by Richard F. Calichman 191 pgs.| pb | 9780231177054 | $25 Columbia University Press Review by Brendan Riley   Crisp, stark, pristine scenes of gaunt settlements, vast wilderness, and tense human encounters fill this 1957 novel by Abe Kōbō, the ...

Three Percent #173: The Poetry in Translation Episode

Anastasia Nikolis (poetry editor for Open Letter Books) and Emma Ramadan (translator, co-owner of Riffraaff) join Chad and Tom to breakdown ALTA 42, talk about poetry in translation, and go on a handful of minor rants—and one major one. (Thanks, Emma!) The Sarah Dessen controversy pops up, as does this article about ...

TMR 10.7: “Blossom, Stasis, Spiral, Whoa” [DUCKS, NEWBURYPORT]

This week's Two Month Review was recorded pretty late (on the east coast), so things are a bit loopy. Nevertheless, James Crossley from Madison Books joins Chad and Brian to talk about pages 429-487 of Ducks, Newburyport. They talk a bit about the cultural references in this section—the old movies, Blossom—flip ahead to ...

Book 7 [The No Context Project]

A couple months ago, while writing about Suzanne Jill Levine and Jessica Powell's translation of Silvina Ocampo's The Promise, I came up with a sort of crazy scheme: But this gave me a grand idea: What if I could review twenty books from twenty publishers in as blind as a fashion as possible? I wouldn’t know ...

TMR 10.6: “The Simple Things” [DUCKS, NEWBURYPORT]

Chad and Brian break format a bit and discuss a number of the concerns, anxieties, and social issues that the narrator of Duck, Newburyport thinks about. From spiders to Morning Routine videos, active shooter situations to Trump feeling up Kurt Suzuki, this episode is a deep, yet funny, dive into our neuroses and ...

How to Launch a Publishing House [Charco Press]

It's Charco Press month! After stepping away from these "monthly themes" for a minute (or, well, actually, a full month), I'm excited to get back to this, and have a bunch of posts planned out for November. If all goes according to plan (spoiler: HA!) I'd like to post a couple interviews with Charco Press translators, a ...

“Garden by the Sea” by Mercè Rodoreda

  Garden by the Sea by Mercè Rodoreda Translated from the Catalan by Maruxa Relaño and Martha Tennent 230 pgs. | pb | 9781948830089   | $15.95 Open Letter Books Review by Kira Baran   Originally published in 1967 in the Catalan, Garden by the Sea is just one of several works that has earned ...

TMR 10.5: “The Buzz Must Go On” [DUCKS, NEWBURYPORT]

Lori Feathers of Interabang Books in Dallas joined Chad and Brian for this special episode to talk about the destruction of her bookstore, what's next for Interabang, and information about how you can help. (Answer: Order Joytime Killbox and The Dreamed Part from their website.) Then they talk about Lori's interview with ...

“The Teacher” by Michal Ben-Naftali

The Teacher by Michal Ben-Naftali Translated from the Hebrew by Daniella Zamir 138 pgs. | pb | 9781948830072  | $14.95 Open Letter Books Review by Kira Baran   Michal Ben-Naftali’s background in philosophy shines through in her debut novel, The Teacher. Originally published in Hebrew in 2015, the work was ...

TMR 10.4: “Is it Translatable” [Ducks, Newburyport]

Rhett McNeil (translator of Machado de Assis, Gonçalo Tavares, Antonio Lobo Antunes, and more) joins Chad and Brian to talk about the way in which Ducks, Newburyport is less of a single-sentence and more of a never-ending list, about how it is and isn't like Ulysses, about time in the novel, about Ellmann's playfulness, ...

A Good, Exciting Translation [BTBA 2020]

Today's Best Translated Book Award post is from Elisa Wouk Almino, a writer and literary translator from Portuguese. She is currently the L.A. senior editor at Hyperallergic and an editor of Harlequin creature’s online translation platform. She teaches translation at Catapult and UCLA Extension. I teach an online ...

Three Percent #171: Can We Go a Week Without an Award Controversy?

This week's podcast is about two kerfuffles: the Booker Prize one and the one between King County Library and Macmillan. There's also some discussion as to why UK book culture allows for critique and small voices to be heard (vs. the American way in which everything is fine), Chad goes on and on about On Becoming a God in ...

TMR 10.3: “How Do I Promote This?” [Ducks, Newburyport]

Vanessa Stauffer from Biblioasis came on this episode to talk about the Booker Prize, about the jacket copy she wrote for the Ducks galley, about types of moms, about things in the book that pay off and mysteries that remain mysteries, about the ways in which Ellmann is breaking form and the strong feminist perspective ...

Time Does Not Bring Relief

"History is written by the victors" is one of those cliches that's so obviously true that it requires next to no explanation. But the ability to provide evidence for what the victors do when writing history is usually a bit more circumspect and tricky to get ahold of . . . Last Thursday, the Nobel Prize for Literature was ...

Three Percent #170: Don’t Give a Million Dollars to a Fascist

This podcast comes in HOT. Lots of talk about how Peter Handke doesn't deserve any award, much less the Nobel Prize. (And if you don't know why, just listen for his quote at the end denying Serb atrocities at Srebrenica by saying "You can stick your corpses up your arse.") Then things transition to an existential conversation ...

TMR 10.2: “The Fact That” [Ducks, Newburyport]

Due to an unforeseen illness, Chad and Brian ended up going this one alone, and focus mostly on the way that "the fact that" functions, both in building the character and impacting the reader. Chad asks Brian some craft questions, they debate what makes a book "difficult" (and whether this is difficult or just long), more ...

TMR 10.1: “Brave Publishing” [Ducks, Newburyport]

The tenth season of the Two Month Review gets underway with special guest Dan Wells of Biblioasis talking about how they came to publish Lucy Ellmann's Ducks, Newburyport, and the risks involved in doing a 1,020-page book. They also introduce Ellmann--who has one of the greatest bios ever--and the novel itself. Conversation ...

Value & Controversy

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post on Vernon Subutex I by Virginie Despentes, translated by Frank Wynne, and Sympathy for the Translator by Mark Polizzotti in which I teased a future post (this one!) in which the "value" and "controversy" terms would be inverted: the nonfiction book from the translator would supply the heat, ...

TMR 9.10: Monsterhuman by Kjersti Skomsvold (pgs 407-448)

And just like that, season nine of the Two Month Review comes to an end. But first, we have a very nice discussion with Kjersti Skomsvold herself about Monsterhuman, trends in Norwegian writing, autofiction vs. creative nonfiction vs. memoir, authors to read, and much more. (Spoiler: She's just as interesting and charming in ...

Available Now: THE INCOMPLETES by Sergio Chejfec and Heather Cleary

“A masterfully nested narrative where writing—its presence on the page, its course through time, its prismatic dispersion of meaning—is the true protagonist.” —Hernan Diaz, author of In the Distance “Now I am going to tell the story of something that happened one night years ago, and the events of the ...

Three Percent #169: Year Two of the NBA for Translated Literature

After an update from Chad about his trip to London and Amsterdam, he and Tom break down the National Book Award for Translated Literature longlist, exposing their general ignorance along the way. (They've read, combined, like two of the ten titles?) Also, sure are a lot of Penguin Random House books on these longlists! They ...

TMR 9.09: Monsterhuman by Kjersti Skomsvold (pgs 360-406)

Translator Becky Crook comes on this week's podcast to talk about the process of working on Monsterhuman, all the things that she couldn't quite get in there, ones she's very proud of, the reasons why she thinks the book works, and much much more! Only one episodee left! You can watch the Wednesday, September 25 episode ...

TMR 9.08: Monsterhuman by Kjersti Skomsvold (pgs 316-360)

This week, Brian is AWOL BUT Patrick Smith brings his A-game. He and Chad talk about the self-conscious humor in Monsterhuman, awkward interactions, the shape and evolution of the narrative as a whole, some info about The Faster I Walk, the Smaller I Am, and much more. A very fun episode that opened as awkwardly as ever . . ...

Controversy & Value

I absolutely love the Virginie Despentes books that I've read, and Vernon Subutex 1—the first part of a trilogy that she concluded in 2017—is no exception. Like her other novels, the prose is direct, unadorned, and based very heavily in character. Very unlikeable characters. Offensive characters. Characters who are most ...

TMR 9.07: Monsterhuman by Kjersti Skomsvold (pgs 275-316)

Although this episode isn't as funny as last week's discussion of "lay-down Sally," it does get into some of Brian's neuroses about his forthcoming book, which is entertaining. They talk a lot about Skomsvold's humor, about the creepy ways in which various photographers and interviewers treat her as a young female artist, ...

Flash Sale on Open Letter Preorders!

For a few different reasons—mainly that I wasn't able to get the new excerpt from Sara Mesa's Four by Four online until the WITMonth discount code had expired, but also to celebrate The Dreamed Part being on Kirkus's list of "30 Most Anticipated Fiction Books"—we've decided to have a flash sale on all of our ...

Three Percent #168: The 6% Improvement

On this episode, Chad shares some interesting data about the number of books by women in translation before and after the creation of Women in Translation Month, Tom talks about the most recent Amazon controversy, they breakdown the National Translation Award for Prose Longlist (they'll talk poetry in a future episode), and ...

“Four by Four” by Sara Mesa [An Edited Excerpt]

Information about Katie Whittemore's translation of Four by Four by Sara Mesa has been floating around this website (and my twitter) since the beginning of the year. January was "Spain Month" and featured an interview with Katie and an early excerpt of Four by Four. Well, by the middle of September, advanced reader copies ...

TMR 9.06: Monsterhuman by Kjersti Skomsvold (pgs 226-274)

Caitlin Baker from Island Books joins Chad and Brian this week to talk about "The Herring Factory" from Kjersti Skomsvold's Monsterhuman. After a strong pitch for nominating Brian for "Best Local Author" in City Paper's annual Best of Rochester voting, they get into the book itself, talking about the meta-textual moment of ...

“Cars on Fire” by Mónica Ramón Ríos [Excerpt]

Now you're really getting to preview our books . . . Although Cars on Fire by Mónica Ramón Ríos, translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers, is available for preorder from various online retailers, we don't even have this book up on our website yet and, as of yesterday, on our website as well. We haven't even presented ...

“The Nocilla Trilogy” by Agustín Fernández Mallo

The Nocilla Trilogy by Agustín Fernández Mallo Translated from the Spanish by Thomas Bunstead pb | 9780374222789 | $30.00 FSG Review by Vincent Francone   Most reviews of The Nocilla Trilogy (written by Agustín Fernández Mallo, recently translated into English by Thomas Bunstead, beautifully packaged by ...

Three Percent #167: We Could All Do Better

Meytal Radzinski joins Chad and Tom to talk about Women in Translation Month, depressing statistics, Virginie Despentes, nonfiction in translation, hopes for the future, and much more. As always, feel free to send any and all comments or questions to: threepercentpodcast@gmail.com. Also, if there are articles you’d like ...

TMR 9.05: Monsterhuman by Kjersti Skomsvold (pgs 180-225)

Tom Flynn from Volumes opens up today's episode with a reading from Brian's first book, Joytime Killbox. Then, along with Chad, they break down the rest of "The Human School" from Monsterhuman, talk about how much they love Skomsvold's voice and sense of humor, look at the way in which she starts playing with first- and ...

Releasing Today: THE TRANSLATOR’S BRIDE by João Reis

      “A neurotic little gem: fast, fun, frenzied, and feisty.” —Jeremy Garber, Powell's         A humorous attempt to get one's life back in order that's part Thomas Bernhard, part Max Frisch At the start of The Translator's Bride, the Translator's bride ...

The Most Anticipated Translation of 2019

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk, translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Riverhead) Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead may well be the most anticipated translation of the season. Olga Tokarczuk’s second novel in as many years is a mystery novel that never declares ...

TMR 9.04: Monsterhuman by Kjersti Skomsvold (pgs 144-180)

Even though the first few seconds ("On today's Two Month Review we'll be talking about . . . ") got cut off, Chad gives his most professional podcast introduction to date, before he and Brian talk about the Nansen Academy, the cyclical nature of chronic illness, the idea of plot points vs. events, and reasons their respective ...

Reread, Rewrite, Repeat

Some years ago, I was invited on an editorial trip to Buenos Aires, where we were given a walking tour of the more literary areas of the city, including a bar where Polish ex-pat Witold Gombrowicz used to hang out.    The tour guide told us a story about how Gombrowicz hated Borges and would frequently, drunkenly, ...

Women in Translation for BTBA 2020

It's time for weekly BTBA posts! First up is one by Louisa Ermelino, who is the author of three novels; Joey Dee Gets Wise; The Black Madonna (Simon and Schuster); The Sisters Mallone (St. Martin’s Press) and a story collection, Malafemmina (Sarabande). She has worked ...

TMR 9.03: Monsterhuman by Kjersti Skomsvold (pgs 92-143)

In this episode, Chad and Brian applaud Kjersti for not getting back together with her ex-boyfriend, talk about circular structures, about the evolution of her written voice, about Antony and the Johnsons, the myth-making behind Babe Ruth, and much more. This week's music is "Patterns Prevail" by Young Guv. Next episode ...

Three Percent #166: Women in Translation Month 2019

Chad and Tom drop a number of recommendations for Women in Translation month, some that they've read, some that they're planning on reading. They also discuss possible infographics that Three Percent can produce over the course of the month (if you have any other suggestions, please email), and discuss Chad's new plan to try ...

Two Spanish Books for Women in Translation Month

Like usual, this post is a mishmash of all the thoughts I've had over the past week, mostly while out on a 30-mile bike ride. (I need to get in as many of these as possible before winter, which is likely to hit Rochester in about a month.) Rather than try and weave these into one single coherent post, I'm just going to throw ...

40% Off All Open Letter Books Written or Translated by Women

Women in Translation Month is always an exciting time to discover, read, discuss, and celebrate books by women from around the world. It was created by Meytal Radzinski back in 2014 (who we're hoping to have on a podcast this month), and has since spawned numerous articles, events, and even the Warwick Prize for Women in ...

TMR 9.02: Monsterhuman by Kjersti Skomsvold (pgs 46-92)

One of the funniest TMR episodes in weeks, Chad and Brian crack each other up over writerly anxieties, the sharp wit Kjersti displays in this section, the White Claw Phenomenon, writer vs. author vs. journaler, Kjersti's distain for bad poetry (and TV) about chronic fatigue syndrome, pop culture references from the ...

Info on the 2020 Best Translated Book Awards

We're happy to announce the 2020 Best Translated Book Award! All the relevant information is below. Please let me know if you have any questions. Award Dates In terms of dates, this is subject to change, but currently we’re planning on announcing the longlists for fiction and poetry on Wednesday, April 1st, the finalists ...

Embrace the Chaos

So, for the first time in, probably ever, when I didn't have an idea for this week's post, I didn't steal one of Sam Miller's ideas from the Effectively Wild podcast. Instead, in a real reversal, I went back to the podcasts I recorded last week and came up with two completely unrelated concepts that I'm going to jam ...

“The Naked Woman” by Armonía Somers

The Naked Woman by Armonía Somers Translated from the Spanish by Kit Maude 168 pgs. | pb | 9781936932436 | $16.95 Feminist Press Review by Rachel Crawford   A woman turns thirty, decapitates herself, and after repositioning her severed head onto her neck, wanders through the woods stark naked. In part, this is ...

TMR 9.01: Monsterhuman by Kjersti Skomsvold (pgs 1-45)

The new season of the Two Month Review starts here! Through the end of September we'll be discussing Kjersti Skomsvold's Monsterhuman, translated from the Norwegian by Becky L. Crook. Marius Hjeldnes from Cappelen Damm joins Chad and Brian to provide a bit of background on Skomsvold, on trends in Norwegian literature, on ...

“Thick of It” by Ulrike Almut Sandig

Thick of It by Ulrike Almut Sandig Translated from the German Karen Leeder 96 pgs. | hc | 9780857425560 | $19.00 Seagull Books Review by Talia Franks   Thick of It by Ulrike Almut Sandig is a slender book of poetry, vibrantly translated from the original German into English by Karen Leeder. The poems are prefaced ...

Three Percent #165: Disorder in the Book Shelves

This episode of the Three Percent Podcast never gets to its actual topic, but includes minor disagreements about ebooks in libraries and its impact on ebook revenue, more questions about Book Culture's situation, a general sense of malaise, trying to make sense of Dean Koontz, Audible's "Caption" program, a wild idea about ...

The All or Nothing of Book Conversation

In theory, this is a post about Norwegian female writers in translation. I know it's going to end up in a very different space, though, so let's kick this off with some legit stats that can be shared, commented on, and used to further the discussion about women in translation. Back in the first post of July—Norwegian ...

Jan Kjærstad [Sort of the Open Letter Author of the Month]

Prior to the start of July, my plan was to highlight Jan Kjæstad, author of the "Jonas Wergeland Trilogy" about a famous TV director who is jailed for murdering his wife. The three books present three different histories of Wergeland's life, which is interesting enough, but what's really great is how each one employs a ...

TMR 8.11: CoDex 1962 (Pages 451-517)

We did it! Chad and Rachel Cardasco (with an assist from Tom Flynn of Volumes) talk about the last sections of Sjón's CoDex 1962. It's been quite the season and they bring it home in old school TMR style with a lot of Twin Peaks talk, many many digressions, acknowledging motifs and ideas that may or may not actually be ...

Three Percent #164: Rapid Expansion

Chad shares his stupid dreams, Tom questions translators who work for AmazonCrossing and then want indie bookstores to help them out, and they both marvel over Deep Vellum's acquisition of Phoneme Media and A Strange Object (and the launching of the La Reunion imprint). It's a short episode, but filled with great moments, ...

TMR 8.10: CoDex 1962 (Pages 407-450)

Things start to come clear in this penultimate episode of this season of the Two Month Review. We get a new story about Joséf's birth, along with some absolutely incredible writing by Sjón. Lots of parallels and mirroring in this section, and the discussion helps set up next week's conclusion. The next episode will focus ...

Nordic Literature In Translation: A Huge Data Dump

As listeners to the Three Percent Podcast already know, last month I went on an editorial trip to Norway to meet with Norwegian publishers, agents, and authors, and to participate on a panel at the Lillehammer Book Festival. The panel ended up being a really enjoyable, wide-ranging discussion (which I will try and replicate ...

TMR 8.09: CoDex 1962 (Pages 344-406)

We're into the homestretch! Today episode, featuring special guest Katie Whittemore, kicks off the discussion of the third and final volume of Sjón's CoDex 1962, "I'm a Sleeping Door: A Science-Fiction Story." More origin myths in this volume, ranging from the epic and literary, to the mundane and realistic. A woman gives ...

Three Percent #163: What Do You Want

Chad and Tom talk about a number of interrelated issues related to the costs of bookstore ownership and being a bookseller. They talk about the recent letter from Chris Doeblin at Book Culture, The Book Diaries, Human Rights for Translators,  the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Internet and Book Culture, and the ...

“The Book of Collateral Damage” by Sinan Antoon

The Book of Collateral Damage by Sinan Antoon Translated from the Arabic by James Richardson 312 pgs. | hc | 9780300228946 | $24.00 Yale Margellos Press Review by Grant Barber   Author Sinan Antoon is an Assoc. Professor at the Gallatin School of Individual Study of NYU. His undergraduate degree was in 1990 from ...

TMR 8.08: CoDex 1962 (Pages 303-343)

This week, Tobias Carroll joined Chad and Brian to talk about werewolves, puns that don't exactly work in translation, evil baseball card shop owners, weird Masonic rituals, Party Down South, and Fred Durst and John Travolta's The Fanatic. They also have a lot of praise for Sjón and the wild, fun nature of the second volume ...

TMR 8.07: CoDex 1962 (Pages 257-302)

This week's episode covers a lot of ground, from disturbing American racism circa 1917 to codswallop; from werewolves to parliamentary fights, from ghosts to crime/heist narratives. It's a really fun episode that has a good take on this section of the book mixed with some really fun segues and digressions. The next episode ...

Three Percent #162: I Am a Wild Rose

Chad and Tom are joined by Mark Haber from Brazos Bookstore and author of the forthcoming Reinhardt's Garden (October 1, Coffee House Press). They talk a bit about Translation Bread Loaf (two thumbs up) and about a special poster for anyone who buys the First 100 from Open Letter, before trying their best to breakdown a ...

The Five Tools, Part I: Authors [Let’s Praise My Friends]

One of the most entertaining parts of my past three weeks of travel was the discovery that Norwegians refer to first-time authors as “debutants.” Which, OK, at first, is weird. The first time someone said it aloud, “she’s a debutant author,” I too had the urge to correct them. But then, like any great joke that's ...

TMR 8.06: CoDex 1962 (Pages 199-256)

Chad and Brian break down the next few chapters of "Iceland's Thousand Years" by Sjón, which really set the plot in motion. They also talk about water, what it means to be an Icelander, how "bacon-eater" is an insult, Danes in general, myth-making, and much more. The next episode will focus on pages 257-302 (all in the ...

Three Percent #161: Will a French Book Win the BTBA?

Chad and Tom took some time off on Memorial Day to bring you this little podcast about the Best Translated Book Award finalists (winner will be announced at 5pm on 5/29 at BEA/NYRF, and there will be an informal afterparty at The Brooklyneer on Houston starting at 7), about the Man Booker International winner, about the ...

TMR 8.05: CoDex 1962 (Pages 156-198)

Even without an expert to guide them, Chad and Brian dissect the end of the first volume of CoDex 1962, talking golems and tenderness, speculating about the film behind the narrator's eyes, evaluating origin myths (and their apocalyptic counterparts), and praising the overall narrative structure of "Thine Eyes Did See My ...

Four Attempts at Approaches [Drawn & Quarterly]

This post comes to you thanks to a few different starting points: a box of translated graphic novels that Drawn & Quarterly sent me a couple of weeks ago, the fact that Janet Hong translated one of them (see last week’s interview), the fact that I don’t have time this month to read a ton of novels for these weekly ...

TMR 8.04: CoDex 1962 (Pages 110-155)

Kári Tulinius joins Chad and Brian this week and provides some incredibly valuable insight into the translation itself, connections to Iceland and to other writings, and much much more. This is one of the most difficult parts of the book to read, given the horrific actions of one of the characters, but also points toward ...

“Melville: A Novel” by Jean Giono

Melville by Jean Giono Translated from the French by Paul Eprile 108 pgs. | pb | 9781681371375 | $14.00 NYRB Review by Brendan Riley   In The Books in My Life (1952), Henry Miller, devoting an entire chapter to French writer Jean Giono (1895-1970), boasts about spending “several years. . . . preaching the ...

Three Percent #160: Double Controversy

One of the calmest podcasts to date featuring two controversial topics: the new Open Letter cover design, and the side-effects of suddenly doubling (or quadrupling) the number of translations published every year. In terms of recommendations, this week Chad is all about the completely wild Bred from the Eyes of a Wolf by ...

Negative Space [Why This Book Should Win]

Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Awards.  Tess Lewis is a writer and translator from French and German. She is co-chair of the PEN America Translation Committee and serves as an Advisory Editor for the Hudson Review. Her ...

the easiness and the loneliness [Why This Book Should Win]

Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Awards.  Laura Marris is a writer and translator. Her poems and translations have appeared in The Yale Review, The Brooklyn Rail,The Cortland Review, The Volta, Asymptote, and elsewhere. ...

Pretty Things [Why This Book Should Win]

Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Awards.  Giselle Robledo is a reader trying to infiltrate the book reviewer world. You can find her on Twitter at @Objetpetit_a_. Pretty Things by Virginie Despentes, translated from ...

Interview with Janet Hong [Graphic Novels in Translation]

Off to a bit of a slow start here, but this month's focus on Three Percent is going to be graphic novels in translation. I'll have a post up on Monday about some Drawn & Quarterly titles I've been reading, then one on NYRB Comics later in the month. Also hoping to have another interview or two, but I'll keep those to ...

Carlos Labbé [Author of the Month]

In celebration of the release of Carlos Labbé's Spiritual Choreographies later this month--and because of a little surprise we'll unveil soon enough--we decided to make Carlos our "Author of the Month." From now until June 1st, you can use the code LABBE at checkout to get 30% off any and all of his books. (Including ePub ...

TMR 8.03: CoDex 1962 (Pages 58-109)

Chad's just back from a 7 hour train ride. Brian is inebriated. Tom Flynn is . . . Tom Flynn? It's a classic episode of the Two Month Review about horny avenging angels, chamber pot dumps, how many books actually last for a hundred years, the name "Karl," whatever Bumble is, and much more. A fun, loose podcast about a ...

TMR 8.02: CoDex 1962 (Pages 1-57)

This is a special episode of the Two Month Review featuring Chad's "World Literature & Translation" class, who read CoDex 1962 (and ten other contemporary works in translation) this semester. They talk with Chad and Brian about interpretation and translation, how they judge whether a translation is good or bad, Werner ...

“Dark Constellations” by Pola Oloixarac

Dark Constellations by Pola Oloixarac Translated from the Spanish by Roy Kesey 216 pgs. | pb | 9781616959234 | $22.00 Soho Press Reviewed by Grant Barber     Dark Constellations, the second novel in translation by the author of Savage Theories, continues the intriguing, complex narratives of science, ...

Three Percent #159: Publishing in 2025?

Chad and Tom are back to talk about Independent Bookstore Day (and Free Comic Book Day and Record Store Day), the Indie Playlist Initiative, fascists storming Politics & Prose, Alex Shephard's Mueller Report article, how much money Stanford (the Duke of the West?) is wasting on their crappy football program instead of ...

After the Winter [Why This Book Should Win]

Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Awards.  Rebecca Hussey is a community college English professor, a book reviewer, and a Book Riot contributor, where she writes a monthly round-up of indie press books, including many books ...

Love in the New Millennium [Why This Book Should Win]

Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Awards.  Rachel Cordasco has a PhD in literary studies and currently works as a developmental editor. She also writes reviews for publications like World Literature Today and Strange Horizons ...

TMR 8.01: CoDex 1962 (Introduction)

The new season of the Two Month Review kicks off with a pretty wide-ranging discussion. Sure, there is a bit about Sjón (pronounced SYOHN, which is not how Chad says it) and a few things about his earlier books and CoDex 1962, but a good part of this introductory episode is about patterns in narrative, cinematic realism, ...

CoDex 1962: Introduction

The podcast version of this will be live tomorrow morning, but in the meantime, you can always watch us talk about literature, Iceland, my silly theories, a mystery project, cinematic realism, and Game of Thrones.  Subscribe to our YouTube channel and you can catch every Two Month Review episode before the official ...

The Man Between [Genre of the Month]

I've been very lax in writing about the Open Letter author/genre of the month for April: nonfiction. But, there are still a couple of weeks left to share some info about our previously published and forthcoming works of nonfiction. And, as always, you can get 30% any of these books by using NONFICTION at ...

Bricks and Mortar [Why This Book Should Win]

Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Awards.  Tony Messenger is an Australian writer, critic and interviewer who has had works published in Overland Literary Journal, Southerly Journal, Mascara Literary Review, Burning House ...

Moon Brow [Why This Book Should Win]

Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Awards.  Tara Cheesman is a blogger turned freelance book critic, National Book Critics Circle member & 2018 Best Translated Book Award Fiction Judge. Her reviews can be found online at ...

Three Percent #158: 2019 Best Translated Book Award Longlists

Best Translated Book Award fiction judge Kasia Bartoszynska joins Chad and Tom to talk about the recently released longlists. After providing some insight into the committee's thinking and discussions (and confirming that Chad had no knowledge of the lists beforehand, while not 100% confirming that Chad isn't Adam ...

The 2019 Best Translated Book Award Longlists

Although it doesn't seem like everyone believes me--I've gotten a few emails about titles that didn't make the Best Translated Book Award longlists, and one promoting a conspiracy theory that I am Adam Hetherington—I had no clear idea which titles made the BTBA longlists until they appeared on The Millions yesterday ...

Meet the BTBA Judges!

Tomorrow morning at 10am the 2019 Best Translated Book Award longlists will be revealed over at The Millions. As a bit of a preview, the judges wanted to introduce themselves . . . Keaton Patterson, a lifelong Texan, has an MA in Literature from the University of Houston-Clear Lake. For the past five years, he has been ...

Interview with Michael Reynolds about Europa’s Nonfiction Line

Thanks to AWP I'm a few days behind in my April posts, but as will be explained in full tomorrow, this month's main focus is going to be on nonfiction in translation. Our nonfiction titles are 30% off all month (use NONFICTION at checkout), and I'll be writing a lot about recent nonfiction titles, ...

Three Percent #157: Post-Portland AWP

On this atypically subdued episode, Chad recounts some of his adventures in Portland at the AWP conference, and speculates about why this was his favorite one to date. Tom helps illuminate some of the mysteries behind IndieBound and what might be next for independent stores trying to capture some online sales. (And how this ...

Interview with Damion Searls about Anniversaries [Part I]

Assuming that I'll be reading Anniversaries slowly but surely over the next four months, I thought it would be fun to talk to translator Damion Searls about the book along the way. If all goes according to plan, these monthly installments will develop into a rich conversation about the book, translation issues, and much ...

Blogging Like It’s 1967 [Anniversaries, Volume 1]

Tomorrow afternoon we'll run the first of several interviews with Damion Searls, translator of the first complete version of Anniversaries to appear in English. If things go according to plan, each month we'll dig deeper and deeper into this massive book, a twentieth-century masterpiece that weighs something ...

Three Percent #156: The Netflix of Titles

On this week's podcast, Chad and Tom talk laugh about how HarperVia conceives of itself, praise this year's National Book Award for Translation judges, give some spotty analysis of the Man Crankstart (?) Booker International longlist, the idea of an International Writers Hall of Fame (vote here), the one NCAA Basketball ...

BTBA-Eligible Books from Japan [BTBA 2019]

We're exactly 24 days away from finding out which titles are on the 2019 BTBA longlist! (It will be announced at The Millions, and I [Chad] won't know what's on it until everyone else finds out. I'm so excited! I love being completely in the dark about this.) If you're interested in joining the conversation about which books ...

Joshua Cohen on Jakov Lind [Author of the Month]

Our featured author of the month is Jakov Lind, an author whose biography, as you'll read below, is absolutely fascinating. To celebrate his work, we're offering 30% off on Landscape in Concrete and Ergo all month—just use the code LIND at checkout.  Joshua Cohen (The Book of Numbers, Witz) wrote an amazing ...

Which Living Writers Are Sure-Thing Hall of Famers?

Last Thursday, I must've sent two dozen people a variation on that question above, usually in the form "Name me ten living 'Hall of Fame' writers." No explanation, no context, nothing. I was curious as to who people would name, what biases would come through, which authors would start debates. And I figured I could get a ...

Three Percent BONUS EPISODE: Interview with Nick During of NYRB

To supplement NYRB month on Three Percent, Chad and Anthony talked to Nick During, publicist for New York Review Books, about the marketing of Anniversaries by Uwe Johnson, the struggles to get attention for reprints, Henry Green's eternal rediscovery, and much more. (Including Nick's ratings of the impact of various ...

Three Percent #155: All Statistics Are Baseball Statistics

After a brief foray into Baseball Prospectus 2019 and Power Ball by Rob Neyer, Chad and Tom get down to business, analyzing Chad's statistically-based, very lukewarm take on translation production in 2018. They come up with innumerable, very rational reasons for the dip in translations that tend to revolve around ideas ...

NYRB Classics: Some Stats [Strategies for Publishers]

This month, I'm going to switch things up a bit. Initially, I was going to leave Canada behind and focus on one single book: Uwe Johnson's Anniversaries. But, well, this is 1,600 pages long, and I have to proof a couple things this month, and reread some books for my class, and go to AWP, and catch up on Deadly ...

“The Faerie Devouring” by Catherine Lalond [Quebec Literature from P.T. Smith]

Before starting this month's focus on Quebec literature, I asked P.T. Smith to recommend a few books for me to read, since he's one of the few Americans I know who has read a lot of Quebec literature. But rather than hoard these recommendations or write silly things about them, we decided it would be best if P.T. wrote weekly ...

Books That Would Make My BTBA 2019 Shortlist If Only They Qualified [BTBA 2019]

Today's Best Translated Book Award post is from Caitlin Baker of Island Books in Seattle/Mercer Island. She's also a frequent Two Month Review guest, and prolific Book Twitterer.  As I get closer to narrowing down the stacks of books I’ve read this past year and finalizing my BTBA 2019 longlist, there are two books ...

“Next Episode” by Hubert Aquin [Quebec Literature from P.T. Smith]

Before starting this month's focus on Quebec literature, I asked P.T. Smith to recommend a few books for me to read, since he's one of the few Americans I know who has read a lot of Quebec literature. But rather than hoard these recommendations or write silly things about them, we decided it would be best if P.T. wrote weekly ...

Three Percent #154: Celebrity Translators

After an update about Chad's computer files and subscriptions, Tom talks about Amazon leaving NYC and they both get into a long discussion about translator Molly Ringwald (who you might also recognize from Riverdale). Chad tries to order a book from IndieBound (where do these books process from?) and then they talk a bit ...

Véhicule Press/Esplanade Fiction & BookThug/Book*Hug [P.T. Smith Redux]

This really is the P. T. Smith-inspired post. As you likely know, Patrick has been writing weekly posts for Three Percent this month about some of his favorite works of Quebec literature. (See this post and this one.) He's one of the few Americans I know (maybe the only one?) who is deep into Quebec lit, so deep in fact that ...

New Release! 77 by Guillermo Saccomanno

We're a few days late announcing this here, but Tuesday, February 12th was the official pub date for Guillermo Saccomanno's 77, translated from the Spanish by Andrea G. Labinger. And today, it was featured in Vanity Fair as one of "6 Must-Read Books from Around the World." Here's the full press release that Anthony put ...

The Bones [BTBA 2019]

Today's BTBA post is from Sofia Samatar, author of A Stranger in Olondria and Assistant Professor at James Madison University.  Reading for an award jury is a special type of reading: very alert and very fast. I’m finding that the accelerated pace, combined with a certain sharpness in my eye, which has to read and ...

Biblioasis [Catherine Leroux Redux]

Last December, when I was working on this post about Quebec fiction, I came up with the idea of having themed months running throughout 2019. Which is why January was all about Spain, February about Quebec, and March about Uwe Johnson's Anniversaries. (Which might kill me and/or lead me into an insane rabbit-hole of ...

“Go Figure” by Réjean Ducharme [Quebec Literature from P.T.]

Before starting this month's focus on Quebec literature, I asked P.T. Smith to recommend a few books for me to read, since he's one of the few Americans I know who has read a lot of Quebec literature. But rather than hoard these recommendations or write silly things about this, we decided it would be best if P.T. wrote a ...

Prague by Madue Veilleux [Excerpt]

I wanted to learn how to live alone. I’d never done it. I’d always taken elaborate care to avoid solitude. I’d been single for two months over ten years. Almost never slept alone. I’d built relationships just to have someone, and I’d had sex for the same reason. At that point, I thought I had to choose between my ...

Interview with Peter McCambridge of QC Fiction

Following up on Monday's post, here's an interview with the founder of QC Fiction, Peter McCambridge. Since he goes into most of his bio below, I'm not going to preface this all that much, except to congratulate him on being a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Translation and the Giller Prize for Songs for the ...

Three Percent #153: Winter Beats and Breaks

At the top of this episode, Tom explains why he and Chad fell off the biweekly schedule for a bit, but then they come back strong, talking about Winter Institute, the Independent Publishers Caucus, minimum wage, this wild New Yorker article that doesn't quite do enough, but makes Chad angry, and Hanif Abdurraqib's Go Ahead ...

QC Fiction [Canada Redux]

I think I might have mentioned this in an earlier post, but now that we’ve put Spain to bed with a week dedicated to each of the four major languages—Castilian, Catalan, Galician, and Basque—we’re turning our attention to the North. As in the Great White. Canada: home of poutine, reasonable political leaders (now that ...

Guillermo Saccomanno [Open Letter Author of the Month]

In celebration of the release of 77 on Tuesday, February 12, we’ve decided to make Guillermo Saccomanno this month’s featured author. Like what we did for Volodine last month, we’re offering 30% all orders for Gesell Dome and 77 (use SACCOMANNO at checkout), and will be running a series of excerpts from his books. ...

Interview with Amaia Gabantxo

To finish off this month of Spanish literature, I talked to Amaia Gabantxo, translator of Twist and Blade of Light by Harkaitz Cano along with a half-dozen other Basque authors, including Bernardo Atxaga, Unai Elorriaga, and Kirmen Uribe, among others. She also moonlights as a flamenco singer and recently released an ...

New Poetry Editor at Open Letter and Call for Poetry Submissions!

Open Letter’s new Poetry Editor, Anastasia Nikolis, interviewed herself so that you wouldn’t have to. These are the questions she thinks might help you learn about the new person reading the poetry submissions at Open Letter Books.   Tell us a little bit about yourself. What else do you do when you aren’t ...

“Tell Them of Battles, Kings, & Elephants” by Mathias Énard

Tell Them of Battles, Kings, & Elephants Translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell 144 pgs. | pb |9780811227049 | $19.95 New Directions Publishing Reviewed by Grant Barber Énard is a Very Important Author indeed. He belongs on the stage with Pamuk, T Morrison, Morante, Okri, Delillo, J. Marías, ...

“Eleven Sooty Dreams” by Manuela Draeger [Excerpt]

As we posted about last week, in honor of Radiant Terminus being the next featured Two Month Review title, Antoine Volodine is our "Author of the Month." So, if you want to buy any of his books, you can get 30% off by using the code VOLODINE at checkout. (And yes, that applies to print AND ebooks.)  Last friday we ...

“The Gradual Disappearance of Jane Ashland” by Nicolai Houm

The Gradual Disappearance of Jane Ashland by Nicolai Houm Translated from Norwegian by Anna Paterson 228 pgs. | pb | 9781947793064 | $15.95 Tin House Books Review by David DeGusta   Nicolai Houm’s novel “The Gradual Disappearance of Jane Ashland,” translated from the Norwegian by Anna Paterson, opens with ...

Three Percent #152: Seven (Or So) Insights

Getting back on schedule for the new year, Chad and Tom convene to talk about two articles: "7 Publishing Insights Revealed by Last Year's Top 100 Bestselling Books," and "Virginia Woolf? Snob! Richard Wright? Sexist! Dostoyevsky? Anti-Semite!" They also talk a bit about YA books and the precipitous decline in reading as ...

Pub Date for “Night School: A Reader for Grownups” by Zsófia Bán!

To celebrate today's release of Night School: A Reader for Grownups by Zsófia Bán we're giving away five copies. You can enter by emailing Anthony Blake with "Night School" in the subject line. But hurry! This contest ends tonight at midnight Eastern time. Now, onto the book itself! We'll be posting a excerpt ...

Why Are Ebooks [Let’s Talk about Catalonia]

Just like with last week's post, I want to kick off this mini-survey of a couple Catalan titles with a chart of the presses who have brought out the most Catalan translations (according to the Translation Database): My first response is: Thank god I finally realized how easy it is to change the color on these charts! I ...

Radiant Terminus [Excerpt]

In support of Antoine Volodine as our featured "Author of the Month," throughout the day we'll be posting excerpts from the three books of his Open Letter has already published. (Next week we'll run excerpts from forthcoming ones . . . )  The last excerpt for today is from Radiant Terminus, translated from the French by ...

Antoine Volodine [Open Letter Author of the Month]

In addition to the monthly themes, another new series for 2019 is a monthly featured author from the Open Letter backlist. Each month we'll choose someone else from our backlist, write a number of posts about them and their work, and offer up a 30% on all purchases made during that month. And for January we've decided to ...

Why Are Meritocracy [Two Castilian Books]

I have two books that I want to talk about this week, and one related publishing/cultural issue, but before I get into all of that, I thought it would be interesting to dig a bit into some of the data from last week's "Spain By the Numbers" post. As I mentioned in that same post, over the course of this month, I'm going to ...

“Seventeen” by Hideo Yokoyama

Seventeen by Hideo Yokoyama Translated from Japanese by Louise Heal Kawai 368 pgs. | hc | 9780374261245 | $28.00 MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux Review by Maggie Myers   Seventeen is a thrilling mixture of truth and fiction by Hideo Yokoyama, acclaimed author of Six Four (which has also been translated into ...

Interview with Katie Whittemore

We're starting out this month's focus on Spanish literature with a look at a couple Castilian authors, especially Sara Mesa, whose works Open Letter will be publishing in 2020. Because I'm a bit impatient, I thought I'd introduce her to you now, via a sample of Four by Four (available on 1/9), a short piece on her ...

Books from Spain [By the Numbers]

I alluded to this in an earlier post (or two?), but one of the things I'd like to do on Three Percent this year is highlight a different group of books every month. It could be a particular country—like this month—or a set of publishers, or a single publisher, or single author. Regardless of the specifics of a particular ...

9 x 9 x 9: Everything Comes to an End

The other day I saw someone on Twitter asking haters of "best of" lists what changes they would institute to make these things more palatable. I thought about this for longer than I'd like to admit because a) circa-2001, I used to love year-end recaps. This was the era of "Best Week Ever" and other clip shows that were ...

I Wrote Some Stuff in 2018

In some ways, this is long overdue, but just in time for the final post of the year, here's the complete collection of "articles" that I wrote this year for Three Percent. The initial plan was to do one a week, using a new translation as a launching pad to talk about international literature, publishing, and book culture, ...

Three Percent #151: A Time for Gifting

After a long conversation about a rather strange Rochester gathering of arts organizations, Chad and Tom get down to business: recommending their favorite books of 2018. Except, rather than just make a list, they decide which of their friends or relatives should receive each of these titles. Then they talk about a couple ...

All the Cameras in Japan

As December rolled around and I started plotting out the end of this year-long series, I had a bunch of ideas for what the final few posts could be about. Knowing that 2019 will bring about some changes to Three Percent (has it ever really remained the same? over eleven-plus years, the one thing that's remained constant is my ...

Maybe These Days Will Be Over, Over Soon

Man, Three Percent is on a Canadian kick as of late. We podcasted with Kevin Williams of Talonbooks. We ran a review of Mama's Boy by David Goudreault. And now this post. It's as if I were 25% Canadian or something! (Fun fact: I actually am.) Oh, Canada. That country Americans remember exists every time we elect a ...

Adam’s Sexy Post [BTBA 2019]

This week's Best Translated Book Post is from Adam Hetherington, a reader from Tulsa who also served on last year's jury. “Do you want to do it again?” he asks. Shit. He is my friend, P.T. Smith. We were both BTBA judges last year; this year he’s invented some sort of easy supervisory role for himself, and invited ...

“Quo Vadis, Baby?” by Grazia Verasani

  Quo Vadis, Baby? by Grazia Verasani Translated from the Italian by Taylor Corse and Juliann Vitullo 180 pgs. | pb | 9781599103662 | $15.00 Italica Press Review by Jeanne Bonner   The last time I wrote about Grazia Verasani’s Quo Vadis, Baby? (Mondadori, 2007) I was researching an article for Literary Hub ...

Three Percent #150: Canadian Publishing

This week, Kevin Williams of Talonbooks out of Vancouver, British Columbia joins Tom and Chad to talk about the state of publishing in Canada. He recaps his career in the book business—as a bookseller, distributor, agent, and publisher—and provides a lot of insight into the Canadian funding structures, the not-so-great ...

The Fault in Our Numbers

the cigarette consumed itself inside her body, her extraordinary body, 70 percent water, 30 percent smoke, and I could not understand it —The Nocilla Lab (Sales(S) x List Price(P)) x Readership® – Fixed Operating Expenses(FOE) – Printing(PR) – Author Payment(AP) – Translator Payment(TP) – Marketing Costs(MC) = ...

Women in Translation [BTBA 2019]

This week's Best Translated Book Award post is from Pierce Alquist of Book Riot. After a record-breakingly frigid Thanksgiving here in the northeast, I’m dreaming wistfully of August. BBQs, beaches, and bikinis are all good but I mostly just miss being able to go outside without wrapping multiple scarves around my face. ...

Three Percent #149: I Have Some Advice

LIVE PODCAST! Well, sort of. Tom was in Rochester, so he and Chad recorded a spontaneous podcast while being in the same room as one another. (And with eight-month-old Aleks, who makes an appearance.) They talk about bookstores Tom visited on this trip, the National Book Awards, and J Franz's now infamous "rules for writers." ...

Long Books and Quick Hits [BTBA 2019]

This week's Best Translated Book Award post is from Elijah Watson. If you're a publisher and haven't submitted your titles for BTBA consideration, there's still time! All the info can be found here. I’m between working at bookstores right now, having left the great A Room of One’s Own in Madison, Wisconsin only a ...

My Struggle, Part II: The 60% Post

Over the past two weeks I've been in NYC for the Words Without Borders gala (THANK YOU AGAIN FOR THE OTTAWAY!), then to LA for the PEN Gala (amazing time with Jessica St. Clair and Dan O'Brien and you too, Ross, I suppose), to Seattle (Amazon Spheres are a thing!), and Minneapolis (sales conference isn't sales conference ...

Three Percent #148: The Hottest Trend

Sticking more or less to their biweekly schedule, Chad and Tom reconvene to talk about a couple recent articles, the challenges of being a literary nonprofit, interesting books they're reading, humblebrags about the Words Without Borders and PEN galas, and more. Surprising lack of sports talk this week, although there is a ...

Holiday BTBA Overview [BTBA 2019]

It's Best Translated Book Award build-up time, which lasts, like four months . . . Anyway, here's Kasia Bartoszynska's overview of a number of exciting titles vying for the BTBA 2019! The holiday season is not yet upon us, but for us judges, there’s an exciting new gift in the mail almost daily, in the form of packages ...

Three Percent #147: Helping Listeners One Translation Heuristic at a Time

This week's episode is mostly inspired by an email from a listener about evaluating translations, and although Tom and Chad don't provide the hardest and fastest rules, they do have an interesting conversation about how they read and judge translated books. They also follow up on a few different threads from earlier episodes ...

“Mamma’s Boy” by David Goudreault

Mamma's Boy by David Goudreault Translated from the French by JC Sutcliffe 192 pgs. | pb | 9781771663823 | $20.00 Book*hug Review by Rafael Sanchez Montes     This incredibly fun novel is a first-person account and confession by the unnamed protagonist, who offers his side of the story to what he ...

My Struggle, Part I: Confusion and Value

As part of my "Deep Vellum Month" experiment, I decided to move from the toponymy—and topography—of Iceland to geography. Or rather, "geography," as in the Geography of Rebels by Maria Gabriela Llansol. Like with most of the books I've been reading of late, I knew basically nothing about this book before picking it ...

Three Percent #146: The Conspiracy Theory Episode

An all-banter episode that touches on an array of topics, from ranking ideas on how to save indie bookstores, to The Great American Read's (embarrassing) top 10 vote getting books (are we sure Outlanders doesn't include people riding on dragons?), the Frankfurt Book Fair, self-censorship, QAnon + Marlins Man, a book scam, ...

It’s the Postseason! [Welcome to October]

It's been too long since I last posted a comprehensive update of where we are with translations this year. Which is why I spent most of today updating the Translation Database. There are probably still a number of books to be added before the year is out, but we're getting close to having a pretty stable—and pretty ...

“Odd Jobs” by Tony Duvert

Odd Jobs by Tony Duvert Translated from the French by S. C. Delaney & Agnés Potier 56 pgs. | pb | 9781939663290 | $11.95 Wakefield Press Review by Kaija Straumanis   I've long been a fan of Wakefield Press, ever since I first read Pataphysical Essays by René Daumal, though I don't get to read nearly as ...

Three Percent #145: Lobbying for No Celebrities

In response to a listener email, Tom expands on his comments from last podcast about the American Booksellers Association. Chad shares some data about genre works in translation and wonders about adding this to the Translation Database. He also has some curious info about Icelandic books in translation and then promotes one ...

Missed Opportunities (Here’s the NBA Translation Post I Promised)

Per usual when I'm writing these posts, I'm standing in front of my TV with the St. Louis Cardinals game on in the background, dwelling on what this season could've been. Sure, as I type, they have a .5 game lead for the final wild-card slot, but their odds of making the playoffs are only at 68.1%—far from a ...

Three Percent #144: The Perfect Publishing Award

Were the National Book Award longlists announced last week? Do Chad and Tom have opinions? YES AND YES. That conversation leads into talking about Penguin Random House, the "perfect publishing house," and then into a frank discussion about the future of small press publishing and the challenges of having a career in nonprofit ...

Publishing Strategies of Rediscovery

A few years ago, New Directions reissued three Clarice Lispector books (and one never-before translated one) with covers that combined into one giant portrait. Although it was preceded by the publication of a new translation of The Hour of the Star—by Ben Moser, who had recently written an all-encompassing biography of ...

“The Great Passage” by Shion Miura

The Great Passage by Shion Miura translated from the Japanese by Juliet Winters Carpenter 222 pgs. | pb |9781477823071 | $14.95  AmazonCrossing Reviewed by Talia Franks   Shion Miura’s The Great Passage chronicles the construction of a dictionary also called The Great Passage, which is a comprehensive catalog ...

Three Percent #143: The Cocky Pod

This week, Chad and Tom return to basics--more book talk than industry talk, a promise to release a new episode every other Wednesday--but start off with something that's very, very Three Percent: #Cockygate. Although the #Cockygate lawsuit is interesting in its own right, it's the breakdown of the seedy underworld of gaming ...

The Simple Pleasures of Reading

My initial plan for this post was to do a huge data dump for Women in Translation Month, but Meytal Radzinski already went and totally crushed it. She has all the best graphs, pie charts, breakdowns, overviews, recommendations, and more. Go click on that link and spend a day reading everything she has to say. I looked over ...

BTBA 2019: Juries, Dates, Request for Your Books

Earlier this week, Patrick Smith sent out the email below to as many publishers as possible, letting them know about this year's Best Translated Book Award juries. In case you didn't get this--or, if you're a translator or author who wants to make sure your book is submitted--I'm reposting it all here. (And, we will have a ...

“The Bottom of the Jar” by Abdellatif Laâbi

The Bottom of the Jar by Abdellatif Laâbi translated from the French by André Naffis-Sahely 220 pgs. | pb |9781935744603 | $17.00  Archipelago Books Reviewed by Brendan Riley   For English language readers, like this reviewer, whose literary sense of North Africa is delimited by periodic forays into the ...

Big Welcome to Anthony Blake

Welcome, Anthony Blake! We'd like to take a minute to introduce you to Anthony Blake—the latest addition to the Open Letter team. Anthony comes to us from the University of Arkansas, where, while finishing his MFA in Poetry, he helped create and run the Arkansas International. Prior to that, he was a marketing ...

Three Percent #142: The Great American Podcast

Back from their respective vacations, Chad and Tom talk about PBS's "Great American Read," the NEA's "Big Read," building a sustainable publishing model that puts readers first, the attempt to address the direct-to-consumer discount problem, books that they've recently read, and ones Tom refuses to stock. Tom also discloses ...

August 2018 Newsletter

Celebrate Women in Translation Month with 40% Off All Open Letter Books Written by Women OR Translated by Women Women in Translation Month is always an exciting time to discover, read, discuss, and celebrate books by women from around the world. It was created by Meytal Radzinski back in 2014, and has since spawned ...

The Very Pleasant Post

Usually I try and make the first post of the month one that's based around some sort of statistical analysis of what's going on with literature in translation. Since this is Women in Translation Month (#WIT2018), it would make a great deal of sense to run a bunch of data about women writers in translation, women translators, ...

A Whole Lot of Blather

I'm back from Ireland! I was there for the past two weeks as part of a University of Rochester Travel Club trip for which I served as the "academic host" and gave four different lectures--two on Ulysses, one on Irish humor, and one on the relationship between contemporary Irish literature and language. I think they all went ...

“Katalin Street” by Magda Szabó

Katalin Street by Magda Szabó translated from the Hungarian by Len Rix 248 pgs. | pb | 9781681371528 | $15.95  NYRB Classics Reviewed by Jason Newport     What is a woman, or her ghost, to do for herself? This is the question that haunts Hungarian author Magda Szabó in her three novels ...

Selection Bias, Best Translations, and Where Are the Women in Translation From?

A couple weeks ago, Boyd Tonkin, the excellent critic and founder of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize--the inspiration for the Best Translated Book Award, and now the Man Booker International--released a rather unattractive looking book called The 100 Best Novels in Translation.  It's pretty obvious what's ...

Three Percent #141: Reimagining the Podcast (AKA Everything Stays the Same)

This week, Chad and Tom talk about the "newly reimagined" BookExpo, the New York Rights Fair, the Albertine Prize (congrats to Emma Ramadan, Anne Garreta, and Deep Vellum!), the BTBA (congrats to Will Vanderhyden and Rodrigo Fresán!), likely shortlisted titles for next year's award, and more. Totally lacking in sports talk ...

9 Books Likely to Win the 2019 Best Translated Book Award

I'm just back from a poetry reading that's part of Rochester's The Ladder literary conference . . . actually, it was a poetry reading PLUS short stories (which are the poetry of novel writing), which is neither here nor there, except that a few of us played a sort of drinking game? Actually, we just straight up played a ...

9 Comp Authors for Dag Solstad, Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace the Listicle

So much has happened over the past two weeks! Given all that I want to say about Dag Solstad's books and the people who review them, I'm going to rush through a few general comments about recent publishing events. First off: the New York Rights Fair and BookExpo. This year marked the first ever NYRF and the "newly ...

The Crime in the Data

A couple weeks ago, writer Kári Tulinius asked me for some information on how prevalent crime novels are in what gets translated. As with most statistics related to literature in translation (and/or the book industry in general), the correct answer was, "uh . . . no idea. Maybe a lot? Sure seems like it . . . So, yeah." I ...

May Is a Month of Grading

The Best Translated Book Award Finalists were announced earlier this week, and following up on my earlier post looking at the representation of various languages on the BTBA longlists, I thought I'd take a second to highlight the publishing houses (#NameThePublisher) that have historically done the best on the BTBA ...

Three Percent #140: Save All the Nobels

Chad and Tom reunite after a few weeks of travel and hot takes to talk about the Best Translated Book Award shortlists, the Nobel Prize controversy, why we should (or shouldn't? or who cares?) save Barnes & Noble, and the awesomeness that is Jean-Patrick Manchette. This week's music is "Every 1's a Winner" by Ty ...

2018 Best Translated Book Award Finalists

May 15, 2018—Ten works of fiction and six poetry collections remain in the running for this year’s Best Translated Book Awards following the announcement of the two shortlists at The Millions website this morning. Featuring a blend of contemporary writers and modern classics, of writers from cultures around the world, ...

“The Last Bell” by Johannes Urzidil [Why This Book Should Win]

This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series (almost done!) is from Abe Nemon who writes essays and reviews of old and out-of-print books at OldBookAppreciator.com, as well as daily bios of obscure authors on their birthdays on Twitter at the handle @bookappreciator. The Last Bell by Johannes Urzidil, translated ...

“Beyond the Rice Fields” by Naivo [Why This Book Should Win]

This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series is from reader, reviewer, and BTBA judge P.T. Smith.  Beyond the Rice Fields by Naivo, translated from the French by Allison M. Charette (Madagascar, Restless Books) Naivo’s Beyond the Rice Fields is the first Malagasy novel ever translated into English. That’s ...

“I Am the Brother of XX” by Fleur Jaeggy [Why This Book Should Win]

This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series is from BTBA judge, reader, and reviewer P.T. Smith.  I Am the Brother of XX by Fleur Jaeggy, translated from the Italian by Gini Alhadeff (Switzerland, New Directions) Instant love is well and good. Confident and rejection is the same, if you’re the one doing the ...

“Incest” by Christine Angot [Why This Book Should Win]

Today's second Why This Book Should Win post is from Bradley Schmidt, a translator of contemporary German literature, most recently of Philipp Winkler’s Hooligan (Arcade), who also teaches writing and translation at Leipzig University. More at bradley-schmidt.com. Incest by Christine Angot, translated from the ...

“The Iliac Crest” by Cristina Rivera Garza [Why This Book Should Win]

First Why This Book Should Win entry for today is from Tim Horvath. Tim Horvath is the author of Understories (Bellevue Literary Press) and Circulation (sunnyoutside), as well as fiction in Conjunctions, AGNI, Harvard Review, and elsewhere. He teaches in the Creative Writing BFA/MFA programs at the New Hampshire ...

The End (Part VIII, IX, Epilogue, Pgs 237-281)

Last week, Chad and Brian (welded at the hip) were joined by “Stiliana Milkova”:https://www.oberlin.edu/stiliana-milkova of Oberlin College’s department of comparative literature to discuss the final moments of Georgi Gospodinov’s The Physics of Sorrow. While we learned that Chad doesn’t like Elena Ferrante, and ...

“Odyssey” by Homer

The Odyssey by Homer Translated from the Greek by Emily Wilson 592 pgs. | hc | 9780393089059 | $39.95 W. W. Norton Reviewed by Peter Constantine                                   Now goddess, child of Zeus, tell the old story for our modern ...

Open Letter is Hiring a Marketing Assistant

As mentioned on the most recent podcast, we are searching for a Marketing Assistant to help out with promoting our books to reviewers, booksellers, and individuals. The complete ad is posted below, and available here. And you have to apply through that link. Open Letter is part of the University of Rochester, so the ...

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Three Percent #139: The Local Scene

Chad and Tom reconvene to talk about self-published titles that stay local, the Best Translated Book Award longlists, the elitism of the industry, and how you should vote for Emma Ramadan’s translation of Not One Day for this year’s Albertine Prize. This week’s music is a snippet from the 13+ minute long Beach ...

Death by Poetry and The Lies about Me

I have a litany of reasons for why I’m combining a few posts here and writing a shorter, more condensed, straightforward post than most of the others. Baby (always an excuse), other obligations—such as the Best Translated Book Award longlists announcement and a bachelor party in which “what happens in Boiceville, stays ...

Best Translated Book Award 2018: The Longlists!

April 10, 2018—Celebrating its eleventh consecutive year of honoring literature in translation, the Best Translated Book Awards is pleased to announce the 2018 longlists for both fiction and poetry. Announced at The Millions, the lists include a diverse range of authors, languages, countries, and publishers. On the ...

Links

Weblogs A Different Stripe A Fistful of Words Absinthe Magazine Blog Arts Fuse Bacacay: The Polish Literature Weblog Bookdwarf booklit Bookslut 2 and 2: Blog for Clockroot Books Conversational Reading Critical Mass Ed Champion's Return of the Reluctant Emerging Writers Network Esther Allen Gloden Rule ...

About

Three Percent launched in the summer of 2007 with the lofty goal of becoming a destination for readers, editors, and translators interested in finding out about modern and contemporary international literature. The motivating force behind the website is the view that reading literature from other countries is vital to ...

The Return of Gospodinov, the Curator (Part VI, Pgs 179-200)

This week for the Two Month Review of Georgi Gospodinov’s The Physics of Sorrow we’re looking at section six, “The Story Buyer,” which greets us with an up-front discussion of Gospodinov’s writing process along with more beautiful prose throughout a series of the darkest and most human stories in this collection ...

A Myth with a Twist (Part V, Pgs 151-178)

Last week, Chad, Brian, and special guest Tom Flynn had a particularly boisterous discussion of Part V of The Physics of Sorrow that was as insightful towards the literature at hand as much as it was to learn sick burns for your friends with weak March Madness brackets. But between the trash talk and discussion of oysters, ...

This Headline’ll Make You MAD, MAD!

It’s fitting that I’m writing this post about a book called Trick as Stormy Daniels is on 60 Minutes? This is one of the daily reminders that life is not books, and that books aren’t as important as I make them out to be in my mind. Nothing matters, nothing makes sense. Guns and corruption are way more important than ...

Ties that Confine [BTBA 2018]

This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is from Lori Feathers, co-owner of Interabang Books in Dallas, TX. She’s also a freelance book critic and member of the National Book Critics Circle. Her recent reviews can be found at Words Without Borders, Full Stop, World Literature Today, Three Percent, Rain Taxi, and on ...

Gospodinov, the Curator; “The Physics of Sorrow,” the Time Capsule (Part IV, Pgs 119-150)

Last week, Chad, Brian, special guest Patrick Smith, and an insightful YouTube commentator discussed part IV of Georgi Gospodinov’s The Physics of Sorrow. This section, in many ways, brought us full circle to the nature of Gospodinov’s work by introducing us to the cultural phenomena of the time capsule, and the ...

9 Moments That Make “Tomb Song” the Frontrunner for the National Book Award in Translation

  Tomb Song by Julián Herbert, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney (Graywolf Press) Moment Number One “Technique, my boy,” says a voice in my head. “Shuffle the technique.” To hell with it: in her youth, Mamá was a beautiful half-breed Indian who had five husbands: a fabled pimp, a ...

Pathways to Discovering the Obscure?

  The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter by Matei Calinescu, translated from the Romanian by Adriana Calinescu and Breon Mitchell (New York Review Books) When I first started reading The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter by Matei Calinescu, translated from the Romanian by Adriana Calinescu and Breon ...

Obsessive Empathetic-Somatic Syndrome and You (Part III)

On this week’s Two Month Review blog post, we’re exploring Part III: “The Yellow House” from Georgi Gospodinov’s The Physics of Sorrow. As was unanimous from the conversation between Chad, Brian, and Nick last week, this is where the magic of the book and the skill of Gospodinov as a writer truly start to shine. And ...

Context Is Everything

Given the length of yesterday’s post, I’m just going to jump right into things, starting with this handmade Excel spreadsheet showing the three-year rolling average of the total number of translations published in the first quarter (January-March) of every year since 2008.   That’s not the most illuminating ...

Everyone Needs an Editor

Before I get into the meat of this post—which is basically just a bunch of quotes and a handful of observations—I wanted to check back in on something from an earlier essay. Back in January, I wrote about Leïla Slimani’s The Perfect Nanny and basically assumed that it would be a best-seller. (There was also a lot of ...

Sorrow-Maker Gospodinov (Part 1, Pgs 1-58)

This week we will be looking at the opening section of Georgi Gospodinov’s The Physics of Sorrow. If you didn’t already, you can catch the conversation between Chad Post, Tom Roberge, and Brian Wood on this section of the book at Three Percent or on YouTube for the unedited, behind the scenes full audio-visual experience ...

Less Than Deadly Serious

Every spring, I teach a class on “World Literature & Translation” in which we read ~10 new translations, talk to as many of the translators as possible, and then the students have to choose one of the books to win their imaginary “Best Translated Book Award.” It’s a great exercise—trying to explain why they ...

Georgi Gospodinov and The Physics of Sorrow (Introduction)

Throughout this season of the Two Month Review, Santiago Morrice will be writing weekly pieces about the section of the book discussed on the previous week’s podcast. These will likely go a bit more in depth into the style and content of the novel itself, nicely complementing the podcasts. On last week’s podcast, Chad ...

Noble Expectations

When I first decided to undertake this project of writing about one 2018 translation a week, I knew that there would come a week in which I didn’t finish the book that I had planned to write about. This might be due to time constraints, or simply because I didn’t feel like finishing the book in question. Well, it took ...

Making the List [BTBA 2018]

This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is from Tara Cheesman, a freelance book critic and National Book Critics Circle member whose recent reviews can be found at The Rumpus, Book Riot, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Quarterly Conversation. Since 2009 she’s written the blog Reader At Large (formerly BookSexy ...

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Three Percent #138: This Is the Most This Podcast Ever

Alex Shepard from The New Republic joins Chad and Tom to discuss the state of book journalism, the new National Book Award for Translation, Chad’s annoying whining about BookMarks, Winter Institute, and more. It’s a fun episode that goes deep into some contemporary book publishing issues—and the disparity between the ...

An Imaginary Sabermetrics for Publishing

  Empty Set by Verónica Gerber Bicecci, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney (Coffee House) Although five books is most definitely a small sample size of throwaway proportions, out of the books that I’ve written about for this weekly “column,” Empty Set by Verónica Gerber Bicecci and ...

Love Is Colder than Death [BTBA 2018]

This week’s BTBA post is from Jeremy Kang, an avid reader, writer, artist, and photographer and freelance reviewer. He is interested in film, languages, culture, and history.   Bergeners by Tomas Espedal, Translated from the Norwegian by James Anderson (Seagull Books) “The Ballad of Denmark Square” A car ...

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Three Percent #137: The Fire & the Fury Over No Amazon in Rochester

After a few weeks away from podcast, Chad and Tom reunite to talk about sales of Fire and Fury and its lasting impact, Milo’s edits, the TA First Translation Prize Shortlist, Rochester’s failure to land the new Amazon HQ, Wormwood, and more. For those keeping track as you listen, here’s the baffling video ...

Never Fact-Check a Listicle

Back when I kicked off my 2018 Translations series I chose to include Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi as the fourth book from January I would read and review. And why not? It won the 2014 International Prize for Arabic Fiction1 and came with pretty high praise. “A haunting allegory of man’s savagery against man ...

“Joyce y las gallinas” by Anna Ballbona

Joyce y las gallinas by Anna Ballbona 200 pgs. | pb | 9788433937261 | €17.90  Anagrama Reviewed by Brendan Riley   This review was originally published as a report on the book at New Spanish Books, and has been reprinted here with permission of the reviewer. The book was originally published in the Catalan ...

A Best-seller Should Be Divisive

When I came up with my plan of reading (and writing about) a new translation every week, I wanted to try and force myself to read books that I would normally just skip over. There are definitely going to be months filled with books by New Directions, Coffee House, Dalkey Archive, etc., but to write about just those titles ...

In Favor of Translator Afterwords

As dumb as the content might be, there’s something to be said for hot takes in the sports world. Or maybe not the takes themselves—again, always dumb, always misguided, always loaded with bad suppositions and overly confident writing—but rather the situation in which you get to dissect and dismantle a hot take. It’s ...

Tabucchi in Portugal: On Tabucchi’s “Viaggi e altri viaggi” [an essay by Jeanne Bonner]

Jeanne Bonner is a writer, editor and journalist, and translator from the Italian now based in Connecticut. In the fall, she began teaching Italian at the University of Connecticut where she is also working on several translation projects. You can find out more about Jeanne and her work at her website here. It’s a travel ...

It’s 2018 and Where Have the Translations Gone?

Now that the Translation Database is over at Publishers Weekly, and in a format that makes it both possible to update in real time1 and much easier to query, I want to use it as the basis of a couple new regular columns here at Three Percent. First off, I want to get back to running monthly previews of translations. But, ...

“Lost in Translation: An Illustrated Compendium of Untranslatable Words from Around the World” by Ella Frances Sanders

Lost in Translation: An Illustrated Compendium of Untranslatable Words from Around the World by Ella Frances Sanders 112 pgs. | hc | 9781607747109 | $14.99 Ten Speed Press Reviewed by Kaija Straumanis   Hello and greetings in the 2017 holiday season! For those of you still looking for something to gift a ...

The Size of the World

The Size of the World by Branko Anđić translated from the Serbian by Elizabeth Salmore 208 pages | pb | 9788661452154 | $10.99 Reviewed by Jaimie Lau   Three generations of men—a storyteller, his father and his son—encompass this book’s world. . . . it is a world of historical confusion, illusion, ...

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Three Percent #136: The Riffraff Is Upon Us

Back at last! Chad and Tom reunite after a month in which Tom finished building an entire bookstore and bar, which is now open! In addition to talking about Riffraff’s first week of business, they talk about the NCIBA statement against publishers selling direct to consumers and institutions, about Tyrant Books tweeting ...

“Island of Point Nemo” by Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès

The Island of Point Nemo by Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès translated from the French by Hannah Chute 450 pgs. | pb | 9781940953625 | $17.95 Open Letter Books Reviewed by Katherine Rucker   The Island of Point Nemo is a novel tour by plane, train, automobile, blimp, horse, and submarine through a world that I can ...

“The Truce” by Mario Benedetti

The Truce by Mario Benedetti translated from the Spanish by Harry Morales 192 pgs. | pb | 9780141396859 | £8.99  Penguin Modern Classics Reviewed by Arianna Aron   Mario Benedetti (1920-2009), Uruguay’s most beloved writer, was a man who loved to bend the rules. He gave his haikus as many syllables as fit ...

Two Events in Toronto!

If you listen to either of our podcasts, you probably know that I’ve been traveling a whole lot this fall. Spain, Poland, Minneapolis (twice!), and Brazil. All of these trips have been fantastic, and you can expect some posts about Poland and Brazil in the near future, but in the meantime, I wanted to tell you about my ...

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Three Percent #135: Polish Reportage and a Lot of Sci-Fi Talk

After discussing the incredibly long Dublin Literary Prize longlist, Chad and Tom discuss Polish Reportage, Stanislaw Lem’s book covers, ordering books for Riffraff, and a serial killer. UPDATE: Here’s a link to all of the new Polish Lem covers. And the one for His Master’s Voice. This week’s ...

“I Am a Season That Does Not Exist in the World” by Kim Kyung-Ju

I Am a Season That Does Not Exist in the World by Kim Kyung-Ju translated from the Korean by Jake Levine 144 pgs. | pb |9781939568144 | $14.95 Black Ocean Reviewed by Jacob Rogers   Kim Kyung Ju’s I Am a Season That Does Not Exist in the World, translated from the Korean by Jake Levine, is a wonderful ...

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Three Percent #134: The Books We Read and Why We Read Them

After an impassioned pitch for why you should support Open Letter’s annual campaign, Chad and Tom talk about ALTA, about how best to promote international literature to common readers, about the moral argument for reading translations, about Tim Parks and this article on Han Kang’s Human Acts, and about how ...

Help Support Open Letter!

If you’re friends with us on Facebook (either me personally, or the press itself), or visit the Twitter on a regular basis, you’re hopefully aware that Open Letter just launched an annual fundraising campaign to support our 10-year anniversary. And if you’re not already familiar with this, that’s ...

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Three Percent #133: From Catalonia to South Korea

After a bit of a hiatus, Chad and Tom are back to talk about Riffraff’s new location, break down Catalonian politics and the recent editorial gathering the Ramon Llull Institute put on in Barcelona, and somewhat pick apart this article about Deborah Smith’s translation of The Vegetarian. This week’s music is Day I ...

Wojciech Nowicki Tour!

This evening, at Volumes Bookcafe in Chicago, Wojciech Nowicki’s U.S. tour for Salki kicks off. A four-city tour spanning the next ten days, this is your one opportunity in 2017 to meet the author of the book about which Andrzej Stasiuk said, “Your skin will crawl with pleasure from ...

“Kingdom Cons” by Yuri Herrera

Kingdom Cons by Yuri Herrera translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman 220 pgs. | pb | 9781908276926 | $13.95  And Other Stories Reviewed by Sarah Booker   Yuri Herrera is overwhelming in the way that he sucks readers into his worlds, transporting them to a borderland that is at once mythical in its ...

Publisher Profile: Nordisk Books

Summer intern David M. Smith, translator from the Norwegian, 2017 ALTA Fellow, future guest on the Two Month Review, conducted this interview with Duncan Lewis of Nordisk Books. Proving there’s more to Scandinavia than macabre crime fiction (not that there’s anything wrong with that) and—hygge (always hygge), ...

Another take on “The Invented Part” by Rodrigo Fresán

The Invented Part by Rodrigo Fresán translated from the Spanish by Will Vanderhyden 552 pgs. | pb | 9781940953564 | $18.95 Open Letter Books Reviewed by Tiffany Nichols   Imagine reading a work that suddenly and very accurately calls out you, the reader, for not providing your full attention to the act of ...

Perceived Humiliations, The Board, and the Dangers of Desire [Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller]

On this week’s Two Month Review podcast, we’ll be discussing the fifth composition book and VI (pages 69-139) from Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller. As a bit of preparation, below you’ll find some initial thoughts, observations, and quotes. You can also download this post as a PDF document. As always, ...

Best Translated Book Awards 2018: Judges, Dates, and More!

It’s that time again! Listed below are all the details for this year’s Best Translated Book Award juries! Award Dates In terms of dates, this is subject to change, but currently we’re planning on announcing the longlists for fiction and poetry on Tuesday, April 10th, the finalists on Tuesday, May ...

The Body, Biographies, and Workplace Injustice! [Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller]

On this week’s Two Month Review podcast, we’ll be discussing the IV composition book (pages 32-68) from Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller. As a bit of preparation, below you’ll find some initial thoughts, observations, and quotes. You can also download this post as a PDF document. As always, you can get ...

Women in Translation Month [Throwback No.2]

As many of you may have noticed already, August is widely considered Women in Translation Month (look for the #WITMonth hashtag basically anywhere). Since Open Letter has published its fair share of baller women authors over the past ten years, we thought we’d take a few posts to highlight a handful of our all-time favorite ...

Interview with Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès

To celebrate the official pub date for Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès’s Island of Point Nemo, you’ll find an interview below between the translator, Hannah Chute (who received a Banff Translation Fellowship to work on this book) and the author himself. You can get the book now either through our website, or from ...

Women in Translation Month [Throwback No.1]

As many of you may have noticed already, August is widely considered Women in Translation Month (look for the #WITMonth hashtag basically anywhere). Since Open Letter has published its fair share of baller women authors over the past ten years, we thought we’d take a few posts to highlight a handful of our all-time ...

Where (and When) Are We? [Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller]

On this week’s Two Month Review podcast, we’ll be discussing the Biography, first composition book, second book, and third composition book (pages 1-31) from Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller. As a bit of preparation, below you’ll find some initial thoughts, observations, and quotes. You can also download this ...

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Three Percent #132: Women in Translation Month, Genres, Co-opting a Style, and Garbage Plates

On this episode of the Three Percent Podcast, Chad and Tom talk about Peter Straub’s 2010 article about genre, the existence (or not) of translation as a genre, Hudson Bookstore’s attempt to co-op the indie bookstore “ethos,” and this stupid infographic. They also touch on Women in Translation month ...

New Jacket Copy for "The Invented Part" from Chad and Brian

As you probably heard on the most recent episode of the Two Month Review, Chad and Brian used a “guide to writing and publishing” to create new, focus-group approved, jacket copy for Fresán’s The Invented Part. In case it was hard to follow on the audio amid all the laughter, here are their respective ...

"The Invented Part" in The Invented Part

As she was reading along with the Two Month Review, Tiffany Nichols kept track of every time the phrase “the invented part” appeared. Here they all are! “he’ll invent something, anything, when answering how he invents the invented part. The invented part—an oh so insubstantial cloud that, ...

Interview with Rodrigo Fresán (Part V)

If you’d rather read this podcast in one document, just dowload this PDF. Otherwise, click here to find all four of the earlier pieces along with a bunch of other Two Month Review posts about The Invented Part. Special thanks to Will Vanderhyden for conducting—and translating—this ...

Airplanes, Hyphellipses, and What's Next? [The Invented Part]

On this week’s Two Month Review podcast, we’ll be discussing the seventh, and final, part of The Invented Part (“The Imaginary Person,” pages 441-552). As a bit of preparation, below you’ll find some initial thoughts, observations, and quotes. You can also download this post as a PDF ...

I See You [The Invented Part]

On this week’s Two Month Review podcast, we’ll be discussing the sixth part of The Invented Part (“Meanwhile, Once Again, Beside the Museum Stairway, Under a Big Day,” pages 405-440). As a bit of preparation, below you’ll find some initial thoughts, observations, and quotes. You can also ...

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Three Percent #131: Stories from the First Half of 2017

Now that half of 2017 is over, Chad and Tom take a minute to reflect back on major stories, trends, and books from the first six months of the year. The conversation is quite lively (listen in to hear Chad lose his mind after reading the latest “Book Match” column), and covers issues of bookstore ownership, ...

Interview with Rodrigo Fresán (Part IV)

This is the fourth of a five-part interview with Rodrigo Fresán. Earlier parts are all avialble on the Three Percent website (I, II, and III), as are all other Two Month Review posts. Special thanks to Will Vanderhyden for conducting—and translating—this interview. Will Vanderhyden: The narrator of ...

"Tomás Jónsson, Bestseller" Release Day!

Fans of challenging, cerebral, modernist epics, rejoice! Today marks the official release date of Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller by Guðbergur Bergsson, a masterpiece of twentieth-century Icelandic literature, the fifth Icelandic work Open Letter has published to date. This is a book that is sure to launch a thousand ...

Structure, Time, Memory, and the Sadness of a Disillusioned Writer [The Invented Part]

On this week’s Two Month Review podcast, we’ll be discussing the fifth part of The Invented Part (“Life After People, or Notes for a Brief History of Progressive Rock and Science Fiction,” pages 361-404). As a bit of preparation, below you’ll find some initial thoughts, observations, and ...

Interview with Rodrigo Fresán (Part III)

You can read the first part of this interview here, the second here, and you can click here for all Two Month Review posts. Special thanks to Will Vanderhyden for conducting—and translating—this interview. Will Vanderhyden: Your fiction wears its influences on its sleeve, but not only do you fully ...

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Three Percent #130: French Fun and BookExpo

Delayed for a couple weeks due to travel and work schedules, Chad and Tom are back to talk about the inaugural Albertine Prize (won by Antoine Volodine’s Bardo or Not Bardo, translated by J. T. Mahany), Houellebecq’s no show, and BookExpo and the forthcoming New York Rights Fair. They also talk a bit about the Two ...

Interview with Rodrigo Fresán (Part II)

You can read the first part of this interview here, and you can click here for all Two Month Review posts. Special thanks to Will Vanderhyden for conducting—and translating—this interview. Will Vanderhyden: Now, this is a question that, in a way, the book takes as its point of departure—so it might make ...

Interview with Rodrigo Fresán (Part I)

As you hopefully already know, for the next two months we’ll be producing a weekly podcast and a series of posts all about Rodrigo Fresán’s The Invented Part. All grouped under the title “Two Month Review,” this initiative is part book club, part exercise in slow reading, and part opportunity to ...

“The Invented Part” by Rodrigo Fresán

The Invented Part by Rodrigo Fresán translated from the Spanish by Will Vanderhyden 552 pgs. | pb | 9781940953564 | $18.95 Open Letter Books Reviewed by Chad W. Post   Given all the Two Month Review posts and everything else, hopefully you’ll have heard of Rodrigo Fresán’s The Invented Part by now. But ...

Win a Copy of "Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller" by Gudbergur Bergsson from GoodReads!

As you may already know, Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller, translated by Lytton Smith, is going to be the second Two Month Review title. This “season” will take place in August and September, but you can get a head start by winning a copy of the book through GoodReads. If you’re a GoodReads user, all you have to ...

"Chronicle of the Murdered House" and "Extracting the Stone of Madness" Win the 2017 BTBA!

The tenth annual Best Translated Book Awards were announced this evening at The Folly in New York City, and at The Millions with Lúcio Cardoso’s Chronicle of the Murdered House, translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson, winning for fiction, and Alejandra Pizarnik’s Extracting the Stone of ...

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Three Percent #129: Two Missteps from Disaster

In this week’s episode, following an unintentional s***storm started on social media, Chad and Tom talk about the obligations of publishers and freelance translators, the cascade of things that can go wrong in the publication process, the necessary sales needed for translations to break even (and how likely that ...

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Three Percent #128: Remembering, Rereading, Rewatching

In this week’s episode, Chad and Tom talk about their first ever episode, the new Granta list of Best Young American Novelists,, and books they’re looking forward to reading this summer. They also introduce the “Two Month Review”—a new series of weekly mini-episodes launching on ...

Chad's Very Unscientific BTBA Odds [BTBA 2017]

When I started posting the “Why This Book Should Win”: entries for this year’s longlisted BTBA titles, I decided to include mostly random, totally unscientific odds for each book both to be shortlisted and to win the whole award. Taken in the aggregate, these odds made no sense. Combined, the ten fiction ...

Why These Poetry Finalists Should Win [BTBA 2017]

Following on yesterday’s post on the fiction finalists, here are links to the “Why This Book Should Win” posts for the five poetry finalists along with short blurbs about what makes each book so good. And once again, if you want to weigh in with your own thoughts, feel free to post to the BTBA Facebook ...

Why These Fiction Finalists Should Win [BTBA 2017]

We’re just over a week away from the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award winners1, so it’s a good time to start ramping up the speculation. Tomorrow I’ll post about the poetry finalists, and give updated odds on the entire shortlist on Thursday, but for today, I thought it would be worthwhile to ...

2017 Best Translated Book Award Fiction Finalists [BTBA 2017]

Wicked Weeds by Pedro Cabiya, translated from the Spanish by Jessica Powell (Dominican Republic, Mandel Vilar Press) Chronicle of the Murdered House by Lúcio Cardoso, translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson (Brazil, Open Letter Books) Eve Out of Her Ruins by Ananda Devi, ...

2017 Best Translated Book Award Poetry Finalists [BTBA 2017]

Berlin-Hamlet by Szilárd Borbély, translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet (Hungary, New York Review Books) Of Things by Michael Donhauser, translated from the German by Nick Hoff and Andrew Joron (Austria, Burning Deck Press) Cheer Up, Femme Fatale by Yideum Kim, translated from the Korean by Ji ...

2017 Best Translated Book Award Finalists [BTBA 2017]

April 18, 2017—Ten works of fiction and five poetry collections remain in the running for this year’s Best Translated Book Awards following the announcement of the two shortlists at The Millions website this morning. A wide range of languages and writing styles are represented on these shortlists, from the more ...

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Three Percent #127: The 2017 Best Translated Book Award Finalists

Riffraff co-owner and BTBA poetry judge Emma Ramadan joins Chad and Tom to talk about the fifteen finalists for this year’s Best Translated Book Awards. After breaking down the poetry and fiction lists, the three talk about the new New York Times Match Book column and the value of booksellers and librarians. This ...

“A Spare Life” by Lidija Dimkovska [Why This Book Should Win]

Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...

“Moshi Moshi” by Banana Yoshimoto [Why This Book Should Win]

Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...

Toward Horizontal Thought: An Interview with László Földényi

Following yesterday’s book review on László Földényi’s Melancholy , reviewer Jason Newport was able to supplement his reading and review by getting a hold of the author himself, to delve a bit further into the process of the book and how melancholy is perceived. Jason Newport is currently a Fulbright ...

“Doomi Golo: The Hidden Notebooks” by Boubacar Boris Diop [Why This Book Should Win]

Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...

“Eve Out of Her Ruins” by Ananda Devi [Why This Book Should Win]

Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...

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Three Percent #126: The Potential Perils of Freelancing

On this week’s podcast, Tom and Chad discuss the potential troubles of getting paid as a freelance translator, the Missing Richard Simmons podcast, and Seed by Joanna Walsh. There are also allusions to the forthcoming BTBA shortlists, and a new podcast project that will be starting up in May . . . This week’s ...

“Zama” by Antonio Di Benedetto [Why This Book Should Win]

Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...

“The Young Bride” by Alessandro Baricco [Why This Book Should Win]

Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...

“Angel of Oblivion” by Maja Haderlap [Why This Book Should Win]

Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...

Some Recent Open Letter Publicity

We don’t post these updates near as frequently as we should, but here’s a rundown of some interesting recent publicity pieces for our books. Frontier by Can Xue, translated from the Chinese by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping Interview between Can Xue and Porochista Khakpour (Words Without ...

“Why This Book Should Win” So Far . . .

Unless someone surprises me with a new write-up, we don’t have any Why This Book Should Win posts for today. That leaves fifteen books to be covered next week, leading us right into the April 18th announcement of the BTBA fiction and poetry finalists. But for today, I thought I’d just post links to all twenty of the ...

“Berlin-Hamlet” by Szilárd Borbély [Why This Book Should Win]

Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...

“Among Strange Victims” by Daniel Saldaña París [Why This Book Should Win]

Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...

“In the Café of Lost Youth” by Patrick Modiano [Why This Book Should Win]

Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...

“Umami” by Laia Jufresa [Why This Book Should Win]

Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...

“Super Extra Grande” by Yoss [Why This Book Should Win]

Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...

“Ladivine” by Marie NDiaye [Why This Book Should Win]

Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...

“My Marriage” by Jakob Wassermann [Why This Book Should Win]

Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...

“Wicked Weeds” by Pedro Cabiya [Why This Book Should Win]

Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...

2017 Best Translated Book Award Fiction Longlist [BTBA 2017]

The Queue by Basma Abdel Aziz, translated from the Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette (Egypt, Melville House) The Young Bride by Alessandro Baricco, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein (Italy, Europa Editions) Wicked Weeds by Pedro Cabiya, translated from the Spanish by Jessica Powell (Dominican Republic, ...

2017 Best Translated Book Award Poetry Longlist [BTBA 2017]

Berlin-Hamlet by Szilárd Borbély, translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet (Hungary, New York Review Books) Of Things by Michael Donhauser, translated from the German by Nick Hoff and Andrew Joron (Austria, Burning Deck Press) Instructions Within by Ashraf Fayadh, translated from the Arabic by Mona ...

Tenth Annual Best Translated Book Awards Longlists [BTBA 2017]

March 28, 2017—Celebrating its tenth iteration, the Best Translated Book Awards announced its longlists for fiction and poetry this morning, highlighting the best international works of literature published in the past year. Announced at The Millions, the lists include a diverse range of authors, from authors who have ...

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Three Percent #125: 2017 Best Translated Book Award Longlists

In this podcast, Tom and Chad go over all thirty-five longlisted titles on this year’s Best Translated Book Award longlists. They offer up some uninformed opinions (and a couple informed ones), make their guesses as to which titles will move on, and talk generally about the plethora of Spanish titles on the two lists. ...

BTBA Final Clues [Days 4 & 5, I Guess]

OK, so these clues are as late as possible, but I did promise a week of BTBA hints, and technically, I have twelve more hours until the longlists are unveiled . . . It’s gotten more and more difficult to come up with these as the days have gone along. I mostly just can’t wait until we can get to talking about the ...

The Hatred of Music

Pascal Quignard’s __The Hatred of Music_ is the densest, most arcane, most complex book I’ve read in ages. It’s also a book that covers a topic so basic, so universal—almost primordial—that just about any reader will be perversely thrilled by the intersections Quignard unearths between the mind and the world of ...

Fragile Travelers

In Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Flaubert attempted to highlight the ordinary, tired, and often crass nature of common expressions by italicising them within the text. When Charles, Emma Bovary’s mediocre husband, expresses himself in a manner akin to that of a million other colourless men before him, Flaubert uses ...

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Three Percent #124: Amazon Gets Physical

This week, Tom and Chad talk about the Cubs and their “Zen way,” the largest publishers in the U.S., this If there were Oscars for Books! “article,” and, most importantly, the new Amazon bookstore, which Tom visited and brought back some pictures. This week’s music is ...

“Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei” by Eliot Weinberger

19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei by Eliot Weinberger Translated by Various 64 pgs. | pb | 9780811226202 | $10.95 New Directions Publishing Reviewed by Russell Guilbault   Eliot Weinberger takes big strides across literary history in his genuinely breathtaking short work, 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, ...

Likes of the Future Are Shaped by Likes of the Past

As in past weeks here’s a PDF version of this post, which might be a lot easier to read. Two years ago, Yale University Press released The Dirty Dust, Alan Titley’s translation of Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s Cré na Cille, a supposedly “untranslatable” masterpiece of Irish literature. This past ...

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Three Percent #123: The Challenges of Selling Books

This week’s podcast opens with the sad news of Harry Mathews’s passing, then goes deep on Winter Institute, and a couple really long essays Chad wrote for Three Percent. There’s a lot that gets unpacked in this episode, from anticipatory lists and market acceleration, to the way that bookstores choose which ...

Tim Parks, Style, and Europanto

As in past weeks, here’s a PDF version of this post, which might be a lot easier to read. For a few years now, on the first day of my “Translation & World Literature” class, I give my students an impossible task—translating the first few paragraphs of Diego Marani’s Las Adventures des ...

The Structural Inequality of Comp Titles

Although not as long as “last week’s post,” I would recommend downloading the PDF version. Besides, it just looks prettier in that format. Although the main point of this post is pretty general and obvious—the rich get richer by already being rich—it was inspired by some publishing-specific, ...

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Three Percent #122: Music We Listened to in 2016

As in years past, the entire Open Letter crew (Chad, Nate, Kaija) got together to talk about some of the music they listened to over the past year. (That and Bud Light ads.) You can listen to all the songs featured on this podcast on this Spotify playlist: Also, just a reminder, since we changed our podcast ...

Reader Selection and Market Acceleration: Are We Living in a Backward World?

Given the insane length of this post, I would recommend downloading the PDF version. Besides, it’s easier to read the footnotes that way. Some of which are pretty fun, I think. Much in the same way it’s impossible for me to choose a single part of Franco Moretti’s Distant Reading that I like the best, I ...

Recent Open Letter Publicity [Justine, Gessel Dome, Ugresic, and More]

I don’t post on social media all that often—unless I’ve been drinking—but do generally try and share all of the reviews and publicity pieces that come up about Open Letter. And as with anything else, this tends to come in waves, including the onslaught of pieces from the past few days that I’ve ...

Open Letter in 2016

Sure, the start of a new year is a good time to look to the future, make resolutions you’ll definitely break, and all of that, but it’s also a nice moment to reflect on the past twelve months. Rather than include all the things that happened with Open Letter last year—from the success of our 2nd Annual ...

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Three Percent #121: The Summer Following

Caroline Casey from Coffee House Press joined Chad and Tom on this podcast to talk about 2016 movies, TV shows, and podcasts. Before they got into a long discussion about the royal family, Luke Cage, Crimetown, Midnight Special, and more, they touched on a number of things that are both intriguing and a little bit ...

“Radio: Wireless Poem in Thirteen Messages” by Kyn Taniya

Radio: Wireless Poem in Thirteen Messages by Kyn Taniya Translated from the Spanish by David Shook 66 pgs. | pb | 978-0-9906601-5-6 | $14.99 Cardboard House Press Reviewed by Vincent Francone   Prose translators will likely disagree, but I believe translating poetry requires a significant level of talent, a ...

Chronicle of the Murdered House by Lucio Cardoso [Biographical Note]

The pub date for Chronicle of the Murdered House by Lúcio Cardoso, which is translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson, with a biographical note from Ben Moser officially came out on Tuesday, December 13th. To celebrate the release of this Brazilian masterpiece, we’ll be running a series ...

Chronicle of the Murdered House by Lucio Cardoso [Interview]

The pub date for Chronicle of the Murdered House by Lúcio Cardoso, which is translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson, with a biographical note from Ben Moser officially came out on Tuesday, December 13th. To celebrate the release of this Brazilian masterpiece, we’ll be running a series ...

Chronicle of the Murdered House by Lucio Cardoso [Excerpt]

The pub date for Chronicle of the Murdered House by Lúcio Cardoso, which is translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson, with a biographical note from Ben Moser officially came out on Tuesday, December 13th. To celebrate the release of this Brazilian masterpiece, we’ll be running a series ...

Chronicle of the Murdered House by Lucio Cardoso [Press Release]

The pub date for Chronicle of the Murdered House by Lúcio Cardoso, which is translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson, with a biographical note from Ben Moser officially came out on Tuesday, December 13th. To celebrate the release of this Brazilian masterpiece, we’ll be running a series ...

An Education in World Literature [BTBA 2017]

This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is by Steph Opitz, who reviews books for _Marie Claire, while also working with the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP), Kirkus Reviews, the Brooklyn Book Festival, and the Twin Cities Book Festival. For more information on the BTBA, “like” our ...

Keeping the Foreign in Translated Literature: a Dispatch from the Oklahoma Prairie George Henson

George Henson is a translator of contemporary Latin American and Spanish prose, a contributing editor for World Literature Today and Asymptote, and a lecturer at the University of Oklahoma. For more information on the BTBA, “like” our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter. And check back here each week for a ...

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Three Percent #120: Crime and Concept Stores

It’s been a few weeks since the last podcast, but Chad and Tom are back with a over-stuffed episode that starts with a recap of recent events before turning to Barnes & Noble’s plans for their concept stores followed by a lengthy discussion about international crime authors. Here’s a complete list of ...

Handicapping Margaret Jull Costa's Odds at Winning the BTBA [BTBA 2017]

This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is by Jeremy Garber, events coordinator for Powells and freelance reviewer. For more information on the BTBA, “like” our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter. And check back here each week for a new post by one of the judges. Esteemed translator Margaret Jull ...

The Architecture of Time, Space and Imagination by Monica Carter

Monica Carter is a freelance critic whose nonfiction has appeared in publications including Black Clock, World Literature Today, and Foreword Reviews. She curates Salonica World Lit, which is a virtual journal dedicated to international literature and culture. For more information on the BTBA, “like” our ...

The Subsidiary

The Subsidiary by Matías Celedón translated from the French by Samuel Rutter 208 pgs. | pb | 9781612195445 | $21.95 Mellville House Publishing Reviewed by Vincent Francone   The biggest issues with books like The Subsidiary often have to do with their underpinnings—when we learn that Georges Perec wrote La ...

BTBA Favorites So Far by Jennifer Croft

This week’s post is by Jennifer Croft who is the recipient of Fulbright, PEN, MacDowell and National Endowment for the Arts grants and fellowships, as well as the Michael Henry Heim Prize for Translation. She holds a PhD from Northwestern University and an MFA from the University of Iowa. She is a founding editor of The ...

“Thus Bad Begins” by Javier Marías

  Thus Bad Begins by Javier Marías translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa 464 pgs. | pb |9781101911914 | $16.95 Knopf Reviewed by Kristel Thornell   Following The Infatuations, Javier Marías’s latest novel seems, like those that have preceded it, an experiment to test fiction’s ...

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Three Percent #119: We Are Being Trolled

This week’s podcast starts with the biggest, most surprising news of recent memory—Bob Dylan winning the Nobel Prize in Literature. Then Chad and Tom talk about the National Book Foundation’s study of translation, the unmasking of Elena Ferrante (and the backlash to that unmasking, and the backlash to the ...

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Three Percent #118: Our Titles Are No Better

This week’s podcast kicks off with a list of corrections from episode 117, from a mix-up of Sophies to an explanation of which Basque Country soccer team only fields Basque players. Then Chad and Tom move on to talk about the recent NEIBA conference and some fall titles they left out of their mini-previews before ...

"One of Us Is Sleeping" by Josefine Klougart [An Open Letter Book to Read]

This is the third entry in a series that will eventually feature all of the titles Open Letter has published to date. Catch up on past entries by clicking here. Last week’s entry was a pretty solid Chad rant involving the incredible Maidenhair by Mikhail Shishkin. Definitely check that one out. By contrast, this ...

Maidenhair by Mikhail Shishkin [An Open Letter Book to Read]

This is the second entry in a series that will eventually feature all of the titles Open Letter has published to date. Catch up on past entries by clicking here. Last week’s entry was about Gesell Dome by Guillermo Saccomanno. Maidenhair by Mikhail Shishkin, translated from the Russian by Marian ...

Read Local: Supporting Rochester Presses and Making Events Fun Again

Although we referenced Read Local in the write up of Josefine Klougart’s tour, I haven’t really explained what it is here, or why I think it could be a really exciting thing for Rochester. Just to as not to bury the lede, the first Read Local event is Friday, September 23rd at 6pm at Nox Cocktail Lounge. ...

Interview with Rein Raud

Officially pubbing last Tuesday, The Brother by Rein Raud, translated from the Estonian by Adam Cullen, is a spaghetti western and “philosophical gem” (West Camel). It’s also Raud’s first novel to appear in English, following an appearance in the Best European Fiction 2015 anthology. The book has ...

“Death by Water” by Kenzaburo Oe

Death by Water by Kenzaburu Oe translated from the Japanese by Deborah Boliver Boehm 432 pgs. | pb | 9781101911914 | $16.00 Grove Atlantic Reviewed by Will Eells   Death by Water, Kenzaburo Oe’s latest novel to be translated into English, practically begs you to read it as autobiography. Like The ...

Gesell Dome by Guillermo Saccomanno [An Open Letter Book to Read]

This is a new, hopefully weekly, feature highlighting a different book from our catalog in each post. Even though this book is pretty recent (official pub date just a few weeks ago August), I plan on going deep into our backlist in the near future. Gesell Dome by Guillermo Saccomanno, translated from the Spanish by ...

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Three Percent #117: Angola Is Not Angola

In this week’s podcast, tom and Chad preview some forthcoming books they’re excited about. Having done no solid research, Chad’s contributions are questionable at best, especially when he talks about Panthers in the Hole in relation to the COUNTRY of Angola instead of the prison that goes by the same ...

“Twenty-One Cardinals” by Jocelyne Saucier

Twenty-One Cardinals by Jocelyne Saucier translated from the French by Rhonda Mullins 176 pgs. | pb |9781552453070 | $19.95 Coach House Books Reviewed by Natalya Tausanovitch   Jocelyne Saucier’s Twenty-One Cardinals is about the type of unique, indestructible, and often tragic loyalty only found in ...

Best Translated Book Award 2017: The Judges

Running a little bit late with the BTBA announcments for this year, but over the next week, expect to see the official page updated and an updated to the translation database. In the meantime, this post will give publishers, translators, and interested readers all the necessary information about who’s on the committee ...

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Three Percent #116: Why Is Tom in Providence?

After an extended hiatus, Chad and Tom are back to discuss a slew of things that happened over the past couple months. These include Book Marks, what’s going to happen to B&N, and Tim Parks’s article on The Vegetarian. They also talk about some books they’ve read recently—including Zero K, which ...

2016 Best Translated Book Award Winners: "Signs Preceding the End of the World" and "Rilke Shake"

May 4, 2016—The ninth annual Best Translated Book Awards were announced this evening at The Folly in New York City, and at The Millions with Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World, translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman, winning for fiction, and Angélica Freitas’s Rilke Shake, translated from the ...

"Silvina Ocampo" by Silvina Ocampo [Why This Book Should Win]

This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series, is by Katrine Øgaard Jensen, BTBA judge, journalist, writer, and translator from the Danish. She previously served as editor-in-chief of Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art and as blog editor at Asymptote and Words without Borders. She is currently an editor at the ...

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Three Percent #114: BTBA Shortlists, The Vegetarian, Diorama

In this week’s podcast Tom and Chad talk about the recently released Best Translated Book Award shortlists, before moving on to discussion of the two Reading the World Conversation Series books for April: The Vegetarian by Han Kang and Diorama by Rocío Cerón. Additional articles and books discussed include, ...

2016 Best Translated Book Award Finalists!

Ten works of fiction and six poetry collections remain in the running for this year’s Best Translated Book Awards following the announcement of the two shortlists at The Millions website this morning. These sixteen finalists represent an incredible array of writing styles and reputation, and include the likes of ...

2016 Best Translated Book Award Fiction Finalists

As announced “earlier this morning at The Millions,”: these are the ten fiction finalists for this year’s Best Translated Book Award: A General Theory of Oblivion by José Eduardo Agualusa, translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn (Angola, Archipelago Books) Arvida by Samuel Archibald, ...

“The Four Books” by Yan Lianke [Why This Book Should Win]

This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series, is by Monica Carter, former BTBA judge and writer whose fiction has appeared in The Rattling Wall, Black Clock, Writers Tribe Review, and other publications. She is a freelance critic whose work has appeared in World Literature Today, Black Clock and Foreword Reviews. She is ...

“The Nomads, My Brothers, Go Out to Drink from the Big Dipper” by Abdourahman A. Waberi [Why This Book Should Win]

This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series, is by Tess Lewis, BTBA judge, writer, translator from the French and German, and an advisory editor of the Hudson Review. We will be running two (or more!) of these posts every business day leading up to the announcement of the finalists.   The Nomads, My Brothers, ...

“The Things We Don’t Do” by Andrés Neuman [Why This Book Should Win]

This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series is by Tiffany Nichols, who will start her Ph.D. studies this upcoming fall and is a contributor at to Three Percent. We will be running two (or more!) of these posts every business day leading up to the announcement of the finalists.   The Things We Don’t Do by ...

“The Sleep of the Righteous” by Wolfgang Hilbig [Why This Book Should Win]

This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series is by Hal Hlavinka, bookseller at Community Bookstore. We will be running two (or more!) of these posts every business day leading up to the announcement of the finalists.   The Sleep of the Righteous by Wolfgang Hilbig, translated from the German by Isabel Fargo ...

"Rilke Shake" by Angélica Freitas [Why This Book Should Win]

This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series, is by Tess Lewis, BTBA judge, writer, translator from the French and German, and an advisory editor of the Hudson Review. We will be running two (or more!) of these posts every business day leading up to the announcement of the finalists. Rilke Shake by Angélica ...

“Beauty Is a Wound” by Eka Kurniawan [Why This Book Should Win]

This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series, is by Kevin Elliott, BTBA judge and bookseller at 57th Street Books. We will be running two (or more!) of these posts every business day leading up to the announcement of the finalists.   Beauty Is a Wound by Eka Kurniawan, translated from the Indonesian by Annie ...

“The Story of the Lost Child” by Elena Ferrante [Why This Book Should Win]

This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series, is by Betty Scott from Books & Whatnot. We will be running two (or more!) of these posts every business day leading up to the announcement of the finalists.   The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein (Italy, ...

“Wild Words: Four Tamil Poets” edited by Lakshmi Holmström [Why This Book Should Win]

This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series, is by Deborah Smith, BTBA judge, translator from the Korean, and founder of Tilted Axis Press. We will be running two (or more!) of these posts every business day leading up to the announcement of the finalists.   Wild Words: Four Tamil Poets, edited and translated ...

Contribute to the “Why This Book Should Win” Series

As you’ve probably noticed, the Why This Book Should Win series has basically taken over the website. Our plan is to highlight all 35 titles longlisted for the Best Translated Book Awards before the announcement of the finalists on Tuesday, April 19th. Most of these posts are written by BTBA judges, although a number of ...

"Arvida" by Samuel Archibald [Why This Book Should Win]

This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series, is by Heather Cleary, BTBA judge, writer, translator, and co-founder of the Buenos Aires Review. We will be running two of these posts every business day leading up to the announcement of the finalists. Arvida by Samuel Archibald, translated from the French by Donald ...

“The Physics of Sorrow” by Georgi Gospodinov [Why This Book Should Win]

This is the first entry in the Why This Book Should Win series, which will highlight each of the 35 “longlisted”: titles for this year’s Best Translated Book Awards. Tom Roberge of Albertine Books wrote this piece.   The Physics of Sorrow by Georgi Gospodinov, translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel ...

2016 BTBA Fiction Longlist

It’s here! The twenty-five best translations of 2015 according to our esteemed panel of judges. As mentioned in the earlier post, we will be highlighting each of these titles on the site starting this afternoon, and finishing just in time for the April 19th announcement of the ten finalists. The winners will be ...

2016 BTBA Longlist Announcement!

This entry is the general press release about this year’s awards. If you want to skip ahead, you can find the poetry list here, and the fiction one here. Check back in later today—we’ll be kicking off the “Why This Book Should Win” series in the afternoon. March 29, 2016—Clarice ...

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Three Percent #112: An Old School Ranty Podcast

This week’s podcast feels like one straight out of 2011, with Chad getting angry about all sorts of things and just letting loose. The starting point for their discussion is the three-part series Tim Parks wrote for the New York Review of Books (part one, part two, part three), but they go on to talk about JellyBooks ...

"Unshaven and Often Drunk" [BTBA]

I know the BTBA announcements will be taking place tomorrow morning, but we have one last preview post for you. This is from judge Mark Haber, who works at Brazos Bookstore in Houston—one of the best stores in the country. Enjoy and tune in tomorrow to find out what made the longlists! If you’ve ever had your ...

Thank You, Katy Derbyshire, For Not Finger-Wagging

Many of you will have read or seen Katy Derbyshire’s recent article in the Guardian on women in translation. I braced myself for paragraphs of commentary on how publishers of literature in translation could “be better” than they are, and was already feeling that defensive twinge build up in my jaw. BUT, Katy ...

Preparing to Read "Diorama" by Rocío Cerón [RTWBC]

Yesterday I wrote a long preview of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, the Reading the World Book Club fiction book for March. Today, I’m switching over to our poetry selection—Diorama by Rocío Cerón, translated from the Spanish by Anna Rosenwong (Phoneme Media.) As always, you can post your thoughts and ...

Introducing "The Vegetarian" by Han Kang [RTWBC]

As previously announced, the fiction book we’re reading for this month’s Reading the World Book Club is The Vegetarian by Han Kang, translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith. Since I already read this one—taught it in my class last year, more on that below—I thought I’d start out this ...

"The Vegetarian" by Han Kang and "Diorama" by Rocío Cerón [RTWBC]

Yesterday afternoon, Tom and I recorded a new podcast about the February Reading the World Book Club books—On the Edge by Rafael Chirbes, translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa, and Monospace by Anne Parian, translated from the French by Emma Ramadan. Since we didn’t get that many comments or questions ...

Share Your Thoughts on "On the Edge" by Chirbes and "Monospace" by Parian [RTWBC]

Sure, February is officially over, but next week Tom and I will be discussing last month’s Reading the Book Book Club selections: On the Edge by Rafael Chirbes and Monospace by Anne Parian. We’d love to include comments and questions and topics from everyone else, so if you have any thoughts or reactions, you ...

Souffles-Anfas: A Critical Anthology

Anyone with any interest at all in contemporary Moroccan writing must start with Souffles. A cultural and political journal, Souffles (the French word for “breaths”) was founded in 1966 by Abdellatif Laâbi and Mostafa Nissabouri. Run by a group of artists and intellectuals, Souffles was a written fight for democratic ...

Introducing Rafael Chirbes [RTWBC]

For anyone who missed this in my earlier posts, the fiction book for February’s Reading the World Book Club is On the Edge by Rafael Chirbes, which is translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa and published by New Directions. As a way of introducing Chirbes, I thought I’d post this bio and interview ...

Variations on a Theme: Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s "Tram 83" [BTBA 2016]

This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is from Heather Cleary, translator of Sergio Chejfec, Oliverio Girondo, professor at Sarah Lawrence, and co-founder of the Buenos Aires Review. For more information on the BTBA, “like” our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter. And check back here each week for a ...

Send Us Your Comments on "The Weight of Things" and "Twelve Stations"! [RTWBC]

Despite all of my New Year Best Intentions, I fell off last week with posting about the two Reading the World Book Club books for January: The Weight of Things by Marianne Fritz and Twelve Stations by Tomasz Różycki. I did read (and enjoyed!) both books and will be talking about both books tomorrow on a podcast with Tom ...

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Three Percent #109: Making Reading Private

In a sort of role-reversal, Tom does most of the ranting in this podcast, partially inspired by this article entitled “Damn, You’re Not Reading Any Books by White Men This Year? That’s So Freakin Brave and Cool.” They also discuss some women in translation stats, Philip Pullman’s decision to pull ...

On Spoiling "The Weight of Things" [RTWBC]

I’m struggling with what to write about The Weight of Things for this week. Initially, I thought we’d have an interview with the translator ready by this point, but I suck at time management . . . Besides, what could I possible add after this interview between Adrian Nathan West and Kate Zambreno? BLVR: ...

Why Are We Ignoring "Apocalypse Baby"'s Most Important Twist? [BTBA 2016]

This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is by Kate Garber, bookseller at 192 Books. For more information on the BTBA, “like” our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter. And check back here each week for a new post by one of the judges. I have yet to find a review of Apocalypse Baby by Virginie ...

"Loquela" Is the Book You Should Be Reading

This is another one of those posts. One in which I wrote a long-ass essay/diatribe that I decided to delete so as to “focus on the positive.” In this case, I was on a roll about how sick I am of the literary field anointing four-five international authors a year and writing endless articles/listicles about ...

Berlin

Randall Jarrell once argued a point that I will now paraphrase and, in doing so, over-simplify: As a culture, we need book criticism, not book reviews. I sort of agree, but let’s not get into all of that. Having finished Berlin by Aleš Šteger, I am reminded of Jarrell’s idea because I am supposed to be writing a review ...

Kaija Straumanis Wins the AATSEEL Award for "Best Literary Translation into English"

Last month we got the news that Kaija Straumanis—our editor and graduate of the University of Rochester’s MA in literary translation program—had won the AATSEEL1 Award for the Best Literary Translation into English for her translation of Inga Ābele’s High Tide. As part of their annual conference, ...

Book Club Breakdown for "The Weight of Things" [RTWBC]

Before getting to the main part of this post—which is admittedly a bit silly, but hopefully a good way to kick things off—I have a few quick notes. I’ve been thinking a lot about how to make it easy for people to share their thoughts and opinions about these books—to make this really a book club and ...

Announcing the Reading the World Book Clubs!

I floated the idea of starting some sort of monthly book club in my year-end poetry list[1], and after Tom and I talked about it on the latest podcast, I convinced myself that this would be a fun and interesting idea to try and implement. My general idea is that every month we would feature two Reading the World Book Club ...

Carlos Labbé on Tour!

If you happened to read Laird Hunt’s “great review of Carlos Labbe’s Loquela in the LA Times”:http://www.latimes.com/books/la-ca-jc-carlos-labbe-20151220-story.html you’ll probably be interested in meeting the man behind this wild and wonderful book. Well, if you live in Dallas, Portland, ...

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Three Percent #108: Lists and Lists and Lists and Lists

This week Chad and Tom talk about this Guardian article about how indie presses are doing the work discovering new authors for the big commercial houses. Then, they talk about all the year-end lists Chad’s been creating for Three Percent and end by raving about champagne bottle sizes and ranting about book cover ...

Seven Books by Women in Translation [My Year in Lists]

Rather than devolve into posting clickbait featuring cats, penguins, hedgehogs, corgis, and books, like other BuzzHole sites, I’m going hard for the rest of the week, starting with seven books by women in translation. The gender disparity in terms of women in translation has been fairly well documented—see the ...

Six University Press Books [My Year in Lists]

I was hoping to have more time to write about the books on this list today, but after having technical problems recording the podcast, I’m going to have to rush through this so that I have enough time at the end of the day to mail out Loquela to all of our subscribers. Considering how many translations are coming out ...

The Best Poetry Books from 2015 I Should Read [My Year in Lists]

Before getting into today’s list, I want to point out a new trend in the Great Listicle Explosion of Book List-Making of 2015™: the “overlooked list.” This has probably been going on for as long as people could count to ten (a prerequisite for list-making), but I had overlooked it (yes, groan) until I ...

Four Books From Underrepresented Countries [My Year in Lists]

Yesterday I posted a bit of a screed against lists, followed immediately by a list of the six translations everyone’s talking about. My hope is to produce a bunch of lists featuring literature in translation from 2015, all organized by various rubrics that can allow you to find a handful of recommendations with a ...

The Six Water-Cooler Fiction Translations of 2015 [My Year in Lists]

Following on my last post, here’s the first entry in my manic series of year-end lists. To kick this off, I thought I’d start with the list of the six books in translation that were the most talked about this year. I did some really heady numerical analysis to determine this—searching Facebook mentions, ...

Let's Talk about Lists

If you’ve been reading this blog for more than a few months, you’ve probably come across one rant or another about listicles and lists in general. Aside from the ones on the ROC in Your Mouth blog I think most of these things are pretty stupid. Actually, let me refine that a bit: “Best of” lists can ...

This Was Going to Be a Hater’s Guide [3 Books]

After reading this excellent Hater’s Guide to the Williams-Sonoma Catalog yesterday (for a typical highlight, scroll down the “cookie press”) I really wished we could do something this for publishing. Like, make ignorant, funny jokes about the finalists for the National Book Awards. Or the Hater’s Guide to Literary ...

Thérèse and Isabelle

I recently listened to Three Percent Podcast #99, which had guest speaker Julia Berner-Tobin from Feminist Press. In addition to the usual amusement of finally hearing both sides of the podcast (normally I just hear parts of Chad’s side of the conversation through my office door, and never know what Tom’s ...

PEN Translation Prizes

This morning, PEN America released the longlist for their two annual translation prizes—the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation and the PEN Translation Prize (for prose.) I’m going to start by listing the PEN Translation Prize longlist, which includes an Open Letter title! This has never happened before, so ...

NEA Awards More Than $27.6 Million in Grants, Including $30K to Open Letter [Yay!]

Somehow I convinced myself that the official release date for info on this year’s National Endowment for the Arts Awards was on Thursday instead of yesterday, otherwise this would’ve been online earlier. Anyway, here’s the official press release with my comments below: National Endowment for the Arts ...

Translation Database Updates: AmazonCrossing Is the Story

The other day, I posted about the Translation Databases, pointing out that the 2014, 2015, and 2016 databases have all be substantially updated. That post was a bit bleak, talking about a 15% reduction in the number of works of fiction and poetry published in 2015 when compared to 2014.1 Since that went live, a lot of ...

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Three Percent #107: The Lost Episode

A couple weeks ago, Chad and Tom recorded a podcast about a slew of recent events, including ALTA 38, the Albertine Festival, the “New Literature from Europe Festival, Wordstock, and the Texas Book Festival. Unfortunately, that podcast—one of the best ever recorded—had to be tossed because of technical ...

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Three Percent #106: Some Women in Translation Stats

Chad’s done a bit more number crunching since this was recorded (see the posts on his Twitter account, which is @chadwpost), but this is a good introduction to the ongoing conversation about women in translation. A lot of this discussion is based on this post from Three Percent. This week’s music is Detachable ...

Border Crossings and a Third Language [BTBA 2016]

This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is from Heather Cleary, translator of Sergio Chejfec, Oliverio Girondo, professor at Sarah Lawrence, and co-founder of the Buenos Aires Review. For more information on the BTBA, “like” our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter. And check back here each week for a ...

Notes on Elena Ferrante from a Bookseller Who Hasn’t Read Her [BTBA 2016]

This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is by Kate Garber, bookseller at 192 Books. For more information on the BTBA, “like” our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter. And check back here each week for a new post by one of the judges. While many people assume that booksellers base their ...

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Three Percent #105: Alexievich, Amazon, and Rights

This week’s podcast features a discussion of Nobel Prize-winner Svetlana Alexievich (who Chad helped publish at Dalkey Archive), Amazon’s recent announcement about investing $10 million into translations, and how rights work. There’s a minor rant about Chase Utley (“worst human being on earth”) ...

Poets & Writers Roundtable on Publishing Translations

A few months ago, Jeremiah Chamberlain invited me to participate in an indie-press roundtable on publishing translations with Barbara Epler from New Directions, Michael Reynolds of Europa Editions, Jill Schoolman of Archipelago Press, and CJ Evans of Two Lines. This ended up being a long, sprawling email conversation, that ...

Quebecois Translations [BTBA 2016]

This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is by reader, writer, and BTBA judge P. T. Smith. For more information on the BTBA, “like” our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter. And check back here each week for a new post by one of the judges. For my first BTBA post, I wrote about sci-fi in translation, ...

Still Hating on DraftKings [3 Books]

Rather than reinvent the ranting wheel (I don’t know what that is, but it sounds fun), I’m going to preface this preview of three new books with a couple of updates from last week’s post. First off, DraftKings. I spend way too much of my mental time hating all over this stupid company. I should just stop. ...

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Three Percent #104: Banned Books Week

This week Chad and Tom discuss Oyster shutting down, whether or not Serial Box makes any sense as a way to consume books, and this list of the top 10 most frequently challenged books. Additionally, they talk about My Struggle: Volume 2 by Karl Ove Knausgaard and Tram 83 by Fiston Mwanza Mujila. This week’s music is ...

BTBA 2016 Poetry: The Jury Is Out [BTBA 2016]

It’s taken longer than it should to announce this—blame my disorganization, all the other events that have been going on, etc.—but we’re finally ready to unveil this year’s jury for the Best Translated Book Award prize for poetry. Before listing the judges, I just want to remind you to check ...

Anne Garréta and William Burroughs [BTBA 2016]

This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is from Tom Roberge from New Directions, Albertine Books, and the Three Percent Podcast. He’s not actually a BTBA judge, but since he’s helping run the whole process, he thought he’d weigh in and post as well. For more information on the BTBA, ...

Places I’ve Never Visited [3 Books and a Rant]

So for the past few months I’ve been too busy to actually write the really long monthly translation previews that I’ve been doing for the past year or two. I really do like writing those though, and highlighting upcoming books, but what with school starting up again, our first ever gala looming on the horizon, and all the ...

Three Articles on Three Great Indie Presses: Graywolf, Coffee House, Europa

Yesterday I posted a little summary on two great translators, so it’s only appropriate that today I post about three great pieces that have come out about three of my favorite presses over the past few days. First up was this Vulture piece by Three Percent favorite Boris Kachka (BORIS!!) on Graywolf Press. ...

Complete Brooklyn Book Fair Schedule

I mentioned a few Brooklyn Book Fair Events in my post about all forthcoming Open Letter events (which I just updated), but the full schedule went up yesterday and, damn. If I were going, and if these were all taking place at different times, here are the panels I would attend: Twisted Fables. Fiction has come a long way ...

Two Great Translators: K. E. Semmel & Amanda DeMarco

I guess both of these articles are a couple of weeks old now—but do things really count if they happen in August while all of Europe is on vacation?—but I still want to share them since both are really interesting and feature two great translators and friends. First up, Asymptote has a nice profile of Danish ...

All Open Letter Fall Events

Although I already miss the lazy days of summer, this fall is going to be amazing. First off, the St. Louis Cardinals will be in the playoffs, again, which guarantees me at least a couple weeks of emotional rollercoasting and eventual disappointment. In terms of books, there are a ton of great things coming out this ...

On Yoel Hoffmann’s "Moods" [BTBA 2016]

This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is by translator and co-founder of the Buenos Aires Review, Heather Cleary. For more information on the BTBA, “like” our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter. And check back here each week for a new post by one of the judges. Earlier this week, I returned home ...

Science Fiction in Translation [BTBA 2016]

This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is by reader, writer, and BTBA judge P. T. Smith. For more information on the BTBA, “like” our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter. And check back here each week for a new post by one of the judges. Up until college, I didn’t put much, if any, thought into ...

Literature on Location: Part I [BTBA 2016]

As with past years, every week one of the Best Translated Book Award judges will be posting their thoughts and observations on some of the books that they’re reading for this year’s award. Stacey Knecht agreed to kick things off today with this post. Yes, I live in the Netherlands. No, I don’t live in ...

Best Translated Book Award 2016: The Fiction Judges

It’s only been a a month and a half since Can Xue’s The Last Lover and Rocio Ceron’s Diorama won the 2015 Best Translated Book Award, but given the number of eligible titles (over 550 last year), we’re getting the process started as early as possible this year, which is why, today, we’re ready to ...

Two Days Left to Apply for an ALTA Emerging Translator Mentorships

Recently, ALTA announced a new mentorship program to support emerging young translators working in Catalan, French, and Polish. This program—which is sort of like the one that BCLT does in Britain—provides emerging translators with the opportunity to work one-on-one with an already established translator over the ...

Second Round of the Women's World Cup of Literature [Women's World Cup of Literature]

The second round of the first ever “Women’s World Cup of Literature”: kicks off later today, with Canada taking on New Zealand. Before posting that result, I wanted to make sure that everyone is up to speed, so here’s a preview of all six second round matches, with links to how they won their first ...

Australia vs. Sweden [Women's World Cup of Literature: First Round]

This match was judged by Rachel Crawford, graduate of the University of Rochester and former Open Letter intern. You can follow her rants online at @loveyourrac. For more information on the Women’s World Cup of Literature, click here or here. Also, be sure to follow our Twitter account and like our Facebook page. ...

My Best BEA Moment [Some June Translations]

Every May, 20,000 or so publishing professionals gather at BookExpo America to a) try and create buzz for their fall books, b) court booksellers and librarians, c) attend panels of minimal import, and d) bitch and moan. Mostly it’s just d, to be honest. Publishing people love to complain about everything. The Javitz ...

BTBA 2015 Winners: Can Xue and Rocío Cerón!

The eighth annual Best Translated Book Awards were announced at BookExpo America this afternoon, with Can Xue’s The Last Lover, translated from the Chinese by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen, taking home the award for fiction, and Rocío Cerón’s Diorama, translated from the Spanish by Anna Rosenwong, winning in poetry. ...

BEA Translation "Buzz" Panels: Adult Fiction

So, this year, for the first time ever, BookExpo America is sponsoring two panels highlighting forthcoming works of fiction: one featuring general fiction, the other focusing on crime and thrillers. (Naturally, I’m moderating the first one and Tom Roberge is doing the other.) The one on general adult fiction will ...

What Makes a Reader Good at Reading? [Some May Translations]

In a couple weeks, the IDPF Digital Book Conference will take place in New York under the theme of “Putting Readers First.” As part of this Ed Nawokta (Publishing Perspectives founder and international publishing guru of sorts), Boris Kachka (Hothouse author and former BEA frond-waver [sorry, inside joke]), Andrew ...

Who We Talk About When We Talk About Translation: The Bloggers

Who We Talk About When We Talk About Translation: The Bloggers* Bloggers increasingly lead in reviewing international literature, as column inches for book reviews in traditional outlets have shrunk. Prominent bloggers discuss their role and how it’s evolving. Where: Albertine Books, 972 Fifth Avenue (at 79th ...

Vano and Niko

What to make of Vano and Niko, the English translation of Erlom Akhvlediani’s work of the same name, as well as the two other short books that comprise a sort of trilogy? Quick searches will inform the curious reader that these short pieces (what contemporary writers would call flash fiction) resemble fables and that ...

Why This Book Should Win – Granma Nineteen and the Soviet's Secret by BTBA Judge Monica Carter

Monica Carter is a writer whose fiction has appeared in Writers Tribe Review, The Rattling Wall, Black Clock, and is a freelance critic. Granma Nineteen and the Soviet’s Secret – Ondjaki, Translated from the Portuguese by Stephen Hennighan, Angola Biblioasis At thirty-six years old, Ondjaki is one of the most ...

Why This Book Should Win – Snow and Shadow by Guest Critic Christine Palau

Christine Zoe Palau is the speechwriter at the Korean Consulate in Los Angeles. She plays accordion, writes theatre reviews for the Noho Arts District, and has recently completed her first novel. Snow and Shadow – Dorothy Tse, Translated from the Chinese by Nicky Harman, Hong Kong Muse Magazine Project Dorothy ...

Why This Book Should Win – Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by BTBA Judge Monica Carter

Monica Carter is a writer whose fiction has appeared in Writers Tribe Review, The Rattling Wall, Black Clock, and is a freelance critic. Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay – Elena Ferrante, Translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein, Italy Europa Editions Elena Ferrante is everywhere now. Yet, I remember when ...

Why this Book Should Win – The Author and Me by BTBA Judge Michael Orthofer

Michael Orthofer runs the Complete Review – a book review site with a focus on international fiction – and its Literary Saloon weblog. The Author and Me – Éric Chevillard, translated from the French by Jordan Stump, France Dalkey Archive Press Obviously, two-time, back-to-back winner László ...

Why This Book Should Win – Talking to Ourselves by BTBA Judge Jeremy Garber

Jeremy Garber is the events coordinator for Powell’s Books and also a freelance reviewer. Talking to Ourselves – Andrés Neuman, Translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia, Argentina Farrar, Straus and Giroux Perhaps the question shouldn’t be why Andrés Neuman’s Talking to Ourselves ...

Why This Book Should Win – Pushkin Hills by BTBA Judge James Crossley

James Crossley is a bookseller at Island Books. He writes regularly for the store’s Message in a Bottle blog and for the website of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association. Pushkin Hills – Sergei Dovlatov, Translated from the Russian by Katherine Dovlatov, Russia Counterpoint Press Pushkin Hills is ...

Why This Book Should Win – Adam Buenosayres by BTBA Judge Michael Orthofer

Michael Orthofer runs the Complete Review – a book review site with a focus on international fiction – and its Literary Saloon weblog. Adam Buenosayres – Leopoldo Marechal, Translated from the Spanish by Norman Cheadle and Sheila Ethier McGill-Queen’s University Press Leopoldo Marechal’s Adam ...

2015 PEN Literary Awards Shortlists

A month or so after the longlists were announced, PEN has announced the finalists for all of their literary prizes, including two translation-specific ones. * First up is the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, which has a killer shortlist: Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream by Kim Hyesoon, translated from the Korean by ...

Why This Book Should Win: BTBA Judge Daniel Medin Q&A with John Keene about Letters from a Seducer

John Keene is the author of Annotations, and Counternarratives, both published by New Directions, as well as several other works, including the poetry collection Seismosis, with artist Christopher Stackhouse, and a translation of Brazilian author Hilda Hilst’s novel Letters from a Seducer. Daniel Medin teaches at the ...

Why This Book Should Win – The Woman Who Borrowed Memories by BTBA Judge Katrine Øgaard Jensen

Katrine Øgaard Jensen is an editor-at-large for Asymptote and the editor-in-chief for Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art. The Woman Who Borrowed Memories: Selected Stories – Translated by Thomas Teal and Silvester Mazzarella NYRB Classics When growing up in Northern Europe, you come to expect a certain ...

Why This Book Should Win – Monastery by BTBA Judge Jeremy Garber

Jeremy Garber is the events coordinator for Powell’s Books and also a freelance reviewer. Monastery – Eduardo Halfon, translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman and Daniel Hahn Bellevue Literary Press One of three titles on this year’s Best Translated Book Award longlist to feature more than one translator ...

Why This Book Should Win – Two Hrabals by BTBA Judges George Carroll and James Crossley

George Carroll is the World Literature Editor of Shelf Awareness and an independent publishers’ representative based in the Pacific Northwest. James Crossley is a bookseller at Island Books. He writes regularly for the store’s Message in a Bottle blog and for the website of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers ...

2015 Best Translated Book Award Longlists Announced

April 7, 2015—Elena Ferrante, Julio Cortázar, Tove Jansson, Kim Hyesoon, and Alejandra Pizarnik are just a handful of the internationally renowned authors with a book on the Best Translated Book Award longlists for fiction and poetry. Announced this morning on the Three Percent website, these longlists represent the ...

The Books I Thought Would Make the BTBA Longlist . . . But Didn't

Over the past week, I’ve given you a bunch of clues about the fiction and poetry longlists and received a few guesses from readers. I think the closest anyone came was 13 right out of 25, which, to be fair, isn’t that bad. Well, since the announcements will be here tomorrow—the poetry list will be ...

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Transcript of Three Percent #91: "Translators, Rates, Money, and Unions"

A couple months back, for the 91st Three Percent podcast, Tom and I invited Alex Zucker (translator, co-chairman of the PEN Translation Committee) on to talk about the idea of a translators guild, PEN’s model translation contract, how much translators get paid, etc. It’s one of our most listened to podcasts ...

I Am a Sore Loser [Some April Translations]

Back when I was in junior high, my best friend and I would spend hours and hours playing Double Dribble on his Nintendo. (Fun fact! This game was called “Exciting Basket” in Japan.) I might be 100% wrong, but I’m pretty sure this was the first basketball game for the Nintendo. And man, was it ever low rent. ...

Who's Publishing What Spanish-Language Books from Where?

A couple weeks ago, Valerie Miles organized a special one-day conference on “Publishing Spanish Writers in English.” It featured a series of interesting, well-designed panels: one with Barbara Epler from New Directions and Jonathan Galassi from FSG talking about editing Spanish-language lit; one on magazines ...

PEN's Book Awards

So, every year, PEN Awards a bunch of books with a bunch of money in a bunch of different categories. Some of these categories are dedicated solely to works in translation (like the PEN Translation Prize, PEN Award for Poetry in Translation), and other longlists just happen to include translated books. Since we cover ...

Iraqi Nights

In a culture that privileges prose, reviewing poetry is fairly pointless. And I’ve long since stopped caring about what the world reads and dropped the crusade to get Americans to read more poems. Part of the fault, as I’ve suggested in past reviews, rests with poets who seem hell-bent on insulating their art from the ...

Things I'm Over, Things That Are Interesting [Some March Translations]

For the handful of people who read these posts every month (I hope there are at least three of you), unfortunately, this one is going to be pretty short. I’m really strapped for time right now, with four trips (to New York, Bennington, Toronto, Seattle-Portland) and at least seven different events scheduled for the next ...

Q&A with Howard Curtis and Dominique Fabre

With the recent publication of French author Dominique Fabre’s Guys Like Me and the recent review thereof, we thought, why not get author and translator to chat quickly about the book, Fabre’s writing, and a bit more? Both were happy to do so, and translator Howard Curtis was kind enough to both prepare the ...

Bookselling in Carolina [Some February Translations]

Last week, the tenth version of the American Booksellers Association’s Winter Institute took place in Asheville, NC, at a resort straight out of The Shining. I know! You should’ve seen the main lobby with it’s 40’ ceilings, giant fireplaces, and hidden passages. It was like something out of ...

The Frontrunners, Part Two by BTBA Judge Jeremy Garber

Jeremy Garber is the events coordinator for Powell’s Books and also a freelance reviewer. Monastery (Bellevue Literary Press) Eduardo Halfon, translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman and Daniel Hahn Like a companion volume or literary reverberation, Eduardo Halfon’s Monastery continues the itinerant ...

The Frontrunners, Part One by BTBA Judge Jeremy Garber

Jeremy Garber is the events coordinator for Powell’s Books and also a freelance reviewer. With the start of spring (for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, that is) less than six weeks away, the BTBA longlist announcement draws ever closer (early April!) – and, as such, we judges continue our evaluation of the ...

Nominations for 2015 Ottaway Award for the Promotion of International Literature Are Now Open

Just got this in the mail from Words Without Borders, and am going to share it in full and encourage all of you to nominate your favorite international lit promoter. Past winners have been Carol Janeway Brown and Drenka Willen—two amazing publishing people. It’s really exciting to see this award continuing, and ...

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Three Percent #89: Don't Laugh So Loud

This week’s podcast is all about Denis Johnson’s The Laughing Monsters, which came out last year and is “a high-suspense tale of kaleidoscoping loyalties in the post-9/11 world that shows one of our great novelists at the top of his game.” Writer, critic, and Johnson fan Patrick Smith (here’s a ...

Prize Winners by BTBA Judge Michael Orthofer

Michael Orthofer runs the Complete Review – a book review site with a focus on international fiction – and its Literary Saloon weblog. Some five-hundred-odd translated titles are in contention – well, at least get considered – for a book prize, the Best Translated Book Award. Not surprisingly, a number of them have ...

Let Me Watch Crap! [Some January 2015 Translations]

This past weekend, my kids and I finally watched The Incredible Hulk—the final Marvel Cinematic Universe movie that we had to see to be all caught up before Avengers 2 comes out in May. After the ultimately disappointing Hulk ended, my son wanted to binge on the new season of Doctor Who, which is available through ...

FIVE NOIR NOVELS by BTBA Judge George Carroll

George Carroll is the World Literature Editor of Shelf Awareness and an independent publishers’ representative based in the Pacific Northwest. My day job is publishers’ representative, which is a snottier way of saying “traveling book salesman.” I present thousands (low thousands) of books twice a year to book ...

Chad vs. Skype/Moneybookers

Admittedly, this has absolutely nothing to do with international fiction, but since it is related to this week’s podcast and is incredibly hilarious, I feel like I have to share. Here’s the setup: Back in 2008, I bought credit on Skype to call some people in India for an article I was writing. After doing the ...

50/50: Fifty Books in Translation from Fifty Presses [Our 2014 Year-End Book List]

Last week I wrote a post that, among other things, included a brief rant on year-end book lists (one of our favorite things to rant about here). Already before the post’s draft stage, I had been scheming up the foundation to a more translation-inclusive year-end list than the other lists out there this year, and soon ...

In Translation But Off the List by BTBA Judge Jeremy Garber

Jeremy Garber is the events coordinator for Powell’s Books and also a freelance reviewer. As the calendar draws to a close, annual lists of the year’s best books begin to proliferate. However subjective these literary lineups may be, it should come as no surprise to readers of translated fiction that titles originating ...

New Literature from Europe 2014 [Weekend Work Getaways and then Some]

This past weekend, I had the pleasure of heading down to NYC for the 2014 New Literature from Europe festival, which primarily took place at the slightly Escherian, but beautiful Austrian Cultural Forum NY building. Even if you don’t read beyond this point, let me just say that this was a great festival, short and ...

Cheesy Thanksgiving Post [Some December Translations]

I don’t think this particular monthly write-up needs any real explanation—it really is a “cheesy Thanksgiving post,” complete with holiday cheer and unwanted gifts—so let’s just get into it. (Also, I think it’s going to be really long.) Texas: The Great Theft by Carmen Boullosa, ...

Jeff Waxman's Rep Nights, Kramerbooks, and the Necessity of Face-to-Face Meetings

I’ve been incredibly discouraged over the past few weeks about the place of Open Letter in book culture. Part of this discouragement comes from traveling for twenty of the past twenty-four days (to Sharjah, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, L.A., and DC), but also, Open Letter didn’t get a single book on this Flavorwire ...

Slim Pickings? by BTBA Judge Michael Orthofer

Michael Orthofer runs the Complete Review – a book review site with a focus on international fiction – and its Literary Saloon weblog. The size of a book shouldn’t really matter, not when judging whether or not it’s Best Translated Book Award-worthy, but one of the things that has struck me about this year’s batch ...

Bigger than the Burj Khalifa [Some November Translations]

This post is being written under extreme jet lag. Last Saturday I flew out to attend the Sharjah International Book Fair (the slogan for which is “A Book for Every Person,” which is not to be confused with Dubai’s Film Festival slogan, “A Movie for Every Person”) and then, yesterday, flew for ...

My Brilliant Friend

It hasn’t quite neared the pitch of the waiting-in-line-at-midnight Harry Potter days, but in small bookstores and reading circles of New York City, an aura has attended the novelist Elena Ferrante and her works. One part curiosity (Who is she?), one part eager devotion (Where is she, I want to be her best friend!), ...

DANIEL MEDIN’S BTBA FAVORITES: FALL 2014

Daniel Medin teaches at the American University of Paris, where he helps direct the Center for Writers and Translators and is Associate Series Editor of The Cahiers Series. Can Xue: The Last Lover, trans. from Chinese by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen, Yale/Margellos The strangest and by far most original work I read this ...

The Best to Come

James Crossley is a bookseller at Island Books. He writes regularly for the store’s Message in a Bottle blog and for the website of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association. By now you may be asking which BTBA-eligible books I’m most looking forward to reading. Probably not, but let’s pretend. ...

Part Two of BTBA Judge Jeremy Garber's Faves for 2015

Jeremy Garber is the events coordinator for Powell’s Books and also a freelance reviewer. Valeria Luiselli ~ Faces in the Crowd As sinuous and singular a novel as Valeria Luiselli’s Faces in the Crowd (los ingrávidos) is (translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney), it is all the more remarkable on ...

40% Reading Comprehension, and Dropping Fast! [Some October Translations]

A couple weeks ago I had a dream that I was dropping my daughter off at a “Reading Tutor” to study for some sort of standardized “Reading Comprehension” test for fifth graders. When I got to the shopping mall for tutors (dream!), I found out that, not only had her tutor quit, but that “Reading ...

Judge Jeremy Garber Shares Two of His Favorites So Far of BTBA 2015

Jeremy Garber is the events coordinator for Powell’s Books and also a freelance reviewer. With so much reading left to do (as submissions continue to fill our mailboxes daily), a handful of books already stand out as some of the year’s finest original translations. Although it remains to be seen whether any of the ...

Judge Jeremy Garber Sums Up His Thoughts for BTBA 2015

Jeremy Garber is the events coordinator for Powell’s Books and also a freelance reviewer. It is quite an honor (to say nothing of a responsibility) to be invited to adjudicate the creative output of others. In merely thinking of the myriad ways one might go about arbitrating the many facets that comprise a finished work ...

My Books and How They Got There

Madeleine LaRue is Associate Editor and Director of Publicity of Music & Literature. I live in Berlin, in a neighborhood with a chronically understaffed post office, so books on their way to me from the United States are usually in for an adventure. A package from Archipelago Books, example, arrived dripping wet, ...

Dear Publisher, I Love You by Monica Carter

Monica Carter is a freelance critic. This week as I takeover the BTBA blog and I finally get the opportunity to do something I have been longing to do – highlight some of the incredible publishers the are committed to producing quality literature in translation. Each day, I will tip my hat to a small press that has grown ...

BTBA Blog Returns with Judge Michael Orthofer

Michael Orthofer runs the Complete Review – a book review site with a focus on international fiction – and its Literary Saloon weblog. Getting started There’s no real official start date for the judging of the Best Translated Book Award – though maybe the announcement finalizing who the judges actually are is a ...

Murakami Can Not Be Stopped!

Right on the heels of the recent release of Murakami’s Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (see our review here), Murkami has another book coming out. From the New York Times: Haruki Murakami’s next book, “The Strange Library,” sounds surreal and experimental even for an author whose work ...

The End of Half-Day Fridays [Some September Translations]

And just like that, school’s back in session. Having students back on campus brings up so many complicated feelings. Annoyance being the first and more obvious. It’s super irritating that from one day to the next it becomes infinitely more difficult to find a parking place for you bike, that you have to wait in ...

Little Grey Lies

In the London of Hédi Kaddour’s Little Grey Lies, translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan, peace has settled, but the tensions, fears, and anger of the Great War remain, even if tucked away behind stories and lies. Directly ahead, as those leftovers of the war simmer to a boil, is World War II. Little Grey Lies is a war novel ...

Work for the NEA! [The NEA Rocks, Part III]

In a different time in my life, I would’ve jumped on the chance to apply for this job at the NEA: As the Grants Management Specialist (Literature), you will be responsible for the following tasks: Review, organize, and process organizational grant applications from the Literature field, and follow these ...

A 14-Hour Zen Koan Shoved Though My Soul [Some August Translations]

Another month, another preview that’s late. This month caught me a bit by surprise though—how is it possible that the new academic year starts in three weeks? It just doesn’t seem right. So in the spirit of “How I Spent My Summer Vacation” essays, I thought I’d kick off this ...

A Musical Hell

The best way to review Alejandra Pizarnik’s slim collection, A Musical Hell, published by New Directions as part of their Poetry Pamphlet series, is to begin by stating that it is poetry with a capital P: serious, dense, and, some might say, difficult. Take from that what you will, but I’m going to follow an idea from ...

BTBA 2015: The Judges!

Although it wasn’t all that long ago that László Krasznahorkai and Elisa Biagini won the Best Translated Book Award, but it’s already time to look ahead to the 2015 iteration—the first step of which is announcing the new group of judges. Similar to years past, the fiction panel will consist of nine ...

The 2014 National Translation Award Longlist

The American Literary Translators Association, which is finally really trying to get its shit together in terms of its public and web presence, just announced the 15-title longlist for this year’s National Translation Award. If you haven’t heard of the NTA, here’s all the necessary info: this is the ...

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Three Percent #80: My Struggle's DNA Is 92% Introspective

This week’s podcast focuses on two main things: This article by Tim Parks about the sales of Knausgaard’s books, and the sale of BookLamp to Apple for an obscene amount of money. This week’s music is MTLOV from the new A Sunny Day in Glasgow album. ...

Live Bait

When my eyes first crossed the back cover of Fabio Genovesi’s novel Live Bait, I was caught by a blurb nestled between accolades, a few words from a reviewer for La Repubblica stating that the novel was, however magically, “[b]eyond any cliché.” Generally, I’m a suspicious reader; big claims scare me off. Having ...

July Newsletter (With Special Subscription Offer!)

If you don’t already subscribe to our (sporadic, but in good times, bi-weekly) newsletter, you can do so by clicking here. And if you missed the one that went out earlier this week, you can see the prettified version here, or just read it all below. The Last Days of My Mother “Pick of the Week” in Publishers ...

Translation, A Reciprocal Process [Interview with Kareem James Abu-Zeid on "Nothing More to Lose" by Najwan Darwish]

It’s always interesting to read a translator’s commentary on his or her translation process. For me personally, hearing how other translators think and work only adds to my personal work and experience, alternately showing me approaches or tactics that don’t work for me and showing me approaches and tactics ...

Conversations

In Conversations, we find ourselves again in the protagonist’s conscious and subconscious, which is mostly likely that of Mr. César Aira and consistent with prototypical Aira style. This style never fails because each time Aira is able to develop a uniquely bogus set of facts that feels as realistic as waking up each ...

Chile vs. Mexico [World Cup of Literature: CHAMPIONSHIP]

Our thirty-first match of the first ever World Cup of Literature features two amazing books written in Spanish: one by a revered, now dead author, the other by a young upstart; one by a man, one by a woman; one from Chile, the other from Mexico; one focused on a singular narrative voice, the other featuring a few ...

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Three Percent #79: Barely Surpassing Lorem Ipsum

On this week’s podcast, Chad and Tom preview the semifinals of the World Cup of Literature (both suspect Chile will meet the US in the Championship), and then discuss The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair and this New Yorker piece about its limited U.S. success. Also, the Penguin Cup is stupid. In relation to the ...

All Set for the Semifinals [World Cup of Literature]

And with Germany’s defeat of BiH the semifinals for the World Cup of Literature are all set. You can download a PDF version here. Here’s a bit of a breakdown on these two match ups: Chile By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolaño, translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews Originally published in ...

Argentina vs. France [World Cup of Literature: Second Round]

This match was judged by Tom Roberge. For more info on the World Cup of Literature, read this, and download the updated bracket. I genuinely love the World Cup. And yet every four years I’m reminded why I haven’t picked an English Premier League team to support, why in the end I’m glad it’s over, why I have no ...

Mexico vs. Australia [World Cup of Literature: Second Round]

This match was judged by Chad W. Post. For more info on the World Cup of Literature, read this, and download the updated bracket. First off, let it be said that Barley Patch doesn’t even deserve to be playing in this match. Sure, Mauro had his reasons for choosing Gerald Murnane’s self-conscious masterpiece over ...

Belgium vs. South Korea [World Cup of Literature: First Round]

This match was judged by Scott Esposito. For more info on the World Cup of Literature, read this, and download the bracket. Everybody knows you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover, and I’m trying damn hard to resist doing just that, but the fact remains that the cover of the St. Martin’s edition of The ...

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Three Percent #78: "I Believe in Guns and Weed"

On this week’s podcast, Chad and Tom review the opening round of the World Cup of Literature and make some predictions, talk about the Amazon-Hachette kerfuffle, and discuss the awfulness of The American Outlaws and the awesomeness of a couple Wikipedia pages. (You have to listen to find out which ones.) Because it ...

Portugal vs. USA [World Cup of Literature: First Round]

This match was judged by Will Evans. For more info on the World Cup of Literature, read this, and download the bracket. The result came to me as a shock, more of a shock to me even than to you: the US pulled out a 3-2 stunner of a victory over Portugal in the 2014 World Cup of Literature: David Foster Wallace’s final, ...

Mexico vs. Croatia [World Cup of Literature: First Round]

This match was judged by Katrine Øgaard Jensen. For more info on the World Cup of Literature, read this, and download the bracket. Mexico vs. Croatia A few years back, during a drunken Christmas party at a Danish newspaper, I asked a colleague how she developed her opinions as a movie critic. She did not have an ...

PEN Award Shortlist Announced

Yesterday, PEN announced its shortlists for all the awards ever, including those for works of poetry in translation and works of fiction in translation. For the 2014 awards, PEN tried out something new by announcing a longlist back in May. The 2014 poetry list was judged this year by Kimiko Hahn: Even Now: Poems by ...

Bombay Stories

I must admit upfront that I went into reading Saadat Hasan Manto’s Bombay Stories almost entirely blind. I have not read Salman Rushdie. I have read, perhaps, two short stories by Jhumpa Lahiri. I might shamefully add that I really only remember the barest details of Gandhi’s life and deeds. I can say, in the ...

Spain vs. Australia [World Cup of Literature: First Round]

This match was judged by Mauro Javier Cardenas. For more info on the World Cup of Literature, read this, and download the bracket. In the year 2010, seventeen years after I stopped watching soccer, I wrote a paean to Your Face Tomorrow, claiming that “here’s the wonderfully parenthetical operations of a human mind in ...

Brazil vs. Cameroon [World Cup of Literature: First Round]

This match was judged by Jeffrey Zuckerman. For more info on the World Cup of Literature, read this, and download the bracket. The last time I watched a soccer game was in the last World Cup, in July of 2010. I had just graduated and moved off campus with my roommate from college. Down the block, a bar was packed with ...

Baltic Adventures [Some June 2014 Translations]

June started a few days ago, which means that my rambling monthly overview of forthcoming translations is overdue. It also means that World Cup 2014 is about to start, which means that for the next month my brain will be as filled with soccer tactics and outcomes as literary ideas . . . But sticking with the now: For the ...

The Official Launch of Deep Vellum

Two summers ago, Will Evans (aka Bromance Will) came to Rochester for the summer to learn about how to launch his own press dedicated to international literature. Although he did help out at Open Letter by reading a bunch of manuscripts, editing High Tide, doing some marketing and publicity, and arranging a bunch of Frankfurt ...

Retranslations in 2064 [Some May 2014 Translations]

Welcome back to my monthly ramble about forthcoming works of literature in translations, which, as always, is punctuated by jokes, rants, and whatever else comes to mind. Even more so than usual, I’m really excited about this month’s offerings—and I actually have some things to say about the books ...

Peter Platt and the Center for Translation Studies @ Barnard College

“From Translation All Science Had Its Offspring” : The Florio Translation of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne Join Barnard College and the Center for Translation Studies at 6:30 p.m. on Monday, April 28th, in the James Room at Barnard Hall for a conversation with Peter Platt of Barnard College and Phillip John ...

BTBA 2014: Poetry and Fiction Winners

László Krasznahorkai becomes the first repeat winner, and Elisa Biagini and her three translators take home the poetry award in this year’s Best Translated Book Award. After much deliberation, Seiobo There Below, Krasznahorkai’s follow-up to last year’s BTBA winner, Satantango, won the 2014 BTBA for ...

"The Oasis of Now" by Sorab Sepehri [Why This Book Should Win]

We’re only hours away from announcing the two winners of this year’s BTBA awards, but it’s never too late to promote one of the finalists. The piece below was written by BTBA poetry judge, Bill Martin. The Oasis of Now by Sorab Sepehri, translated from the Persian by Kazim Ali and Mohammad Jafar ...

Tirza by Arnon Grunberg, Trans. by Sam Garrett [Why This Book Should Win]

Casey O’Neil is a bookseller at the Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle. His writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books. These days, he most often reads standing up, with a small sleeping daughter strapped to his torso. How to describe a book as affecting and unusual as Tirza I could cobble together a few ...

City of Angels: Or, the Overcoat of Dr. Freud by Christa Wolf, Trans. by Damion Searls – Why This Book Should Win

Sarah Gerard’s novel Binary Star is forthcoming from Two Dollar Radio in January 2015. Her essay chapbook, Things I Told My Mother, was published by Von Zos this past fall. Other fiction, criticism and personal essays have appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, Bookforum, the Paris Review Daily, the Los ...

Sankya

When Sankya was published in Russia in 2006, it became a sensation. It won the Yasnaya Polyana Award (bestowed by direct descendants of Leo Tolstoy) and was shortlisted for the Russian Booker and the National Bestseller Award. Every member of the cultural elite had an opinion on it. There was even a hatchet job by the ...

“Sandalwood Death” by Mo Yan, Trans. by Howard Goldblatt [Why This Book Should Win the BTBA]

Today’s entry in the “Why This Book Should Win” series is from Jonathan Stalling, an Associate Professor of English at Oklahoma University specializing in Modern-Contemporary American and East-West Poetics, Comparative Literature, and Translation Studies. He is also the co-founder and deputy editor-in-chief of Chinese ...

How to Become a Pessimist [Some April 2014 Translations]

Every semester I tell my publishing students about the time I was walking around BEA with Jerome Kramer and he pointed out how the whole fair was “filled with failure.” Mostly I want to shock and break them—every good professor needs to upend his/her student’s expectations and their latent belief that ...

The African Shore by Rodrigo Rey Rosa, Trans. by Jeffrey Gray – Why This Book Should Win

Christopher Schaefer’s reviews and interviews have appeared in World Literature Today and The Quarterly Conversation. He lives in Paris. Like many American readers, I stumbled upon Rodrigo Rey Rosa thanks to Bolaño. How could you not be willing to check out a previously unheard-of Guatemalan author after encountering ...

The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra by Perdro Mairal, Trans. by Nick Caistor – Why This Book Should Win

Sarah Gerard’s novel Binary Star is forthcoming from Two Dollar Radio in January 2015. Her essay chapbook, Things I Told My Mother, was published by Von Zos this past fall. Other fiction, criticism and personal essays have appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, Bookforum, the Paris Review Daily, the Los ...

The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante, Trans. by Ann Goldstein – Why This Book Should Win

Monica Carter curates Salonica World Lit. She is a writer and reviewer. Her most recent critical piece appeared in World Literature Today (September 2013). She is also a reader for Tin House Magazine. There is something about Elena Ferrante as a writer that is difficult to ignore. She never misses a beat. Her novels, ...

Red Grass by Boris Vian, Trans. by Paul Knobloch – Why This Book Should Win

Sarah Gerard’s novel Binary Star is forthcoming from Two Dollar Radio in January 2015. Her essay chapbook, Things I Told My Mother, was published by Von Zos this past fall. Other fiction, criticism and personal essays have appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, Bookforum, the Paris Review Daily, the Los ...

Why This Book Should Win: Leg Over Leg Vol. 1, Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, translated by Humphrey Davies

Michael Orthofer runs the Complete Review – a book review site with a focus on international fiction – and its Literary Saloon weblog. Why should Humphrey Davies’ translation of Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq Leg Over Leg (Vol. 1) win this year’s Best Translated Book Award? Well, simply put: because it is ...

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Three Percent #71: The 2014 Best Translated Book Awards Fiction Longlist

This week’s podcast is EPIC. With a minimum of digressions, we review every single book on the 2014 Best Translated Book Award Fiction Longlist, providing descriptions, some commentary on its chances of winning, other remarks about the titles we’ve read, etc. This may be a really long episode, but it’s also ...

Commentary by Marcelle Sauvageot – Why This Book Should Win

Monica Carter curates Salonica World Lit. She is a writer and reviewer. Her most recent critical piece appeared in World Literature Today (September 2013). Consider this: You are a woman living in France during the 1920s and 1930s. You hold the highest teaching awarded in France. In your early thirties, you are in love ...

The Infatuations – Why This Book Should Win

This post is courtesy of Best Translated Book Award judge, the inimitable George Carroll. Not only is he one hell of a West Coast sales rep for publishing companies large and small, he has an inexhaustible knowledge of translated literature. The Infatuations by Javier Marias rolled into its publication date with more ...

BTBA 2014 Fiction Longlist: It's Here!

The wait is over. Listed below are the twenty-five titles on this year’s Best Translated Book Award Fiction Longlist. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be highlighting each and every one of these as part of the annual “Why This Book Should Win the BTBA” series. It’s a fun way of learning about ...

The AWP of Bubbles, Balloons, and Lonely Hipsters [Some March 2014 Translations]

Last weekend, over 14,000 writers, publishers, agents, translators, reviewers, professors, and readers swarmed the Washington State Convention Center in Seattle for the annual Associated Writing Programs conference—four days of heavy drinking, pot-chocolate (it’s legal in Washington!), endless craft panels, a ...

Elizabeth Harris Tells Us Why Translation Makes All the Difference

Elizabeth Harris has translated fiction by Mario Rigoni Stern, Fabio Stassi, and Marco Candida, among others. Her translation of Giulio Mozzi’s story collection Questo è il giardino (This Is the Garden) will be published by Open Letter Books in 2014; the individual stories have appeared in The Literary Review, The Missouri ...

Michael Orthofer's Final Selections

Michael Orthofer runs the Complete Review – a book review site with a focus on international fiction – and its Literary Saloon weblog. Final selections The deadlines approach – well, that one first, big deadline: with the Best Translated Book Award longlist due to be announced March 11 we judges have to decide what ...

Daniel Medin’s BTBA Favorites: Winter Reading

Daniel Medin teaches at the American University of Paris, where he helps direct the Center for Writers and Translators, is an editor of The Cahiers Series ,and co-hosts the podcast entitled That Other Word. He has authored a study of Franz Kafka in the work of three international writers (Northwestern University Press, 2010) ...

Reason #387 Why Publishing Is a Thankless, Frustrating Business

Last year we brought out Tirza by Arnon Grunberg, one of my favorite books of the past few years. (And a title that deserves to at least be shortlisted for this year’s BTBA . . .) At the time I talked to Arnon about doing two of his other books—The Man without Illness and The Asylum Seekers—since we all ...

A Handbook for the Perfect Adventurer

Think back to the last adventure- or action-type book you read. Wasn’t it cool? Didn’t it make you want to do things, like learn to shoot a crossbow, hack complicated information systems, travel to strange worlds, take on knife-wielding thugs, or transport a secret package that turns out to be a member of a royal ...

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2013 Albums I Like Listening To [Chad's Picks]

This is usually the section of my Music of the Past Year roundup post where I go on and on about how much easier it is to discover music than it is to discover books. Although I still feel the same way—right now I’m listening to the new El Ten Eleven EP thanks to an email from Spotify I received this morning; ...

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2013 Albums That Are the Best in Their Own Ways [Nate's Picks]

Hey, there. We’ve done this annual music podcast thing for a few years now, so let’s be clear on what’s happening here, eh? I’m Nate—the man behind the podcasting curtain. If you’re a regular listener, you’ve almost certainly heard Chad and/or Tom refer to “Nate” on ...

Slim Little Stories

Sarah Gerard is a writer who used to work at McNally Jackson Books, but recently took a job at BOMB Magazine. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, Bookforum, the Paris Review Daily, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Slice Magazine, and other publications. Her new book, “Things I Told My ...

Kopenhaga

“What if even in the afterlife you have to know foreign languages? Since I have already suffered so much trying to speak Danish, make sure to assign me to the Polish zone . . .” So reads a typical aphoristic “poem” in Kopenhaga by Grzegorz Wróblewski. I use quotation marks in an attempt to indicate that ...

Sticking with the Italian Theme . . .

We’ve published two Italian books at Open Letter—Aracoeli by Elsa Morante, translated by William Weaver, and more recently, This Is the Garden by Giulio Mozzi, translated by Elizabeth Harris. Since we’ve already posted about Weaver today, it only seems appropriate that we should write up this interview ...

Antony Shugaar on William Weaver and Translation in General

Using William Weaver’s passing as a launching point, Italian translator Antony Shugaar wrote a really informative, interesting op-ed on translation issues for Monday’s New York Times. There are a lot of great bits I could quote—like the description of FMR magazine, its espresso and prosciutto orders, the ...

Relocations: 3 Contemporary Russian Women Poets

Two women dominate the history of Russian poetry: Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva. Both authors transcended the label of “woman poet” and live in the realm of the eternal untouchable legends of Russian poetry. To wit, I remember a Russian professor in college correcting a short essay I wrote on an Akhmatova poem ...

All My Friends

For my first review for Open Letter Books, I was delighted to discover in my letterbox in the French Pyrenees a copy of Marie NDiaye’s All My Friends. Tearing open the package, I savored the look and feel of the jacket covers, as is my habit prior to dipping into a book. It was smooth, rich and velvety to the touch, black ...

Tom's Anti-List Rant

This is Tom Roberge’s contribution to our “Best Books of 2013” podcast. As you can see below, he’s calling bullshit on this whole “best books” thing. Do we mind if I rant a bit? About lists and “Best of” things? I have a theory about “best of” lists, especially for things like ...

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Chad's 2013 Books

As I mentioned in an earlier post—or two—I ended up reading 111 books last year. A lot of South Korean titles—as part of my judging their biannual translation contest—and a random assortment of other things, both that Open Letter is publishing, or that I wanted to review/think might be BTBA longlist ...

Pierre Reverdy

To read a poem by Pierre Reverdy is to enter a world of dreamlike contradictions, surreal metaphors, and jarring juxtapositions. Marked by recurring themes of consciousness, time, distance, and memory, Reverdy’s work inhabits an otherworldly realm. As when viewing a cubist painting, it’s hard to maintain a sense of ...

What Is a Zola?

I’m not entirely sure what a Zola is—an ebook only store! a social network for readers! a discovery engine! something made in Manhattan!—but apparently it’s important enough to acquire (and thankfully dismantle) Bookish. From Publishers Weekly: Bookish, the struggling social network funded by ...

The Snow Day Edition [Some January Translations]

Along with about, well, everyone else in the northeast, I’m snowed into my apartment today, so instead of answering the phones at Open Letter (HA! no one ever calls us), I’m at home, working on our forthcoming anthology of Spanish literature, A Thousand Forests in One Acorn, and, as a break of sorts, I thought ...

The Faint-hearted Bolshevik

Let’s say you’re in a car accident. It’s not a bad one. You rear-end someone on a busy highway where traffic is crawling. And let’s say the person you hit happens to be a wealthy woman who leaps from her vehicle and berates you in language unfit for the ears of small children. What would you do? Javier, the supposed ...

The Genre Heap

Michael Orthofer runs the Complete Review – a book review site with a focus on international fiction – and its Literary Saloon weblog. A common complaint leveled against the Man Booker Prize is that it ignores genre fiction – for a couple of years there was the obligatory Ian Rankin denunciation of how unfair it was ...

Dutch Treats

Michael Orthofer runs the Complete Review – a book review site with a focus on international fiction – and its Literary Saloon weblog. One of the many interesting things about judging the Best Translated Book Award is the sense it gives you of what (and how much) is actually being translated into English (and ...

Daniel Medin’s BTBA favorites: Autumn reading

Daniel Medin teaches at the American University of Paris, where he helps direct the Center for Writers and Translators, is an editor of The Cahiers Series ,and co-hosts the podcast entitled That Other Word. He has authored a study of Franz Kafka in the work of three international writers (Northwestern University Press, 2010) ...

Pixy Stick Infused Candy Canes [Some December Translations]

So, my 9-year-old daughter recently moved to a new school—one that encourages its students to participate in something called Odyssey of the Mind. If you’re not familiar with this, which I totally wasn’t, it’s basically a competition in which teams perform different tasks that highlight ...

The Big Books of the BTBA

This post is courtesy of BTBA judge, Scott Esposito. Scott Esposito blogs at Conversational Reading and you can find his tweets here. I like the fact that the BTBA has a strong track record for picking not only the massive, monumental doorstoppers that tend to garner the lion’s share of award attention but also the slim, ...

Words Without Borders: The Oulipo Issue

Aside from every stupid Buzzfeed list ever, the number one link I’ve seen on my social media networks over the past few days has been to the new Words Without Borders issue. On the one hand, this is a testament to the amazingness of WWB; on the other, it illustrates that the vast majority of my friends are book nerds ...

Paul Klee's Boat

Paul Klee’s Boat, Anzhelina Polonskaya’s newest bilingual collection of poems available in English, is an emotional journey through the bleakest seasons of the human soul, translated with great nuance by Andrew Wachtel. A former professional ice dancer(!), Polonskaya left the world of dancing and moved back home to the ...

Four Titles from the Big Stacks

Sarah Gerard is a writer who used to work at McNally Jackson Books, but recently took a job at BOMB Magazine. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, Bookforum, the Paris Review Daily, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Slice Magazine, and other publications. Her new book, “Things I Told My ...

Thanksgiving Weekend (and Hanukkah Week) Is a Weekend (Week) for Reading

Thanks to a blown out tire, which forced me to spend most of last Friday riding in a tow truck and sitting in a tire shop, I didn’t have a chance to write my weekly Weekend Reading post.1 So this week, I’m going to triple up on the normal post and write about the three books I hope to spend the next four days ...

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Let's Capitalize on the Garth Risk Hallberg Thing for a Post

If you’re into book industry news and whatnot, you’ve probably heard the story about Garth Risk Hallberg’s novel, City on Fire. Just to recap though, before the book had a publisher, Scott Rudin, the movie producer behind Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and No Country ...

Step Out of Line, The Man Comes . . .

This week’s BTBA post is written by George Carroll, a publishers representative based in Seattle who blogs at North-North-West. He is also the soccer editor for Shelf Awareness and he and Chad frequently spent part of the weekend texting about EPL match-ups and Manchester Fucking United. Paranoia by Victor ...

Typographical Era's Translation Award

In response to the incredibly lame GoodReads Choice Awards (and yes, I’m totally voting for Jodi Picoult in the fiction category), Typographical Era launched their own Translation Award: It all started when I asked a simple question on Twitter yesterday. Why in the HELL do the GoodReads Choice Awards not have a ...

Every Good Heart is a Telescope

Poetry always has the feel of mysticism and mystery, or maybe this feeling is a stereotype left over from high school literature class. It is generally the result of confusion, lack of time committed to consuming the poetry, and the general difficulty poetry imposes on the reader. In Víctor Rodríguez Núñez’s ...

November 2013 Translations Worth Checking Out: The "ORDNUNG!" Edition

Before getting into this month’s list of recommended translations—which is kind of long, mostly because I couldn’t decide on which titles to cut—I want to follow-up a bit on last month’s post about our trip to the Frankfurt Book Fair. Actually, to be more specific, I want to talk about Germans ...

BTBA 2013 Poetry Committee

OK, I’ve been promising this for a long time, but I’ve finally got my stuff together and have information on the five judges for this year’s BTBA in Poetry. Bios for all five can be found below, and for publishers looking to submit their books, here is a PDF of mailing list label that you can use, and ...

A Cautionary Tale

Here’s an open letter from Jonathan Wright about some shit that went down with Knopf and Dr. Alaa Al Aswany, the author of The Yacoubian Building. If nothing else, you MUST check out this set of corrections from Al Aswany. It is things. And something I’m using in my classes from now until forever . . . Anyway, the ...

CONTENDERS FOR DANIEL MEDIN’S SHORTLIST (SUMMER READS)

Daniel Medin teaches at the American University of Paris, where he helps direct the Center for Writers and Translators, is an editor of The Cahiers Series ,and co-hosts the podcast entitled That Other Word. He has authored a study of Franz Kafka in the work of three international writers (Northwestern University Press, 2010) ...

October 2013 Translations Worth Checking Out: The "Our Flight to Frankfurt Is Delayed" Edition

As mentioned last month, I decided to start this monthly round-up for two reasons—to highlight a few interesting books in translation that other venues likely won’t, and because I think there’s more to literature that the monthly Flavorwire listicles. (One more Flavorwire thing: It’s totally fine that ...

Nobel Considerations

BTBA blog post – Michael Orthofer Michael Orthofer runs the Complete Review – a book review site with a focus on international fiction – and its Literary Saloon weblog. This Thursday or next the Swedish Academy will likely announce who will receive the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature – still considered the ultimate ...

Elizabeth Harris Talks Translation

Elizabeth Harris has translated fiction by Mario Rigoni Stern, Fabio Stassi, and Marco Candida, among others. Her translation of Giulio Mozzi’s story collection Questo è il giardino (This Is the Garden) will be published by Open Letter Books in 2014; the individual stories have appeared in The Literary Review, The Missouri ...

Under This Terrible Sun

Equal parts stoner pulp thriller and psycho-physiological horror story, a pervasive sense of dread mixes with a cloud of weed smoke to seep into every line of the disturbing, complex Under This Terrible Sun. Originally published by illustrious Spanish publishers Editorial Anagrama, Under This Terrible Sun is Argentine ...

Sarah Gerard's Three Longlist Contenders

Sarah Gerard is a writer and a bookseller at McNally Jackson Books. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, Bookforum, the Paris Review Daily, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Slice Magazine, and other publications. She holds an MFA from The New School and lives in Brooklyn. I’m only going to talk ...

This Is Sort of a Translation Problem

So, Vitamin Water decided to run a contest in Canada that included random words under the bottle cap—one in English and one in French. Supposedly Coca-Cola reviewed all the words in the contest, but seemed to miss out on a few crucial words that mean one thing in French and another in English . . . From Huffington Post ...

Ten Translations to Check Out in September: Not Really a Listicle

I’ve been wanting to do monthly highlights of books coming out for a while, but thought to myself that, well, Flavorwire already does stuff like this, so why bother. Then I remembered that Flavorwire is the worst, so here we are. High Tide by Inga Ābele. Translated from the Latvian by Kaija Straumanis. ($15.95, ...

The Arabic Sterne?

Thanks to a Three Percent fan who sends me periodic updates on titles I’ve left out of the translation database, I just found out about Humphrey Davies’s first-ever English translation on of Leg over Leg by Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq. Originally published in 1855, this sounds like the sort of crazy, ...

LARB Interview with Brendon O'Kane

Over at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Jeffrey Wasserstrom (author of China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know and co-editor of Chinese Characters: Profiles of Fast-Changing Lives in a Fast-Changing Land) has an interview with Brendan O’Kane, who, well, I’ll let Wasserstrom explain his importance ...

¡Feliz cumpleaños, Julio Cortázar!

Julio Cortázar, one of the greatest writers ever,1 was born on August 26, 1914, and to celebrate the week of his birthday, Archipelago Books, one of the greatest presses ever, is offering a 25% discount on all three of the Cortázar books that they publish. Just insert “HOPSCOTCH13,” a code based on one of the ...

Words Without Borders is Looking for a New ED

For the right person, this is such a great opportunity, which is why I thought I’d just post the whole listing: Executive Director, Words Without Borders Full time, From Home (May change in future) Reports to: Board of Directors Words without Borders (wordswithoutborders.org) promotes cultural understanding ...

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Three Percent #63: Spermatic Economy

This week’s podcast is a special combo version featuring two separate conversations: one between Chad, Stephen Sparks (BTBA judge, Green Apple bookseller, and excellent reviewers), and George Carroll; and one between Chad and Paul Yamazaki (legendary City Lights bookseller). Topics range from soccer to Karl Pohrt to ...

The Book of Emotions

João Almino’s The Book of Emotions is the prototypical Dalkey Archive book. Not that all of Dalkey’s books are the same, but there is a certain set of criteria that a lot of their titles have—and which Almino’s novel has in spades: It’s a book about someone trying to write a book. From Mulligan Stew to At ...

Antonia Lloyd-Jones Wins Again

Wow. I’m just going to post this press release in its entirety: The Polish Book Institute, the Polish Cultural Institute London, and the Polish Cultural Institute New York are delighted to announce that the winner of the 2012 Found in Translation Award is Antonia Lloyd-Jones. Usually the award is given for a single ...

Interview with Kazim Ali and Libby Murphy about Duras's "L'Amour"

Over at the Fiction Writers Review, Jennifer Solheim has posted a great interview with the two translators of Duras’s L’Amour, which just pubbed this past Tuesday. You can read the whole thing here, but here are a few highlights. Jennifer Solheim: In your beautiful introduction, Kazim, you write, ...

Kafka's Hat

Quebecois author Patrice Martin’s first book, translated into English by Chantal Bilodeau as Kafka’s Hat and published by Talon, is strongly influenced by Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, and Paul Auster. I’m putting this up front because it is something Martin really, really wants you to know. These authors are named ...

Win a Copy of Marguerite Duras's L'Amour!

This morning the Arts Fuse ran a great review by John Taylor about Marguerite Duras’s L’Amour, which we’ll officially be publishing in just a couple weeks . . . Is L’Amour then a novel? Yes, in the ordinary and hardly helpful sense that there is a story (or rather, several intermingled, fragmentary ...

2014 Best Translated Book Award . . . The Beginning

Although the announcement of the 2013 Best Translated Book Award winners is only a couple of months old, it’s already time to start thinking about next year’s award. First up—announcing the fiction jury and the deadline for fiction submissions. Easy bit first: As with years previous, to submit a title for ...

Another Megan McDowell Post

The second book from Frisch & Co. has just been released— Under this Terrible Sun by Carlos Busqued and translated by Megan McDowell. Cetarti spends his days in a cloud of pot smoke, watching nature documentaries on television. A call from a stranger, informing him that his mother and brother have been ...

Another Interview: Megan McDowell and Arturo Fontaine

This month, Yale University Press is publishing La Vida Doble by Chilean author Arturo Fontaine, translated by Megan McDowell. Set in the darkest years of the Pinochet dictatorship, La Vida Doble is the story of Lorena, a leftist militant who arrives at a merciless turning point when every choice she confronts is ...

Interview with Harold Goldblatt

Last semester, one of my favorite class periods was the one in which we talked with Harold Goldblatt about his translation, especially his translation of Mo Yan’s Pow!. One of the great moments was when I asked him how many books he had translated and he honestly wasn’t sure. “Something around 50-55, I ...

Interview with Angel Igov

Getting caught up on a bunch of paperwork and spreadsheets today, but thought I’d first share a couple of interesting interviews that were published in the past couple months. First off, here’s one that Steven Wingate did with Angel Igov, the author of the recently published A Short Tale of ...

Antoine Volodine & His Self Interview

Next year we’re going to be publishing Antoine Volodine’s Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons: Lesson Eleven, a book that I’m super excited about, and which help explain (somewhat) Volodine’s crazy-awesome project. If you’re a regular listener to the “Three Percent Podcast”: you’ve ...

New New Books in German

The new issue of New Books in German has been out for a little while, but it’s pretty loaded and deserving of a mention for anyone who might have missed it. I am delighted to introduce issue 33 of New Books in German: spring is finally springing here in London and our bright yellow plumage captures the vernal ...

Why Bury the Lede? AmazonCrossing Publishes More Books in Translation than Anyone Else (In 2013. Probably.)

For everyone interested in the state of literature in translation today, I just posted updates to the 2012 Translation Database and the 2013 one. First things first: In 2012, AmazonCrossing published more works of fiction and poetry in translation than any other press except for Dalkey Archive, and is the largest publisher ...

Polyglossia and Jose Manuel Prieto's "Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia" [Part II]

This article is a transcript of a presentation Esther Allen gave at Boston University on Friday, February 22, 2013. Click here for Part I. For the reader of the original text, the book’s origin in the Spanish-speaking world is evident in its every word and requires no further emphasis. As its translator into English, my ...

Polyglossia and Jose Manuel Prieto's "Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia" [Part I]

This article is a transcript of a presentation Esther Allen gave at Boston University on Friday, February 22, 2013. Earlier this month I was invited to be on a panel about translation at a Brooklyn bookstore. The announcement promised potential audience members they would “Find out what it takes to make sure the ...

Clive James's and His Ignorant Comment

Hopefully that headline got your attention. But seriously, check out this bit from the By the Book feature that appeared in the New York Times this weekend: Are you a rereader? What books do you find yourself returning to again and again? I don’t do much rereading anymore because I’ve been ill and feel that ...

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Three Percent #58: Richard Nash.

We’re back! With our newest and semi-delayed installment of the Three Percent Podcast. This week is a two-parter. First, Chad and Tom run down the list of fiction and poetry finalists for the 2013 Best Translated Book Awards. Yes, it’s true that these were announced a couple weeks ago, but, as luck would have it, ...

Mundo Cruel by Luis Negrón

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 translated from the Spanish by Suzanne Jill Levine, winner of the 2012 PEN Center USA ...

Why This Book Should Win: "Transfer Fat" by Aase Berg [BTBA 2013]

Over the course of this week, we will be highlighting all 6 BTBA Poetry Finalists one by one, building up to next Friday’s announcement of the winners. All of these are written by the BTBA poetry judges under the rubric of “Why This Book Should Win.” You can find the whole series by clicking here. Stay tuned ...

Why This Book Should Win: "Almost 1 Book / Almost 1 Life" by Elfriede Czurda [BTBA 2013]

Over the course of this week, we will be highlighting all 6 BTBA Poetry Finalists one by one, building up to next Friday’s announcement of the winners. All of these are written by the BTBA poetry judges under the rubric of “Why This Book Should Win.” You can find the whole series by clicking here. Stay tuned ...

Why This Book Should Win: "Wheel with a Single Spoke" by Nichita Stanescu [BTBA 2013]

Over the course of this week, we will be highlighting all 6 BTBA Poetry Finalists one by one, building up to next Friday’s announcement of the winners. All of these are written by the BTBA poetry judges under the rubric of “Why This Book Should Win.” You can find the whole series by clicking here. Stay tuned ...

LoveStar

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 recall such a time.) He noted as much himself in a recent interview with The ...

2013 Best Translated Book Award: The Poetry Finalists

Over at the Poetry Foundation, the names of the six poetry finalists for this year’s Best Translated Book Awards have been revealed. Before reproducing the list below, I just want to take a second to thank all six judges for this year’s competition: Brandon Holmquest, poet, translator, editor of CALQUE; Jennifer ...

2013 Best Translated Book Award: The Fiction Finalists

I’m really excited about this year’s list of finalists—it’s a pretty loaded list that includes works from eight different countries, ranging from Russia to Argentina to Djibouti. All ten books have a valid chance of winning the award depending on what criteria you want to emphasize. (Click here to see ...

Why This Book Should Win: "Happy Moscow" by Andrey Platonov [BTBA 2013]

As in years past, we will be highlighting all 25 titles on the BTBA Fiction Longlist, one by one, building up to the announcement of the 10 finalists on April 10th. A variety of judges, booksellers, and readers will write these, all under the rubric of “Why This Book Should Win. You can find the whole series by clicking ...

Where Tigers Are at Home

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 French journalist lives in a ...

Why This Book Should Win: "The Island of Second Sight" by Albert Vigoleis Thelen [BTBA 2013]

As in years past, we will be highlighting all 25 titles on the BTBA Fiction Longlist, one by one, building up to the announcement of the 10 finalists on April 10th. A variety of judges, booksellers, and readers will write these, all under the rubric of “Why This Book Should Win. You can find the whole series by clicking ...

Shishkin's Rejection and Gender Priviledge

This is a guest post from Tanya Paperny, a writer, translator, event planner, and adjunct professor of journalist and composition. Her translations of Andrei Krasnyashykh have recently appeared in The Massachusetts Review and _The Literary Review. You can read more of her writing at Culturally Progressive, her personal ...

Why This Book Should Win: "My Struggle: Book One" by Karl Ove Knausgaard [BTBA 2013]

As in years past, we will be highlighting all 25 titles on the BTBA Fiction Longlist, one by one, building up to the announcement of the 10 finalists on April 10th. A variety of judges, booksellers, and readers will write these, all under the rubric of “Why This Book Should Win. You can find the whole series by clicking ...

"Where State Television Has Become a Prostitute" [Mikhail Shishkin & the Russian Government]

So, our author Mikhail Shishkin (whose Maidenhair is the most important book I’ve ever published) cause a bit of a stir over the weekend, when he decided against participating in the Read Russia delegation to BookExpo America this summer. Here’s the complete text of his letter declining the invitation, as ...

Why This Book Should Win: "The Lair" by Norman Manea [BTBA 2013]

As in years past, we will be highlighting all 25 titles on the BTBA Fiction Longlist, one by one, building up to the announcement of the 10 finalists on April 10th. A variety of judges, booksellers, and readers will write these, all under the rubric of “Why This Book Should Win. You can find the whole series by clicking ...

2013 Best Translated Book Award Fiction Longlist

Without further ado, here are the books that our nine1 judges selected for this year’s Best Translated Book Award Fiction Longlist.   The Planets by Sergio Chejfec, translated from the Spanish by Heather Cleary (Open Letter Books; Argentina) Prehistoric Times by Eric Chevillard, translated from the French by ...

BTBA 2013: "Pow!" [The Books that DIDN'T Make It]

I’m pretty bummed about this one. And my secret hope of hopes is that Mo Yan’s Pow! didn’t make the list because everyone is so enamored with Sandalwood Death, which we officially decided to make eligible for the 2014 BTBA. I reviewed this novel a couple months back, and will be using it in my ...

BTBA 2013: "Necropolis" [The Books that DIDN'T Make It]

Santiago Gamboa’s Necropolis, which won the La Otra Orilla Literary Award in 2009, is frustratingly good, inventive, and obsessed with story telling. The premise is simple: An author much like Santiago Gamboa himself, is invited to participate in a literary conference about biography—one that will also be attended ...

BTBA 2013: "The Obscene Madame D" [The Books that DIDN'T Make It]

Next Tuesday, March 5th, at 10 am(ish), we will be unveiling this year’s BTBA Fiction Longlist. This year’s judges—click here for the complete list—did a spectacular job selecting the 25 best works of fiction in translation published last year. In contrast to years past, this time I recommended that ...

The New Gerbrand Bakker Novel [Weekend Reading]

I hate to admit it, but a few years ago, when Archipelago first sent me a copy of Gerbrand Bakker’s The Twin, I assumed that it was a book that I was probably never going to read. I mean, it’s a book about a farmer. A quiet book about a farmer. An introspective aging farmer taking care of his invalid father. ...

Blindly

A few pages into Claudio Magris’s Blindly, the reader begins to ask the same question posed by the book’s jacket: “Who is the mysterious narrator of Blindly?” Who indeed. At times the narrator is Tore, an inmate in a mental health facility. Other times, the narration is handled by Jorgen Jorgenson, king of Iceland, ...

Things to Attend . . .

For all of you lucky people living in the great city of New York, here are two fantastic upcoming events that you should try and attend. First off, next Thursday, February 21st at 7pm at McNally Jackson, Stephen Snyder and Allison Markin Powell (both of whom make me swoon) will be talking about Japanese literature in ...

Open Letter Newslestter [2.13.13]

The new Open Letter Newsletter was mailed out yesterday, and is now online (in a pretty, slick format). Included is information about 18% Gray, next Monday’s Tirza launch party at 192 Books & The Half King, and a bit about the 2013 Preview Podcast. If you’d like to sign up for the newsletter (and really, ...

How Literature Saved My Life

David Shields’s books have the power to change the way you approach all art. What separates us is not what happens to us. Pretty much the same things happen to most of us: birth, love, bad driver’s license photos, death. What separates us is how each of us thinks about what happens to us. That’s what I ...

Revenge

One of the most pleasant surprises of the literary world in the past few years, at least in my opinion, is the success that Japanese author Yoko Ogawa has seen in the United States. Her breakout, modest hit The Housekeeper and the Professor received national attention and, more anecdotally, was a top-selling book for years ...

Open Letter Love from the West Coast, Part II

I’m not even going to bother setting this one up—just read the opening of this review by Gregory Leon Miller from the San Francisco Chronicle: Quim Monzó might just be the best writer you’ve never heard of. One could say he’s Catalan’s best-known writer – in fact, the publicity ...

Open Letter Love from the West Coast, Part I

A couple weeks ago, we released Zachary Karabashliev’s 18% Gray, which looks like this: and should not be confused with Anne Tenino’s 18% Gray and looks like this: Anyway, Zack’s book, which was the co-winner of the 2012 Contemporary Bulgarian Writers Contest (sponsored by the ever-wonderful ...

Bookish: What it Isn't [Weekly Rant #1]

OK, so first off, for anyone who saw my little Facebook hissy fit last night about Bookish, I apologize. I may have overstated things a bit (yeah, I know that totally doesn’t sound like me), and jumped the gun a bit on some of my insults. That said, and before I get more fully into the Bookish conundrum, a few of the ...

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Three Percent #52: 2013 Doesn't Officially Start Until We Podcast

So, it’s been a while. Due to some technical difficulties, we haven’t been able to post a podcast for the past few weeks. But thanks to the whizbang IT department at the University of Rochester, our 10,000 year old iMac is up and functioning again. Which means that 2013 can finally officially start—thanks to ...

Sin

Zakhar Prilepin is one hell of a writer, and an interesting figure to boot. Sin is an exciting debut in English for one of one of Russia’s most popular and critically-acclaimed writers. Though this is his first novel published in English, Prilepin has written a lot: four novels, three books of short stories, plus a ...

On Submissions [We're Not Phone People]

I’d like to talk a bit about submissions. Because I’ve had a very stressful and involved week of cataloging, catching up with, and responding to every single submission Open Letter has received since essentially July of last year, I’m a little on the edge right now when it comes to submitters repeatedly asking about ...

Ways of Going Home

Ways of Going Home, Alejandro Zambra’s third book to be published in English (and second translated by Megan McDowell), packs a lot of themes—historical memory, difficulties of love, honesty in art—into a brief 139 page novel set between the two great Chilean earthquakes in 1985 and 2010. It’s an ...

Man Booker International Prize 2013 Finalists

This morning, the finalists for the 2013 Man Booker International Prize were announced, and it’s a pretty fantastic list: U R Ananthamurthy (India) Aharon Appelfeld (Israel) Lydia Davis (USA) Intizar Husain (Pakistan) Yan Lianke (China) Marie NDiaye (France) Josip Novakovich (Canada) Marilynne Robinson ...

Sandalwood Death and Books with Numbers [January Translations, Part I]

Tom and I will record our “official” 2013 preview podcast tomorrow, so you can look forward to that, but as a way of upping the number of books we can talk about on the blog, I’d like to start a weekly “preview” column. Something that may not always be that serious, yet will at least give some ...

We Monks & Soldiers

Lutz Bassman’s We Monks & Soldiers is a post-exoticist collection of several interrelated stories set during the final shallow breaths of humanity. An exorcism is performed that may or may not have resulted in the slaughter of an innocent family. An agent carries out a strange mission with varying levels of success. A ...

2013 BTBA Poetry [Panelists and Info for Submitting]

This is a long time in coming, but here’s the list of the poetry judges for this year’s Best Translated Book Award: Brandon Holmquest, poet, translator, editor of CALQUE Jennifer Kronovet, poet and translator John Marshall, owner, Autumn Hill Books and ...

Amerika: The Missing Person

A couple years ago, some trickster posted the first page of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest to a Yahoo group looking for advice about “his” new novel. Not surprisingly, the um, yahoos, didn’t recognize the source text and populated the message board with all sorts of terrible advice about the lack ...

2013 Resolutions!

One of my favorite 2012 posts to write was this one in which I got to ramble unchecked about stuff I wanted to do in the New Year. Since that was so fun, I’m going to keep up the tradition with some looking back, some new resoluting, and some stupid jokes. So here goes! Resolution #1: Drink More Mimosas Seriously. ...

Pow!

The first book by recent Nobel Laureate, Mo Yan, to come out in English translation, Pow! is guaranteed to get a lot of attention, especially considering the recent hubbub about his relationship to the Chinese Communist Party, to censorship, to the plight of fellow writer Liu Xiaobo. A lot of reviewers will scrutinize Pow! ...

Facts and Bad Jokes [France Apocalypse Trip!]

So, I’m in Paris this week. It’s a special editorial trip that came about last minute thanks to the fact that Laurence Marie and Anne-Sophie Hermil are the most wonderful people. They brought me here yesterday (Monday morning) for 18 appointments with literary folks in four days—a rather intense schedule ...

A Special Appeal from Open Letter

As the year comes to a close, we thought we’d take a minute to look back at what we’ve done over the past twelve months. It’s also that time of year when we thank you for your continued support, and ask for your help in the year to come by participating in our Annual Campaign. You probably already know that Three ...

More Mo Yan and the "C" Word

Mo Yan accepted the Nobel Peace Prize for Literature the other day, giving this acceptance speech: In the fall of 1984 I was accepted into the Literature Department of the PLA Art Academy, where, under the guidance of my revered mentor, the renowned writer Xu Huaizhong, I wrote a series of stories and novellas, ...

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Three Percent #50: Favorite Translations of 2012 (And Trilogies Tom Likes)

In this week’s podcast (Tom’s last one of of the year), we discuss the translations we did (and didn’t)1 read from 2012, including Maidenhair by Mikhail Shishkin, Satantango by Laszlo Krashnahorkai, Woes of the True Policeman by Roberto Bolano, and Necropolis by Santiago Gamboa. This kicks off the beginning ...

Canvas.

Over at Full Stop, Scott Cheshire has a lot of love for Benjamin Stein’s The Canvas, including this review: The Canvas is loosely based on the account of Binjamin Wilkomirski, author of Fragments (1995), a tremendously popular Holocaust memoir; like Minksy’s story it was proven to be a fabrication. But when I say ...

Thursday Is Fun Day!

The number one question I’m asked by people interested in Open Letter/publishing is how we find our books. We do a lot of reading of catalogs and reviews online, talking to people, getting recommendations, and, most importantly, receiving submissions over the interwebs. Well, like this one: Subject: QUERY Its All ...

Riffle. Oh, Riffle

So, a couple weeks ago, Publishers Weekly ran an article on Riffle, asking whether it could be “the Pinterest for Books.” A social media tool powered by Odyl, Riffle takes its name from the word for thumbing through a book.1 And that’s exactly the sense of discovery that Odyl founder and CEO Neil Baptista ...

Quarterly Conversation #30 [The Author Interviews]

Most of today’s content is brought you by Scott Esposito and Daniel Medin and the spectacular new issue of Quarterly Conversation, which, as always, features a lot of great international lit related content. Generally, when a new issue comes out, I post a summary piece linking off to all of the various articles of ...

Thank You, National Endowment for the Arts!

The first set of Art Works grants from the NEA were announced this morning, and I’m incredibly giddy about the fact that Open Letter was awarded $45,000 for the following: To support the publication and promotion of books in translation and the continuation of the translation website Three Percent. Works from ...

Kirkus's Best Fiction of 2012 List Featuring TWO Open Letter Titles

Now that Cyber Monday is underway, it’s about time for the “Best of Everything!!!” lists to start coming out. (Or, as documented at Largehearted Boy, continue coming out.) Personally, I fricking love these sorts of lists, to find books/albums that I need to check out, and to serve as fodder for my anger . . ...

GoodReads Giveaway for "A Thousand Morons" by Quim Monzo

Our next GoodReads Giveaway just went live—we’re going to be giving away 15 copies of Quim Monzó’s latest collection, A Thousand Morons. And not just that, we’re going to include a “Thousand Morons” t-shirt with each copy of the book . . . (Speaking of our fantastic t-shirts, ...

Brenner and God

Brenner and God is the first book in the “Brenner” series to come out in English, and only the second Wolf Haas title overall. The Weather Fifteen Years Ago came out from Ariadne Press a few years back and blew away the BTBA fiction committee—one reason why I was really excited to pick up this novel. ...

The Poems of Octavio Paz

This collection of poems spanning Paz’s writerly life also spans the historical events of the twentieth century and a significant arc of modernism. The book presents the original Spanish on the left, with the English translation on the opposing page. Translations are principally by Eliot Weinberger, but include other ...

2012 Translation Database is FINALLY Online [Chad's So Lazy]

So, a mere 10 months into the year, I’ve finally updated the Translation Database and just posted a new version of the spreadsheet for 2011 and posted the first version of the spreadsheet for 2012.. I’m fully aware that the 2012 list of poetry books is woefully incomplete, so if you are a poet, or a translator ...

An ALTA So Great it Made the New York Times [ALTA 2012]

Way back at the start of the year, I promised that this year’s ALTA would be “THE GREATEST CONFERENCE IN THE HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSE OF CONFERENCES.” Now, I’m not sure that was the case—although it was the most interesting ALTA I’ve ever attended—but it was awesome enough to get ...

2013 Best Translated Book Award: Fiction Update

OK, now that ALTA is over and the new catalog doesn’t come out for two months, I have a bit of time to concentrate on this year’s Best Translated Book Awards. Over the next couple weeks I’ll be posting information about the fiction and poetry panelists, along with an updated list of all translations ...

Michael Henry Heim (1943-2012)

I’m really not sure how to write this post . . . I didn’t know Michael Henry Heim as well as a lot of other people, such as Esther Allen, Susan Bernofsky, Sean Cotter, and the like, but I did have a number of really amazing interactions with him, and his passing is incredible sad and hitting me pretty hard. ...

Seven Houses in France

I want to do a podcast sometime about the difficulties of reading. Everything from the amount of time it takes to read a book (and where that time comes from) to what makes a particular book (Finnegans Wake for example) tricky to get into, to books that one avoids because they “seem” like they’d be a bit of ...

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Three Percent #46: The Greatest ALTA of All ALTAs

This week’s podcast features special guest Kaija Straumanis to help preview the upcoming American Literary Translators Conference. (Click here for more information about the conference.) Every fall, approx. 350 translators get together for three days of panels, discussions, readings, movies, and drinking. (Oh, and ...

Are You Ready for the Greatest ALTA Ever? [ALTA 2012]

I know that I’ve mentioned the fact that Rochester is hosting this year’s American Literary Translators Association conference before, but now that the dates are creeping up on us (October 3 is only 16 days away), it’s time to really start promoting this and filling you in on all of the insanely awesome ...

Reading in Reverse [Part III of III]

And here’s the final part of Matt Rowe’s dissertation on Daniel Levin Becker’s Many Subtle Channels. You can read part I here and part II here. Enjoy! It’s in Part III of Many Subtle Channels that Levin Becker turns to the “So What” question, the influence and value of the Oulipo in the wider world ...

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Three Percent #45: +1

This week’s podcast features freelance book critic Jacob Silverman, who stirred up a lot of discussion last month when Slate published his piece, Against Enthusiasm about “the epidemic of niceness in online book culture.” Basically, Jacob argued that online book culture has lead away from legit discussion to ...

Reading in Reverse [Part I of III]

As you may have noticed I’m a big fan of Daniel Levin Becker’s Many Subtle Channels a book about the Oulipo and potential literature. Which is why I asked Matt Rowe to review this for us. Well, he did. But in epic, multi-part style. (Matt Rowe is a true Three Percenter in that regard.) Today I’m posting Part ...

2012 PEN Literary Awards

The other day, PEN announced the winners of this year’s literary awards which range from the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing (which went to Dan Berry) to the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for a debut work (which went to Vanessa Veselka). There are also a number of translation-related awards handed out which ...

John Locke Paid People to Buy His Books [Last Laughs Laugh Best]

Hardcore Three Percent fans may remember some of my issues and troubles with the hack writer, John Locke (in comparison to the talented philosopher John Locke and the John Locke who featured prominently on Lost), who is the author of hundreds1 of Donovan Creed mystery novels, which feature midgets, pseudo-thriller plot-lines, ...

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Three Percent #44: The Exoticism of Fruit Machines

This week’s podcast—the last before Tom goes off to visit the good people of Carolina—is a bit of a surprise. Tom told me he had a topic, but wanted to spring it on me and get my unprepared reaction. So, to share in the spirit of surprises, I’m not going to say anything about what we talked about, ...

George Carroll on Translations

Sales rep superstar and international literature enthusiast George Carroll just posted a “destination guide” at NW Book Lovers that highlights a number of great presses, organizations, and books worth checking out. Many of these—like Three Percent, New Directions, the Center for the Art of ...

PEN Center USA Translation Award to Suzanne Jill Levine

The 2012 winners of the PEN Center USA Literary Awards were announced Wednesday, and I’m extremely glad to see that Suzanne Jill Levine won in the translation category for her work on José Donoso’s The Lizard’s Tale, which came out late last year from Northwestern University Press. Unfortunately, we ...

Maidenhair

“Mikhail Shishkin’s Maidenhair is the type of novel that professors of Russian literature can hold up as a shining example in their classrooms that no, Russian literature is not dead (nor has it ever been), while those who might not know their Pushkin from their Shishkin can read and enjoy Maidenhair as a standalone ...

Confusion

There is inarguably no better hook, line, and sinker for a reader to pick up a novella than one that is written by an author who had lived and died as Stefan Zweig: living in exile like the unrivaled Nabokov, banned by the government (or, in Zweig’s case, Nazi Germany), and who had fulfilled his authorship with a ...

Satantango

Susan Sontag called László Krasznahorkai the “Hungarian master of the apocalypse,” which would make Satantango his magnum opus of the apocalypse. The end of the world is coming in a deluge of rain that is turning the world into a muddy wasteland that mirrors the spiritual condition of its inhabitants. Satantango ...

Inventing the Enemy

Umberto Eco introduces Inventing the Enemy as a compilation of “occasional writings” (xi); indeed, the essays in this collection were written intermittently throughout the past decade and expound upon a vast array of subject matters. Several of the essays were originally presented as lectures at various gatherings ...

Another Intern Introduction

My name is Sarah Young, but Chad calls me Sarah Two because I was the second intern named Sarah to start at Open Letter this summer. I know my nickname is not as cool as “Quantum Sarah” or “Paranoid Sarah” (whose name is actually Rachel), but I’m just grateful my parents didn’t give me a weird, hyphenated last ...

Aldus, A Journal of Translation

Click here to read the latest issue of Aldus, a new literary translation journal from Brown University. The pioneers behind this ambitious new publication are Three Percent contributors Matthew Weiss and Tim Nassau. Tim’s also a former Open Letter intern, and recently reviewed Tomas Tranströmer’s The Deleted ...

Susan Sontag 2012 Prize for Translation

The Susan Sontag Foundation recently announced Julia Powers and Adam Morris as the winners of their 2012 Prize for Translation. Every June, the $5,000 prize is awarded to a literary translator under the age of 30 over the course of five months, during which the proposed project must be completed. The award was established to ...

The Deleted World

Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer’s winning the Nobel Prize brought to light a rare bit of translation gossip: that there’s bad blood between a few of his translators. And as there should be—a lot of people suddenly want to buy Tranströmer’s poetry; of the five plus out there, which book are you going to get? The ...

(Re-)Introducing Alek!

Hi there! I’m Aleksandra Fazlipour, although I typically go by Alek. Chad introduced me before, but I finally got registered as a contributor to the site, so it’s my turn to do it again! I started doing an independent study at Open Letter in January in an attempt to fill out a Creative Writing minor that I took ...

Banipal 44

Here’s the newest issue from Banipal, an independent literary magazine that publishes authors from the Arab world in English translation. This summer issue spotlights twelve women writers from all around the Arab diaspora, whose short stories and excerpted novels center on “human issues such as loss, identity, personal ...

Hi there!

I’m Sarah Winstein-Hibbs – nicknamed “quantum Sarah” by Chad, who thinks my weird hyphenated last name sounds like some kind of subatomic particle – and I’m an English Literature major at University of Rochester. I’m interning at Open Letter this summer, so I’ll be posting on ...

The Long Term Is the Only Race Worth Winning

Right now I should be getting on a plane in Cape Town to head back home after the 29th International Publishers Congress. UNFORTUNATELY, the jags employees at Delta’s ticket counter in Atlanta refused to let me board the plane since my passport doesn’t contain a complete blank page. OK, I get it, I get in, ...

Latvian Publishing Controversy

Our Latvian publishing correspondent Kaija Straumanis (no, not Janis Stirna, he’s restricted to Eurovision) came across an interesting controversy that just took place in Latvia. I think the translated letters/articles pretty much speak for themselves, but I’ll try and contextualize this as it goes along . . . ...

Javier Calvo's "The Hanging Garden"

Javier Calvo—the author of Wonderful World which was published by HarperCollins a couple years ago—is in the States for a few events, including this one with Edith Grossman that’s taking place on Saturday at McNally Jackson in New York. To mark this, and to bring attention to an interesting young Spanish ...

Yingelishi: Sinophonic English Poetry and Poetics

If poets are, as P. B. Shelley wrote, “the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” then translation must be one of the unacknowledged legislators of poetry. Certainly translation of Chinese poetry has been essential to modern American writing: Ezra Pound’s Cathay didn’t just invent, as T. S. Eliot put it, “Chinese ...

Russian Big Book Prize Shortlist Announced

Friend of Three Percent, Lisa Hayden Espenschade, who runs the incredible Russian literature blog Lizok’s Bookshelf posted the shortlist for the über-prestigious Big Book (Bol’shaya Kniga) Prize. Big Book is one of the “big three” Russian literary prizes, along with the Russian Booker and the National ...

Scars, Scars, and More Scars

Over at Numéro Cinq (“A Warm Place on a Cruel Web”) there’s a great feature on Scars by Juan José Saer, a book that I recently claimed in an interview was my “favorite Open Letter book ever.” (And which I qualified by saying that my mind will change by the time the interview is over . . . My ...

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Three Percent #39: The King of Publishing

In this week’s podcast, Tom and I talk about two related subjects: this New Yorker article about the translation of the first line of Camus’ The Stranger, and the PEN World Voices panel about “Reviewing Translations.” (See video embedded below.) There are also some digressions, mostly involving me ...

The Walk

For the narrator of Robert Walser’s The Walk, walking is the better part of writing. Shortly before declaring his arrival at “something like the peak” of this 90-page Pearl from New Directions (translated by Christopher Middleton and Susan Bernofsky—more on that in a second), Walser’s narrator delivers a brilliant ...

Very Short List: World in Translation Month

The people at Very Short List were kind enough to ask me to put together a special list featuring items related to World in Translation Month. For anyone who doesn’t know, VSL started a few years ago with a very simple idea: every day subscribers would receive an email highlighting one cool and interesting thing. ...

"Most Beauteous Non-Prostitution Woman in Shortest Dress" [FuckyeahEurovision!]

After a minor hiatus, Janis Stirna is back with his on-going preview of the Eurovision. The semi-finals start next Tuesday (5/22), and he promised me he’d cover all the entries before the finals along with all his yes/no votes on who will make it to the finals. Hello my friends. If You are here today this is ...

A Book You Should Read: "The Little Red Guard" by Wenguang Huang

Two of my friends have memoirs coming out this spring (the other being Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s A Sense of Direction), which is a sort of interesting phenomenon. I don’t typically read a lot of memoirs, but when it’s someone you know? . . . That’s extra intriguing. I don’t know either Gideon or Wen ...

New Podcasts to Listen To

I just received email notification that the third episode of That Other Word, the podcast from American University of Paris’s Center for Writers and Translators and the Center for the Art of Translation is now online. This particular episode features a discussion between Daniel Medin and Scott Esposito about W.G. ...

The 2012 Best Translated Book Award Winners: Wiesław Myśliwski’s "Stone Upon Stone" and Kiwao Nomura’s "Spectacle & Pigsty"

The winning titles and translators of this year’s Best Translated Book Award were announced earlier this evening at McNally Jackson Books as part of the PEN World Voices Festival. In poetry, Kiwao Nomura’s Spectacle & Pigsty, translated from the Japanese by Kyoko Yoshida and Forrest Gander, took the top honor, and ...

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Three Percent #36: A Couple Gin & Tonics Does NOT Make Me a Better Oulipian

(My initial plan was to create a title for this podcast that was actually an acrostic spelling out “Oulipo.” The best I came up with was “Our Unique Lab Instigating Poetic Opportunities,” which is decent, self-referential, and strange, but not perfect. Unfortunately, drinking didn’t help me ...

"False Friends" by Uljana Wolf [5 Days of Poetry]

With the Best Translated Book Award announcements taking place Friday, May 4th at 6pm at McNally Jackson Books it’s time to highlight all six poetry finalists. Over the course of the week we’ll run short pieces by all of the poetry judges on their list of finalists. Click here for all past and future posts in ...

Quarterly Conversation #27: Saer, Lispector, Rodoreda, and More . . .

OK, granted, this came out a couple weeks ago, which is basically a million eons in Internet time, but the new(est) issue of the Quarterly Conversation is now online and is loaded with great translation-centric material. (And great reviews of Open Letter titles, and Open Letter favorites . . .) Here are short highlights of ...

The New Standard for Publishers Re: Acknowledging the Translator

So last month, Uday Prakash’s The Walls of Delhi was published by the University of Western Australia Press in Jason Grunebaum’s translation. At some point, we’ll run a review of this book, but for now, I just wanted to point out UWAP’s conscientious approach to highlighting the fact that this book ...

2012 Best Translated Book Award Finalists: Fiction and Poetry

April 10, 2012—On Tuesday evening, the poetry and fiction finalists for the 2012 Best Translated Book Awards were announced during a special event at the University of Rochester, and on Three Percent, the university’s translation-centric website (www.rochester.edu/threepercent). “In previous years, there was much less ...

Margaret Carson at The Mookse and the Gripes

Over at The Mookse and the Gripes, Trevor Berrett posted a really interesting interview with Margaret Carson, the translator of Sergio Chejfec’s My Two Worlds (among other books): A “walking” book, when I finished My Two Worlds I wrote, “It’s meandering (obviously), sometimes feels pointless (deliberately), ...

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Three Percent #34: "These Creatures I Must Woo"

This week Tom and I welcomed Jeff Waxman of University of Chicago Press and 57th Street Books to the podcast to talk about different approaches to marketing different “types” of translations, such as contemporary translations vs. classic works vs. new translations vs. reprints vs. . . . It’s an interesting ...

"Private Property" by Paule Constant [25 Days of the BTBA]

As with years past, we HIGHLIGHTED (past tense) the rest of the 25 titles on the BTBA fiction longlist. We had a variety of guests writing these posts, all of which centered around the question of “Why This Book Should Win.” Hopefully these funny, accidental, entertaining, and informative posts prompted you to ...

"Montecore" by Jonas Hassen Khemiri [25 Days of the BTBA]

As with years past, we’re going to spend the next week highlighting the rest of the 25 titles on the BTBA fiction longlist. We’ll have a variety of guests writing these posts, all of which are centered around the question of “Why This Book Should Win.” Hopefully these are funny, accidental, ...

"I Am a Japanese Writer" by Dany LaFerrière [25 Days of the BTBA]

As with years past, we’re going to spend the next week highlighting the rest of the 25 titles on the BTBA fiction longlist. We’ll have a variety of guests writing these posts, all of which are centered around the question of “Why This Book Should Win.” Hopefully these are funny, accidental, ...

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Three Percent #33: The Spaz and the Straight Man

In this week’s podcast, we talk about the future of book reviewing, focusing on a few central questions: who reads book reviews? (A: definitely not my students), what is the function of the book review in today’s world?, is there a website/app that would be the ideal book review platform? We also digress into ...

"Leeches" by David Albahari [25 Days of the BTBA]

As with years past, we’re going to spend the next two weeks highlighting the rest of the 25 titles on the BTBA fiction longlist. We’ll have a variety of guests writing these posts, all of which are centered around the question of “Why This Book Should Win.” Hopefully these are funny, accidental, ...

"Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion?" by Johan Harstad [25 Days of the BTBA]

As with years past, we’re going to spend the next two weeks highlighting the rest of the 25 titles on the BTBA fiction longlist. We’ll have a variety of guests writing these posts, all of which are centered around the question of “Why This Book Should Win.” Hopefully these are funny, accidental, ...

Children in Reindeer Woods Giveaway

For all you GoodReads users, we’re giving away 10 copies of Kristin Omarsdottir’s Children in Reindeer Woods though their special program. To enter, simply click on the button below before March 31st. In terms of this book, it’s a very intriguing novel that’s kind of like a war book that’s not ...

It's Still Us Against Them

From an article in The Guardian about a very jacked Russian translation of a movie about Margaret Thatcher: Speaking to a crowd of supporters, Margaret Thatcher, as played by Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady, explains what she would do as prime minister: “Crush the working class, crush the scum, the ...

"Fiasco" by Imre Kertesz [25 Days of the BTBA]

As with years past, we’re going to spend the next three weeks highlighting the rest of the 25 titles on the BTBA fiction longlist. We’ll have a variety of guests writing these posts, all of which are centered around the question of “Why This Book Should Win.” Hopefully these are funny, accidental, ...

"Upstaged" by Jacques Jouet [25 Days of the BTBA]

As with years past, we’re going to spend the next three weeks highlighting the rest of the 25 titles on the BTBA fiction longlist. We’ll have a variety of guests writing these posts, all of which are centered around the question of “Why This Book Should Win.” Hopefully these are funny, accidental, ...

"The Truth about Marie" by Jean-Philippe Toussaint [25 Days of the BTBA]

As with years past, we’re going to spend the next four weeks highlighting the rest of the 25 titles on the BTBA fiction longlist. We’ll have a variety of guests writing these posts, all of which are centered around the question of “Why This Book Should Win.” Hopefully these are funny, accidental, ...

"Suicide" by Edouard Levé [25 Days of the BTBA]

As with years past, we’re going to spend the next four weeks highlighting the rest of the 25 titles on the BTBA fiction longlist. We’ll have a variety of guests writing these posts, all of which are centered around the question of “Why This Book Should Win.” Hopefully these are funny, accidental, ...

"Funeral for a Dog" by Thomas Pletzinger [25 Days of the BTBA]

As with years past, we’re going to spend the next five weeks highlighting all 25 titles on the BTBA fiction longlist. We’ll have a variety of guests writing these posts, all of which are centered around the question of “Why This Book Should Win.” Hopefully these are funny, accidental, entertaining, and ...

"Zone" by Mathias Enard [25 Days of the BTBA]

As with years past, we’re going to spend the next five weeks highlighting all 25 titles on the BTBA fiction longlist. We’ll have a variety of guests writing these posts, all of which are centered around the question of “Why This Book Should Win.” Hopefully these are funny, accidental, entertaining, and ...

You Too Can Be a Three Percent Writer

So, as you probably know, for the next four+ weeks, we’re going to be featuring a book a day from the BTBA Fiction Longlist. These posts aren’t reviews per se, but more like little intros designed to both intrigue new readers and make a case for why that particular book deserves to win the whole thing. ...

2012 ALTA Travel Fellowship Awards

So, ALTA just sent out the following info about applying for a fellowship for this year’s conference, which will take place from October 3-6 right here in Rochester. If you’re a young translator, you really have to apply for this for a few reasons: 1) ALTA will introduce you to mentors and contacts that will ...

"Lightning" by Jean Echenoz [25 Days of the BTBA]

As with years past, we’re going to spend the next five weeks highlighting all 25 titles on the BTBA fiction longlist. We’ll have a variety of guests writing these posts, all of which are centered around the question of “Why This Book Should Win.” Hopefully these are funny, accidental, entertaining, and ...

"My Two Worlds" by Sergio Chejfec [25 Days of the BTBA]

As with years past, we’re going to spend the next five weeks highlighting all 25 titles on the BTBA fiction longlist. We’ll have a variety of guests writing these posts, all of which are centered around the question of “Why This Book Should Win.” Hopefully these are funny, accidental, entertaining, and ...

Come Find Me at AWP!

So for the first year ever, Open Letter has a booth at AWP, the annual conference of the Associated Writing Programs. Our booth is J8, which, if you look at this rather daunting map, is against the wall in the Southeast Hall. Not exactly the center of all AWP foot traffic, so PLEASE come by. I promise to make it worth your ...

And Here It Is: The BTBA 2012 Fiction Longlist

I was really excited to get the longlist from the judges last Thursday. Having removed myself entirely from the process, it was as much of a surprise to me as it is for anyone reading this. And after spending a few days going over it, checking off the titles I’ve read, and the ones I want to read, I have to say that ...

"Translation: A Transdisciplinary Journal"

Thanks to Edwin Gentzler, the font of knowledge for all things translation, I just found out about a new journal called, simply, Translation. With this publication, the editors present the new international peer-reviewed journal translation, which from January 2012 will be published twice a year. The journal—a ...

The Noise of Time

I have to thank Daniel Medin for bringing to my attention Cynthia Haven’s post about a small French publisher focused on literature in translation: Translation is the poor stepchild of literature – academics get more applause for producing their own books, not for translating the writing of others; for writers, ...

Death in Spring on All Things Considered

This review actually appeared online a couple months ago, but National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward’s piece on Merce Rodoreda’s Death in Spring made it onto “All Things Considered” last night. I personally think Death in Spring is one of the most unique, and interesting books that we’ve ...

Juan Gabriel Vasquez's "The Secret History of Costaguana"

This may be thanks to Bolano and his massive appeal, but it seems (to me at least), like Spanish literature is going through a sort of a “Second Boom.” Not so much in terms of a shared aesthetic, but in terms of having captured the imaginations of American publishers. In addition to standards like Javier Marias ...

While the Women Are Sleeping

Javier Marias’s greatness in the world of world literature seems pretty much unquestioned. And I’ve always thought of him as a pretty cool guy—for boycotting the United States for as long as Bush was president, for example, which was one of the first things I learned about him. This was while I was interning at ...

About Time

From this PW piece on BookExpo America and changes to the show: Reed is already looking to bigger changes in 2013. In a blog post yesterday Rosato discussed a move to B2C, enabling publishers to connect directly with consumers. The show would move to Thursday to Saturday with the general public invited to attend author ...

Stig Sæterbakken (1966-2012)

As noted on the Dalkey Archive website, Norwegian author Stig Sæterbakken took his own life this past Tuesday. Sæterbakken was the author of the novels Incubus, The New Testament, Siamese, Self-Control, and Sauermugg (the latter three constituting the “S-trilogy”), and two collections of essays, Aesthetic ...

Endangered Language & Poetry in Mexico

David Shook—who has reviewed for Three Percent. in the past—is starting a new project to produce a short documentary film and a five-chapbook set of indigenous Mexican poetry. Rather than explain this in my own words, I asked him to write a short introductory post laying out the basis for this venture. As you can ...

2012 Festival Neue Literatur

The lovely and energetic Riky Stock just sent me a ton of information about this year’s Festival Neue Literatur, which will take place in NYC from February 10th-12th and is curated by the also lovely and energetic Susan Bernofsky. Here’s all the info you need: The Festival of New Literature (February ...

Criticism Is Where It's At [NBCC Awards]

This weekend, the National Book Critics Circle announced the finalists for its books wards for publishing 2011 and—not to bury the lede—including Dubravka Ugresic’s Karaoke Culture as one of the five finalists in the Criticism category. This is the first major book award that one of our titles has been ...

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Three Percent #26: What's in Store for 2008 (Er . . . 2012)

After a run of special podcasts, we’re back to the normal Tom and Chad show . . . This week we decided to talk about books we’re looking forward to and other random predictions about 2012. (I believe that is the year we are living in. Although as you’ll hear when you listen, I have a few problems knowing ...

DSC Prize for South Asian Literature

With the announcement of the winner taking place on Saturday, this seems like a good of time as any to mention the second annual DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. The DSC Prize for South Asian Literature is a first-of-its-kind initiative as it is specifically focused on the richness and diversity of South Asian ...

The Morning News Tournament of Books 2012

The Morning News Tournament of Books is BACK! For the uninitiated, this is a 16-book, bracket-style “tournament” designed to crown the . . . well, I’ll just let them explain it: Today we’re announcing the shortlist for the 2012 Tournament of Books (for novels, of course, published in 2011) only a week ...

Great Publishing Jobs

Over the break, I heard about two great publishing jobs that might interest some of you (and many of my students, former students, and colleagues). First up, the phenomenal Melville House is hiring a publicist. Duties include performing all aspects of book publicity, including: designing campaigns; writing press ...

It's 2012–Time for Some Resoluting!

Back when I was a kid, I used to love the start of every New Year. A fresh calendar, new journal to write in every day for a week before forgetting it in the back corner of a desk, dedicated routines (read for an hour a day! only watch TV once a week!), promises of better health and finally talking to that girl I’d been ...

Ruth Franklin on Five Books She Wished She Had Written About

Over at The New Republic Ruth Franklin (who is working on a biography of Shirley Jackson, which should be amazing) has a piece detailing the five books that came out in 2011 that she wishes she had reviewed. It’s a great list that includes Teju Cole’s Open City (“Reminiscent of the works of W.G. Sebald, ...

Farhad Manjoo, Amazon, and Independent Bookstores [Controversies]

Following on my post from yesterday, which was following on Richard Russo’s op-ed piece, which was following on Amazon’s “Price Check special,” today Slate’s tech guy, Farhad Manjoo, has his own piece about Amazon and indie bookstores—one that has seemingly pissed off everyone I know. If ...

1Q84

Like many an English-speaking Murakami fan, I have been waiting to read 1Q84 for almost three years. That’s right, three years, since around January 2009, when news reports from Japan were just announcing that Murakami had finished his latest novel, one still without a title and rumored to be twice as long as Kafka on the ...

Year End Lists & Books You Should Read [Hearts for Scott Esposito]

OK, so I don’t really heart Scott Esposito—as well all know, he’s shit at riding a mechanical bull and that is a NECESSARY in my book—but he has been doing a lot of great work lately, and has prompted me to write an appreciation of his recent reviews and round-up of some year end lists that I’ve ...

Three Messages and a Warning [Read This Next]

This week’s Read This Next title is Three Messages and a Warning: Contemporary Mexican Short Stories of the Fantastic, edited by Eduardo Jimenez Mayo and Chris N. Brown, with an introduction from Bruce Sterling. This will be officially available from Small Beer Press is bringing this out in late-January, but it can be ...

A Special Appeal from Three Percent & Open Letter

As the year comes to a close, we thought we’d take a minute to look back at what we’ve done over the past twelve months. It’s also that magical time of year when we thank you all for your continued support, and ask for your help in the year to come by participating in our Annual Campaign. Most of you ...

My Visit to Toronto: Book Clubs and Book Discovery

One of the things that Open Letter and Three Percent is premised upon is the idea that a good publisher—especially in this day and age—is one that has a close connection to its audience. All too frequently, publishers remove themselves from their customers . . . Over the past few years we’ve written ...

Zachary Karabashliev's "18% Gray"

As promised last week, here’s a bit more information on 18% Gray, one of this year’s Bulgarian Contemporary Novel contest’s co-winners. 18% Gray is a sort of non-linear road novel. In the present, Zack is traveling to the East Coast trying to sell off the huge bag of marijuana that has come into his ...

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Three Percent #22: Best Fiction of 2011

Since the year is coming to an end, it seemed like the perfect time for us to start creating our “best of” lists for 2011. We decided to start with the best fiction that we read over the past year. Our list is pretty idiosyncratic, and all the titles mentioned are worth checking out. You’ll have to listen ...

Bulgarian Translation Fellowship

In addition to the Bulgarian Contemporary Novel contest, Open Letter and the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation also sponsor a special fellowship that allows for one Bulgarian translator to stay in Rochester for three weeks and learn about the American publishing scene and interact with the literary translation students at the ...

Dubravka Ugresic and Jessa Crispin

Kirkus just posted a longish interview by Jessa Crispin (founder/editor of Bookslut) with Dubravka Ugresic about her new collection, Karaoke Culture. (Which, not to give too much away, is one of the books on my “Best of 2011” list that Tom and I will be discussing on this week’s podcast.) You should go ...

EVENT – Thursday, Dec. 1, 2011: Sergio Chejfec & Margaret B. Carson

Our second (and final!) Reading the World Conversation Series event of the fall is happening in just a few days. As always, it’s taking place in Rochester, NY. So, if you’re in the area, you’d better check it out—lest all your friends go without you and bond intimately over the great time they all ...

Making the Translator Visible: Gary Racz

Gary is another great example of the hyperactively funny male translator. He’s incredibly fun, warm, and without going into any ALTA politics, one of the important people on ALTA’s board and committees who is liked by all sides. In addition to his ALTA work, and serving as review editor for Translation Review, ...

Making the Translator Visible: Marian Schwartz

Don’t mean to play favorites here, but to be honest, in my opinion, Marian Schwartz is one of the smartest, most talented translators working today. Especially in terms of Russian translation. And retranslation. In recent years, she’s translated Envy by Yuri Olesha, Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov, A Hero of Our Time ...

Making the Translator Visible: Jason Grunebaum

Simply put, Jason Grunebaum is one of the funniest people I’ve ever met. Super energetic, witty as all get out, he should have his own reality show. (Or something.) At least a podcast. Or a regular guest spot on someone else’s podcast. (Jason: you going to be at MLA? If so, let’s talk.) He’s also ...

Making the Translator Visible: Matt Rowe

I first met Matt Rowe when he attended his first ALTA conference a few years back as an ALTA fellow. Matt’s an interesting guy with, at expense of making a fool of my memory, an interesting history, having started his career in computers, working for, among other companies, Microsoft. Then he abandoned that all ...

Making the Translator Visible: Pam Carmell

Since I already wrote about her once, it only seemed fitting to make Pam Carmell a bit more visible . . . I met Pam at the first ALTA conference I ever attended. If I remember right (and trust me, I probably don’t), we ended up standing next to each other in a line for something (food?) and Cristina de la Torre ...

Making the Translator Visible: Russell Valentino

Russell Valentino is a superstar in the world of literary translation. Just look at his bio from the University of Iowa: Russell Scott Valentino is professor of Slavic and comparative literature and chair of the Department of Cinema and Comparative Literature. He has published a monograph on nineteenth-century Russian ...

Making the Translator Visible: Megan McDowell

So after the first ALTA panel—on the “subversive” translator and the idea of making the translator “visible” without interfering too much with the original text—Megan McDowell (pictured above) and I came up with a project idea. (Or what some may call a gimmick.) We thought that we could ...

"Thrown into Nature" by Milen Ruskov [Read This Next]

This week’s Read This Next title is Milen Ruskov’s Thrown into Nature, which is translated from the Bulgarian by Angel Rodel, and won the first annual Contemporary Bulgarian Writers Contest. This contest is sponsored by the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation, the America for Bulgaria Foundation, and Open Letter ...

David Bellos on the new PRI's The World in Words

One of my favorite podcasts (aside from the Three Percent podcast, of course) is PRI’s The World in Words, which is hosted by Patrick Cox and covers a ton of really interesting topics related to language, translation, etc. It’s worth checking out every week, but especially this week, since the main focus is on ...

Congrats to Francisco Goldman!

Francisco Goldman was the MC at the very first Best Translated Book Award ceremony, which took place at the fantastic Melville House offices. He gave a great speech about the importance of translation, and included an anecdote about translating a Gabriel Garcia Marquez story for Playboy . . . As many of you probably know, ...

Time for An Announcement [ALTA 2012]

With this year’s American Literary Translators Association conference just around the corner (Kansas City better prepare itself), this seems like a good time to announce that the 2012 conference will take place from October 3-6 right here in Rochester, NY. We’ll be posting a lot of details about this over the ...

CONTEXT #23 [Back!]

After an absurdly extended hiatus, Dalkey Archive Press’s tri-ennial quarterly occasional tabloid magazine, CONTEXT is back! For anyone familiar with it, this is great news . . . CONTEXT is consistently interesting, and one of the best ways to discover and learn about “experimental,” “strange,” ...

One Interesting Translation Person Talking About Another

Last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review had a few interesting pieces, including Adam Thirlwell’s review of David Bellos’s new book Is That a Fish in Your Ear?, which is, by far, one of the best reviews I’ve read about this title. That’s not all that surprising, since Thirlwell is such an ...

Man Asian Literary Prize Longlist

The 12-title longlist for this year’s Man Asian Literary Prize has just been announced. You can watch the “breaking news” style announcement below, and below that you can read the whole list and get summaries of the more interesting titles (in my opinion). Before getting into the list though, it’s ...

Assault on the Minibar

I mentioned this in passing a couple weeks back, but The Paris Review website recently posted Dubrakva Ugresic’s “Assault on the Minibar,” which is one of the many fantastic pieces in her new collection, Karaoke Culture. A number of sites have been linking to this essay, and I particularly like the ...

Balls of Gold

Over at Salon, Kevin Canfield has a nice piece about the challenges of translation and the way translators are underappreciated: Gavin Bowd, the English translator for Michel Houellebecq, was working on the controversial French novelist’s “The Map and the Territory” — Knopf will publish the first American edition ...

Karaoke Culture

After taking a few weeks to mull over Dubravka Ugresic’s Karaoke Culture, I took a rainy afternoon and watched a movie with Chinese food. The movie was High Fidelity and I’ve seen it many times, but never have I thought about the final lines so much before. With uncharacteristic selflessness, Rob Gordon explains how to ...

New NEA Director of Literature is Ira Silverberg

This is just fantastic news all around. I really like Ira, and I think he’ll be great for the NEA. Well done. Washington, DC—The National Endowment for the Arts welcomes Ira Silverberg as its new director of literature on December 5, 2011. Silverberg brings 26 years of experience in book publishing and literary ...

Parallel Stories

Most of the books I have reviewed for this site were only reviewed in one or two other places: small journals, literary blogs, a paragraph in Publishers Weekly, perhaps . . . This is, of course, the norm for literature in translation, and the discrepancy between the quality and coverage of these books has been bemoaned enough ...

"Parallel Stories" by Peter Nadas [Read This Next]

After a bit of a hiatus, Read This Next is back, with a book of truly massive proportions. This week’s title is Parallel Stories by Hungarian author Peter Nadas, which is translated by Imre Goldstein and just out from FSG. It’s impossible to mention this book without talking about its size and scope. The ...

Murakami Profile in the NY Times Magazine

This past weekend, in advance of today’s drop date for 1Q84, Sam Anderson wrote a long, very well-textured profile of Murakami entitled The Fierce Imagination of Haruki Murakami. To be honest, I’m not the biggest Murakami fan in the world. I really like Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and to a ...

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Three Percent #18: Occupy Everything

This week’s podcast is a mixed bag of stuff. Our main focus is on book events—why from a publisher’s perspective they can be frustrating, what makes them interesting (or not), etc. But we also talk a bit about Occupy Wall Street and books that we hope are in the OWS library. Oh, and as can only be ...

Albert Cossery and Two Lines Launch Event

On Wednesday, November 9th at 7:30pm, Two Lines is collaborating with The Bridge reading series to put on a special event at McNally Jackson (52 Prince St.) in celebration of the new issue, Counterfeits. “Counterfeits” editor Luc Sante will host the event, and will be joined by translators Aaron Kerner, Patrick ...

The Three Percent Problem & Local News

This morning, I was on our local morning show (the one that we’re generally on, which is most likely the only local news program in the whole U.S. to have featured authors from both Croatia and Iceland), to talk about The Three Percent Problem. The conversation kind of meanders, but I’m very glad that I was able ...

Open Letter Subscription Offer

As you probably already know, since our inception, we’ve offered subscriptions to Open Letter. You can subscribe for six months or a year and receive every title that we publish during that time, which means that you receive a book about every five weeks. Also included is a letter explaining how we came to publish that ...

One Last, Final Last, Icelandic Post [Icelandic Sports]

So I’m suffering the head cold of a decade, but I should be back tomorrow with normal posts, book reviews, etc., etc. In the meantime, I thought I’d leave you with a post about Stjarnan, my favorite Icelandic soccer club. To be honest, although I love me some football (especially Barcelona, especially the ...

"The Ambassador" by Bragi Olafsson [Icelandic Literature]

Since we publish two of his novels, and since we featured his band yesterday, I thought today would be a perfect day to excerpt Bragi Olafsson’s The Ambassador, which is translated by Lytton Smith. (FYI: Lytton is the one responsible for providing me with the bottle of Brennivin featured in my upcoming “Black ...

Ólafur Arnalds, "Tunglið" [Icelandic Music]

Sorry for yesterday’s minor hiccup re: Icelandic Week. TMI: On Saturday, a car of deaf kids ran a red light and slammed into me. (Yes, I know this sounds like the set-up to a joke.) I had my two kids with me, so it was exceptionally scary, but we’re all fine. As a result though, I’ve spent the past two days ...

Gerður Kristný [Fabulous Iceland]

Another thing I want to do this week (in addition to a special post about Icelandic cuisine) is highlight some of the as-yet-untranslated authors featured on the wonderful Fabulous Iceland site. First up is Gerður Kristný, who I had the honor of meeting last time I was in Iceland. (Facebook friends go first! Besides, ...

Book Sluts [Icelandic Culture]

This is a guest article by Amanda DeMarco, editor of Readux: Reading in Berlin and contributor to Publishing Perspectives. Just so happens that Amanda is in Iceland right now, and totally wanted in on this Icelandic Week project. In addition to this piece, she’s working on at least one more for us, which will run later ...

The Bridge Series: David Bellos

Last week we featured David Bellos’s Is That a Fish in Your Ear? on our Read This Next, website and after reading the sample we made available (along with the interview and full review), I’m sure that everyone in the greater NYC area will want to go see Bellos talk about his book as part of The Bridge Series. ...

Introducing Icelandic Week

The Frankfurt Book Fair kicks off next Wednesday, and since I won’t be able to attend this year (boo!), I’ve decided that instead, next week will be “Icelandic Week” here at Three Percent as a way of celebrating Iceland as this year’s Guest of Honor. We’ve got an amazing amount of stuff ...

"Karaoke Culture" by Dubravka Ugresic [Read This Next]

This week’s Read This Next title is Karaoke Culture by Dubravka Ugresic, which is translated from the Croatian by David Williams, Celia Hawkesworth, and Ellen Elias-Bursac, and is coming out from Open Letter at the end of the month. I’m really excited about this book—in my opinion, it’s one of the ...

Karaoke Culture

To even write this review is to participate in the Karaoke Culture the Dubravka Ugresic criticizes. To be one of the voices the mass experiment in democratic culture is only one more example of a worldwide culture that is collapsing into parodies of itself as we all become yet another karaoke singer demanding our moment and ...

Another Nobel Prize Odds Update

Bob Dylan is now listed at 5/1 making him the favorite for this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature. I find this very confusing. Bob Dylan? Nobel Prize in Literature? I doubt he’ll win, but in a way, it would be awesomely fitting after all of the complaints over the past few years that a) Americans don’t win ...

"Reading Alberto Moravia in Silvio Berlusconi’s Italy"

This past weekend, the NY Times Book Review included this interesting essay by Rachel Donadio about reading Alberto Moravia: In its culture as in its politics, Italy lives under the shadow of Silvio Berlusconi. With his endless legal entanglements and sexual imbroglios and his colorful manner of governing (or not ...

Nobel Prize in Literature To Be Announced on Thursday

According to various reports, this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature will be announced on Thursday around lunchtime. As always, the announcement of the forthcoming announcement brings out the speculation as to who will win, the complaints about why Americans don’t win every year, and the betting. Since I ...

Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

It makes a strange sort of sense that the man who translated Life A User’s Manual would subtitle his new book “Translation and the Meaning of Everything.” Clearly, David Bellos isn’t lacking in ambition, and without giving away too much too soon, that’s for the best. Maybe it’s because of ...

Is that A Fish in Your Ear? by David Bellos [Read This Next]

This week’s Read This Next title is David Bellos’s Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything, which is coming out in late October from Faber and Faber. As I mentioned on a couple of our Three Percent podcasts, this is one of the fall books that I’ve been looking forward to for ...

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Three Percent #16: There's a Book Version of That

Following on last week’s fall books preview, this podcast is centered around movies coming out over the next few months, in particular, movies based on books. Tom does most all of the recommending, since he’s a much bigger movie buff than I am, and his list includes movies that he’s really excited about ...

"Good Offices" by Evelio Rosero [Read This Next]

This week’s Read This Next title is Good Offices by Evelio Rosero, translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean and Anna Milsom, and coming out from New Directions next week. Good Offices is the second novel by Evelio Rosero (after The Armies, 2009) to be published by New Directions. It’s also the first to be ...

Quarterly Conversation #25

I mentioned the new issue of Quarterly Conversation a couple weeks back in relation to the long piece I have in there about Antonio Lobo Antunes, but never got around to making a post about all the other great stuff in this issue . . . So, here’s a list of excellent articles that are definitely worth checking ...

The Nonfiction Gap

This is a special piece by Sal Robinson, freelance editor and co-founder of The Bridge, the first independent reading and discussion series in New York City devoted to literary translation. She has worked for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Phaidon, and Words Without Borders. Among the small number of translated books published ...

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Three Percent #15: "Let's Rock!"

This week’s podcast is our official “Fall Books Preview,” in which we list a dozen or so books we’re really excited about, diss a few states in the union, and discuss a few strange and interesting book covers. You’ll have to listen to the podcast to get the complete list, but here are a few of ...

"Zero and Other Fictions" by Huang Fan [Read This Next]

This week’s Read This Next title is Zero and Other Fictions by Huang Fan and translated from the Chinese by John Balcom. Columbia University Press is bringing this out on October 4th. Here’s Lily Ye’s description: Huang is a celebrated modern Taiwanese writer who has been writing for over 30 years. This ...

Andrew Barrett's Words Without Borders Debut

Over the next couple months, we’ll be featuring some of the recent University of Rochester translation students on our weekly podcast. They’re all extremely interesting (and entertaining) people, and all working on very cool projects that we’d like to feature. One of those students is Andrew Barrett, who ...

The Bridge: Sergio Chejfec + Margaret Carson + E.J. Van Lanen

The next event in The Bridge Series will take place this Thursday, September 15th at 7pm at McNally Jackson, and will consist of a discussion about the writing, translation, and editing of Sergio Chejfec’s My Two Worlds. We just brought out My Two Worlds, the first of three Chejfec books that we’re planning on ...

"Here's My Million Dollar Idea: A Sort of Spotify for Books"

For those of you who listen to our (semi) weekly Three Percent podcast, you may remember a discussion Tom and I had a month or so ago about the idea of a “Spotify for books,” whereby someone could subscribe to have unlimited access to all ebooks available on a given platform. As with Spotify, you wouldn’t ...

Introducing "The Three Percent Problem" [Update on Kindle Apps]

In a variety of podcasts and other posts, I’ve made reference to a “best of Three Percent” book that we were putting together. One that would sell for $2.99 with all the proceeds going to benefit translators . . . Well, at long last, after forcing Taylor McCabe (Intern #1) to read and sort some thousands ...

"Penguin Lost" by Andrey Kurkov [Read This Next]

Prelude Apology: Sorry for being a bit behind—I’m home sick with a nasty cold . . . More posting and podcasting next week. This week’s featured Read This Next title is Penguin Lost, the second book in Andrey Kurkov’s detective series that, yes, includes a penguin (and is translated from the Russian ...

Why Read Antonio Lobo Antunes?

That’s the title of the extremely long article I wrote about Antonio Lobo Antunes for the new issue of Quarterly Conversation. (More on that issue later.) If you’ve read this blog at all, you’ve probably come across one or more posts in which I wax poetic about the awesomeness of Antunes’s writing. ...

Splendor in Portugal

Splendor of Portugal is the tenth book by Antonio Lobo Antunes to appear in English translation, and the seventh that I’ve reviewed. Which, in some ways, makes this difficult to write. Not to mention, I just wrote an epically long piece on Antunes for a forthcoming issue of Quarterly Conversation. It was one of those ...

"The Splendor of Portugal" by Antonio Lobo Antunes [Read This Next]

Starting next week, we’ll be posting all of the content for our Read This Next title on Thursday. You’ll get the extended preview, the translator interview, and the review all at once, giving you plenty of material to read over the weekend . . . We were planning on implementing this change this week, but, well, ...

Excerpt from Murakami's "1Q84"

This week’s New Yorker includes an excerpt from 1Q84 (pronounced “Q-teen Eighty Four”) the forthcoming (nearly here!!) new novel by Haruki Murakami: At Koenji Station, Tengo boarded the Chuo Line inbound rapid-service train. The car was empty. He had nothing planned that day. Wherever he went and ...

Argentina Independent Spotlight on Carlos Gamerro

The Argentina Independent has a great feature on Carlos Gamerro, a very interesting Argentine writer who once contributed to Three Percent and has a couple books coming out in translation. Here’s Joey Rubin’s intro: The time has come for Carlos Gamerro to speak English. Born into a bilingual family in Buenos ...

Edith Grossman Tells it Like it Is [We Are So Small]

Over at Publishing Perspectives, there’s a profile piece by Hernán Iglesias Illa on Edith Grossman, translator extraordinaire and author of Why Translation Matters. (Which I wrote about at length for Quarterly Conversation back when it came out.) Let’s start with an interesting part about Grossman’s ...

Is That a Fish in Your Ear? [Book Trailers]

I’m about halfway through David Bellos’s forthcoming Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything, and absolutely love it. I think we’ll be promoting this in Read This Next in late-September, and I’ll definitely be using it in my translation class next spring. I’ll ...

Interview with Emmanuel Carrere [Read This Next]

The interview with Emmanuel Carrere about Lives Other Than My Own — this week’s Read This Next title — just went live. Here’s an excerpt: Lily Ye: You write that this is a book for others (especially Juliette’s daughters), but has it had an effect on you as well? How do you think this narrative ...

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Three Percent #13: Literary Journals, Why We Don't Read Short Stories, and the $%#@ing Brewers

For this week’s podcast, Tom and I answered our first mailbag question about literary journals, discussed the old adage that “short stories don’t sell,” and complained about the unbeatable Milwaukee Brewers. (We also talk a bit about my son’s obsession with all 19 seasons of the Mighty Morphin ...

"Lives Other Than My Own" by Emmanuel Carrere [Read This Next]

For this week’s Read This Next, we have chosen a book by French author and screenwriter Emmanuel Carrère, who began his career writing fiction but has transitioned to a particularly self-examining non-fiction. His last book was the revealing autobiographic My Life as a Russian Novel, and the one before that The ...

Matthew Battles on Tove Jansson

Over at the B&N Review, Matthew Battles (Harvard University’s rare books librarian and author of Library: An Unquiet History, Widener: Biography of a Library, along with other articles) has a long, interesting piece on Tove Jansson. He talks a bit about the recently released Fair Play, but I really like this bit ...

Learning to Pray in the Age of Technique by Goncalo Tavares [Read This Next]

This week’s Read This Next featured selection is Goncalo Tavare’s Learning to Pray in the Age of Technique translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn, and available from Dalkey Archive Press at the end of the month. E.J. wrote about Tavares a couple years back when he won the Portugal Telecom Prize for ...

Cain

I keep coming back to that basic question, “Why do people tell stories, and others pay attention?” Answers range from creating entertainment (Patterson or Siddons), to engaging in reflections of human nature by a writer such as Conrad or Greene, to intellectual play in novels by Barbary or Murdoch. Some novels can ...

Kafka's Leopards

I was going to write a review of Kafka’s Leopards by the recently deceased Brazilian author Moacyr Scliar, and then I got around to reading the piece that translator Thomas Beebee wrote for us on Scliar, his writings, and Kafka’s Leopards and realized that there was not much enlightenment that I could offer on any of ...

Henrich Böll: My New Favorite Author

Although I tend to write these quite often, I somewhat hate doing the effusive “this author is so great!” thing. Not that the authors don’t deserve it, in fact, quite the opposite, but there’s something much more intellectually satisfying about writing a harsh diss. Virulent criticism, which is usually ...

Thomas Beebee on "Kafka's Leopards"

In support of this week’s Read This Next title—Kafka’s Leopards by Moacyr Scliar—translator Thomas Beebee wrote this essay about the man and the novel: The extended European setting of Kafka’s Leopards is adventuresome for Scliar, but Kafka’s Leopards is a frame-tale connecting Porto Alegre in ...

"Kafka's Leopards" by Moacyr Scliar [Read This Next]

This week at Read This Next we’re featuring Kafka’s Leopards, a short book by celebrated and prolific Brazilian author Moacyr Scliar that’s translated from the Portuguese by Thomas Beebee and forthcoming from Texas Tech University Press. This book is one of strange misunderstandings, attributions of vital ...

Vertical Motion by Can Xue [Read This Next]

This week’s Read This Next title is Vertical Motion, a new collection of stories by Can Xue, which is translated from the Chinese by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping and coming out from Open Letter in mid-September. Super-intern Lily Ye explains why we selected this book for RTN: This week we’ve chosen Can ...

"There Are Things I Want You to Know" About Stieg Larsson and Me

I will admit, right off the bat, that I have never read anything by Stieg Larsson. Not a word, not a page, not even the back of a book cover. Yes, I am aware of the existence of the Millennium Trilogy, with the movies and the books and the commercials and whatnot, and I have perhaps eavesdropped on a few hushed, excited ...

An Interview with Gregor Von Rezzori [Read This Next]

As part of this week’s Read This Next focus on Gregor Von Rezzori’s An Ermine in Czernopol, we dug up this interview with Von Rezzori that appeared in BOMB magazine way back in 1988. Bruce Wolmer: I’m tempted to begin by asking the question interviewers on French TV like to pose: “Gregor von Rezzori, _qui ...

Interns–They Grow Up Too Fast

Back in the tumultuous summer of 2009, Timothy Nassau was an intern here at Open Letter. He read some manuscripts, he packed some orders, he listened to a variety of rants, wrote a few blog posts and reviews, and returned to Brown University a bit wiser and with ambition in his heart. Fast-forward two years, and young ...

The Ermine of Czernopol by Gregor Von Rezzori [Read This Next]

This week’s Read This Next selection is The Ermine of Czernopol, the first in a trilogy of semi-autobiographical works by Gregor von Rezzori (The Snows of Yesteryear, Memoirs of an Anti-Semite), all of which are available from New York Review Books. We chose this book because of its unique and revealing perspective: von ...

Job

Job, recently published by the consistently incredible Archipelago Press in a new translation by Ross Benjamin, is the first, and still only, book by Joseph Roth—a household-canon-grade writer in Europe—I have read. (I did have to get this review out in a timely fashion, and his other, more infamous masterpiece, ...

Interview with Alberto Moravia [Read This Next]

To finish off this week’s Read This Next feature on Alberto Moravia’s Two Friends, here’s an interview from the Paris Review with the man himself: Interviewer: You write, then—? Moravia: I write simply to amuse myself; I write to entertain others and—and, well, to express myself. One has ...

Interview with Marina Harss [Read This Next]

As part of this week’s Read This Next feature on Alberto Moravia’s Two Friends, we just posted an interview with translator Marina Harss conducted by U of R translation grad student (and fellow soccer fan) Acacia O’Connor. Here’s an excerpt: Acacia O’Connor: Two Friends is a unique text — ...

Numbers that Make You Go Ouch

So, Borders is basically dead-and-nearly-gone, what with their liquidation starting tomorrow and almost 11,000 employees losing their jobs in the next few weeks. This was a long time in coming, and is a surprise to no one. That said, it’s a tricky thing to formulate an adequate response to. On the one hand, over the ...

Two Friends by Alberto Moravia [Read This Next]

This week’s Read This Next title is Two Friends by Alberto Moravia, a posthumously published set of related novellas that’s translated from the Italian by Marina Harss and forthcoming from Other Press. The extended preview is available now and we’ll be posting a review and interview later this week. I ...

Filip Florian and Alistair Ian Blyth interviews

For this week’s Read This Next, we’re very fortunate to have gotten interviews with both the author of The Days of the King, Filip Florian, and the translator, Alistair Ian Blyth. I would strongly recommend everyone read these interviews, as not only are they a wonderful read in and of themselves, but they will also ...

The Days of the King by Filip Florian [Read This Next]

This week’s Read This Next title is Filip Florian’s The Days of the King, translated from the Romanian by Alistair Ian Blyth and coming out on August 16th from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Florian’s first translated title—Little Fingers—got a lot of great attention (Michael Orthofer gave it a ...

Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion?

In most of us there is the secret (or not so secret) desire for greatness, to be shortlisted for the Nobel or the Pulitzer, to be the answer to the freebie question on a 5th grade history exam. With the advent of YouTube, it seems any ten-year-old with a half-decent voice is on the fast track to virtual fame. Everyone wants ...

"In Red" by Magdalena Tulli [Read This Next]

This week’s Read This Next book is In Red by Magdalena Tulli, translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston, and coming out from Archipelago Books in September. In Red is the fourth Tulli book to come out from Archipelago, following on Dreams and Stones, Flaw, and Moving Parts. The jacket copy from their site ...

Man Booker International vs. Translated Literature

The following piece was written by Ángel Gurría-Quintana, a freelance journalist, editor and translator. He is a regular contributor to the books pages of the Financial Times. His writing has also appeared in The Observer, The Economist, Prospect, The Paris Review and Brick. Ángel lives in Cambridge, U.K. This piece of ...

From the Observatory by Julio Cortazar [Read This Next]

This week’s Read This Next book is From the Observatory by Julio Cortazar. Wonderfully translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean, this will be available from Archipelago Books in early August. In the words of Complete Review’s Michael Orthofer, this book is “striking, odd,” which is just about ...

The Final Frontier: Translating Sci-Fi & Fantasy with Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud

On June 20, 2011 Small Beer Press was delighted to announce their winners for their inaugural Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation “Award.”:http://tinyurl.com/3wpflje This year’s long-form award went to celebrated short story writer Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud, author of the winning book A Life on Paper: ...

The Lake

“The first time Nakajima stayed over, I dreamed of my dead mom.” This is the first sentence of Banana Yoshimoto’s latest novel to be translated into English, The Lake. I vaguely recall learning or reading somewhere some sort of creative writing related piece of wisdom—or maybe it’s just some advice, or simply ...

Interview with Linda Coverdale [Read This Next]

To supplement the advance preview of Jean Echenoz’s Lightning — this week’s Read This Next — book, I talked with translator Linda Coverdale about Echenoz, and the three “Eccentric Genius” books of his that she’s translated. You can read the entire interview here, but for now, ...

Italian Fiction and The Bridge

The next event in The Bridge series—a reading and discussion series for literary translation that takes place at McNally Jackson in NYC and is organized by Bill Martin and Sal Robinson—is tied into the Chicago Review special issue on New Italian Writing that we wrote about yesterday. Taking place on Wednesday at ...

"Lightning" by Jean Echenoz [Read This Next]

This week’s Read This Next title is Lightning by Jean Echenoz, a book that I truly love. Simply put, Echenoz’s charm + Tesla’s crazy genius = Incredibly Engaging Novel. Over the rest of the week, we’ll be posting a few things about Echenoz’s general career (his noir books, his transitional ...

The Nine-Eyed Agate: A Conversation with Jangbu

Where: Trace Foundation’s Latse Library, 132 Perry Street, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10014 Join us as we celebrate the publication of the most recent work by one of Tibet’s most influential poets, Jangbu (Dorjicering Chenaktsang), and catch a sneak preview of his upcoming documentary Yartsa. The Nine-Eyed Agate: Poems ...

Introducing Julianna Romanazzi

In 17 minutes, Julianna Romanazzi will become the newest Three Percent blogger. Julianna is here all summer gaining invaluable publishing experience, such as “how to mail review copies,” “why we don’t edit Chad’s reviews,” and “why snarky blog titles are popular.” She goes to ...

Summer Issue of Bookforum

The new issue of Bookforum arrived in the mail yesterday. Traditionally, the summer issue (covering June/July/Aug) has a significant special section—last year it was “Utopia/Dystopia” and the year before was “Fiction Forward,” with a focus on six new writers. This year’s special section ...

Horacio Castellano Moya's "Tyrant Memory" [Read This Next]

Following up on my last post, it’s a pleasure to announce that the first Read This Next selection is Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Tyrant Memory, which is translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver and available later this month from New Directions. I’ve been a fan of Horacio’s ever since I read ...

Read This Next

As previewed on last week’s Three Percent podcast, today is the launch of Read This Next a new Three Percent project where we’ll be previewing a new work of international literature every week. Read This Next is modeled in part on the “album previews” available through KCRW and NPR, and the belief ...

Ice Trilogy

Back a few years ago, New York Review Books released Ice, one of the first books by Russian literati bad boy Vladimir Sorokin to make its way into America. After all the hype surrounding Sorokin—for being the star of post-Glasnost Russian literature, for being well hated by the Putin Youth, for writing fairly offensive ...

Nabokov and Books about Nabokov

Although I haven’t read all of his works, Vladimir Nabokov is one of my personal favorite writers. I love Pale Fire and Lolita, but also like the less tricksy novels, like Laughter in the Dark. (Which was on Lost!) And for the past year(s) I’ve been planning on reading The Gift and Ada, or Ardor, both of which ...

I Can't Keep Writing Posts about Cutting You Up

So the last time I went to BookExpo America, I ended up writing a five-part series that was basically about how everything sucked, the publishing industry was imploding, BEA’s focus was fuzzy at best, etc., etc. Well, last week BEA took place in the fairly dysfunctional Jacob Javits Center in NY and the mood was . . ...

Intro to "On Translating for the Stage"

Jon Peede, formerly of the NEA, put Joanne Pottlitzer in touch with me in hopes that we could help publicize her recent essay “On Translating for the Stage.” The essay—which will go up in about 10 minutes—is very interesting, and discusses one of the singular challenge of translating drama. In order to ...

Can S&S, Penguin, and Hachette Recommend the Best Books?

As mentioned before, I’m obsessed interested in the ways in which readers find books—especially in the New Digital Reality of Facebook comments and whatnot. The idea of a “Pandora for Books” (or maybe better, a “Last.fm for Books”) has been batted around for sometime now, and apparently a ...

Day of the Oprichnik

Set in a futuristic Moscow (2028 according to the jacket copy), Day of the Oprichnik is exactly that: a day in the life of Andrei Danilovich Komiaga. The oprichniki were essentially a cultish “death squad” that was set up by Tsar Ivan the Terrible back in the mid 1500s to protect his ass and slay his enemies, and ...

Vladimir Sorokin's Coming Out Party

As mentioned on last week’s podcast, and further elaborated on in this week’s one (BTW, you can subscribe to the Three Percent podcast at iTunes), Vladimir Sorokin was one of the authors I was most interested in seeing at the PEN World Voices Festival. Way back when, I read his short, early novel The Queue in a ...

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Three Percent #2: So, about that revolution . . .

As you may have noticed, last week, we launched a new Three Percent podcast featuring myself and Tom Roberge of New Directions. Our goal with this is to talk every week about books, events, some industry stuff, and so on. Hopefully these will be around 20 minutes long (we both talk a lot) and will provide a nice preview of ...

PEN World Voices in Rochester [Events!]

In case we haven’t mentioned this before, tonight we’re co-hosting a special event with Writers & Books and PEN World Voices featuring three international authors: Najat El Hachmi, Marcelo Figueras, and Carsten Jensen. All the info can be found here, but in short, this event starts at 7pm at Writers & ...

PEN: Russia in Two Acts

Where: The Morgan Library & Museum, Lehrman Hall, 225 Madison Ave., New York City Watch a World Champion chess player, now journalist, unravel the complexities of Russia’s cultural and geopolitical landscape. In Part One of this event, Garry Kasparov will offer his personal spin on the state of contemporary Russian ...

2011 Best Translated Book Award Winners: Aleš Šteger’s "The Book of Things" and Tove Jansson’s "The True Deceiver"

April 29, 2011 — The winning titles and translators for this year’s Best Translated Book Awards were announced earlier this evening at the Bowery Poetry Club as part of the PEN World Voices Festival. In poetry, Aleš Šteger’s The Book of Things, translated from the Slovenian by Brian Henry, took the top honor. In ...

PEN: Catalan Literature’s Modern Tradition

Where: Scandinavia House, 58 Park Ave., New York City One of the world’s most beautiful romance languages, Catalan, has a rich literary trove, unknown to most of the English-speaking world. A discussion of seminal 20th-century works, such as Llorenc Villalonga’s The Doll’s Room and Josep Pla’s The Gray Notebook, led ...

PEN: Who Tells the Story? Children’s Book Writers Talk About Voice

Where: Greenwich House Music School, Renee Weiler Concert Hall, 46 Barrow St., New York City Must the writer get inside the head of the child in order to find an authentic voice for a young character? Or does the authentic voice come from someplace else? Three distinguished writers share ideas about how their lives shape ...

PEN: The Next Decade in Book Culture

Where: Greenwich House Music School, Renee Weiler Concert Hall, 46 Barrow St., New York City The critic’s voice indelibly shapes the works we read. But in an age when readers are rapidly migrating to Twitter book clubs, literary web sites, and Amazon reader reviews, how will the critic continue to lead literary ...

Handicapping the BTBA Poetry Field [Last Thoughts]

Sorry for the posting snafu yesterday . . . I somehow managed to leave the second part of the fiction preview on “draft,” so it didn’t go live until midnightish . . . Anyway, today we’ll go over the five poetry books that are up for the 2011 BTBA. I’m admittedly not nearly as knowledgeable ...

Handicapping the BTBA Fiction Award, Part II [Last Thoughts]

Following up on yesterday’s look at five of the BTBA fiction finalists, below are brief bits about the remaining five titles. Again, take none of this too seriously, but please do check out and read the books—that’s the whole point of all of this. And all 15 of the shortlisted titles are fantastic—you ...

Handicapping the BTBA Fiction Award, Part I [Last Thoughts]

So, the BTBA Ceremony is taking place this Friday, where we will crown the kings & queens of the 2011 translation universe and provide them with $5,000 cash prizes courtesy of Amazon.com. Taking place at the Bowery Poetry Club at 8:45 and lasting till the wee hours, this promises to be an incredible event—one that ...

MLA on Evaluating Translations

Following on the 2009 Convention’s “Focus on Translation,” the MLA1 has just released an official statement on Evaluating Translations as Scholarship. Overall, this is a pretty interesting document, both because it helps establish some guidelines for assessing translations in “personnel decisions ...

A Life on Paper [BTBA Finalists]

With the announcement of the BTBA winners just a mere 15 days and 5-1/2 hours away, it seems like a good time to start reviewing the finalists. First up is Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud’s A Life on Paper, which just received a very enthusiastic write-up over at The Mookse and the Gripes. Before the Best ...

2011 IFFP Shortlist [Some Other Awards: Part II]

The Shortlist for the 2011 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize was announced on Monday and is a really interesting group of six titles: Visitation by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Susan Bernofsky from the German Kamchatka by Marcelo Figueras, translated by Frank Wynne from the Spanish The Museum of Innocence ...

EVENT – Wednesday, April 13, 2011: Reading the World w/ Piotr Sommer & Bill Martin

As mentioned in the previous post, our second RTW event of the spring is almost upon us, and it’s happening this Wednesday, April 13, at the University of Rochester. All the breathtaking details follow below. Reading the World Conversation Series Piotr Sommer & Bill Martin: Polish Poetry and ...

I Know You All Want a Copy of "Lodgings" . . .

Last month, Open Letter published its first work of poetry in translation:1 Andrzej Sosnowski’s Lodgings, translated from the Polish by Benjamin Paloff. It recently received a very nice review by E. C. Belli in Words Without Borders: With Lodgings, translator Benjamin Paloff has made an important contribution to ...

Child of Nature [Why This Book Should Win the BTBA]

Starting this week, we’ll be highlighting the five finalists in the poetry category for the BTBA. Similar to what we did for the fiction longlist, these will be framed by the question: “Why should this book win?” Click here for all past and future posts in this series. Today’s post is by poetry committee member ...

Let Us Now Praise Texas Tech's "The Americas" Series

Now that the 8th book in the Americas Series from Texas Tech has arrived, it seems like an opportune time to bring some attention to Irene Vilar’s exciting project. Irene used to run this series out of the University of Wisconsin Press back in the early 2000s, but after leaving and writing a memoir (Impossible ...

The Bridge: Christopher Middleton & Susan Bernofsky

Where: The Swiss Institute, 495 Broadway, 3rd Floor, New York, NY renowned translators of Swiss author Robert Walser read & discuss their work moderated by Edwin Frank Editor, NYRB Classics 212-925-2035 Lunch-time comestibles will be available for purchase. Organized by The Bridge Series and the Swiss Institute ...

2010 French-American Translation Prizes

The Florence Gould Foundation and the French-American Foundation recently announced the finalists for this, the 24th annual, French Translation Prizes. Winners will be announced in May at a swanky event, and they’ll each receive $10,000. You can find more details about the history of the prize, etc., by clicking ...

The Life of Irene Nemirovsky

Since 2004, the name Irene Nemirovsky has been primarily associated with her bestselling and haunting novel, Suite Francaise. Entrusted to her daughters in a suitcase in 1942, the manuscript remained untouched until 1998 when Nemirovsky’s daughter, Denise, resolved to type out the handwritten novel with the aid of a ...

Indie Booksellers Choice Awards

The Independent Booksellers Choice Awards was launched by Melville House a couple months back as a way of giving independent booksellers a chance to promote the books from independent publishers that they most love. It’s a great idea, and who better to run this than the stridently independent Melville House Press? ...

Readux

Seeing that we already referenced Amanda DeMarco once today, it seems like the perfect time to mention Readux the new Berlin-based online literary magazine that she’s running. Here’s how they describe the magazine on their about page: Readux is a Berlin-based literary website with reviews, interviews, ...

Bolano: Who Would Dare?

Over at the New York Review of Books Blog, you can find Who Would Dare?, an essay from Roberto Bolaño’s forthcoming collection Between Parentheses. (Which Jeremy Garber reviewed for us.) After that, after I stole that book and read it, I went from being a prudent reader to being a voracious reader and from being a ...

Cool Guardian Series

The Guardian is one of my favorite newspapers for any number of reasons, but I particularly like their series and their overall international focus. For instance, earlier this month they launched their New Europe Series, which features an in-depth look at four European countries: Germany, France, Spain, and Poland. (The ...

PEN World Voices 2011: Quick Overview

This morning, PEN updated their World Voices page with info about this year’s festival, including a list of participants and a daily schedule listing all the planned events. We’ll give this more coverage as the time grows closer, but for now, here are a few of the highlights from each of the days of the ...

Why Should The Jokers Win the BTBA? Look No Further.

As referenced in this article in the New York Times, the April issue of Oprah Magazine has a special feature on Spring Fashion Modeled by Rising Young Poets. And one of the featured poets? None other than Anna Moschovakis, who is one of the editors at Ugly Duckling Presse (whose collection Geometries by Guillevic is a poetry ...

Everybody Please Just Calm the &*%$ Down [We Should All Be Butler]

In honor of Butler’s semi-improbable run to the Final Four, making Brad Stevens the youngest coach in history to make it to two Final Fours, and because it’s true that publishers and bloggers and people in general freak out too much, and because it’s Monday, I’m rerunning this post from last April, ...

Remote Control

I’m just going to fess up right now: I’m a bit of a culture snob. I can’t help it. I don’t know what happened in my upbringing that led me to be this way – that I can’t check out a summer blockbuster without reading the reviews first, that I prefer listening to the local college or independent radio station to ...

BTBA Announcement on Rochester's Local Morning Show

Always fun going on the CW to talk about international literature. And I have to admit, I’m always surprised that they keep inviting us back . . . In order of mention, here are the books that were discussed: Time of Sky & Castles in the Air by Ayane Kawata, translated from the Japanese by Sawako Nakayasu ...

2011 Best Translated Book Award Finalists

After months of reading, discussing, evaluating, and collaborating, the 14 fiction and poetry judges have settled on the 2011 Best Translated Book Award Finalists. Here’s the official press release. Highlights from this year’s fiction list include Ernst Weiss’s Georg Letham: Physician and Murder, translated from ...

Agaat [Why This Book Should Win the BTBA]

Similar to years past, we’re going to be featuring each of the 25 titles on the BTBA Fiction Longlist over the next month plus, but in contrast to previous editions, this year we’re going to try an experiment and frame all write-ups as “why this book should win.” Some of these entries will be absurd, some more ...

A Celebration of Czeslaw Milosz

Where: The Unterberg Poetry Center, 1395 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10128 Tickets: $19/$10 age 35 and under, $10 online with discount code “POLE”, Tel. 212.415.5550 WITH CLARE CAVANAGH, ROBERT HASS, AND ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI Czeslaw Milosz’s “trust in the delicious joy-bringing potential of art ...

To the End of the Land [Why This Book Should Win the BTBA]

Similar to years past, we’re going to be featuring each of the 25 titles on the BTBA Fiction Longlist over the next month plus, but in contrast to previous editions, this year we’re going to try an experiment and frame all write-ups as “why this book should win.” Some of these entries will be absurd, some more ...

The Rest Is Jungle & Other Stories [Why This Book Should Win the BTBA]

Similar to years past, we’re going to be featuring each of the 25 titles on the BTBA Fiction Longlist over the next month plus, but in contrast to previous editions, this year we’re going to try an experiment and frame all write-ups as “why this book should win.” Some of these entries will be absurd, some more ...

Pornografia

Darkly humorous, witty and terrifying, Witold Gombrowicz’s Pornographia translated for the first time into English out of the original Polish by Danuta Borchardt, captures the tense and surreal lives of two men looking for an escape from city life in 1943 Warsaw. The narrator, Witold Gombrowicz, and his companion, Fryderyk, ...

Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer [Why This Book Should Win the BTBA]

Similar to years past, we’re going to be featuring each of the 25 titles on the BTBA Fiction Longlist over the next month plus, but in contrast to previous editions, this year we’re going to try an experiment and frame all write-ups as “why this book should win.” Some of these entries will be absurd, some more ...

Quarterly Conversation 23 [What to Read This Weekend]

The new issue of the Quarterly Conversation went live recently and is definitely worth checking out. Every issue of the QC is great, but holy crap is this issue STUFFED with interesting pieces. Here’s a list of some of the essays and reviews that worth checking out: Notes Toward an Understanding of Thomas ...

Another Book to Add to the To Read List

One of my favorite writers from the past few years has to be Enrique Vila-Matas, whose Bartleby & Co. and Montano’s Malady are absolutely fantastic. Very excited that Vila-Matas wrote an intro for our forthcoming publication of Sergio Chejfec’s My Two Worlds, and also very excited to read his new book, Never ...

DiscoverReads, Let Downs, and "Books"

As written about in today’s New York Times GoodReads (which has come a bit of an obsession of mine) has just launched a new site called DiscoverReads that uses an algorithm to recommend books. (Book recommendations and how people choose what to read is another obsession of mine, so this announcement is like a double ...

The Blindness of the Heart [Why This Book Should Win the BTBA]

Similar to years past, we’re going to be featuring each of the 25 titles on the BTBA Fiction Longlist over the next month plus, but in contrast to previous editions, this year we’re going to try an experiment and frame all write-ups as “why this book should win.” Some of these entries will be absurd, some more ...

I Curse the River of Time [Why This Book Should Win the BTBA]

Similar to years past, we’re going to be featuring each of the 25 titles on the BTBA Fiction Longlist over the next month plus, but in contrast to previous editions, this year we’re going to try an experiment and frame all write-ups as “why this book should win.” Some of these entries will be absurd, some more ...

Fair Play

“There is no silence like sitting in a fog at sea and listening,” writes Tove Jansson in her newly-translated story collection Fair Play. “Large boats can loom up suddenly, and you don’t hear the bow water in time to start your motor and get out of the way.” Stuck waiting out a dense, chilling fog in ...

It's Good to Be Here [Excuses & Bits]

Admittedly, things have been a bit slow around here lately. I’ve been in NY for the Festival of New French Writing (more below), and hard at work on a grant for the National Endowment for the Arts. It’s due next week, but, I have to finish tomorrow (along with review for Bookforum) or suffer the bureaucratic wrath ...

Italian Literature after World War II

Where: Italian Cultural Institute New York, 686 Park Avenue (between 68th and 69th streets), New York City A lecture by Italian author Giorgio Montefoschi. Montefoschi will present his analysis of Italian literature after the Second World War. His in depth viewpoint it is not the one of a literary historian, but that of a ...

In the Age of Screens (Part V)

Over the course of this week, we’ll be serializing an essay I wrote for the recent Non-Fiction Conference that took place in Amsterdam a couple weeks ago. If you’d rather not wait until Friday to read the whole thing, then click here and download a PDF version of the whole thing. Or you can click here to see all ...

In the Age of Screens (Part IV)

Over the course of this week, we’ll be serializing an essay I wrote for the recent Non-Fiction Conference that took place in Amsterdam a couple weeks ago. If you’d rather not wait until Friday to read the whole thing, then click here and download a PDF version of the whole thing. Or you can click here to see all ...

In the Age of Screens (Part III)

Over the course of this week, we’ll be serializing an essay I wrote for the recent Non-Fiction Conference that took place in Amsterdam a couple weeks ago. If you’d rather not wait until Friday to read the whole thing, then click here and download a PDF version of the whole thing. Or you can click here to see all ...

Albert Cossery [Why These Books Should Win the BTBA]

Similar to years past, we’re going to be featuring each of the 25 titles on the BTBA Fiction Longlist over the next month plus, but in contrast to previous editions, this year we’re going to try an experiment and frame all write-ups as “why this book should win.” Some of these entries will be absurd, some more ...

In the Age of Screens (Part II)

Over the course of this week, we’ll be serializing an essay I wrote for the recent Non-Fiction Conference that took place in Amsterdam a couple weeks ago. If you’d rather not wait until Friday to read the whole thing, then click here and download a PDF version of the whole thing. Or you can click here to see all ...

Touch [Why This Book Should Win the BTBA]

Similar to years past, we’re going to be featuring each of the 25 titles on the BTBA Fiction Longlist over the next month plus, but in contrast to previous editions, this year we’re going to try an experiment and frame all write-ups as “why this book should win.” Some of these entries will be absurd, some more ...

In the Age of Screens (Part I Redux)

Over the course of this week, we’ll be serializing an essay I wrote for the recent Non-Fiction Conference that took place in Amsterdam a couple weeks ago. If you’d rather not wait until Friday to read the whole thing, then click here and download a PDF version of the whole thing. Or you can click here to see all ...

The True Deceiver [Why This Book Should Win the BTBA]

Similar to years past, we’re going to be featuring each of the 25 titles on the BTBA Fiction Longlist over the next month plus, but in contrast to previous editions, this year we’re going to try an experiment and frame all write-ups as “why this book should win.” Some of these entries will be absurd, some more ...

In the Age of Screens (Part I)

So, following up the last post about the Non-fiction Conference . . . When I was invited to talk at this, I decided that I really wanted to write something new, something that I haven’t exactly written about, or talked about before. (It’s way easier just going back to the tried-and-true, but that does start to ...

Herve Le Tellier & PEN World Voices [Sensible Pricing]

I’ll post about this again as the time grows closer, but I wanted to announce that on Monday, May 2nd, Herve Le Tellier, Amelie Nothomb, and Carsten Jensen will be here in Rochester for our annual PEN World Voices event. For this year’s event, we’ve partnered with the admirable Writers & Books who will ...

If You Want Your Bolano Fix . . .

As announced on their site the next issue of The Paris Review includes the first part of The Third Reich, Roberto Bolano’s “lost” novel (due out next year), which will be serialized over all four 2011 issues. Spring is almost here1—and so is our spring issue! It’s an especially exciting one: We ...

An Interview I Love

I have to thank GoodReads reviewer extraordinaire/B&N Union Square employee (who makes the best book displays ever) Karen Brissette for pointing me to this interview. She was searching for information on Iren Nigg (who is apparently awesome and totally not translated1) and came across this Stefan Sprenger interview that ...

New Issue of Bookslut

The new issue of everyone’s favorite provocatively named webmag/blog is now available and includes a few translation-related items. First off, there’s a review of To Hell with Cronje by Ingrid Winterbach and translated from the Afrikaans by Elsa Silke. The review is solid, and starts with a nice bit that ...

Visitation [Why This Book Should Win the BTBA]

Similar to years past, we’re going to be featuring each of the 25 titles on the BTBA Fiction Longlist over the next month plus, but in contrast to previous editions, this year we’re going to try an experiment and frame all write-ups as “why this book should win.” Some of these entries will be absurd, some more ...

The New Melville House Catalog Looks Damn Good

Haven’t received the hard copy yet, but the online version of Melville House’s Summer Catalog is up, and, to be quite direct, kicks some international literary ass. First off, there’s the new Banana Yoshimoto book The Lake, which is translated by Michael Emmerich. Here’s the line from the copy that ...

Cool New Blog on Central European Literature

Over at Ceska Pozice, Michael Stein has launched a new blog dedicated to Central European writing. Obviously, as a new blog, there’s not a ton of posts available yet, but everything that I’ve looked at is very well-written and interesting. Take for example the current piece on the Slovak fiction scene, which ...

The Facts Behind One Story in Dalkey Archive’s Best European Fiction for 2011

The following was written by Mima Simić regarding her recent experiences in publishing “My Girlfriend” in the Best European Fiction 2011 anthology. Enjoy! Best European Fiction for 2011 has hit the bookstores and review sections of your favorite cultural papers, but there’s some pretty bad non-fiction ...

Prefacing a New Series of Posts [We Are Not Muckrakers]

Before posting Mima Simić‘s story of the offensive edits done to the story/translation of hers that appeared in this year’s Best European Fiction volume from Dalkey Archive Press, feel like I should provide a sort of frame and preface that explains my professional interests and personal concerns about running ...

Asymptote Journal

Announcing the launch of ASYMPTOTE, a new international literary journal dedicated to the art and practice of translation. Founded out of Singapore, with editors scattered across the globe, ASYMPTOTE offers a well-calibrated window on world literature, in all its forms. Issue Jan 2011 features original essays by ...

2011 Best Translated Book Awards: Fiction Longlist

Commentary and analysis will go in another post . . . for now, here’s the official press release. January 27, 2011—The 25-title fiction longlist for the 2011 Best Translated Book Awards was announced this morning at Three Percent—a resource for international literature at the University of Rochester. According to ...

NCBB Fiction Finalists

Over the weekend, the National Book Critics Circle announced the list of finalists for this year’s awards, which consist of six categories: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, autobiography, biography, and criticism. You can find the complete list of finalists at the link above, but I just want to list the fiction finalists, ...

Gary Racz Wins Alicia Gordon Award

Next spring (like March 2012), we’re publishing Gary Racz’s translation of Eduardo Chirnino’s The Smoke of Distant Fires. I’m really excited about this book, and especially excited to be able to work with Gary. I’ve only known him for a few years, but he’s one of the friendliest, funniest, ...

Calypso Editions

Although they’ve only published one book so far — Leo Tolstoy’s How Much Land Does a Man Need, translated from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk with a foreword by Brian Evenson — Calypso Editions looks like a press worth paying attention to. Here’s how Elizabeth Myhr & Piotr Florczyk describe ...

Six Questions with Charlotte Mandell

Zone has been getting a lot of attention recently, such as this review in the New York Times and in the recent issue of N+1. (I also found a copy on display at the Bay City Public Library—my hometown library—and someone had actually checked it out!) One of the first reviews of Zone actually appeared in the ...

PEN America #13 [New Issue III]

Also arriving in yesterday’s mail was the new issue of PEN America, making it a pretty big day in literary magazines . . . Anyway, this issue is entitled “Lovers,” a theme backed up on the PEN website with this forum, which you can participate in, and which currently features various authors writing about ...

Absinthe 14 [New Issues II]

Absinthe 14 arrived in yesterday’s mail, and is loaded with interesting authors and pieces, including: An excerpt from Wieslaw Mysliwski’s Stone Upon Stone, which was translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston and recently published by Archipelago books. (Actually using this in the “Translation & ...

The Weird of Dalkey's Catalog [Publishing Mysteries & Wild Speculation]

So, in addition to the interesting books I found in going through Dalkey’s catalog, I also came across a couple of odd listings that I thought I’d share in hopes that someone out there can explain this to me . . . One of the reasons I go through all catalogs is to add all the new titles to our Translation ...

Thanks and Happy New Year

So, it’s 2011, and we just wanted to take a (slightly belated) minute to thank everyone who visits Three Percent, or reads books from Open Letter—or any literature in translation, for that matter—or hands an international novel to their friend, or takes the time to contribute some words, actions, or dollars ...

Jan 2011 Words Without Borders

The January 2011 issue of Words Without Borders is now available, and has a number of really interesting pieces. This issue’s theme is “The Work Force,” which is elaborated on in the little intro to the issue: Whether loathed or loved, work provides both livelihood and identity; and in times of economic ...

Welcome to the Latest Year to Look Weird on Checks . . .

Ever since the year 2000, every year seems less believable to me . . . When I was a kid, I never thought I’d see the year 2000, much less the year 2010, after which, 2011 seems sort of anti-climactic. Sure, this technically marks the start of a new decade, but since we never named the last one, it feels pretty ...

Javier Montes [Granta's Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists]

As we mentioned a couple Fridays ago, we’re going to spend the next 5 days highlighting all of the authors selected for Granta’s _“Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists” special issue. All past and future posts related to this issue can be found by clicking here. Today’s featured Granta ...

A Special Message from Three Percent & Open Letter Books

Dear Readers, Over this past year we’ve been working so hard that we sometimes forget to look up and take stock of all we’ve accomplished. The year started with an exceptional profile in the New York Times that nurtured, more than we could have imagined, a widespread awareness of Three Percent and Open ...

"Emerging from Years of Obscurity . . ." [Bulgarian Literature, Part II]

About seven years ago, when I was working at Dalkey and prepping the marketing plan for Bulgarian author Georgi Gospodinov’s Natural Novel, I came up with a bit of a crazy idea. (Yeah, surprising, I know.) This remarkable books—a moving, fragmented portrait of one man’s dealing with divorce1 that’s ...

Translation as Literary Ambassador

Last year around this time, Larry Rohter wrote this amazing piece about the mission of Open Letter and the need for literature in translation. Which did wonders for our reputation and subscription program, and was one of the coolest pieces of publicity we’ve ever received. Well, as the holidays roll back around, ...

Pablo Gutierrez [Granta's Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists]

As we mentioned a couple Fridays ago, we’re going to spend the next 10 days highlighting all of the authors selected for Granta’s _“Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists” special issue. All past and future posts related to this issue can be found by clicking here. Today’s post—which ...

Museum of Eterna's Novel (The First Good Novel)

Prologue to the Review Macedonio Fernandez is little known outside Argentina. Unfortunately I foresee this remaining the case for some time. Even with the recent translation and publication of his posthumous novel, The Museum of Eterna’s Novel: The First Good Novel (Museo de la Novela de la Eterna), by Open Letter Books ...

Alejandro Zambra [Granta's Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists]

As we mentioned a couple Fridays ago, we’re going to spend the next 15 days highlighting all of the authors selected for Granta’s _“Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists” special issue. All past and future posts related to this issue can be found by clicking here. Today’s featured author is ...

Don't Forget to Tweet about Granta

As mentioned yesterday, this morning we’re having a special “Twitter Party” regarding Granta‘s special issue featuring the “Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists.” So fire up your TweetDeck and join us . . . At this moment, I’m probably trying to cram a dozen hyperbolic statements ...

Carlos Labbe [Granta's Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists]

As we mentioned last Friday, we’re going to spend the next 19 days highlighting all of the authors selected for Granta’s _“Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists” special issue. All past and future posts related to this issue can be found by clicking here. As a Thanksgiving Day special, we’re ...

Santiago Roncagliolo [Granta's Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists]

As we mentioned last Friday, we’re going to spend the next 21 days highlighting all of the authors selected for Granta’s _“Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists” special issue. All past and future posts related to this issue can be found by clicking here. Up today: Peruvian author Santiago ...

The Jokers

Albert Cossery is the best dead writer I’ve discovered this year. A few of his books were published in English translation back before I was born, but this year saw the publication of two never-before-translated Cossery novels — A Splendid Conspiracy, which was translated by Alyson Waters and published by New ...

"Nocturne" by Andres Barba

See this post about Barba for more information about this piece, which was translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman. The ad in the “male seeking male” section said: I’m so alone. Roberto. (91) 3077670. and was in amongst others listing predictable obscenities and a series of oral necessities. Page 43. At the ...

Andres Barba [Granta's Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists]

As we mentioned last Friday, we’re going to spend the next 22 days highlighting all of the authors selected for Granta’s _“Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists” special issue. All past and future posts related to this issue can be found by clicking here. First up: Spanish author Andres Barba, ...

The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry

The joy of an anthology is similar to the joy of a college course in literature, of listening to the radio, of attending an art exhibition: it is the pleasure of having someone else tell you what is good and important and how it all connects together. You may find the joy of a discovery or an insight that you would probably ...

Finlanda Prize, Finlandia Controversy [International Prizes, Take Two]

Last week, the Finnish Book Foundation announced its six-title shortlist of the Finlandia Prize for fiction, which carries with it a 30,000 euro prize. Before getting into the “controversy” part of this post, here’s a look at the six finalists. (All descriptions from the FILI newsletter): Joel ...

International IMPAC Dublin Award 2011 Longlist [International Prizes, Take One]

So the 2011 longlist for the IMPAC Award was announced this morning, and includes 162 books from 43 countries. According to the press release 42 are titles in translation, covering 14 different languages. This is where I usually complain about the IMPAC’s website, the absurdity of a 162 book longlist, of the name of ...

WLT Nov/Dec Issue in Full HTML Glory!

Last time I wrote about World Literature Today, I did so in some not entirely pleasant terms. Not because of WLT‘s content—which is always fantastic—but because of problems with my subscription (which, admittedly, I did nothing to try and correct prior to posting that post) and the WLT website (which, ...

Snakebite: Flaubert, Translation, and the Imprint of the Real

Where: University of Chicago, Rosenwald 405, Chicago, IL Esther Allen, The 2010–11 Dedmon Writer-in-Residence As the birth of photography made visual artists increasingly anxious about realism, Flaubert devised realist novels that claimed an impersonal, photographic, and near-scientific detachment from their subject ...

Petition for Portuguese Translation Support

Just received this call for support of the Portuguese translation programs and thought some of you might be interested in knowing about this and/or signing the petition. It goes without saying that this sort of support is invaluable. Without organizations and programs like this, the publication of literature in translation ...

RTWCS: Ledig House Special

Our next Reading the World Conversation Series event takes place tomorrow and features four international authors currently at the Ledig House, a wonderful residency program for international writers. The event takes place at 6 p.m. in the Hawkins-Carlson room in University of Rochester’s Rush Rhees library. Totally ...

Antonio Ungar Wins 2010 Herralde Novel Prize

Just received an e-mail announcement from the Spanish publisher Anagrama, that Colombian writer Antonio Ungar has won this year’s Herralde Novel Prize for Tres ataudes blancos (Three White Coffins). The Herralde Prize was launched in 1983 with the goal of promoting new works of Spanish literature. Over the years, a ...

Interview with Gunter Grass on "The Box"

Maya Jaggi from The Guardian has a really interesting long piece on Gunter Grass’s The Box, which comes out next week (both in the UK and U.S.). (And which sounds fantastic . . . Hopefully HMH will send a copy to us for review . . .): The second volume of his fictive autobiography, The Box, is published by Harvill ...

Melville House Discourages Translators from Trying to Win Cash Prize, Recognition

As we announced last week, both here and at the American Literary Translators Association annual conference, Amazon.com is underwriting the 2011 Best Translated Book Awards to the tune of $25,000, allowing each winning translator and author receive a $5,000 cash prize. (And the leftover $5K will allow all of our 14 judges to ...

Stranger Than Fiction: Characters as Outsiders: François Beaune & Joshua Ferris

Where: Le Skyroom at FIAF, 22 E 60th Street, New York, NY Conversation in English between François Beaune (Un homme louche) and Joshua Ferris (The Unnamed and Then We Came to the End) Moderated by Albert Mobilio, Bookforum editor Some of the most memorable characters in contemporary fiction experience life as strangers, ...

National Translation Award to Alex Zucker for "All This Belongs to Me"

Really late with my ALTA 2010 write-ups (there are a couple in the works though), but I wanted to make a special post congratulating Alex Zucker on receiving this year’s National Translation Award for his translation from the Czech of Petra Hulova’s All This Belongs to Me. From the press release: Alex ...

State of Emergency: Censorship by Bullet in Mexico [Special Offer!]

This is pretty last minute, but at 7pm tomorrow night (Tuesday) there’s an interesting PEN event going on at Cooper Union exploring violence in Mexico. AND because PEN loves YOU, they’re giving a special discount on tickets to Three Percent readers . . . (See details below.) The State of Emergency: Censorship by ...

AmazonCrossing at Frankfurt

OK, with a little luck I’ll be able to post a lot of new content later this week during the American Literary Translators Conference. This is one of my favorite conferences of the year, in part because of all the cool people there, in part because the panels tend to be pretty interesting. I’ll post more about this ...

Robert Fagles Translation Prize Winner Announced

Yesterday they announced the winner of the National Poetry Series’s Robert Fagles Translation Prize, which carries with it publication by Graywolf Press. This year’s winner is The Rest of the Voyage by Bernard Noël, translated by Eléna Rivera. Here’s the press release: The National Poetry Series is ...

Douglas Rushkoff & "Program or Be Programmed"

I linked to this in a post the other day, but attached below is the complete interview I did with Douglas Rushkoff about our digital world, his new book, and why he decided to publish with OR Books. This interview originally appeared here. And I want to publicly thank Ed Nawotka for running this in its entirety even though ...

It Helps to Have a Sense of Humor [Frankfurt, Day One]

Although today is the first day in which all eight halls are buzzing with excitement (or hangovers . . . whatever), the 2010 Frankfurt Book Fair officially kicked off yesterday with the TOC Frankfurt conference, the International Digital Rights Symposium, the Opening Ceremony, dozens of agent meetings at the Frankfurt Hof, ...

Michael Cunningham on Translation

Below is a guest post from intern/translation grad student Acacia O’Connor, who also used to work at the Association of American Publishers. Over the weekend the New York Times published a really great editorial about writing as an act of translation by Michael Cunningham, author of the Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner ...

What Happens in Scranton . . .

Tomorrow kicks off a killer 11-day trip for me: first to NYC to pick up a rental car and three authors/transltors (Bragi Olafsson, Margaret Carson, and Sergio Chejfec) and drive them to Scranton, PA, then from there to Frankfurt, and then back in Rochester on October 11th . . . I’ll still be posting on occasion (mostly ...

The MFA Program in Literary Translation at Queens College

Putting together the introduction for Susan Bernofsky is kind of intense . . . She’s accomplished so much and has so many things going on, including her involvement with the MFA program in Literary Translation at Queens College—a unique translation program that some of you (potential students? others?) might be ...

Quarterly Conversation: Issue 21

Running a bit behind with the news here, but the Fall 2010 issue of the Quarterly Conversation is now available online. As always, there’s a lot of great content here, including an essay on Nicholson Baker as the missing link between Updike and DFW, a piece on Helene Cixous’s So Close, and tons of interesting book ...

First Annual Literature in Translation Forum at Vermont Studio Center

Another to add to the long list of events I wish I could attend . . . This Friday, the Vermont Studio Center is hosting the First Annual Literature in Translation Forum featuring Polish poet Adam Zagajewski and his translator Clare Cavanaugh. Polish poet Adam Zagajewski (who will be at VSC for the week as a Visiting ...

Brooklyn Book Festival: Reading the World

The Brooklyn Book Festival took place this past Saturday, and as always, I wish I could’ve been there. I was able to attend a few years back, and was really impressed by how many people were out browsing the stands, attending panels and readings, and generally getting excited about books. And from what I’ve heard ...

Obituary: Rodolfo Fogwill

Although it hasn’t been covered in the U.S. papers (at least to the best of my knowledge), Argentine author Rodolfo Fogwill passed away at the end of last month. He published a ton of stuff in Argentina—around 20 books—but only one—Malvinas Requiem—has been published in English translation. ...

Interview with Esther Allen

Earlier this week, the NEA announced the recipients of this year’s Literature Translation Fellowships. To provide more info about the stellar group of people and projects the NEA is supporting, they’re going to be interviewing at least some of the authors for Art Works, their relatively new, and quite impressive ...

How Much We Love "Love German Books" (& Susan Bernofsky)

Love German Books is rocking my world today . . . In addition to the German Book Prize roundup we wrote about earlier, Katy also has an interview with Susan Bernofsky about her translation of Jenny Erpenbeck’s Visitation, a novel that sounds really curious . . . Here’s the description from the New Directions ...

PW's Indie Sleepers . . . Including "Zone"

I feel like this is a week of individual themed days . . . Yesterday was all Japanese literature and Michael Emmerich, today is all Zone . . . Publishers Weekly‘s Indie Press Sleepers list for the fall came out yesterday, featuring twenty titles from independent presses that may be slightly less hyped than ...

23rd Annual French-American Foundation Translation Prizes

I just received an invitation to the award ceremony for the French-American Foundation & Florence Gould Foundation Annual Translation Prizes, and since I think I missed the announcement of the finalists, I thought I’d take this chance to congratulate all ten translators being honored. Fiction: John Cullen for ...

RTWCS: Robert Walser & His "Microscripts"

Just so happened that a copy of Walser’s Microscripts arrived in the mail this morning from the wonderful people at New Directions, so I thought I’d follow up on the last post with a bit more info about the first event in the fall RTWCS. On September 23rd, Barbara Epler of New Directions will talk with Susan ...

Vila-Matas's New Book

I can’t access the full review (yet), but according to Stephen Mitchelmore at This Space the new issue of the TLS has an interesting review by Nick Caistor on Enrique Vila-Matas’s Dublinesca. Here’s an interesting bit that Stephen pulled out: Vila-Matas insists that there is a “moral ...

Albert Cossery in the L.A. Times

I just received a copy of The Jokers last week, and as soon as I finish it I’m going to write my own appreciation of just how awesome Albert Cossery is. I can’t believe I never heard of this guy before this summer . . . His books are incredibly funny, smart, well-crafted—but more on that in a later post. ...

Argentina's "Hot 20"

With Argentina as Guest of Honor at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair, there’s bound to be a ton of articles coming out about its publishing scene. And based on my obsession with Argentine literature, we’re bound to feature as many as possible. (We’ll also try to do something special to highlight a ...

Internal Promotion and Blurbs

Over the weekend, in addition to proofing Mathias Enard’s Zone and rereading Julio Cortazar’s Cronopios and Famas, I started reading Justin Cronin’s The Passage. Now don’t judge—I’m a single guy in frickin’ Rochester who doesn’t own a TV and might possibly be spending too much ...

A Rational Discussion about Amazon

Over at The New Republic, Ruth Franklin has one of the most rational pieces on Amazon.com that I’ve seen in a long while. She wrote this in response to Colin Robinson’s The Trouble with Amazon article that appeared in a recent issue of The Nation. (And which I haven’t read, because after subscribing to The ...

Little Star and a Little Love for Jerzy Pilch

Ann Kjellberg—who has not only serves as literary executor for Joseph Brodsky, but has been an editor at The New York Review of Books, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and Artes, the journal of the Swedish Academy—recently launched a new journal called Little Star, featuring work from a host of interesting authors and ...

Odyssey Editions

Last Thursday the publishing news of month year century broke with the announcement that the Andrew Wylie Literary Agency (one of the largest, most powerful, most intimidated, most unscrupulous literary agencies out there) had launched Odyssey Editions so they could publish ebook editions of a number of backlist titles by the ...

Man Booker Longlist

The Man Booker Longlist was just announced. I haven’t read many of these, but I’m really excited that both David Mitchell and Tom McCarthy are on here: Peter Carey: Parrot and Oliver in America (Faber and Faber) Emma Donoghue: Room (Pan MacMillan – Picador) Helen Dunmore: The Betrayal (Penguin – ...

Ebooks and Numbers and Little Girls in Rochester Suburbs [Random Digital Stuff]

A number of interesting e-book related articles and news items came out over the past few days, and rather than try and make something coherent out of all this, I’m just going to post a smattering of links . . . So: The big news this week was Jeff Bezos’s announcement that Amazon.com is now selling more e-books ...

Serbian Prose in Translation (Quick Update)

Yesterday I posted a short thing about Geopoetika’s Serbian Prose in Translation series and managed to both include a few inaccuracies and leave things a bit vague and confusing. Par for the course, I know, but just to clarify a few things: Zoran Zivkovic’s novel Escher’s Loops is listed on the ...

"Beyond Words: Translating the World"

As if the Banff Centre — one of the few residencies for translations — wasn’t already amazing enough, they just published Beyond Words: Translating the World. From the press release: Published by The Banff Centre, Beyond Words is about the art of translation. It guides readers “along the path from ...

The Critical Flame on Mabanckou's "Broken Glass"

The new issue of The Critical Flame is now available online, complete with a piece by editor/founder Dan Pritchard on Internet Book Reviews (through the lens of an internet review of the Open Letters Monthly anthology of internet book reviews), and an interesting piece by Katherine Evans on Alain Mabanckou’s Broken ...

Cerise Press: Summer 2010 Issue

The new issue of Cerise Press: A Journal of Literature, Arts & Culture is now available online, and as with all their issues, there’s a strong representation of translations. (Which is obvious from their mission: “Cerise Press, an international online journal based in the United States and France, builds ...

Pratilipi Kicks off the Storm of Saer Hype

Although Argentina disappointed the world me greatly by choking—choking!—against the well-oiled and efficient German soccer army, I still heart the hell out of this country. When I retire (yeah, real funny, like, I’m sure I’ll receive a Genius grant right around that same time), I want to move to ...

Feisty Small Presses

Over at the Huffington Post Anis Shivani has an Independence Day feature on “15 Feisty Small Presses.” (There’s also a poll where you can vote for Open Letter your favorite): To celebrate Independence Day, here are 15 small presses that exemplify the best qualities of this publishing tradition—so ...

Where People Talk about Books

The other week, the first Future of Reading conference took place at the Rochester Institute of Technology. It was a fantastic few days, very interesting, with a range of great speakers. Rather than summarize each panel or person, I want to try and explore a few of the topics that came up. A lot of these posts will be simply ...

What We Talk about When We Talk about the Future of Reading

The other week, the first Future of Reading conference took place at the Rochester Institute of Technology. It was a fantastic few days, very interesting, with a range of great speakers. Rather than summarize each panel or person, I want to try and explore a few of the topics that came up. A lot of these posts will be simply ...

The Collaborators

The Collaborators is a novel about a novel. The book in question is called Dancing the Brown Java, volume one of a sprawling epic set in Resistance-era France, and perhaps the greatest French work since Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Voyage to the End of the Night.1 The reader doesn’t learn too much about the content of this ...

Tim Parks on Literature in Translation

Really interesting article called “America First?” in the new issues of the New York Review of Books. In this piece, Tim Parks looks at four recent books: Best European Fiction 2010 edited by Aleksandar Hemon, Why Translation Matters by Edith Grossman, The Novel: An Alternative History, Beginnings to 1600 by ...

"Amateur Thursdays"

Earlier this week, Ed Nawotka wrote a great piece at Publishing Perspectives on “Amateur Thursdays” a new webcast project that’s the brainchild of Fabrice Rozie (book critic) and Giovanna Calvino (Italo’s daughter): Entitled “Amateur Thursdays” the concept is to present five-minute, edited ...

The Year in Translations (So Far): "Purge" by Sofi Oksanen

Some time in the past I was on the Wisconsin Public Radio show Here On Earth to make some international literature summer reading recommendations. We weren’t able to cover the full list of books I came up with, so I thought I’d post about them one-by-one over the next couple weeks with additional info, why these titles ...

Jules Chametzky Prize

In our fifty-first year of publication, the editors of the Massachusetts Review plan to dramatically increase the amount of fiction, poetry, and socially-engaged nonfiction they publish in translation. Today, we see a great need for literary journals to internationalize—to open their ears and their pages to voices from ...

The Year in Translations (So Far): "The Literary Conference" by Cesar Aira

Last week I was on the Wisconsin Public Radio show Here On Earth to make some international literature summer reading recommendations. We weren’t able to cover the full list of books I came up with, so I thought I’d post about them one-by-one over the next couple weeks with additional info, why these titles sound ...

The Year in Translations (So Far): "Baba Yaga Laid an Egg" by Dubravka Ugresic

Earlier this week I was on the Wisconsin Public Radio show Here On Earth to make some international literature summer reading recommendations. We weren’t able to cover the full list of books I came up with, so I thought I’d post about them one-by-one over the next couple weeks with additional info, why these ...

Contemporary Bulgarian Writers

It would be hard to overstate all the amazing things the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation for Creative Writing (and Elizabeth herself) has done for contemporary Bulgarian writers. Sure, there’s the Sozopol Fiction Seminars, but they also organized a special day of panels on Literary Diplomacy to take place in Sofia, helped ...

Alejandro Zambra with Megan McDowell

Where: 192 Books, 192 10th Avenue, New York, NY Alejandro Zambra and his translator Megan McDowell will discuss Zambra’s latest book to be translated into English, The Private Lives of Trees. Alejandro Zambra is acclaimed as the greatest writer of Chile’s younger generation. He is a poet and critic and currently ...

Let's Talk about Amazon for a Minute

I’ve been meaning to write about The AmazonCrossing announcement all week, but it’s taken a few days of Torino detox to partially regain my ability to put words into some sort of meaningful order. (Emphasis on “partially” . . . my mind is still unfurling, but hopefully by the time I’m drowning in ...

exchanges: Hack Work

The new issue of eXchanges, the University of Iowa’s journal of literature translation, is now available online complete with a rather gruesome front cover. (And I know I mention this every time a new issue comes out, but please for the love of Jacob, drop the capitalized “X” in the journal’s name. Not ...

Reading the World Podcast #4: Esther Allen

And here’s the new episode of the Reading the World Podcast (iTunes link, or click here to read our posts about the previous episodes). This month features a discussion among Esther Allen, Erica Mena, and Chad Post on all sorts of translation things, mainly related to Esther’s translation of Jose Manuel ...

Torino Book Fair [Arrivederci!]

Barring more volcano trouble (oh crap—looks my Alitalia flight has been delayed for 5 hours) I’m going to be in Turin for the rest of the week attending the Torino International Book Fair. The Italian Trade Commission organized this trip, bringing maybe 10 or so Americans to the book fair to help promote ...

Object Press and Christian Oster's "In the Train"

A few months back, I was contacted by the editor of Object Press, a relatively new publishing house in Toronto that was in the process of bringing out Christian Oster’s In the Train. I’m always excited to find out about new presses doing lit in translation, especially ones with simple, effective, attractive ...

New Books in the Japanese Literature Publishing Project

The Japanese Literature Publishing Project, which is one of the most interesting of all the various cultural agencies out there working to promote literature in translation, just announced the fifth list of titles to be included in their program. In case you’re not aware of the JLPP, this organization launched in 2002 ...

PEN World Voices 2010: Some Cool Things to Watch

OK, so another PEN World Voices Festival is now in the books. As usual, all the people at PEN (especially festival director Caro and her amazing staff of employees and interns) did a spectacular job putting this all together and making sure everything came off with a hitch. (Or at least without too many noticeable hitches.) ...

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Brings the Translations

OK, so longtime readers of Three Percent have probably noticed that I make fun of HMH a lot. Mainly because their website is a total pile of shit, and also because of how they treated Drenka Willen. (Seriously, even though the situation was rectified—thanks to the support of Saramago, Grass, etc.—someone’s ...

Foreignization and Neologism

A shorter post today: what are blogs for if not indulging (à livre ouvert, as they say) parbaked ruminations? Removing this one from deep freeze and tossing it to the hive mind. Two summers back at Banff, an author was defending her insistence on using foreign words in her novel, which her American editor objected to. I ...

Towards New Ways of Reading

Bonjour à tous! Chad Post has asked me to take some time off from designing my “Google Translate is People!” t-shirts (hint: the words are superimposed over a horrified and battered Charlton Heston) and cover for him this week. I am delighted and honored to be guest blogging at “the threep.” I think this ...

RTWCS: Horacio Castellanos Moya and Chad W. Post

This past Monday’s RTWCS event—featuring Horacio Castellanos Moya (author of Senselessness, The She-Devil in the Mirror, and Dance with Snakes among many other untranslated books)—was easily one of the best events of the series. Castellanos Moya is engaging, hilarious, and extremely interesting, and I think ...

Romanian Literature Has Its Quarter

I know that Romanian lit has received a lot of love over the past few years (according to our translation database 13 books have been published in English translation since Jan 2008), and that the Romanian Cultural Institute is very proactive and persuasive, but it’s still a bit of a surprise that two (two!) major ...

Bob Brown's Digitial Reading Device

Jennifer Schuessler has a really fun and interesting article in this week’s New York Times Book Review about Bob Brown, the Godfather of the E-Reader: Brown is perhaps best remembered for The Readies, a 1930 manifesto blending the fervor of the Futurists with the playfulness of Jules Verne. “The written word ...

Quim Monzo: "Gasoline" and PEN World Voices [Part I]

Not a lot going on in terms of publishing news today, so I thought I’d take a break from the usual posts about ebooks, Zen wisdom, and disturbing novels to bring you a bit of information about Catalan author Quim Monzo, whose Gasoline recently arrived from the printer. (If you’re an Open Letter subscriber, ...

Siamese

Since his literary debut at the age of 18, Norwegian author Stig Sæterbakken has made a name for himself by challenging convention. At times, this challenge has manifested as an interrogation of the Norwegian nation’s sense of identity and its relationship to Europe. At others, it has revealed itself more questionably, ...

We're Number 25!

OK, so to be honest, I never heard of “Online University Lowdown.com” before this morning, but I’m psyched that Three Percent is number 25 on their list of 50 Places to Find Literary Criticism Online. (It’s been one of those weeks. I’ll take any love I can get.) According to Emma Roberts, who ...

Nobody said it was going to be fun: Etgar Keret

Where: Columbia University, Dodge 501, New York, NY On Transcending Politics, Translating Politics, Israeli Politics, Bus Driver Politics, and Grandmas with Guns Join the Center for Literary Translation for an evening with Israeli author and filmmaker Etgar Keret. One of the most successful Israeli writers today, ...

Everybody Please Just Calm the &*%$ Down [We Should All Be Butler]

So last night’s National Championship was one of the best basketball games I’ve ever watched. Back-and-forth, fairly well-played, intense, exciting, etc., etc., all coming down to a half-court miracle shot that was a fraction of a hair from going in and bringing the Evil Duke Empire (and their possibly unhinged ...

Marian Schwartz on Faithfulness in Translation

Yesterday’s Boston Globe has a nice interview with Marian Schwartz, one of the great contemporary translators, whose translation of Olga Slavnikova’s 2017 was recently released. (Here’s a link to K.E. Semmel’s review of 2017 that we ran last week.) Q. What is a good translation? A. I think a ...

Reading the World Podcast #3: Suzanne Jill Levine

A new month and a new Reading the World Podcast, this time with Suzanne Jill Levine, famed translator (of Three Trapped Tigers, of Heartbreak Tango, of dozens of other wonderful books) and author of the very influential The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction. We recorded this back at MLA in December (in ...

Publisher Branding

The always interesting Publishing Perspectives has a great double-sided post today about publisher branding, with Erin Cox advocating for publishers to spend more time & money on this, and Sarah Russo arguing about why publishers shouldn’t “brand the brand.” It’s not hard to figure out where I ...

Latest Revew: "2017" by Olga Slavnikova

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by K.E. Semmel on Olga Slavnikova’s 2017, which is translated from the Russian by Marian Schwartz (one of our favorite translators) and published by Overlook. K.E. Semmel is the Publications & Communications Manager of The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, ...

RTWCS: Helen Anderson and Konstantin Gurevich on Ilf & Petrov's "The Golden Calf"

Last Monday we kicked off the spring season of the Reading the World Conversation Series with an event featuring the husband and wife translating team of Konstantin Gurevich and Helen Anderson. They talked with Open Letter editor E.J. Van Lanen about the process of translating Ilf & Petrov’s The Golden Calf, which ...

Schedule for "Your Face Tomorrow"

Again with me and the last minute postings, but if you’re planning on participating in Conversational Reading’s YFT Reading Group, here’s the official schedule: VOLUME 1 –1: Fever– Week 1, March 21-27: pp. 3 – 95 (Section ends at: “But before getting back to the Tupras . . .”) Week 2, ...

Google, Machine Translation, and Literature

The other week, the New York Times ran a piece on advances in Google’s translation tools, focusing on the way Google essentially crowdsources its mechanical translations by searching its mammoth database of web pages, books, etc. Creating a translation machine has long been seen as one of the toughest challenges ...

The Possibility of International Poetry

The Poetry Foundation website posted a fascinating conversation last week between author/editor/translator Ilya Kaminsky and reviewer Adam Kirsch. The reason for this interview was the recent release of The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry (full review forthcoming), and the main topic is the possibility, or ...

"Your Face Tomorrow" Reading Group

After reading a bunch of glowing reviews for the third volume of Javier Marias’s Your Face Tomorrow trilogy (including this one from the Independent in which the trilogy is referred to as “one of the most thoughtful and inspiring fictional works of the last decade”) I tentatively decided that I would spend ...

Hello there!

I feel like it’s been ages since I last posted anything new here . . . In my defense, it’s kind of tricky finding the time to come up with good material during a ten-day trip to Abu Dhabi, two panels (including the 2010 BTBA announcement), and an extended trip to New York. Two-and-a-half weeks of traveling is ...

The Greatest Event Since It and the World Began

This is still a few weeks away, but seeing that I’ll be off in Abu Dhabi for a while (see tomorrow’s post), I thought I should mention this now. On Thursday, March 11th at 7:00pm at the Americas Society (680 Park Ave, NYC) there will be a special event in honor of the first English publication of Macedonio ...

"Lightwall" by Liliana Ursu [BTBA 2010 Poetry Finalists]

Over the next eight days, we’ll be featuring each of the ten titles from this year’s Best Translated Book Award poetry shortlist. Click here for all past write-ups. Lightwall by Liliana Ursu. Translated from the Romanian by Sean Cotter. (Romania, Zephyr Press) Poetry judge Matthew Zapruder — poet, ...

"In Such Hard Times" by Wei Ying-wu [BTBA 2010 Poetry Finalists]

Over the next nine days, we’ll be featuring each of the ten titles from this year’s Best Translated Book Award poetry shortlist. Click here for all past write-ups. In Such Hard Times by Wei Ying-wu. Translated from the Chinese by Red Pine. (China, Copper Canyon) Poetry judge Matthew Zapruder — ...

BTBA 2010 Fiction Finalists: A Recap

A commenter asked the other day for links to all of the daily summaries for this year’s BTBA fiction finalists. Well, I’ll do you one better . . . Below are all ten shortlisted books with links to AND excerpts from the overview pieces: César Aira, Ghosts. Translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews. ...

Min Kamp

Last fall at Frankfurt I visited with quite a few Norwegian publishers, and every one of them was talking about Karl Ove Knausgård’s Min Kamp (My Struggle, or Mein Kampf to make the provocation plain), which our good friends at Oktober Forlaget were publishing in six volumes, three in one season and three the next, for ...

BTBA 2010: The Fiction Finalists

Man, was it tricky to come up with a top 10 for this year’s BTBA fiction award. This was a really deep list—due in part to the added judges, the fact that we were more focused on reading books for the award all year, and the high quality of stuff that came out in 2009—and any of the twenty-five books on the ...

The Year of Jakov Lind

Today marks the third anniversary of Jakov Lind’s death. It was the occasion of his death that first brought Lind to our attention—I’m pretty sure I first read about him on Ready, Steady, Book, where Mark posted a link to his obituary. I did a little investigating at the time, and I discovered that his books ...

"The Ninth" by Ferenc Barnás [BTBA 2010 Fiction Longlist]

Over the next five days, we’ll be highlighting a book a day from the Best Translated Book Award fiction longlist. Click here for all past write-ups. The Ninth by Ferenc Barnás. Translated from the Hungarian by Paul Olchváry. (Hungary, Northwestern University Press) Below is a guest post from Bill Marx, one ...

"News from the Empire" by Fernando del Paso [BTBA 2010 Fiction Longlist]

Over the next six days, we’ll be highlighting a book a day from the Best Translated Book Award fiction longlist. Click here for all past write-ups. News from the Empire by Fernando del Paso. Translated from the Spanish by Alfonso Gonzalez and Stella T. Clark. (Mexico, Dalkey Archive) I can’t do half the ...

Indie Bookstore Pics (Part I)

The other week I was talking with Paul Kozlowski of Other Press about studies that have been done on what gets a reader to actually purchase a book. As we all cynically assume, when it comes to purchasing a physical book from a brick-and-mortar store, reviews hardly matter at all—it’s all about the cover and the ...

"Vilnius Poker" by Ricardas Gavelis [BTBA 2010 Fiction Longlist]

Over the next seven days, we’ll be highlighting a book a day from the Best Translated Book Award fiction longlist. Click here for all past write-ups. Vilnius Poker by Ricardas Gavelis. Translated from the Lithuanian by Elizabeth Novickas. (Lithuania, Open Letter) Vilnius Poker may well be one of the darkest ...

"Every Man Dies Alone" by Hans Fallada [BTBA 2010 Fiction Longlist]

Over the next eleven days, we’ll be highlighting a book a day from the Best Translated Book Award fiction longlist. Click here for all past write-ups. Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada. Translated from the German by Michael Hofmann (Germany, Melville House) Below is a guest post from Tom Roberge, an editor ...

"The Discoverer" by Jan Kjaerstad [BTBA 2010 Fiction Longlist]

Over the next twelve days, we’ll be highlighting a book a day from the Best Translated Book Award fiction longlist. Click here for all past write-ups. The Discoverer by Jan Kjaerstad. Translated from the Norwegian by Barbara Haveland. (Norway, Open Letter) Yes, The Discoverer is the third volume in Jan ...

"Anonymous Celebrity" by Ignacio de Loyola Brandao [BTBA 2010 Fiction Longlist]

Over the next thirteen days, we’ll be highlighting a book a day from the Best Translated Book Award fiction longlist. Click here for all past write-ups. Anonymous Celebrity by Ignacio de Loyola Brandao. Translated from the Portuguese by Nelson H. Vieira. (Brazil, Dalkey Archive) When I picked up Anonymous ...

"The Weather Fifteen Years Ago" by Wolf Haas [BTBA 2010 Fiction Longlist]

Over the next fourteen days, we’ll be highlighting a book a day from the Best Translated Book Award fiction longlist. Click here for all past write-ups. The Weather Fifteen Years Ago by Wolf Haas. Translated from the German by Stephanie Gilardi and Thomas S. Hansen. (Austria, Ariadne) Wolf Haas’s The ...

"Giving the Fig"

I’m no marketing guru, but there is one rule of advertising that I think everyone should follow: if you dominate a market, never draw attention to your (smaller) competition. This is why Apple attacks Microsoft so directly in ads—for better or worse, Microsoft has a market share the size of a Chicagoan’s ...

"Memories of the Future" by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky [BTBA 2010 Fiction Longlist]

Over the next three weeks, we’ll be highlighting a book a day from the Best Translated Book Award fiction longlist. Click here for all past write-ups. Memories of the Future by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky. Translated from the Russian by Joanne Turnbull. (Russia, New York Review Books) Since today is the day ...

"The Skating Rink" by Roberto Bolaño [BTBA 2010 Fiction Longlist]

Over the next four weeks, we’ll be highlighting a book a day from the Best Translated Book Award fiction longlist. Click here for all past write-ups. The Skating Rink by Roberto Bolaño. Translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews. (Chile, New Directions) Well, 2009 wasn’t nearly the “Year of ...

"The Confessions of Noa Weber" by Gail Hareven [BTBA 2010 Fiction Longlist]

Over the next four weeks, we’ll be highlighting a book a day from the Best Translated Book Award fiction longlist. Click here for all past write-ups. The Confessions of Noa Weber by Gail Hareven. Translated from the Hebrew by Dalya Bilu. (Israel, Melville House) It’s hard to write an objective overview ...

"The Zafarani Files" by Gamal al-Ghitani [BTBA 2010 Fiction Longlist]

Over the next five weeks, we’ll be highlighting a book a day from the Best Translated Book Award fiction longlist. Click here for all past write-ups. The Zafarani Files by Gamal al-Ghitani. Translated from the Arabic by Farouk Abdel Wahab. (Egypt, American University in Cairo Press) I came across The Zafarani ...

"Wonder" by Hugo Claus [BTBA 2010 Fiction Longlist]

Over the next five weeks, we’ll be highlighting a book a day from the Best Translated Book Award fiction longlist. Click here for all past write-ups. Wonder by Hugo Claus. Translated from the Dutch by Michael Henry Heim. (Belgium, Archipelago) I might be wrong about this, but it seems like Hugo Claus is one ...

"The Twin" by Gerbrand Bakker [BTBA 2010 Fiction Longlist]

Over the next five weeks, we’ll be highlighting a book a day from the Best Translated Book Award fiction longlist. Click here for all past write-ups. The Twin by Gerbrand Bakker. Translated from the Dutch by David Colmer. (Netherlands, Archipelago) Archipelago has done an amazing job of creating a brand for ...

"The Tanners" by Robert Walser [BTBA 2010 Fiction Longlist]

Over the next five weeks, we’ll be highlighting a book a day from the Best Translated Book Award fiction longlist. Click here for all past write-ups. The Tanners by Robert Walser. Translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky. (Switzerland, New Directions) Thanks to New York Review Books, University of ...

2010 Best Translated Book Awards: Honorable Mention

Before jumping into the day-by-day look at each of the 25 titles on the Best Translated Book Award fiction longlist I thought I’d post about a few of the books that didn’t make the list. It’s cliched to even say, but it really is difficult coming up with this list. Down to the final moment of voting, I was ...

The Golden Calf: An Interview with the Translators

Over at the consistently interesting Lizok’s Bookshelf, Lisa Hayden Espenschade has an interview with Konstantin Gurevich and Helen Anderson, the co-translators of Ilf & Petrov’s The Golden Calf: In your translators’ note, you write, “we approached the novel as a work of literature first and foremost, ...

2010 Best Translated Book Award: Fiction Longlist

After months and months (twelve to be exact) and books upon books, our nine fiction panelists finally came up with the 25-title fiction longlist for this year’s Best Translated Book Award. It was a rather difficult decision—it always is, and for me, there’s always a moment where it seems like 30 books ...

Mo Yan's "Frog"

Thanks to Paper Republic for pointing out this early English-language review of Frog, Mo Yan’s latest novel. The author of many novels, including Red Sorghum and The Republic of Wine, Mo Yan is one of the lucky Chinese writers who has been published in English translation, and it’s likely Frog will make ...

Unpacking Galassi's Op-Ed Piece

On the surface, the op-ed piece that FSG publisher Jonathan Galassi wrote for the Tiimes this past weekend seems pretty mundane. His main point seems to be that good editors at good publishing houses make good books better. Or more directly: publishers do more than simply print and sell books. They have special knowledge ...

Back from MLA and Goodbye to 2009

Sorry that things have been a bit quiet around here. A couple days after Christmas I drove down to Philadelphia for this year’s Modern Language Association Convention, which had a special focus on Translation. (Jen Howard wrote a great summary piece about this for the Chronicle of Higher Education that’s worth ...

Winter Reading List

One of the best unexpected results of putting together the translation databases is being able to put together an awesome reading list of forthcoming translations. (Or, to put it in a slightly more negative light: to know about way more interesting books than I’ll ever have time to read.) The spring is a perfect ...

The She-Devil in the Mirror

At last year’s Best Translated Book Award ceremony, there were three novels cited as the best of the best: eventual winner Attila Bartis’s Tranquility, Roberto Bolano’s 2666, and Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Senselessness. All the judges agreed that Moya’s book was really tight and amazing. ...

Summer 2010 Open Letter Catalog

Only seems appropriate that just before Christmas we should announce our summer list of titles . . . You can click here to download a pdf version of the new catalog (which contains excerpts from all the books), or, for those of you who are anti-pdf, the list below has the basic information for the next five Open Letter ...

Jan/Feb 2010 Issue of World Literature Today

Michael Orthofer has complained in the past about the crappy format of World Literature Today online, and he’s absolutely right. WLT (along with the Review of Contemporary Fiction, another publication resisting the online world) is one of the most interesting magazines being published today concerned with international ...

If We Don't Publish It, People Won't Steal It

Every time I feel like I’ve said all I really want to say about e-books and digital revolution (see all of these pieces from my recent trip to Paris), some crazy announcement or other is made, feathers are ruffled, barbs are traded, and I feel the insane itch to comment . . . And no matter how much I try and resist ...

Interview with Amelie Nothomb

The Winter issue of Tin House is now available, and includes an interesting interview Heather Hartley conducted with French Belgian Japanese cosmopolitan writer Amelie Nothomb. Hartley’s intro does a great job in pointing out the huge difference between Nothomb’s popularity in the States (despite being published ...

Haruki Murakami and the Problems of Popularity

I’m home sick—damn winter colds that are even resistant to Advil Cold & Sinus, the Wonder Drug—so it’s a perfect day for a guest post from intern Will Eells. You might remember Will from his review of The Housekeeper and the Professor, and he will be writing more reviews for us in the future, ...

Catching Up on "What Bolano Read"

Fallen way behind on tracking the brilliant Melville House series on “What Bolano Read.” These ten posts are culled from Roberto Bolano: The Last Interview and Other Conversations, which Melville House recently published. And which you can purchase for 20% off during Melville’s Holiday Sale (more on the sale ...

Is The Quarterly Conversation The Greatest Online Literary Magazine Ever?

My unabashed love for The Quarterly Conversation is longstanding and predates all reviews/excerpts of Open Letter titles . . . In fact, I remember when we first launched Three Percent (back in the simpler, halcyon days of summer 2007 . . . ) Scott Espositon and Quarterly Conversation/Conversational Reading was by far the most ...

More Dispatches from Guadalajara

Because it snowed today in Rochester, I’m going to post again about the Guadalajara Book Fair. Mainly, I want to apologize for doing crap research before linking to Hermano Cerdo’s coverage of the fair . . . Their coverage is excellent, and Hermano Cerdo deserves tons of traffic, but there are some others also ...

Making the Publisher Visible

Well. Sometime over the past couple days, ALTA posted pictures of a number of people who attended the conference. (A lot of these are the same photos we’re planning on using for the Making the Translator Visible series, so you can kind of get a sneak preview of sorts.) That’s all fine and good. But what’s ...

Translation Is a Love Affair

One of the most interesting facets of Translation Is a Love Affair is the brief bio on Sheila Fischman: Sheila Fischman has published more than 125 translations of contemporary French-Canadian novels including works by Jacques Poulin, Francois Gravel, Anne Hebert, Marie-Claire Blais, Michel Tremblay, and Gaetan Soucy. In ...

NBCC: Why Translation Matters?

A couple weeks ago, the National Book Critics Circle hosted a panel at Prairie Lights Books in Iowa City entitled “Why Translation Matters?” and featuring Sarah Fay, Christopher Merrill, Cole Swenson, Russell Valentino, (incorrectly identified as Rudolph Valentino on the NBCC info page, which isn’t ...

"You Have Nothing to Lose but Your Spoons" [ALTA Conference]

As if it isn’t obvious from my earlier posts about ALTA, I’m a huge fan of the conference, the people, the panels. (To riff on the nature of the panels for a second: these are almost anti-MLA type events. It’s an unwritten—or maybe even written—rule that you don’t read a paper on an ALTA ...

The 2010 Edition of the Best Translated Book Award

Although it seems (to me at least) like we just had the 2009 Best Translated Book Award ceremony a couple months ago, it’s getting to be that time again . . . For the 2010 award, our group of nine fiction panelists (more on them below and more on the poetry people next week), all original translations published ...

"Short Drop Only While Getting It Off"

So, I’m back from Southern California, all post-ALTA inspired about translation, the state of translation, the amazing manuscripts people are working on, etc. But I’m way, way too jetlagged and exhausted to actually write any real posts today . . . So, in a blogging version of an “under ...

The Future of Latin American Fiction (Part III)

To celebrate the recent release of Jorge Volpi’s Season of Ash, all this week we’re going to serialize a speech that Jorge gave this past summer on the Future of Latin American Fiction. And, as a special offer, for the next 20 people who subscribe to Open Letter—either a 5 book or 10 book ...

Why Translation Matters

Where: Prairie Lights, Iowa City, Iowa NBCC Reads and Prairie Lights welcome panel discussion on Why Translation Matters, with Moderator: Sarah Fay is an advisory editor at The Paris Review. Her work appears regularly in the New York Times Book Review, The Paris Review, Bookforum, and The American Scholar, among others. ...

The Future of Latin American Fiction (Part I)

To celebrate the recent release of Jorge Volpi’s Season of Ash, all this week we’re going to serialize a speech that Jorge gave this past summer on the Future of Latin American Fiction. And, as a special offer, for the next 20 people who subscribe to Open Letter—either a 5 book or 10 book ...

Hey There, I'm an Author, You're a Reader . . . (Part V of the French Study Trip)

This isn’t the easiest of series to wrap up. In part because of today’s schedule (I have meetings/class from 10am until 1pm, so god only knows when this post will actually go live), and in part because there are no real conclusions that can be drawn. Well, except maybe one: Coming at it from a publishing ...

Open Letter RSS

By the way, we sometimes post here the highlights of goings-on at Open Letter, but if you really want to keep up-to-date on Open Letter news, events, reviews, releases, the occasional book giveaway, and etc., don’t forget that Open Letter has it’s own RSS news feed to which you may happily subscribe . . ...

Open Letter Books Receives Grant from Amazon.com

We’re interrupting the longest posts known to bloggers to officially announce a grant that we received from Amazon.com to support The Wall in My Head. Here’s the official press release: Open Letter Books has been awarded a $20,000 grant from Amazon.com to support the publication and promotion of The Wall in My ...

How to Sell Books in France (Part III of the Study Trip Posts)

OK, so despite my best efforts, I don’t really have an overarching design to all of these posts about the study trip. I do have ideas about what I’m going to write about tomorrow (good/bad of eBooks and pricing) and on Friday (authors and business models), but I can’t actually imagine that reading these from ...

French Study Trip

We’ll have a few other sorts of posts going up this week (like maybe, finally, a few new book reviews—this fall has been rather rough on our schedule, but I have pieces in the works on Anonymous Celebrity by Ignacio de Loyola Brandao, The Informers by Juan Gabriel Vasquez, and Running Away by Jean-Philippe Toussaint), but ...

A "Wall in My Head" Roundup

If you read Three Percent often, then you’ve already heard of The Wall in My Head: Words and Images from the Fall of the Iron Curtain. In case you’ve missed it, though, Wall is a collection of of stories and essays from over 30 writers (and nearly as many translators) “that witnessed the fall of the Iron ...

Jorge Volpi with Alfred Mac Adam

Where: University of Rochester, Plutzik Library, Rochester, NY Jorge Volpi, author of Season of Ash will be in conversation with his translator, Alfred Mac Adam. Jorge Volpi is a doctor in law and a teacher of Mexican literature at the UNAM (Autonomous University of Mexico), as well as a PhD in Hispanic Philology by the ...

RTWCS: Jorge Volpi and Alfred Mac Adam

If you happen to be here in Rochester, you should definitely come to U of R’s Plutzik Library at 6:30 for tonight’s Reading the World Conversation Series event with Jorge Volpi and Alfred Mac Adam. Jorge is one of the founding members of the “Crack” group—a collection of young Mexican ...

Estonian Literature, Book Buying, and Capitalism

This post originally appeared on the Frankfurt Book Fair blog. I highly recommend visiting the official blog for interesting posts from Richard Nash, Alex Hippisley-Cox, and Arun Wolf One of the most interesting figures Kaidi Urmet of the Estonian Publishers’ Association dropped in her speech about the Estonian Book ...

Georges Simenon Discussion

Where: London Review Bookshop, 14 Bury Place, London, UK John Banville and John Gray discuss the work of Georges

2 for $22

In celebration of our thirteen-month anniversary, we’re offering a special on all twelve of the titles we’ve published so far: from now until November can buy any 2 Open Letter books for $22. And when you do (and hopefully you will—this is a killer bargain!), you’ll automatically be entered into a ...

Nobel Prize for Literature for 2009 Given to Herta Mueller

Wow. Michael Orthofer was right and Romanian-German author Herta Mueller has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. From the Associated Press: Romanian-born German writer Herta Mueller won the 2009 Nobel Prize in literature Thursday, honored for work that “with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of ...

Michael Orthofer's Nobel Prize Speculation

Not many people are as dialed into the Nobel Prize for Literature speculation as Michael Orthofer of the Literary Saloon. And his post this morning about the possibility of Herta Müller being announced as the winner tomorrow is pretty intriguing. And before anyone says “Herta who?,” Michael already put together ...

More Walser

Over at the New Directions blog there’s a fascinating interview with translator Susan Bernofsky (one of my favorite translators) on Robert Walser (one of my favorite authors). Number of interesting comments on the process and art of translation, but this bit about Walser’s Microscripts was what caught my ...

Poem Strip Launch Party

Where: Idlewild Books, 12 W. 19th St., New York, NY Idlewild Books, launch party for the first graphic novel published by New York Review Books, Poem Strip by Dino Buzzati, featuring translator Marina ...

The Wheel of Publishing History

In my spare time [sic], I’ve been reading Ted Striphas’s very interesting The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control, which was released by Columbia University Press earlier this year, and very thoughtfully reviewed by Richard Nash in the most recent issue of The Critical Flame. At ...

Baba Yaga Laid an Egg by Dubravka Ugresic

Thanks to Lauren Wein for sending me a galley of Dubravka Ugresic’s latest book, Baba Yaga Laid an Egg. (Which is translated by Ellen Elias-Bursac, Celia Hawkesworth, and Mark Thompson.) This was released in the UK not too long ago (and has been receiving some great reviews) and will be available here in the States ...

¿Qué pasa? An NBCC Reads Event

Where: Durango Building, UT-San Antonio, San Antonio, TX The National Book Critics Circle recently polled its membership on the question: “Which work in translation has had the most effect on your reading and writing?”  Some of the responses were posted on the NBCC Web site. As a follow-up, in various cities the NBCC ...

Dream of Reason

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 with the writings of Freud and James Joyce and the philosophies of Nietzsche ...

Horacio Castellanos Moya and the "Bolano Myth"

At Conversational Reading, Scott Esposito points to an interesting article by Horacio Castellanos Moya about his disgust with the “Bolano Myth.” The article is primarily based on Sarah Pollack’s essay “Latin America Translated (Again): Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives in the United ...

October Translations

I can’t believe September is almost over . . . Although I’m sort of glad—October brings the Frankfurt Book Fair, a study trip to France (more on that in another post), and another playoff appearance for the St. Louis Cardinals. (Next year, Cubs fans. Next. Year.) October also brings some interesting ...

Best of the National Book Award Fiction Winners and Best Books of the Millennium

“Best Of” lists tend to pop up all over the internet come December, but both the National Book Foundation and The Millions got the jump on everyone with two very intriguing projects that kicked off this week. Over the course of the summer, the NBF has been highlighting all 77 fiction winners from the past 60 ...

The Confessions of Noa Weber

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 of the past decade, and the return of the Moby Lives blog (I still wear ...

Some Icelandic Authors

The article I wrote for Publishing Perspectives about the Iceland Literary Festival (along with a video interview with Kristjan B. Jonasson, the head of the Icelandic Publishers Association) will go live tomorrow morning, but in the meantime, I thought I’d put together a short write-up of some of the interesting ...

THE GOLDEN CALF galley available online (for now . . .)

Continuing our proud tradition (does two times equal a tradition?) of posting galley’s online so that anyone and everyone who’s interested may get a preview, you can now view the ARC of The Golden Calf by Ilf & Petrov. This new translation of The Golden Calf—a true classic of Russian ...

European Book Club: The Mighty Angel

Where: Solas Bar, 232 East 9th Street, 2nd Floor (between Second & Third Avenues), New York, NY To register for this session, send us an email at poland.nyc@europeanbookclub.org The Book: The Mighty Angel begins with its alcoholic narrator, Jerzy, having returned home from the “alco ward” for the eighteenth and ...

Tomorrow's E-Utopia? [Part 4 of 4]

Here’s the final part of the paper I’m preparing for the Iceland Literary Festival. Click here for part one and here for part two and here for part three. Again, please pass along any comments/suggestions you might have—in no way is this essay fixed in stone. (I’m sure there are a million minor typos ...

Tomorrow's E-Utopia? [Part 2 of 4]

Here’s the second section of the paper I’m preparing for the Iceland Literary Festival. Click here for part one. The third part will go up later today, and the fourth over the weekend. Let me back up a bit to give a broader context for how e-books hold some promise to revolutionize the business of publishing ...

The Skating Rink

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, the ambition, the overreaching, and the risks he took. But ...

September Issues

New issues of a bunch of my favorite magazines (online and in print) came out this week. Here’s a quick summary: The new Bookforum is a three-month issue, so thankfully there’s a lot of great stuff. Ben Anastas on faith in fiction, a review by Matthew Shaer of Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s The Informers, a ...

And Let Us Now Praise Georges Perec

Yesterday’s afternoon mail brought with it two Georges Perec books that Godine just brought out: a new edition of Life A User’s Manual and Thoughts of Sorts, a collection of essays published posthumously in France in 1985. And which, according to the jacket copy, “completes the Godine list of ...

It's September–Time for a Translation Database Update

Since it’s the start of a new month, and since I’ve added a number of books since the last update, it seems like the perfect time to post updated versions of our Translation Database. To read the complete background on this database, and to access the updated files, simply click here. Or, click here for the 2008 ...

Dubravka Ugresic's "Baba Yaga Laid an Egg"

This won’t be available in the States until next spring, but Dubravka Ugresic’s Baba Yaga Laid an Egg is already getting some great press in the UK, such as this piece in the London Review of Books by Marina Warner: Dubravka Ugrešić’s Baba Yaga Laid an Egg is the latest, most inventive and most ...

Good Books, "Difficulty," and Plot

I think blogs were created for the very reason of attacking articles like Lev Grossman’s Good Novels Don’t Have to Be Hard, which appeared in the Wall Street Journal over the weekend. This article is so annoying and so preposterous that it’s actually dangerous. It opens with Grossman’s praising ...

Upcoming on Three Percent

Now that school is back in session (speaking of which, if there are any U of R students reading this—or friends of U of R students—we still have a couple internship openings, so e-mail me if you’re interested), we’re really getting back into the swing of things with the site. I know it was a bit quiet ...

Cool Russian Books (And Journals)

One of the most interesting journals I’ve heard about recently is Chtenia: Readings from Russia a very well-produced publication that features a wide range of works by Russian authors, from classic authors to new voices. And it includes not just fiction (although they do claim to be the “only regularly published ...

Selcuk Altun's Turkish Lit Recommendations

To mark the English-language release of Selcuk Altun’s new novel, Many and Many a Year Ago, The Guardian asked him to give a top 10 list of his favorite Turkish novels. Click the above link for all of his descriptions, but here’s the list with links to purchase English translations and a few of my comments: 1. ...

NY Times on "Woman from Shanghai"

Earlier in the month we posted a piece by Chinese translator—and amazingly nice guy—Wen Huang about Xianhui Yang’s collection of “stories” Woman from Shanghai. And no, those aren’t unnecessary quotes—these pieces are based on real-life events, with added fictional/literary aspects in ...

Observer, Paper-over-Board, and Oprah

OK, I threw my little fit about this on Facebook, and now that that’s out of my system, I can take a more tempered, critical look at Leon Neyfakh’s article in today’s New York Observer about books without dust jackets. (It’s new! It’s hip! It’s trendy!) September will see the ...

NEA Translation Fellowships (Follow-Up)

I know E.J. posted about this last week, but I wanted to give my own personal shout-out to a few of the recipients of this year’s NEA Translation Fellowships. Complete descriptions of all sixteen funded projects can be found here, but in addition to the projects E.J. mentioned—Charlotte Mandell’s ...

NEA grants and Open Letter

The National Endowment for the Arts just announced its 2010 winners of the Literature Fellowships for Translation Projects. And there’s a few Open Letter connections this year. First, Charlotte Mandell won a grant to translate Mathias Enard’s Zone (“The narrative unfolds during a train journey from Milan ...

Bread Loaf and Slow Days on Three Percent

I’m leaving this afternoon for a three-day visit to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference (giving a presentation on Open Letter, state of translations in America), so I probably won’t be posting much this week. I’ll try and post my reviews of Robert Bolano’s The Skating Rink and Tanguy Viel’s ...

Thirlwell on Hrabal

I don’t usually like to re-post things that have appeared on The Literary Review, mainly because I think our site and Michael’s have an audience Venn diagram that looks more like a single big circle than two overlapping ones, but this is too good to pass up. This weekend, Adam Thirlwell had a piece in The ...

Mario Bellatin in the New York Times

This is a few days old now, but it was great to see Larry Rohter of the New York Times do a special feature on Mexican novelist Mario Bellatin. Bellatin—and his books—are really interesting. Even the opening story in the piece is awesome: A few years ago the Mexican novelist Mario Bellatin attended one of ...

Mathias Enard in Le Monde

Next fall we’ll be bringing out Zone, a 517-page, one-sentence book by Matias Enard that was all the rage in France last fall and, at least from the sample I’ve read, is utterly amazing. (Here’s a Chicago Tribune article about the book, and here’s a thoughtful review that ran at Quarterly ...

Selçuk Altun

Total broken record moment, but if you haven’t subscribed to the Publishing Perspectives daily newsletter, you definitely should. The pieces are always interesting, and very well done. Anyway, a couple months back I was planning on writing a long piece on Turkish fiction coming out this year, including Ahmet Hamdi ...

E-Readers: The Good, Bad, and Flexible

Today’s Publishing Perspectives piece is a great editorial by editor Ed Nawotka on e-books, specifically in relation to kids books: My daughter loves to read. “Book, ook, ook,” she’ll say, trying to form the right word that will get my attention to plop onto a beanbag chair, pull her into my lap, and read to ...

“I hope to be remembered as a writer who speaks the truth”

Below is a guest post from Wen Huang, whose translation of Liao Yiwu’s The Corpse Walker is now available in paperback, and whose translation of Xianhui Yan’s Woman from Shanghai releases on Thomas Pynchon day today. We’re planning on reviewing this in the next week or so—sounds ...

Swiss Horror at World Books

Over at World Books, Bill Marx has a very thoughtful review of two Swiss horror books: The Vampire of Ropraz, by Jacques Chessex, translated by W. Donald Wilson and published by Bitter Lemon (a Best Translated Book nominee) and The Black Spider, by Jeremias Gotthelf, translated by H. M. Waidson and published by Oneworld ...

Nicolson Baker on the Kindle

The new issue of The New Yorker has a really interesting piece by print-advocate Nicholson Baker about the Kindle. It’s worth reading the whole article—I haven’t read a review of the Kindle quite like this one—but here are a few of the highlights: It came, via UPS, in a big cardboard box. Inside ...

2009 Man Asian Literary Prize Longlist

The twenty-four title longlist for the 2009 Man Asian Literary Prize was announced last week and is listed in full below. The press release has bio information for all of the authors, but not a lot of info on their books. (Just as Michael Orthofer has his bit about how this award isn’t Asian enough I have my standard ...

Introduction to Elsa Morante's Aracoeli

Our most recent release—which shipped to subscribers last week—is Elsa Morante’s Aracoeli, her last novel, and by far her darkest. Below you’ll find the excellent introduction Robert Boyers wrote for our reissue of this book. Thirty years ago, Elsa Morante seemed to many American writers and critics ...

Where Have I Been These Past Few Months

That I didn’t realize New Directions has a blog. Not terribly active, but still, today’s post about Borges’s history with ND is pretty interesting. To provide some context for this quote: earlier in the summer ND held a contest to see if anyone could identify the first publication of Borges by ND. Answer: ...

Scandinavian Crime Novels

Although I’m personally not a reader of Scandinavian crime fiction (unless you can somehow count Jan Kjaerstad’s trilogy in that group, which is closer to a leap than a stretch), I find the debate between Nathaniel Rich and Larissa Kyzer about why these books are so popular pretty fascinating. First off, ...

Texas and Translations

A few months ago we posted about the University of Texas Press’s decision to relaunch its Latin American literature in translation series. (And at some point soon we’ll have a full review of the first new title in the series, And Let the Earth Tremble at its Centers by Gonzalo Celorio.) Well on Friday I found ...

European Union Prize for Literature

The first twelve winners of the European Union Prize for Literature were announced earlier this week with the aim of bringing increased attention to the contemporary European literature. This is a bit of an odd prize—each year an award is given to one author from 11 or 12 of the various EU countries. The list of ...

Summer Recommendations from the BTB Panelists

Before getting into this list of recommendations, I feel like I have to provide a bit of background and a few qualifications. First off, in no way is this the longlist for the 2010 Best Translated Book Award. We won’t be voting on that until late-November, so please don’t assume that if a book is (or ...

The Vampire of Ropraz

If it weren’t for Michael Orthofer of Complete Review, I don’t think I would’ve ever picked up this slender book. I don’t mind my vampires on TV (True Blood is a pretty decent show), but I tend to avoid them in literature. (No, I haven’t read Twilight and probably never will.) But this ...

New Issue of The Critical Flame

The second issue of The Critical Flame is now available online, including a review of J.M.G. Le Clezio’s Desert by Scott Esposito: Desert was acclaimed as Le Clézio’s “breakout” novel by the Swedish Academy, but the book’s mass appeal can be difficult to see at first — it is not the easiest read to get ...

Agents and Editors

I agree with Michael Orthofer, the interaction between super-agent Andrew Wylie and super-awesome Playboy editor Amy Grace Loyd over the first-serial rights to Nabokov’s The Original of Laura is a bit gross. From the New York Observer: It was an inspired method, the flowers serving as a reference to Nabokov’s ...

Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector

One of the fall books that I’m really looking forward to is Benjamin Moser’s biography of Clarice Lispector entitled Why This World, which, according to the back jacket, is “based on previously unknown manuscripts, numerous interviews, and years of research on three continents.” Moser replaced the ...

Paper-Over-Board Follow-Up

So a couple weeks ago I caused a little bit of a stir by announcing via an article in Publishing Perspectives that we were abandoning the paper-over-board format in favor of all paperbacks. We got a lot of responses about this, ranging from people who were disappointed and love paper-over-board, to booksellers explaining that ...

And Now Back to Your Regularly Scheduled Blogging . . .

Well, hopefully. It might take another day to get back in the swing of things, but I am back and will be writing a couple reviews this week, featuring July’s store of the month, etc., etc. (And finally replying to e-mails, in case you’re waiting for a response . . .) In the meantime, here’s a link to a ...

The Private Lives of Trees

We wanted to post this article about Alejandro Zambra in The Nation when it came out a few weeks ago, but we were in the middle of trying to sign Zambra up, so we wanted to wait until it was official. Readers who consider Roberto Bolano the pole star of contemporary Chilean fiction will be jolted by Zambra’s ...

Editors Speak Piece on Merce Rodoreda's Death in Spring

Jeff Waxman from The Front Table was kind enough to let me write a pretty long piece on Merce Rodoreda’s Death in Spring, a book that I absolutely love. Rodoreda’s something special, and the book (which is paper-over-board—get it while it’s hot!) has one of the most intricate, fitting, and cool covers ...

Jan Kjaerstad's Trilogy

The third part of Jan Kjaerstad’s “Wergeland Trilogy” (The Seducer, The Conqueror and The Discoverer) was recently released in the UK (our edition comes out in September), and Paul Binding wrote a really nice overview of the book for The Independent: The Discoverer completes the trilogy to which ...

World Literature Weekend: Elias Khoury with Jeremy Harding

Where: London Review Bookshop, London, UK Edward Said described Elias Khoury as an artist who gives ‘voice to rooted exiles and trapped refugees, to dissolving boundaries and changing identities, to radical demands and new languages’. Best known to English readers for his epic Gate of the Sun, Khoury’s new novel is ...

World Literature Weekend: Voicing the Masters (and Mistresses): Translation with Variations

with Marina Warner and Robert Chandler Where: Stevenson Room, British Museum, London, UK Marina Warner, the prominent writer, critic, historian and broadcaster, and Robert Chandler, the eminent translator of Russian texts, will together explore their interest in the translation of oral stories into written literature. ...

World Literature Weekend: Mourid Barghouti with Ruth Padel

Venue: London Review Bookshop, London, UK Midnight and Other Poems, translated by Radwa Ashour, is the first major collection of Mourid Barghouti’s poetry to be published in the UK. This remarkable Palestinian writer, best known to English-language readers for his autobiography I Saw Ramallah, which won the Naguib Mahfouz ...

World Literature Weekend: Dubravka Ugresic with Lisa Appignanesi

Sunday 21 June at 12.00 p.m. Venue: Stevenson Room, British Museum, London, UK An award-winning novelist and essayist, Dubravka Ugresic reflects on femininity, ageing, identity, secrets and love. These are the themes of her new novel, Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, a modern reworking of a traditional myth, translated by Ellen ...

World Literature Weekend: Faïza Guène with Sarah Ardizzone

Interpreter: Carine Kennedy Where: BP Room, British Museum, London, UK Faïza Guène is a French writer and film director, born to Algerian parents in 1985. She wrote her first novel, Kiffe Kiffe demain (published in English as Just Like Tomorrow), when she was 17 years old. It was a huge success in France, and has been ...

World Literature Weekend: Ma Jian with Flora Drew

Where: BP Room, British Museum, London, UK Ma Jian’s Beijing Coma, winner of the T. R. Fyvel Index on Censorship Award and shortlisted for this year’s Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, is a seminal novel about the Tiananmen Square protests. Gao Xingjian, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, has called Ma’s ‘one ...

World Literature Weekend: Translation: Making a Whole Culture Intelligible?

with Independent Foreign Fiction Prize-winning translators Anne McLean, Anthea Bell, Daniel Hahn and Frank Wynne Where: London, UK Chair: Kate Griffin, Arts Council England Anthony Burgess insisted that ‘translation is not a matter of words only’. Umberto Eco has said that ‘translation is the art of failure’. ...

World Literature Weekend: Hanan al-Shaykh with Esther Freud

Where: BP Room, British Museum, London, UK The leading Lebanese writer Hanan al-Shaykh’s most recent novel, Only in London, was shortlisted for the 2002 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. Also a short-story writer and playwright, she pays particular attention in her work to women’s role in society and the relationship ...

Frankfurt Book Fair: Finland and International Booksellers

Over the past couple days, I’ve received two interesting press releases from the Frankfurt Book Fair worth sharing. First off, it was announced earlier this week that Finland will be the 2014 Guest of Honor. From the press release: Finland is known for its literary export of children’s books – for example, ...

A River & A Sound and an Interesting Danish Writer

A River & A Sound is a brand new online magazine published in association with the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University that grew out of a one-of-a-kind, literary entertainment program designed to make literary events more exciting. You can check out the rest of the magazine at the link above, but ...

Best Harper's Ever & A Giveaway

Well, at least in relation to Open Letter books . . . The new issue of Harper’s has two pieces on Open Letter titles: a long review by Robert Boyers of Woman of Rome: A Life of Elsa Morante by Lily Tuck and a shorter review of Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer’s Rupert in Benjamin Moser’s New Books column. (Both pieces ...

REX at the Rex: A Conversation with José Manuel Prieto and Esther Allen

Where: Hotel Rex, 562 Sutter St., San Francisco Co-Sponsored by PEN West and the Center for the Art of Translation REX is a sophisticated literary game rife with allusions to Proust and Borges, set in a world of wealthy Russian expats and mafiosos in western Europe. It is the final volume in a trilogy of novels that ...

Reading from REX: José Manuel Prieto and Esther Allen

Where: 111 Minna Gallery, San Francisco Co-Sponsored by PEN West and the Center for the Art of Translation REX is a sophisticated literary game rife with allusions to Proust and Borges, set in a world of wealthy Russian expats and mafiosos in western Europe. It is the final volume in a trilogy of novels that includes the ...

Here's the Future? (Random BEA Thoughts, Part V)

Follow these links for Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV. If you’ve read the first four parts of this post (or this piece I wrote a few months ago), you pretty much know where this is headed. After X years of keeping BEA confined to the “trade,” I think things have to open up to the ...

We're Not Who We Think We Are (Random BEA Thoughts, Part IV)

Follow these links for Part I, Part II, and Part III. Over the past few years the debate between print and online reviewers has been one of the more contentious in all of the book business. Similar to publishing, this is an area where technology has outstripped the prevailing model, where with a couple bucks, a smart ...

"Bookishness Goes Marginal": A Report from the Bookishness Symposium

A few weeks back we mentioned the then upcoming symposium at the University of Michigan on the “future of reading.” Well, the amazing Karl Pohrt was able to attend and wrote this comprehensive piece on the somewhat bleak gathering. Bookishness: The New Fate of Reading in the Digital Age is the title of a ...

Free Manga Porn Stuff (Random BEA Thoughts, Part III)

Follow these links for Part I and Part II. Over the past few years, the book industry has become much flatter, allowing many, many more people to enter into the business. For instance, the advent of self-publishing allows almost anyone to become an author and make their book available for sale. Blogs turn your voracious ...

Bringing Corn to the Chickens (Random BEA Thoughts, Part II)

Part I of this BEA-roundup can be found here. Attendance (and foot traffic on the floor) tends to become the primary evaluative criteria. And the show was crowded on Friday. (Although Saturday afternoon was a bit bleak, and on Sunday, it was damn near post-apocalyptic.) But one interesting thing—and I’m sure ...

So, Was It Good for You? (Random BEA Thoughts, Part I)

If there’s one thing publishing people like more than complaining about how bad business is, it’s analyzing whether or not BookExpo America was successful. Which isn’t easy to determine . . . Lance Fensterman (who runs the show for Reed Exhibitions) has pointed out before how difficult it is to quantify the ...

Enard's Zone wins Le prix du Livre Inter 2009

Mathias Enard’s Zone, which Open Letter is proud to be publishing next May, has won Le prix du Livre Inter 2009. The prize is awarded by France Inter, which is a public radio station in France (their podcasts are great if you’re trying to learn French!). It’s a unique prize: France Inter invites 24 listeners ...

New Bookforum Website

Late last week, Bookforum launched their new website, which has all of the great features of the previous one (the daily round up blog, articles from the print version, etc.), but has also added a couple of cool things, like a daily review section and a syllabi section containing lists of recommendations within a particular ...

Issue 16 of The Quarterly Conversation

Issue 16 (16!) of The Quarterly Conversation is now available, and, as always, there’s a lot of great content, including an excerpt from one of our forthcoming titles, The Museum of Eterna’s Novel. In addition to an interview with one of our favorite authors, Amanda Michalopolou (or, as Chad likes to call her, ...

The 2009 FAF Translation Prize Winners . . .

Last night the French-American Foundation and Gould Foundation held their annual translation prize ceremony, honoring Jody Gladding & Elizabeth Deshays in the fiction category for their translation of Small Lives by Pierre Michon (Archipelago) and Matthew Cobb & Malcolm Debevoise in nonfiction for their translation of ...

Publishing Perspectives

It doesn’t officially launch until June 1st, but Publishing Perspectives the new daily newsletter from the Frankfurt Book Fair, and run by Ed Nawotka and Hannah Johnson is off to a pretty solid start. It’s kind of a “literary VeryShortList,” featuring one interesting, well-developed story each day and ...

The 2009 FAF Translation Prize Winners . . .

Last night the French-American Foundation and Gould Foundation held their annual translation prize ceremony, honoring Jody Gladding & Elizabeth Deshays in the fiction category for their translation of Small Lives by Pierre Michon (Archipelago) and Matthew Cobb & Malcolm Debevoise in nonfiction for their translation of ...

Summer Issue of Bookforum

Just in time for BookExpo, the summer fiction issue of Bookforum is now available in print and online. This year’s special fiction issue is all about fiction forward: We invited dozens of publishers to submit excerpts from books that will be published in the fall and winter, and we selected six of the very best. ...

Hans Eichner's Kahn & Engelmann

(This post could be subtitled, “The Beginning of a Canadian Bender . . .” but more on that over the next couple days.) One of the most exciting Canadian presses that I’ve come across in recent times is Biblioasis, in part because of their International Translation series, and in part because of Joshua ...

Calling All Kindle Owners

Like a slew of other litblogs, Three Percent is now available for the Kindle. Of course, you can still read it for free here (or via your RSS reader), but this is one more option for accessing our site . . . ...

Caine Prize for African Writing Finalists

The finalists for this year’s Caine Prize for African Writing (given to a short story from an African writer published in English) were announced earlier this week. Here are the five shortlisted pieces, with links to pdf versions of some of the stories: Mamle Kabu (Ghana) The End of Skill from Dreams, Miracles and ...

A Romanian Bookstore in Manhattan

Last year, the first foreign-language edition of the Book Review launched in Romania. Now, in another unexpected bit of cultural turnabout, Midtown Manhattan has gotten what must be its only Romanian bookstore. (ed: look for one of Open Letter’s board members in the photo) Well, sort of. From now until July ...

Bookishness: The New Fate of Reading in the Digital Age

Where: University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, 3222 Angell Hall 9:30-10:00: Coffee and Refreshments 10-12:00: Panel on New Reading Practices and Literacies in a Digital Age 2:00-4:00: Forum on New Institutions for the Digital Age At the current moment of ever-accelerating technological change, it’s particularly ...

Pretend This Post Appeared Yesterday . . .

As pointed out at Moby Lives yesterday marked the 93rd year after the death of Sholem Aleichem. (No, I don’t think 93 has any real numerological significance, but anniversaries are a nice reason for writing about someone’s work/life. And this does happen to be the 150th year after Aleichem’s birth . . . ...

I Mean, I *LOVE* Yu Hua's Brothers

From the Library of Congress (via The Elegant Variation): On April 23, 2009, a federal district court in the southern Russian province of Dagestan issued an unprecedented ruling, ordering a journalist of a local newspaper to pay compensation in an amount equal to US$1,000 to a writer who did not like a review of his book ...

Fail, Fail Again

Just when you thought the Times had figured out how to correctly pair writers with appropriate topics . . . Kidding—the Times will never get that straight. Here’s some clips from today’s review of Lost‘s season finale: [. . .] the producers of “Lost,” who have devoted the show’s fourth and ...

Critical Flame

Daniel E. Pritchard has just launched The Critical Flame, a promising new online journal of book reviews and criticism with a goal of engaging with literature in a serious way: A life of constant education is a life lived well, and the heart of our continued education is a public discourse that is free from small-minded ...

For Everyone in Ann Arbor . . .

The “Bookishness: The New Fate of Reading in the Digital Age” conference taking place at the University of Michigan on Friday, May 15th looks pretty amazing. There are two main panels: one on “New Reading Practices and Literacies in a Digital Age” and one on “New Institutions for the Digital ...

The Year of Jakov Lind

Although the fiction buyer at Barnes & Noble had her doubts about 2009 being the “Year of Jakov Lind,” this year really does represent the best chance this overlooked, peculiar Austrian writer has of being rediscovered. Over the course of the next few months, three Lind titles will be reissued: Landscape in ...

Well, Not Quite . . .

One of the several mammoth translations released this year that’s on my “to read for the Best Translated Book Award” shelf—along with The Kindly Ones, News of the Empire, The Loop, Brothers, etc.—is Rafik Schami’s The Dark Side of Love. Clocking in at over 850 pages, Interlink Publishing ...

Japanese Issue of Words Without Borders

Corridor of Dreams, which is the May issue of Words Without Borders, is now available online and focuses on contemporary Japanese literature. From translator and guest editor Allison Powell’s introduction: Over the past several decades, a steady stream of fascinating writers from Japan have appeared in English, ...

Indian Literature and Publishing in Abu Dhabi and London

As pointed out at the Literary Saloon, the new issue of the Literary Review at The Hindu has a couple of articles about India’s presence at the recent London and Abu Dhabi book fairs. It’s interesting how different these two articles are—the one on the ADIBF is more focused on India’s entrance into ...

Rain Taxi Love for Vilnius Poker

The new issue of Rain Taxi has a really nice review by Alex Starace of Ricardas Gavelis’s Vilnius Poker: As Vilnius Poker begins, the main character, Vytautus Vargalys, has to go to work just like any other citizen in 1970s Lithuania—no matter that he is plagued by sustained paranoia, psychotic visions and ...

Women Translating Women

Where: Mercantile Library Center for Fiction, 17 E 47th St., New York, NY The Center for Literary Translation at Columbia University will host an event at the Merc on the art of translation. Participants will include Esther Allen on translating New Yorker writer Alma Guillermoprieto and Mexican novelist Rosario Castellanos; ...

Marketing Translations and Other "Difficult" Books

That was the name of the panel that I moderated at this year’s London Book Fair, and which featured Abby Blachly of LibraryThing, Lance Fensterman of Reed Exhibitions (in particular, BookExpo America and New York Comic Con), Bob Stein of the Institute for the Future of the Book, and Mark Thwaite of ReadySteadyBook.com, ...

Books from Finland Now Online

Although I’m going to miss receiving hard copies of Books from Finland, in the end, I think the move to make the magazine an online only publication is a really smart one. The site officially launched last Monday, at the start of the London Book Fair, marking the end of a long transition from being a quarterly print ...

Rex

It a more perfect world, I would have enough time to read this book at least one more time before even attempting to write this review. Rex is a novel that’s filthy with references to other novels, plays, essays, TV shows, works of art, etc. Even from the opening line—“I’ve been reading it for years, ...

Suzane Adam and Becka Mara McKay—Laundry

Where: Magers and Quinn Booksellers, 3038 Hennepin Avenue S, Minneapolis, MN 55408 Israeli author Suzane Adam is joined by her translator Becka Mara McKay for a reading from her novel Laundry and a conversation about the translation process. Laundry is a novel of psychological suspense that focuses on family ...

Tahar Ben Jelloun

I’m hoping to get to Tahar Ben Jelloun’s Leaving Tangier in the near future, but in the meantime, Moroccan Board has a nice review of the novel, and an interesting interview. Q. You write in French but your books have been translated into many languages. What do you see as the challenges of publishing your ...

Didn't We Read This Story Just a Few Months Ago?

Yesterday it was announced that Moody’s has downgraded Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s rating, which sounds sort of familiar . . . probably because they did the same thing last December. This isn’t good news for the Education Media & Publishing Group—which is incorporated in the Cayman Islands and ...

More eARC Info

Last week, Jessica Stockton Bagnulo, Jenn Northington, Stephanie Anderson, and other independent booksellers started a conversation about the benefits of eARCs—electronic versions of the Advance Reading Copies all publishers send out to reviewers, booksellers, bloggers, etc. My complete post about this can be found ...

Turkish Lit and President Obama

Paper Cuts wrote about this last week, but I think it’s cool enough to repeat . . . Last week, during a visit to Turkey, Pres. Obama was presented with a copy of A Mind at Peace by Ahmet Hamd Tanpinar, which was recently translated into English by Erdag Göknar and published by Archipelago Books. From Paper ...

Doghead

When first published in Denmark in 2005, Morten Ramsland’s Doghead was a staggering success. Although Ramsland’s prior poetry collection and first novel had been largely overlooked, Doghead received widespread popular and critical acclaim, winning numerous national prizes, including the prestigious Danish Booksellers’ ...

E-Books and Indie Bookstores: Part I — eARCs

I have to visit a graduate seminar later today to talk about e-books and the future of the publishing industry, so the impact e-books will have (or rather, are having) on publishing structures (like indie bookstores) has been very much on my mind the past few days, so finding Jessica Stockton Bagnulo’s post about recent ...

GBO Giveaway: Hans Fallada's Every Man Dies Alone

One of the biggest books this spring—at least in terms of general coverage and growing hype—has to be Hans Fallada’s rediscovered masterpiece, Every Man Dies Alone. It’s based on a true story of a working class couple living in Berlin during WWII who launch a “simple, clandestine resistance ...

Harvard Crimson on Three — Yes, Three — Open Letter Titles

Last Thursday was “Open Letter Day” at the Harvard Crimson, as the university daily newspaper covered three new Open Letter books: The Mighty Angel by Jerzy Pilch, Death in Spring by Merce Rodoreda, and Landscape in Concrete by Jakov Lind. (Typically, these links would be to our Indie Bookstore of the Month, but ...

Alain Mabanckou Interview

Richard Lea has a great audio interview with Alain Mabanckou about Broken Glass, his second novel to be published in English. (Although apparently only in the UK for now. Soft Skull did African Psycho a couple years ago, but I haven’t seen a listing for the new book yet.) The Guardian also posted a positive review of ...

Open Letters Monthly on My Uncle Napoleon

I remember when the Modern Library first published Iraj Pezeshkzad’s My Uncle Napoleon a few years, but this review by Bryn Haworth makes it sound really interesting. (When Byrn writes about the book itself. The stuff about today’s Iran is good, but this novel sound intriguing to me for other, more literary ...

Vilnius Poker in the B&N Spotlight

The Barnes & Noble Review continues to impress me by covering books/movies/CDs that aren’t best-sellers, such as Christopher Byrd’s piece on Vilnius Poker: While reading Ricardas Gavelis’s Vilnius Poker, a line from Joyce’s Ulysses surfaced in my memory, “Stephen bent forward and peered at ...

Some April Translations

For whatever reason, April is a huge month for literature in translation. According to the translation database there are 39 works of fiction and poetry coming out in translation this month. We will be running full-length reviews of a number of these titles, but over the course of the month, I thought I’d highlight the ...

Sold!

I can’t remember ever buying a book based on a blurb, but even if I wasn’t already a Thomas Bernhard fan, I’d buy his Meine Preise immediately if this blurb were on the cover: “The asshole Thomas Bernhard—and I say this even though I dislike speaking ill of the dead—the asshole Thomas ...

Latest Revew: Mr Dick or The Tenth Book

Monica Carter’s piece on Mr Dick or The Tenth Book is the latest addition to our review section. In addition to checking our Monica’s review, I’d also recommend checking out her recently redesigned web publication Salonica World Lit. Included in this redesign—which looks great—is an ...

German Book Office Book Picks and Giveaways

As announced to members of the German Book Office Facebook Group yesterday, the GBO is giving away a few copies of their recent Book Club pick, Therapy by Sebastian Fitzek. Here’s the PW review: Starred Review. Extreme grief permeates Fitzek’s brilliant psychological thriller, a bestseller in his native ...

Neuman wins Alfaguara Prize

Argentina’s Andres Neuman on Monday was awarded Spain’s Alfaguara Novel Prize – considered among the most prestigious of its kind in the Spanish language – for “El viajero del siglo” (The Traveler of the Century). Neuman, a novelist, poet and short story writer who was born in 1977 in Buenos Aires but ...

For English-Speaking Readers

This post originally appeared at the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair blog. After spending a week in Abu Dhabi talking with Arabic publishers, looking at Arabic stands, I’m personally very interested in reading a few contemporary Arabic works. As most everybody knows, translation ain’t a specialty of American/UK ...

Women in Publishing: Marketing Outside the Mainstream

This post originally appeared at the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair blog. One of the liveliest and interesting professional programs of the week was “How Did You Do It?” a special Women in Publishing Business Lunch that focused on innovative marketing strategies implemented by two independent presses. Rana Idress ...

N+1 BR

The new N+1 online book review supplement is up now, and it features another take on Bolaño, a review of the Charlotte Roche (out in English in a few weeks), and an overview of Per ...

This Week

Things might be a little slow here at Three Percent this week. I’m going to be in Abu Dhabi attending—and writing about—the book fair. I’m not sure where exactly my articles/reports will appear, but as soon as I have the link, I’ll post it here. As a mini-preview of things to come, after I get ...

Charlotte Mandell on Translating The Kindly Ones

To complement all the review coverage that Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones has been receiving, Ron Hogan from Beatrice, has posted a piece by Charlotte Mandell about translating this controversial novel: People talk about ‘free translation’—and they usually mean something that I’d judge sloppy or ...

NPR and The Sailor from Gibraltar

Jessa Crispin (the woman behind Bookslut) wrote a great reivew of Marguerite Duras’s The Sailor from Gibraltar) for NPR: But this is a novel by the cerebral French writer and filmmaker Marguerite Duras, so nothing much happens at all. And it’s all the more thrilling because of it. There are long philosophical ...

Some Buzz for The Conqueror

In my opinion, Jan Kjaerstad’s The Conqueror is one of the best books we brought out in our first season. Compelling and engaging, with a brilliant over-arching structure, it’s a novel that’s very literary and very readable, and one that we were really hoping would take off. (Especially since this is part of ...

April/May Bookforum

The new issue of Bookforum is now available online, and, as always, has some interesting pieces about some interesting works of international literature, including: William Giraldi’s review of Aharon Appelfeld’s Laish: “Being labeled a Holocaust writer might indeed irritate Appelfeld, but no living ...

Five Spice Street

Recently, I happened to be on the same flight as super-translator Michael Henry Heim (who literally speaks more than a dozen languages). We got to talking about books (naturally) and about what we were currently reading, and as it turns out, we had both brought along Can Xue titles for our trip. He was reading Blue Light in ...

Bacacay: The Polish Literature Weblog

The Polish Cultural Institute in New York recently launched Bacacay, a new blog with info on Polish literature for English-language readers, translators, reviewers, publishers, and so on. Even though the site is brand new, Bill Martin has done a great job putting together some really interesting, informative posts, such as ...

The Second Pass

A good friend of mine, and of Three Percent’s, has just launched an online literary magazine called The Second Pass. Unlike many of these sorts of ventures (ours included?), he appears to have a solid plan in place—and an an impressive list of contributors—and the site is already off and running, with a ...

The Future of Calque

The rumor’s been floating out there for the past few months that the recent issue of Calque is also the final issue. As Steve and Brandon write on the Calque website this is “both true and not strictly accurate.” It’s true that the current format of the magazine is going to end, but Calque will live ...

Observer Translation Project

The Observer Translation Project is a relatively new website featuring news, reviews, and samples from and about Romanian authors. From the About Us page: We highlight a “pilot” author each month. This is the place to learn about Romanian writers, find updates on Romanian writing abroad, read CV’s, take a look at ...

Harvard "Select Seventy" and Other Open Letter Publicity

I just found out last week that the Harvard Book Store selected The Conqueror by Jan Kjaerstad as part of its Select Seventy program. As implied by the name, this program consists of seventy books selected by booksellers and buyers—all of which are sold at a 20% discount for the month. Seeing any of our books on a ...

French Voices — Year Four

Information about the fourth year of French Voices was announced yesterday. As stated on the above website, the goal of French Voices is to ensure that contemporary French works (both fiction and non) are published in English translation. To that end, each year, between seven and twelve titles are selected to be part of ...

Issue 15 of Quarterly Conversation

Seems to me like The Quarterly Conversation is getting better and better with every issue . . . The most recent one (which just went online over the weekend) has some great cover features, including a piece from the editors On the Demise of Publishing, Reading, and Everything Else, a (aforementioned) review of Mathias ...

A Couple Books from the German

These two books arrived a couple weeks ago and are nearing the top of my reading list: Every Man Dies Alone is one of three Hans Fallada books Melville House is bringing out this season. (The Drinker and Little Man, What Now? being the other two.) A mammoth book (although written in only twenty-four days!), Every Man Dies ...

2009 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize longlist

The longlist for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize has (finally!) been announced. Here you go: Voice Over by Céline Curiol (trans. Sam Richard) A Blessed Child by Linn Ullman (trans. Sarah Death) The Blue Fox by Sjon (trans. Victoria Cribb) Friendly Fire by A.B. Yehoshua (trans. Stuart Schoffman) My ...

Stephen to the rescue

As I don’t have the time, I want to respond very briefly to Michiko Kakutani’s review of The Kindly Ones. This is the most inept, ill-perceiving reviews of the novel I can imagine (though one other runs it close). “Aue is clearly a deranged creature,” she writes “and his madness turns his ...

More on The Kindly Ones

Kakutani takes her shot at Littell’s monster: No doubt the author intends such remarks to convey the horrors of the Holocaust, but “The Kindly Ones” instead reads like a pointless compilation of atrocities and anti-Semitic remarks, pointlessly combined with a gross collection of sexual fantasies. After this ...

The State of Shaman Drum

Last week, Shelf Awareness ran a short bit about the precarious state of Shaman Drum Bookshop’s finances. This was based on a letter that owner (and Open Letter advisory board member) Karl Pohrt wrote for the Ann Arbor Chronicle. Rather than rehash what was said, or speculate about the Shelf Awareness piece, ...

The Future of BEA

Today’s Publishers Weekly Daily included a pretty big announcement about the future of BookExpo America, which includes some significant changes, and some interesting/disturbing implications. First off, the specific changes: The annual meeting, set for New York May 29-31, will now also be held at New York’s ...

Machine

Although Danish author Peter Adolphsen has made a name for himself as a formalist for whom economy is a virtue (to date his five novels and short story collections are less than 300 pages combined), “as a reader,” one reviewer writes, “you feel you have covered a huge distance with him.” Drawing comparisons to Borges ...

You're All Invited

The Best Translated Book of 2008 Award Party will take place on Thursday, February 19th from 7 to 9:00pm, and you’re all invited. We’re having the party at Melville House Books at 145 Plymouth St. in Brooklyn. (To get there take the F train to York Street, the first stop in Brooklyn.) Francisco Goldman will ...

Best Valentine's Day Gift

This is a pretty self-promotional post, but we really appreciated Karen Vanuska’s comment on her blog about The Sailor from Gibraltar: received my copy of The Sailor from Gibraltar from Open Letter Books today. For a blissful half hour, I stopped grading papers, working on articles and reviews and working on ...

Bookselling and Bloggers

In a post picking up on the whole “future of book reviewing” discussion, Kassia Krozser brings up a point that’s crossed my mind at times: Booksellers Should Hand-Sell on the Internet: One of the great things about new technology is that it opens up the conversation in multiple direction. [. . ...

New Books from China

It’s no surprise that more and more Chinese literature is making its way into English (there were 11 original works of fiction and poetry that came out in the U.S. in 2008, and through the first half of 2009, I’ve already identified 9), but this spring has a number of titles that look really fantastic, and that we ...

University of Texas Press

I’m sure that most fans of Latin American literature are already familiar with University of Texas Press’s long tradition of publishing great works in translation. Back in the day they did Borges, Clarice Lispector, even Juan Rulfo. But for the past few years the series has been pretty silent . . . But ...

John Updike (1932-2009)

I think I read the Rabbit books at too young an age to ever fully appreciate John Updike’s work. But once I started working at Dalkey, the thing I did appreciate was his amazing literary taste. Over and again we would be reprinting a somewhat obscure author, like Robert Pinget, and in searching for reviews and quotes ...

Best Translated Book of 2008: Fiction Finalists

I think I speak for all the panelists when I say that this was a pretty difficult task. I think we all had 13-15 books that we felt deserved to be in the top 10 . . . But in the end, I think we came up with a very solid list. For additional info about any of these titles, click on the links below, or visit the pretty minisite ...

Best Translated Books of 2008: Poetry Anthologies

This post is giving away something about the make-up of the ten “Best Translated Book of 2008” poetry finalists . . . But whatever, there were four great poetry anthologies that came out this past year that deserve a bit of extra recognition, so in advance of tomorrow’s announcement, here are a few extra ...

Best Translated Books of 2008: University Presses

Admittedly, books from university presses are under-represented on this year’s Best Translated Book of 2008 fiction longlist, a situation that will hopefully change next year. But for now, I thought that before announcing the finalists for fiction and poetry (and yes, I do know what they are, but that post ...

Best Translated Book 2008 Longlist: The Book of Chameleons by Jose Eduardo Agualusa

This is it—the last overview of a book from the 25-title Best Translated Book of 2008 fiction longlist. The 10 finalists will be announced on Tuesday . . . Click here for all previous overviews. The Book of Chameleons by Jose Eduardo Agualusa, translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn. (Angola, Simon & ...

Is Anyone Translating this Book?

Flammarion released Ennemis Publics—a series of letters between French “bad boys” Bernard-Henri Lévy and Michel Houellebecq—last fall, and based on the recent review in the Times Literary Supplement, this sounds like it would be a lot of fun to read, even if it’s not as over-the-top and ...

Best Translated Book 2008 Longlist: The Post-Office Girl by Stefan Zweig

We’re into the home stretch now . . . For the next two days we’ll be highlighting a book-a-day from the 25-title Best Translated Book of 2008 fiction longlist, leading up to the announcement of the 10 finalists. Click here for all previous write-ups. The Post-Office Girl by Stefan Zweig, translated ...

Best Translated Book 2008 Longlist: Khirbet Khizeh by S. Yizhar

We’re into the home stretch now . . . For the next three days we’ll be highlighting a book-a-day from the 25-title Best Translated Book of 2008 fiction longlist, leading up to the announcement of the 10 finalists. Click here for all previous write-ups. Khirbet Khizeh by S. Yizhar, translated from the ...

Best Translated Book 2008 Longlist: Yalo by Elias Khoury

We’re into the home stretch now . . . Over the next five days we’ll be highlighting a book-a-day from the 25-title Best Translated Book of 2008 fiction longlist, leading up to the announcement of the 10 finalists. Click here for all previous write-ups. Yalo by Elias Khoury, translated from the Arabic ...

Vilnius Poker by Ricardas Gavelis

After reading a 20-page sample of Vilnius Poker by Ricardas Gavelis, everyone on our editorial committee agreed that we had to publish this book. It’s complicated, dark, occasionally humorous, fragmented, told from several conflicting viewpoints, inconclusive, and considered to be “the turning point in ...

New Hermano Cerdo

For all Spanish readers, the new issue of Hermano Cerdo is now online. In his post about it, Scott Esposito points out this review of a new anthology of fiction by Peruvian women. It would be great if a few more Peruvian women writers made their way into English . . . ...

Best Translated Book 2008 Longlist: Detective Story by Imre Kertesz

We’re into the home stretch now . . . Through next Friday we’ll be highlighting a book-a-day from the 25-title Best Translated Book of 2008 fiction longlist, leading up to the announcement of the 10 finalists. Click here for all previous write-ups. Detective Story by Imre Kertesz, translated from the ...

Feb/Mar Issue of Bookforum

The new issue of Bookforum is now out and available online. Like usual, there are a number of interesting pieces worth checking out, including Leland de la Durantaye’s review of Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones (pretty positive review), Ben Ehrenreich’s review of Ismail Kadare’s The Siege, (not so ...

Best Translated Book 2008 Longlist: The Darkroom of Damocles by Willem Frederik Hermans

We’re into the home stretch now . . . Through next Friday we’ll be highlighting a book-a-day from the 25-title Best Translated Book of 2008 fiction longlist, leading up to the announcement of the 10 finalists. Click here for all previous write-ups. The Darkroom of Damocles by Willem Frederik Hermans, ...

Best Translated Book 2008 Longlist: Tranquility by Attila Bartis

We’re into the home stretch now . . . Through next Friday we’ll be highlighting a book-a-day from the 25-title Best Translated Book of 2008 fiction longlist, leading up to the announcement of the 10 finalists. Click here for all previous write-ups. Tranquility by Attila Bartis, translated from the ...

Best Translated Book 2008 Longlist: The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery

We’re into the home stretch now . . . For the next two weeks we’ll be highlighting a book-a-day from the 25-title Best Translated Book of 2008 fiction longlist, leading up to the announcement of the 10 finalists. Click here for all previous write-ups. The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery, ...

PEN Translation Grant Deadline

Applications for grants from the PEN Translation Fund are due one week from today. Grants range from $2,000 to $10,000 and support the translation of book-length works of fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, or drama that have not previously appeared in English or have appeared only in an egregiously flawed ...

Best Translated Book 2008 Longlist: Metropole by Ferenc Karinthy

For the next several weeks we’ll be highlighting a book-a-day from the 25-title Best Translated Book of 2008 fiction longlist, leading up to the announcement of the 10 finalists. Click here for all previous write-ups. Metropole by Ferenc Karinthy, translated from the Hungarian by George Szirtes. (Hungary, ...

Best Translated Book 2008 Longlist: Unforgiving Years by Victor Serge

For the next several weeks we’ll be highlighting a book-a-day from the 25-title Best Translated Book of 2008 fiction longlist, leading up to the announcement of the 10 finalists. Click here for all previous write-ups. Unforgiving Years by Victor Serge, translated from the French by Richard Greeman. (France1, ...

Will You Like It?

Although he includes a few caveats about its effectiveness, Tim’s post at the LibraryThing blog about their new “Will you like it?” feature is pretty interesting. Each book page now has a little bar that, after clicking, will predict whether or not you’d like a particular book. How does it ...

Obituary: Inger Christensen

Reclusive writer Inger Christensen who “built experimental poems, essays and novels around systematized and mathematical structures” passed away at the age of 73. One of the books of 2009 that I’m most looking forward to is her novel Azorno, which New Directions is bringing out this summer. But after ...

Best Translated Book 2008 Longlist: The Waitress Was New by Dominique Fabre

For the next several weeks we’ll be highlighting a book-a-day from the 25-title Best Translated Book of 2008 fiction longlist, leading up to the announcement of the 10 finalists. Click here for all previous write-ups. The Waitress Was New by Dominique Fabre, translated from the French by Jordan Stump. ...

Best Translated Book 2008 Longlist: Senselessness by Horacio Castellanos Moya

For the next several weeks we’ll be highlighting a book-a-day from the 25-title Best Translated Book of 2008 fiction longlist, leading up to the announcement of the 10 finalists. Click here for all previous write-ups. Senselessness by Horacio Castellanos Moya, translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver. ...

Guardian on Jean-Pierre Ohl

We just got Ohl’s Mr Dick or The Tenth Book in for review, and after reading this piece in The Guardian I’m pretty sure we’ll be covering it in the near future. Monsieur Dick, Ohl’s first novel, came out in France four years ago and has won three literary prizes. The English translation has just ...

The Post-Office Girl

By Stefan Zweig Translated from the German by Joel Rotenberg New York Review Books Three Percent’s

Unforgiving Years

By Victor Serge Translated from the French by Richard Greeman New York Review Books Three Percent’s

Best Translated Book 2008 Longlist: I'd Like by Amanda Michalopoulou

For the next several weeks we’ll be highlighting a book-a-day from the 25-title Best Translated Book of 2008 fiction longlist, leading up to the announcement of the 10 finalists. Click here for all previous write-ups. I’d Like by Amanda Michalopoulou, translated from the Greek by Karen Emmerich. ...

Book Cover of the Year

Over at the Book Design Review, the votes have been tallied and readers named David Pearson’s cover design for The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin the best cover of the year. (I voted for this—guess that makes me two for two in 2008.) ...

Ready Steady Book's Books of the Year Symposium

Over at Ready Steady Book Mark Thwaite has posted the “Books of the Year 2008 symposium” featuring recommendations from a host of authors, translators, and reviewers, including Scott Esposito (who recommends Adolfo Bioy Casares and others), Charlotte Mandell (who is all about Flann O’Brien), her husband ...

Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Literary Work

One other MLA thing worth mentioning is that Timothy Billings and Christopher Bush (of Middlebury College and Northwestern University respectively) won this year’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for their translation of Stèles by Victor Segalen, which was published by Wesleyan University Press in 2007. NYRB ...

MLA

For the uninitiated, this article from an old issue of The Believer is a great description of MLA. Especially this bit about publishing and tenure: The upshot: university presses, once institutions of gentlemanly loss in the service of niche scholarship, have been forced to reorient themselves toward the bottom line. ...

Translation Databases: Last one for 2008 and first one for 2009

It was just about a year ago that I started thinking about creating a “translation database” to keep track of all original translations of fiction and poetry published in the U.S. After all the speculation, guesstimation, and incomplete or inaccurate studies, I thought it would be useful to produce an actual list ...

Special Conqueror Giveaway

Yesterday afternoon we found out that The Conqueror by Jan Kjaerstad, the second book in the “Wergeland Trilogy,” received a glowing, starred review in Kirkus: Back in the day, Jonas Wergeland was an inquisitive student, brilliant, capable of speculating that “Dante’s observations on the celestial ...

Best Translated Book 2008 Longlist: 2666 by Roberto Bolano

For the next several weeks we’ll be highlighting a book-a-day from the 25-title Best Translated Book of 2008 fiction longlist, leading up to the announcement of the 10 finalists. Click here for all previous write-ups. 2666 by Roberto Bolano, translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer. (Chile, FSG) What ...

"So I Killed Her"

From Daniel Swift’s aptly titled review of The Taker and Other Stories in this weekend’s Financial Times: To call these short stories is perhaps to indulge in a genteel euphemism: these violent little narratives more closely resemble rants, confessions or boasts. A married man likes to run over pedestrians in ...

Bit of Love from Barnes & Noble

Not too terribly long ago, Barnes & Noble.com started Barnes & Noble Review a weekly web magazine featuring reviews of books, CDs, DVDs, etc. Pretty interesting strategy—rather than compete with Amazon on price, provide compelling editorial content. B&N has attracted a nice line of reviewers, including John Freeman ...

One More LibraryThing Post

This actually went up a while ago, but we’re giving away copies of The Sailor from Gibraltar by Marguerite Duras, and Vilnius Poker by Ricardas Gavelis in this month’s Early Reviewers program, so be sure to go and request a copy . . . ...

New CONTEXT

The new issue of CONTEXT Magazine is now available online. (And I assume in print. For some reason, we don’t get copies in Rochester, but this is usually available at bookstores like St. Mark’s.) Almost all of the readings, interviews, etc., are about recent Dalkey titles, such as the interesting excerpt from ...

Best Translated Book 2008 Longlist: The Enormity of the Tragedy by Quim Monzo

For the next several weeks we’ll be highlighting a book-a-day from the 25-title Best Translated Book of 2008 fiction longlist, leading up to the announcement of the 10 finalists. Click here for all previous write-ups. The Enormity of the Tragedy by Quim Monzo, translated from the Catalan by Peter Bush. (Catalonia, ...

Urban Elitist on the Future of Publishing

The future of publishing is a hobby-horse of mine, and I’m always excited to find someone else — like David Nygren at Urban Elitist — writing long, intelligent articles about this topic. A lot of his ideas will be familiar to frequent readers of this blog, but the way he describes the situation is ...

Best Translated Book 2008 Longlist: The Great Weaver from Kashmir by Halldor Laxness

For the next several weeks we’ll be highlighting a book-a-day from the 25-title Best Translated Book of 2008 fiction longlist, leading up to the announcement of the 10 finalists. Click here for all previous write-ups. The Great Weaver from Kashmir by Halldor Laxness, translated from the Icelandic by Philip Roughton. ...

Open Letter Spring 09 Catalog: Aracoeli by Elsa Morante

A couple weeks back I started unveiling the spring/summer Open Letter list . . . and then promptly got distracted by our Best Translated Book of 2008 award. But now I’m back . . . We announced The Mighty Angel by Jerzy Pilch and Landscape in Concrete by Jakov Lind earlier, and today I’d like to write about our ...

Best Translated Book 2008 Longlist: What Can I Do When Everything's On Fire? by Antonio Lobo Antunes

For the next several weeks we’ll be highlighting a book-a-day from the 25-title Best Translated Book of 2008 longlist, leading up to the announcement of the 10 finalists. Click here for all previous write-ups. What Can I Do When Everything’s On Fire? by Antonio Lobo Antunes, translated from the Portuguese by ...

Lost in Translation Reading Challenge

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 ...

Best Translated Book of 2008: The Fiction Longlist

After weeks of reading, researching, voting, taking recommendations, discussing, and passionately defending, we’ve finally come up with our 25-title fiction longlist for the “Best Translated Book of 2008:” The Book of Chameleons by José Eduardo Agualusa, translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn ...

We Agree

From Literary License’s 12 Days of Books: An Open Letter subscription is the perfect gift. It’s cheap (just $65 for half a year and $120 for the full year), and the books are intelligently chosen and beautifully designed. Your giftee will thank you throughout the year as the books get delivered month after month, ...

Knopf, Black Wednesday, and More Publishing Struggles

Seems like every day there’s more bad publishing news . . . Yesterday was declared Black Wednesday by Media Bistro as Random House restructured, essentially consolidating within themselves, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s publisher Becky Saletan abruptly resigned, HMH fired executive editor Ann Patty along with ...

Best Book Covers of 2008

Over at the Book Design Review, Joseph Sullivan has a post about his favorite covers of 2008. Lots of interesting covers here, including one of my favorites—the cover of Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, designed by David Pearson. There’s even a poll for readers to ...

Things To Do Tonight in New York

I usually don’t post things like this, but there are two great events happening tonight that I wish I could be at. First off, Archipelago Books is having their “third biennial fundraising auction” tonight at the Cultural Services of the French Embassy at 972 Fifth Ave. from 6:30 to 8:30. Lots of great ...

Holt Uncensored Returns

Pat Holt is back, this time in blog format. For those unfamiliar with Holt, she’s been in the business for her entire career, including stints at Houghton Mifflin, as a correspondent for PW, and as the book review editor for the San Francisco Chronicle. Her e-newsletter Holt Uncensored was a critical look at all ...

Best Translated Book of 2008: The Honorable Mentions

Tomorrow morning we will unveil the 25 works of fiction that made the “Best Translated Book of the Year” longlist, but as a prelude, I thought I’d highlight a few titles that didn’t make it and a couple of magazines that deserve some special recognition. A twenty-five title longlist might seem like a ...

Banipal #33

The Autumn/Winter issue of Banipal recently came out, and sounds pretty interesting. (I wish some of the pieces were available online, but whatever.) The issue opens with a 70-page feature on Mahmoud Darwish (some of the articles are available onlie and also continues the special series on “Contemporary Syrian ...

Dec 08 Issue of Words Without Borders

The new issue of Words Without Borders is now online, and is entitled “The Home Front”: This month we’re reporting on the war at home, with international dispatches on domestic conflicts. Here homeland security is both threatened and maintained, as couples tie the knot but long to cut the cord, and double ...

Some End of the Year Reading Lists

In anticipation of announcing the fiction longlist for the “Best Translated Book of 2008” on Thursday, here are a couple other “year end” lists worth checking out. I don’t remember The Guardian using this format for its year end lists in the past, but then again, I have a hard time remembering ...

Zone, Zone, Zone

Mathias Enard’s Zone, which we’ve mentioned a few times already, just keeps racking up attention. Thanks to Michael, for pointing out that Zone made Lire‘s 20 best books of 2008 list. According to my pidgin French, they say that it “possesses a scope that is rare in the French novel” and that ...

New Quarterly Conversation

Issue 14 of The Quarterly Conversation is now available online and features a number of interesting articles and reviews. In terms of reviews, there’s a piece by Scott Esposito on 2666, and one by Scott Bryan Wilson of Attila Bartis’s Tranquility. The “Features” sound really interesting as well, ...

Day Off

Seeing as that today is a national holiday, we’re not going to be posting anything new today. We’ll be back tomorrow with a review and the next part of the “Publishing Model” speech. Next week is a big week for Three Percent, with the announcement of the Best Translation Book of 2008 fiction longlist . ...

Borders Update

As reported in Publishers Weekly,: sales at Borders fell by 10% in the third quarter to $693.4 million, resultiing in a net loss of $172.2 million for the period. And in terms of being for sale? Well, that’s now a thing of the past: Borders also announced that it is no longer for sale. Company CEO George Jones ...

Top Ten Literature Blogs

Over at Blogs.com, guest list-maker David Gutowski of Largehearted Boy came up with a list of the “10 Best Literature Blogs”:       3 Quarks Daily       Bookslut       Ed Champion’s Reluctant Habits       Emerging Writers Network       ...

Publishing Models, Translations, and the Financial Collapse (Part 7)

This is the seventh part of a presentation I gave to the German Book Office directors a couple weeks ago. Earlier sections of the speech can be found here. There are still a number of parts left to post, but these should all be up before the end of the month. Stage Three: Financial Collapse, the Borders Situation, ...

Chad on Omnivoracious

Heidi, over at Omnivoracious, Amazon’s weblog, has an interview with Chad, and some nice things to say about Open Letter: If you looked at the recent media frenzy over Bolano’s 2666 (even The Economist has a story about it), you’d think that translations were really hot this year. According to a ...

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Mathias Enard's Zone

Yesterday afternoon, Publishers Weekly sent out an e-mail alert regarding Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s decision to “temporarily” (their quotes, not mine) pause acquisitions. Which doesn’t sound very good: Josef Blumenfeld, v-p of communications for HMH, confirmed that the publisher has ...

The Next BIG Translation?

Back a couple years ago, Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes was all the rage. The son of Robert Littell, Jonathan has dual-citizenship here and in France, and, in an unusual move, wrote this 900-page novel of a former Nazi officer in French. In this article by John Litchfield, Littell explains his ...

Publishing Models, Translations, and the Financial Collapse (Part 4)

This is the fourth part of a presentation I gave to the German Book Office directors last week. Earlier sections of the speech can be found here. And we’ll probably be posting bits and pieces of this for the next week or so. Stage Two: Translations, Economic Censorship, and Independent Presses So where do ...

Open Letter Spring 09 Catalog: Landscape in Concrete

Over the next week or so, I’ll be unveiling all six of Open Letter’s spring 2009 titles. Our finished catalog will be back from the printer in the not-too-distant future, and on our website before that, but I thought it would be fun to give a bit of special attention to each of the titles. First up is a reprint ...

A One-Stop Book Site

A relatively new site, Book Trib is a pretty cool meta-blog that re-posts book reviews, book articles, author interviews, etc., from a wide range of publications and blogs, from such diverse sources as the New Yorker, A Progressive on the Prairie, Literary Saloon, and many, many more. I already subscribe to the RSS feeds ...

Siddhartha Deb on Elias Khoury

Siddhartha Deb reviews Elias Khoury’s Yalo for The Nation: In Yalo, the tenth novel by Lebanese writer Elias Khoury, is such a book. Published in Arabic in 2002 and now available in a translation by Peter Theroux, Yalo is set in 1993 and revolves around a single consciousness unable to make sense of itself or its ...

The Taker in Time Out New York

This week’s Time Out New York has a great four star review — out of six, but still, a four-star review — by Anderson Tepper of Rubem Fonseca’s The Taker and Other Stories. In short, fragmented vignettes that ring with the hard-boiled edge of crime fiction. Fonseca, 83, has charted his own ...

Dec/Jan Issue of Bookforum

The Dec 08/Jan 09 issue of Bookforum is now available both in print and online. As always, there’s a lot of great stuff, including a review of Saramago’s Death with Interruptions and Olivier Pauvert’s Noir, which sounds pretty cool: The dystopian thriller is narrated by an unnamed white man, who ...

Blaft Publications and Zero Degree

One translated book I recently had to add to the 2008 translation database is Zero Degree by Charu Nivedita (translated from the Tamil by Pritham K. Chakravarthy and Rakesh Khanna), which was published by Blaft Publications earlier this year. I have to admit that until reading Rakesh Khanna’s comment on an earlier ...

Even O is Hip to It

A number of 2666 reviews are out now, including one in the L.A. Times and one by Adam Kirsch in Slate. And even in O Magazine, which compares the book to a video game (?!): Holding a reviewer’s copy of 2666 in public was like brandishing the newest Harry Potter at the playground three months before the on-sale ...

2008 Miriam Bass Award Ceremony

This year’s Miriam Bass Award for Creativity in Independent Publishing was given to Jill Schoolman of Archipelago Books, a good friend, fantastic publisher, and energetic advocate for international literature. She truly deserves this award and all the accolades that Marianne Bohr included in her introduction: This ...

November E-Newsletter

The latest Open Letter Newsletter is now available online. As an update: the Vilnius Poker giveaway is now closed. We received a lot of submissions and will be sending out e-mails to the three winners (and all other entries) this afternoon. Another book featured in the newsletter is Fonseca’s The Taker and Other ...

How to Package Digital Media

Not that anyone’s paying attention to anything aside from the polls today, but the other day there was an interesting article on the Book Design Blog that I’ve been meaning to mention. Entitled “How to package books for digital media,” this piece looks at what sort of “enhanced content” ...

2008 Translations — Final Numbers?

It’s been a few months since I last posted an update to our ongoing “translation database” project. Over the past 10 months, I’ve been going through every catalog I can get my hands on, all reviews in Publishers Weekly, every new book announcement from Small Press Distribution, and e-mails from ...

Grand Idea Surrounding Crappy Content

Joe Wikert writes about the recent push at Thomas Nelson to engage with book bloggers. I’m not sure how revolutionary it is to offer writers/bloggers a copy of a book if they will review/write about it (we call these review copies), but, you know, good job Thomas Nelson, this “free book” strategy got ...

Books and Booze Totally Mix

In order to draw more customers to their (relatively) new downtown Grand Rapids location, Schuler Books & Music is trying to get a liquor license: Fehsenfeld envisions adding beer and wine to his cafe’s extensive coffee menu, so bookstore patrons could have a glass with dinner, browse the books, relax by the ...

Stock Market and Art

Not the most common of connections, but that’s the angle that Bloomberg‘s Robert Hilferty takes in his review of Proust’s The Lemoine Affair: A hundred years ago French novelist Marcel Proust (1871-1922) lost money in the stock market, too. And as he would in the epic In Search of Lost Time, he ...

ELM #27

The new issue of the Estonian Literary Magazine is now available in print ant online. It’s a very poetry heavy issue, with articles about the “legendary” Heiti Talvik (who was the “guru” of his generation “like Burroughs was for the Beatniks”), on Maarja Kangro (the title of the ...

Vick Prize for the Bulgarian Novel of the Year

As reported at Literary Saloon, Evgenia Ivanova’s Photo Stoyanovich won this year’s prize. In case you’re not familiar with the Vick Prize it started in 2004 with the goal of promoting the best Bulgarian book of the year: The prize is a monetary award of BGN 10,000 and the option of a translation of ...

Calque on ALTA Conference

I can’t express how disappointed I was to have to miss the ALTA conference this year. This is by far my favorite annual conference for any number of reasons. (I once wrote a piece for Words Without Borders about how I loved ALTA because most of the translators were shorter than me. That’s incredibly unusual and ...

Arabic Literature in English Translation

In the Literary Saloon post about David Tresilian’s A Brief Guide to Modern Arabic Literature, Michael Orthofer quotes this paragraph about the dismal (though not terribly shocking) number of Arabic books translated into English since World War II: Recently modern Arabic literature seems to have made several long ...

The Whale Is Still Out There, Man . . .

MobyLives is back! Started by Dennis Loy Johnson years ago, MobyLives was one of the pioneering lit/political blogs. It was insanely popular and triumphantly smart, and it’s refreshing to have it back. In case you’re wondering what DLJ (and his wife Valerie Merians) did in the years between shutting this down ...

New Farafina

I have to admit that I hadn’t heard of Farafina until seeing it referenced on Laila Lalami’s blog. Focused on African culture, each issue combines “everything from photo essays to cartoons, art interviews to political exposes, narrative essays to short stories.” The latest issue, guest edited by ...

German Book Prize Winner

We’re a bit late with the news—I swear, the Book Fair will be my excuse for everything for the next three weeks at least—but Uwe Tellkamp’s Der Turm won this year’s German Book Prize. Hasn’t been a huge amount of interest from American or British publishers (surprise!) for this 1,000 page ...

Contemporary Romanian Writers

My friend Bogdan from Polirom pointed me to this excellent new site, Contemporary Romanian Writers. They sum it up nicely: www.romanianwriters.ro is now online. It offers publishers from all over the world English-language presentations of the contemporary Romanian writers published by Polirom and Cartea Românească, ...

Catalan Literature: One Year Later

This post originally appeared on the Frankfurt Book Fair blog. Catalan Culture was last year’s Guest of Honor at the Fair, and put on a huge display of Catalan culture, and producing a number of slick publications and presentations to help make people aware of their rich literary tradition. (It’s sad, but I think a lot ...

The European Union and Translation Culture

This post originally appeared on the Frankfurt Book Fair blog. (Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like the English-language version of this brochure—”* Great Translation by the Way”—is available for download from the NLPVF site. Here’s the Dutch version and if anyone can find the English, ...

New International Promotions

This post originally appeared on the Frankfurt Book Fair blog. In contrast to Russia, both the Korean government and the Romanian government have recently launched large projects to better promote their writers abroad. The Korea Literature Translation Institute (6.0 E 937) recently published some wonderful, quite elegant ...

Interview with Charlotte Mandell

Emprise Review has a nice interview with French translator Charlotte Mandell, who has translated a number of classic authors (Balzac, Proust, Flaubert) along with more contemporary works (Genet, BHL, Littell). She recently completed an excerpt of Mathias Enard’s Zone (which I have in my hands right now), which is ...

Translation Prizes 2008

Over at the Literary Saloon Michael Orthofer has a great summary about the 2008 “Translation Prizes,” lamenting the generic name and overall lack of coverage: We realise it’s sort of an umbrella-designation — the six prizes do come with their own names and/or sponsors — but it still seems ...

More Praise for Machado de Assis on the 100th Anniversary of his Death

Over at the PRI’s World Books, Bill Marx has a great appreciation piece for Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, a writer far ahead of his time, and who died 100 years ago yesterday: “If Borges is the writer who made Garcia Marquez possible,” observed Salman Rushdie, “then it is no exaggeration to say that Machado ...

The State of Publisher-Reader Relations

Yesterday, E.J. and I were talking about the presentation on the “state of publishing in the U.S.” that he has to give as a Frankfurt Fellow. I thought it would be funny—and totally unexpected—if instead of giving the usual doom and gloom speech1, he provided a vision of an ideal book culture, one ...

Dubravka Ugresic on the Internets

Over the past week or so, Dubravka’s book (Nobody’s Home) has been making its way around the internet, garnering some really nice praise along the way. First off, it received a great review (4 out of 5) by Gwen Dawson at the always excellent Literary License. And then yesterday, Douglas Rushkoff (whose ...

Rupert by Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer

Reading a translation when it first comes in is always a fascinating, exciting experience. Frequently we acquire books based on a sample translation, a reader’s report, and conversations/recommendations from trusted readers and translators. Although this system—for all its baroque qualities—works quite well, ...

Daniel Kehlmann Against the German Book Prize

Over at the Literary Saloon, — Litblogging’s Finest Source of International News — Michael Orthofer reports on Daniel Kehlmann’s article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung railing against the German Book Prize. I can’t read the article in the original (which can be found here), but ...

New York on the (Bleak) Future of Publishing

Going into it, I expected to disagree vehemently with Boris Kachka’s article about the publishing industry that’s simply titled, The End. But after reading the entire thing, and discovering that he’s primarily concerned with “the end” of commercial publishing, I found this rather well-thought out ...

Going to Be a Slow Week . . .

This is probably going to be a slow week for Three Percent. Dubravka Ugresic arrives in Rochester tonight and we have a packed weeks of events, interviews, classroom appearances, etc., lined up for her. Specifically, tomorrow morning she’ll be on WHAM-13’s morning show (a local TV-station, whose previous guests ...

R.I.P. DFW

David Foster Wallace’s passing this past Friday is a huge blow, and incredibly sad. There’s not much to add to the discussions and appreciations online (such as this one that Ed Champion put together). DFW was an amazingly talented writer, whose Infinite Jest is one of the greatest books to come out in the past ...

New FILI Newsletter

The latest newsletter from the Finnish Literature Exchange (the government sponsored organization dedicated to promoting Finnish lit worldwide) arrived yesterday and included a couple interesting article/links. First off, there have been a few additions to the Beginners’ Guide to Translation, which, to be honest, I ...

Another Cool Bookstore Blog

The Front Table has gone through a few changes over the years. Dedi Felman—who, until recently, worked with Words Without Borders—helped found this publication, which Seminary Co-op (in Chicago) distributed to all of their members. At one point in time, Philip Leventhal—now an editor at Columbia University ...

Saramago's Latest

Complete Review pointed this out as well, but the Independent has an article by Elizabeth Nash about the latest Saramago book, The Elephant’s Journey: Portugal’s Nobel Literature laureate Jose Saramago has announced the completion of his latest work “The Elephant’s Journey”, based on the ...

More Details on Future Bolano Books

In a post about Time Out New York‘s fall books preview, I referenced the forthcoming Roberto Bolano books that New Directions is bringing out over the next few years, but didn’t include many details. Thanks to the incredibly New Directions Newsletter the full list of upcoming Bolano is now ...

September Issue of Words Without Borders

The new issue of Words Without Borders is now available online, and this month’s theme is “Reversals”: We’re prolonging summer with another month of flip-flops, as international writers contemplate the reversals of various fortunes. On the air in Sarajevo and under the radar in São Paulo, in chilly ...

Full Interview with Bragi Olafsson

We conducted this interview a few months ago, but thought we’d run it in its entirety today, since his book is now available and will be shipping to bookstores in the very near future. Bragi Ólafsson was born in Reykjavik, and may be most well known for playing bass in The Sugarcubes, Björk’s first band. After ...

And Now There Are Two

This morning, the second Open Letter book arrived — The Pets by Bragi Olafsson. Just last week, Kirkus reviewed this, giving it the most positive review I’ve read in quite some time: Icelandic novelist Ólafsson’s English-language debut is part Beckettian or even Kafkaesque black comedy, part ...

Next Round of September Translations

This isn’t a reflection on the start of the new school year, or the end of summer, or anything like that, but today’s capsules of forthcoming translations features three fairly bleak books . . . What Can I Do When Everything’s On Fire? by Antonio Lobo Antunes, translated from the Portuguese by Gregory ...

Per Hojholt in Calque

I first heard of Per Hojholt in 2004, when, shortly after he died, the Literary Saloon posted a short piece about his obituary and about Auricula: Of particular interest: his recent novel, Auricula (not translated into English — yet). As we understand it, the premise of the book is that time very briefly came to a ...

Bookforum: The Best News . . .

The September/October/November issue of Bookforum went online yesterday, and is absolutely loaded with reviews of great books. Of course, in a somewhat self-serving way, I’m especially excited about this issue since it has a very positive review of the first Open Letter title: Nobody’s Home by Dubravka ...

NY Sun: The Bad News . . .

From today’s issue of the New York Sun This morning I write to you about the future of The New York Sun, which is in circumstances that may require us to cease publication at the end of September unless we succeed in our efforts to find additional financial backing. The managing editor, Ira Stoll, who is one of the ...

More September Translations

As an update, at this moment I have records for 314 original translations of adult fiction and poetry coming out in 2008, and 28 for 2009. (I’ve barely started entering 2009 info . . .) As part of our goal to highlight as many of these titles as possible, below are capsules on a few more translations coming out this ...

Quarterly Conversation: Issue 13

The new issue of Quarterly Conversation is now online, and, as can be expected, filled with great stuff. One of the lead pieces is Scott Esposito’s article about the similarities in the writings of Adolfo Bioy Casares and Franz Kafka: In his Prologue [to The Invention of Morel, Borges calls on writers of the 20th ...

September Translations

If I didn’t spend every morning writing about things that bug me, I’d have more time to write about new books . . . Which, in the end, is probably more interesting and useful. So here are three more September titles: The Tsar’s Dwarf by Peter Fogtdal, translated from the Danish by Tiina Nunnally ...

Publishing Rant

Over the weekend, the Huffington Post published Part 1 of an essay by Richard Laermer called “Why Book Publishing Is Dead.” Now, I’m one of the first people to jump on the bandwagon and criticize the publishing industry (or book industry as a whole) for it’s lack of innovation and odd practices. (As ...

Mark Athitakis Has Interesting Things to Say

Critical Mass — the official blog of the National Book Critics Circle — always has great (though depressing) coverage about the decline of book reviews in America. And yesterday, they ran a piece by Mark Athitakis (Arts Editor at the Washington City Paper) on book reviewing in alt-weeklies that’s very cogent ...

New York on Bolano

In this week’s Fall Books Preview, Sam Anderson has a write-up on 2666, which promises to be one of—if not the—big books of 2008. For a certain demographic of high-lit dorks, 2666 is like Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: We’ve been shivering for it for months. Given the current climate of ...

Comments on Dimissing Translations

Yesterday’s post about how to dismiss translations caused a good deal of discussion in the comments section, ranging from Monica’s question about whether other cultures have this same authenticity/accuracy/I-can’t-judge-without-knowing-the-original language issues (I doubt it, but would love to hear from ...

Javier Marias's Publishing Venture

Literary Saloon pointed us to this El Pais article entitled “Esta absurda aventura” (This Absurd Adventure) about Javier Marias’s Reino de Redonda publishing house. (For non-Marias fans, here’s a short history of the Kingdom of Redonda and Marias’s ties to it. It really is a fun story and cool ...

Oscar Villalon and the S.F. Chronicle

This is pretty depressing news: San Francisco Chronicle books editor Oscar Villalon is leaving the paper, having taken a buyout. Buyouts have been looming at the paper, which has been suffering from worsening financial woes along with other major dailies throughout the country. Villalon’s last day will be Friday, and it is ...

How to Dismiss Translations

I sort of understand what Daniel Green is trying to do in this post in which he explains why he doesn’t focus on translated fiction in his blog. And since it is his blog, I have no complaint about his not wanting to write about international literature (except on rare occasions like the piece about Tulli’s Flaw). ...

Book Publishing Recommendations

Richard Nash pointed this out on Friday, but Business Week ran an interesting article last week by Sara Lacy about how book publishers should learn from Web 2.0 ideas and revitalize their practices. Publishing is a subject near and dear to me—and not only because for the past two years I have been writing my first ...

Interview with Peter Pistanek

A couple of months ago, Robert Buckeye reviewed Peter Pistanek’s Rivers of Babylon, a novel about Racz, a stoker in the Hotel Ambassador whose power quickly expands when he realizes that “he who puts the heat on can control things.” Rivers of Babylon was on the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize longlist ...

NPR Goes to Europe! Sort of . . .

It may be irrational, but this Three Books . . . column about doing the “Grand Tour” of Europe via literature just bugs me. Not the idea that “literature takes you places!” but the fact that the three books featured are Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and A Room with a View. This ...

German Book Award Longlist

The longlist for the 2008 German Book Award was announced yesterday, and as Michael Orthofer points out, there a number of familiar names on the list, including Peter Handke, Karen Duve, Uwe Timm, Ingo Schulze, and Feridun Zaimoglu. Michael’s write-up on the prize is really good, especially since he reads German and ...

September Translations

Earlier this year, I was trying to write up short overviews of all forthcoming translations. Unfortunately, things got in the way, and this project was sort of pushed to the side. Which is unfortunate. One of the main reasons we started this website was to promote international literature and uncover great books and ...

Marian Schwartz on World Books Podcast

Over at PRI’s World Books, Bill Marx has a really interesting podcast interview with Marian Schwartz, whose retranslation of Bulgakov’s The White Guard was recently released by Yale University Press. (Bill Marx also put together a special White Guard related Geo Quiz.) The interview is really interesting, ...

It's Not Surprising

That publishers would employ BzzAgent to generate sales, but I was surprised to find out that a book was behind the first “Bzz” campaign—and that this campaign actually worked. From the fascinating and incredible Buying In by Rob Walker: The first full-fledged Bzz campaign was for a book called The ...

Non-profit Bookstores

The other day NPR ran this segment about Wordsmiths in Decatur, Georgia, and the store’s recent decision to ask for donations from customers in order to stay in business. In its typical middle-of-the-road objective, NPR’s focus is on whether it’s good or bad for people to donate to a for profit business, ...

More Kindle Quotes

From Levi Asher: If 240,000 units have really sold, then I am flat out wrong. Nobody, not even me, can argue with $75 million in revenue for an innovative tech product’s first year. I do find this figure slightly incredible (especially since I live in New York City and have never yet seen anybody walking around ...

Niloufar Talebi and Belonging: New Poetry by Iranians Around the World

I had the pleasure of spending a couple of days with Niloufar Talebi at an American Literary Translators Conference in Montreal a few years back, when she was still translating the poems for Belonging and looking for a publisher. (To be frank, I knew immediately that I was going to like Niloufar, when, after an ALTA ...

Diverse Views on the Kindle

The 240,000 Kindle sales figure has been written about quite a bit over the past few weeks, with everyone speculating on whether this number is strong enough to make the Kindle the next iPod. According to Silicon Alley Insider,- Citi’s Mark Mahaney has doubled his estimate of Kindle sales to 378,000 for this year. ...

Sun, Stone, and Shadows: 20 Great Mexican Short Stories

It can be tricky reviewing an anthology. Especially a general anthology that strives to introduce the literature of a particular country or region, since in an attempt to be all-encompassing, these anthologies can seem too diffuse, without anything linking the included pieces. When I first picked up Sun, Stone, and Shadows ...

Open Letter Update

Things have been a bit slow around here the past few weeks, but now that I’m back in the office for the rest of the month (I think), things should pick up. We have a couple of reviews coming up in the next week or so—Sun, Stone, and Shadows: 20 Great Mexican Short Stories and I’d Like by Amanda ...

Sony eReader vs. Amazon's Kindle

From Financial Times (free registration required—why does anyone do this anymore?): Sony launched the Reader in October 2006 with quite a fanfare. It is a light, book-sized gadget with a screen made by a technology company called E-Ink that is easier and more restful to read than a computer’s and needs no ...

Two Great New Literary Blogs

It’s always great to uncover (or be told about) great new literary blogs, and last week I found about a couple of really impressive ones. The first is Salonica World Lit which bears the slogan “Exploit. Explore. Examine. A Blog Dedicated to International Literature.” This is done by Monica Carter of ...

A Translation of a Translation

I have to admit that I was surprised to see this info line in today’s PW fiction review section: The Howling Miller Arto Paasilinna, trans. from the Finnish into French by Anne Colin du Terrail; trans. from the French by Will Hobson. Canongate, $14 paper (288p) ISBN 978-1-84767-181-3 One would think that with ...

NY Sun on Muñoz Molina

The New York Sun review’s A Manuscript of Ashes and this time Ben Lytal lets someone else get in on the fun: Now, with the publication of “A Manuscript of Ashes” (Harcourt, 305 pages, $25), we have the chance to read the book that launched Mr. Muñoz Molina’s career as a novelist. First published ...

Daniel Whatley on Agualusa

Over at Conversational Reading, Daniel Whatley has a review of the latest translation of one of my favorites, Jose Eduardo Agualusa: The Book of Chameleons is not precisely like any novel you’ve likely read, though its antecedents and influences are numerous. Agualusa has mixed his elements with a light hand, ...

New Hungarian Quarterly

As has been mentioned elsewhere, the new issue of the Hungarian Quarterly is now available. (Some pieces are available online, but in most instances, there’s just a sample.) There are quite a few interesting pieces, including an interview with Magda Szabó (whose most famous novel—The Door appears to be ...

2008 Man Asian Literary Prize Longlist

The Man Asian Literary Prize is an annual award for the best Asian novel unpublished in English. As stated on the website, the prize has three main goals: To bring exciting new Asian authors to the attention of the world literary community; To facilitate publishing and translation of Asian literature in and into ...

France Week at Vulpes Libris

Last week Vulpes Libris put together a special week with reviews, interviews, and guest essays all revolving around French literature. (This week is dedicated to ferrets, so don’t be surprised when you click on the above link—just scroll down.) The review of Marguerite Duras’s Summer Rain is definitely worth ...

Reading the World 2008: Unforgiving Years by Victor Serge

This is the eighteenth (almost 3/4 of the way to the end) Reading the World 2008 title we’re covering. Write-ups of the other titles can be found here. And information about the Reading the World program—a special collaboration between publishers and independent booksellers to promote literature in translation ...

J.J. Long's W.G. Sebald

Over at Conversational Reading, Scott Esposito has a great review of J.J. Long’s recent book, W.G. Sebald: Image, Archive, Modernity: A partial list of major topics will bring more detail if not more cohesion: (post-)colonialism, photography, the gaze, maps, archives, police/nanny states, the Holocaust, ...

Esterhazy's Revised Edition

Literary Saloon pointed this out over the weekend, but coming on the heels of the bit we wrote about Peter Esterhazy’s Celestial Harmonies Hungarian Literature Online has a long piece on the “sequel” to CE entitled Revised Edition: Revised Edition was published in 2002, shortly after Celestial ...

CNQ: The Translation Issue

So at times I take a bit of pride in my Canadian heritage and think about how cool parts of Canada are, about all the interesting publishers up there, about how nice everyone is, etc. And I make an internal promise to pay more attention to Canadian publications, presses, and the like. But for whatever reason, although ...

German Book Office Pick for July

The German Book Office recently chose Eros by Helmut Krausser as its book pick for July. Krausser’s book—which doesn’t actually release until mid-August, though you could pre-order copies now—is coming out from Europa Editions and sounds pretty interesting: Alexander von Brücken, an ageing ...

Counterpath and Von Doderer

One of the fun things about Book Expo America is that it offers a great opportunity to find out about new presses, magazines, bookstores, etc. It can be difficult when you’re blinded by the Random House fortress or the overwhelming Ingram “booth,” but there is a lot going on at the fringes. I’ve been ...

Cool Idea for a Book Event

Over at The Valve there’s an interesting reading event taking place that could be a really cool model for future online book clubs. The book at the center of this event is Douglas Wolk’s very interesting Reading Comics. But it’s the structure of this “event” that got me intrigued. ...

Reading the World 2008: Serve the People! by Yan Lianke

This is the seventeenth Reading the World 2008 title we’re covering. Write-ups of the other titles can be found here. And information about the Reading the World program—a special collaboration between publishers and independent booksellers to promote literature in translation throughout the month of June—is ...

50 Outstanding Translations

To celebrate its 50th anniversary, the Translators Association of the Society of Authors has released a list of 50 outstanding translations from the last 50 years. We love us a good list, and like all top XX compilations, this one should generate some discussion. In the Times comment section, someone points out that Edith ...

Peter Nadas

A number of people are raving about Deborah Eisenberg’s essay on Peter Nadas from the current New York Review of Books, and for good reason. The main occasion for the article is the release of Fire and Knowledge: Fiction and Essays, which came out last year from FSG, and is now available in paperback from Picador. (As ...

In Contrast to Argentina's Import Problems . .

Yesterday, I wrote a bit about the cost of imported books in Argentina and the impact this has on access. (In case you’re interested, Scott Esposito wrote an interesting piece a while back about the cost of books.) Oddly enough, it seems like Australia has a related, yet different sort of problem—publishers ...

Not Sure This Is a Good Thing

From Tell Zell here’s an excerpt of a memo from Lee Abrams, Chief Innovation Officer at the Tribune Co.: *Books: Heard a conversation about how Book reporting doesn’t generate revenue and may have to go away. WAIT! Maybe Book reviews and coverage are one of those things that don’t generate revenue ...

Zhu Wen's What Is Love and What Is Garbage

We’re planning to post a review of Zhu Wen’s short story collection I Love Dollars (first published by Columbia University Press and now available in paperback from Penguin) in the very near future, but in the meantime, Paper Republic has an excerpt from his first novel. I’ll let translator Cindy Carter set ...

Ben Lytal on Nabokov

I’ve said it before, and will repeat it endlessly—Ben Lytal has one of the sweetest reviewing gigs there is. He has the opportunity to write about the latest works of international fiction, and at the same time, can write pieces like the one today on the recent New Directions reissues of Nabokov’s Laughter ...

Reading the World 2008: Yalo by Elias Khoury

This is the fifteenth Reading the World 2008 title we’re covering. Write-ups of the other titles can be found here. And information about the Reading the World program—a special collaboration between publishers and independent booksellers to promote literature in translation throughout the month of June—is ...

As If It's Not Hard Enough Selling Translations

Michael Orthofer has a great rant over at Literary Saloon about “how not to publish translations.” His piece centers around Serbian Classics Press, a press that I’ve personally never heard of (neither had Michael, so I feel like my ignorance is excusable), but one that is bringing out Mansarda, Danilo ...

Koreans Studying their Translated Works

The Korea Literature Translation Institute (KLTI) started a two-year project in 2007 to evaluate published English translations of Korean literature. In the first stage of evaluation work. 41 novels in 72 editions from 721 books that had been translated and published up to 2006 were evaluated. The second stage of the ...

July Issue of Words Without Borders

The new issue of Words Without Borders is now online: In the spirit of Independence Day and Bastille Day, we salute freedom fighters of all stripes with writing about revolution. In the pulsing heat of Che’s Havana and the gray chill of Lenin’s Moscow, on ravaged battlefields and blasted domestic fronts, writers ...

NPR Brings the Serious Book Coverage

Never in my life did I expect to see NPR do something like this: National Public Radio has expanded the book coverage on its website, adding weekly book reviews, and has hired six new book reviewers—including a graphic novel reviewer—and added more features to an already existing lineup of author podcasts, ...

Reading the World 2008: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

This is the fourteenth Reading the World 2008 title we’re covering. Write-ups of the other titles can be found here. And information about the Reading the World program—a special collaboration between publishers and independent booksellers to promote literature in translation throughout the month of June—is ...

The Lost Daughter

“I’m an unnatural mother,” the protagonist, Leda, says of herself. In this brave and searing novel by Elena Ferrante, The Lost Daughter explores the psyche of a woman who regrets having children. Leda is a modern Italian woman. She is divorced. She is an accomplished professor. And she is comfortable ...

Reading the World 2008: I'd Like by Amanda Michalopoulou

This is the thirteenth Reading the World 2008 title we’re covering. Write-ups of the other titles can be found here. And information about the Reading the World program—a special collaboration between publishers and independent booksellers to promote literature in translation throughout the month of June—is ...

Seven Japanese Authors

I finished reading Contemporary Japanese Writers, Vol. 2 over the weekend, and found seven writers/books that I wish were translated into English: Yoshikichi Furui Asagao (Rose of Sharon) is a masterpiece from Furui’s middle period. In a commentary to the paperback edition, writer Hisaki Matsuura remarks on the ...

Always Good to End on a Positive Note (Or Not)

Today’s PW Daily has a piece from Rachel Deahl about the possible death of another book review section: Amid the pending real estate sale and newsroom cutbacks, rumors have surfaced about book sections being cut at Tribune-owned papers. One freelance critic told PW that the Tribune Company is planning to slash ...

New Catalan Fiction issue of RCF

This actually came out a month or two ago, but I recently received the new Review of Contemporary Fiction, which is a special focus issue on New Catalan Fiction. (Full disclosure: I set this project into motion at Dalkey Archive after returning from a trip to Barcelona, but left before seeing it to fruition.) It’s a ...

Reading the World 2008: The Diving Pool by Yoko Ogawa

This is the twelfth Reading the World 2008 title we’re covering. (Almost half-way!) Write-ups of the other titles can be found here. And information about the Reading the World program—a special collaboration between publishers and independent booksellers to promote literature in translation throughout the month ...

Reading the World 2008: Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolano

This is the eleventh Reading the World 2008 title we’re covering. Write-ups of the other titles can be found here. And information about the Reading the World program—a special collaboration between publishers and independent booksellers to promote literature in translation throughout the month of June—is ...

New Issue of Boldtype

The July issue of Boldtype is now available online and the focus is “Summer Reads.” In addition to a nice review of Sasa Stanisic’s How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, there’s a great write-up by Scott Esposito of Adolfo Bioy Casares’s The Invention of Morel. What do you do when ...

English as she is spoke

In China, this sort of free-form adoption of English is helped along by a shortage of native English-speaking teachers, who are hard to keep happy in rural areas for long stretches of time. An estimated 300 million Chinese — roughly equivalent to the total US population — read and write English but don’t get ...

Reading the World on The World

Last week, Bill Marx—the mastermind behind the World Books section of PRI’s The World website—was kind enough to interview me about Reading the World for his World Books Podcast. It’s always fun to talk with Bill—he knows more about international literature than almost everyone I know—and ...

La Follia Improvvisa di Ignazio Rando

Ignazio Rando had been a model employee at the Land Registry Office of Ferrara for 37 years, 5 months and 4 days – a few months short of his pensionable age – when one day he climbs onto the table and walks out, leaving his colleagues and the public staring in open-mouthed amazement. The theme of Dario Franceschini’s ...

Two Notes on the Future of Books

The first is from The Guardian: Blackwell’s is to become the first high-street bookseller in the UK to offer print-on-demand books while customers wait. The innovation will be delivered by an “Espresso Book Machine” (EBM), which can print and bind any one of a million titles. Set to be piloted ...

Another Reason Ubuweb is So Cool

I really don’t check up on Ubuweb as often as I should . . . It’s only thanks to a link via Gary Westmoreland that I was able to find this fascinating documentary on Jorge Luis Borges. Here’s part of Orlando Archibeque’s review of the documentary: This documentary’s major strength (others ...

The Crux of Literary Translation

One of the fundamental discussions in the world of literary translation is the debate between whether a translator should “retain the foreignness” of a work, or “smooth” it over for the benefit of the target audience. Richard Pevear’s recent letter to the London Review of Books about his ...

Stephen Mitchelmore on Senselessness

Over at Ready Steady Book, Stephen reviews Senselessness: The uncommon, elongated noun describing the mental state of the father is enough to remind the reader of Bernhard’s 1967 novel Verstörung — translated as Gargoyles yet meaning “disturbance” — in which a doctor takes his student son ...

Nike 2008 Longlist

Earlier this month Gazeta Wyborcza announced the longlist for the 2008 Nike Prize, which is awarded to the best Polish book from last year. The website is less than helpful—every time I click on the “more” button about the prize, I’m brought back to the same opening page and the fragmented ...

Amelie Nothomb in The Guardian

Michael Orthofer from Complete Review is responsible for getting me interested in Amelie Nothomb. He’s reviewed twelve of her books, grading all of them between a B and an A. (Most are in the A or A- range, with Loving Sabotage—published by New Directions—receiving an A+.) Unfortunately, despite this ...

NEA's Big Read

As reported in PW yesterday, the NEA just announced the next round of Big Read grants and will be giving $2.8 million to 208 libraries and other organizations across the country to put together Big Read events in their community. (Including Writers & Books here in Rochester.) There are now 23 titles eligible for selection, ...

Reading the World 2008: Beijing Coma by Ma Jian

This is the ninth Reading the World 2008 title we’re covering. Write-ups of the other titles can be found here. And information about the Reading the World program—a special collaboration between publishers and independent booksellers to promote literature in translation throughout the month of June—is ...

Reading the World 2008: Knowledge of Hell by Antonio Lobo Antunes

This is the eighth Reading the World 2008 title we’re covering. Write-ups of the other titles can be found here. And information about the Reading the World program—a special collaboration between publishers and independent booksellers to promote literature in translation throughout the month of June—is ...

Quarterly Conversation on Macedonio Fernandez

As has been mentioned on many other blogs, the new issue of the Quarterly Conversation is now available online. Yet another great issue, especially the article by Dan Green on the reissuing of Donald Barthelme’s books and the reviews of Bolano’s Nazi Literature in the Americas and Antunes’s Knowledge of ...

WWB/RTW Book Club: The Assistant by Robert Walser

The newly redesigned Words Without Borders/Reading the World book clubs are now underway, and this month the book under discussion is Robert Walser’s The Assistant, which came out last year from New Directions and is translated by Susan Bernofsky. In contrast to the old version of the book clubs—which was ...

BookExpo America: Party People

Everyone loves themselves a little BEA party. Outside of New York—and really, maybe even in NY—there’s rarely a chance for so many diverse book people from across the country to get together to mingle and drink and exchange business cards and all that stuff. Hanging out with so many intelligent, well-read ...

Life A User’s Manual

1 The life of the Perec family (the family name was originally Peretz) was one of removals. The Perecs moved from one city to another in Poland before leaving Poland for France. Georges was born in France in 1936 and against the background of troubled times the exact details of his early life are lost. His father was one of ...

BookExpo America: Panels

I participated in two translation panels on Saturday at BEA—one on funding for translations and the other on marketing. The morning session on funding was organized and moderated by Caro Llewellyn from PEN America (and director of the PEN World Voices Festival) and included star translator Michael Henry Heim, Michael ...

Nicholas Spice on Jelinek

Nicholas Spice reviews Elfride Jelinek’s Greed in the LRB: In Greed, Jelinek finds a way to deal with depth (with the abyss inside the human) without either reverting to the analgesic of realism or exhausting the reader with flood-lit ugliness. For all its derangement, Greed is not ugly. Indeed, once one has got ...

BookExpo America: The Books (and More)

I would title this post “Day Two,” but many, many days have passed since my last entry (who would’ve though Three Percent could be so quiet for so long?) and I’m not sure I can separate what I want to write about into specific days . . . Now that I’m back in Rochester, and my voice is slowly but ...

BookExpo America and the Reading the World Party

I’m leaving tomorrow morning for BookExpo America (aka BEA, aka ABA, well, OK, ABA is more than a bit outdated, but I think some people still say this), and with E.J. in Norway things might be a little quiet around here for the next few days. This year BEA is in L.A., which is always nice and sunny. And somewhat ...

The Post-Office Girl

In their usual classy-as-hell manner, New York Review Books delivered a real gem last month in the 2008 Reading the World selection THE POST-OFFICE GIRL, by Stefan Zweig and translated by Joel Rotenberg. Zweig’s posthumously published book is bitter, brutal, and everything I love about post-war literature while still ...

Hey Look, Borders Has a Website

Now that the arrangement with Amazon.com is over, Borders is reestablishing their web presence. Haven’t explored enough to make any strong statements, but in general, I like the “Magic Shelf” (pictures are cool!) and dislike how cluttered this all looks. From what I’ve read, it sounds like Borders ...

New Bookforum

As a number of other people have already pointed out, the new issue of Bookforum is now available, both in print and online. This is the summer “Fiction and Politics” issues, which, in addition to a heap of good reviews, has a few features on politics novels and the like. There’s even a reflections section ...

Nation Spring Books Issue

The “Spring Books” issue of The Nation is now out, with a lot of the content available online including pieces on Stefan Zweig and Imre Kertesz. The Kertesz is a really positive review of both The Pathseeker (out from Melville House) and Detective Story (out from Knopf) by Ruth Scurr. This year Tim ...

Reading the World 2008: The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante

This is the seventh Reading the World 2008 title we’re covering. Write-ups of the other titles can be found here. And information about the Reading the World program—a special collaboration between publishers and independent booksellers to promote literature in translation throughout the month of June—is ...

The Other Major Galley of 2008 I've Been Waiting For

In addition to Bolano’s 2666, the other big (in every sense of the word) galley I’ve been waiting for is Antonio Lobo Antunes’s What Can I Do When Everything’s On Fire?, which is due out in September from W.W. Norton. Well, it arrived yesterday: It’s only 585 pages long and is prefaced ...

Reading the World 2008: The Corpse Walker by Liao Yiwu

This is the fifth entry in our series covering all twenty-five Reading the World 2008 titles. (We’re 20% of the way there!) Write-ups of the other titles can be found here. And information about the Reading the World program—a special collaboration between publishers and independent booksellers to promote ...

Center for the Art of Translation "Lit & Lunch"

Ari Messer — who works at Stone Bridge Press and freelances for the San Francisco Bay Guardian — is going to be covering some West Coast translation related events for us. (And possibly some interviews as well.) Here to kick things off is a write-up of a recent “Lit & Lunch” event put on by the Center ...

Reading the World 2008: The Girl on the Fridge by Etgar Keret

This is the fourth entry in our series covering all twenty-five Reading the World 2008 titles. Write-ups of the other titles can be found here. And information about the Reading the World program—a special collaboration between publishers and independent booksellers to promote literature in translation throughout the ...

The Millions on Translation and Prizes

Over at The Millions, Garth follows up on his literary prize post of a few days ago: I know next to nothing about the translation business, except that it is vital to my reading habits. And so, earlier this week, I posted a little survey of international awards for fiction, along with the unobjectionable (I think) ...

Reading the World 2008: The Assistant by Robert Walser

This is the third entry in our series covering all twenty-five Reading the World 2008 titles. Write-ups of the other titles can be found here. And information about the Reading the World program—a special collaboration between publishers and independent booksellers to promote literature in translation throughout the ...

Reading the World 2008: The Post-Office Girl by Stefan Zweig

Following on yesterday’s post, here’s the second round-up of this year’s twenty-five Reading the World titles. Since The Post-Office Girl was reviewed in today’s NY Sun by Eric Ormsby it seems like the perfect book to feature next. Stefan Zweig was born in 1881 into a wealthy and privileged ...

Reading the World 2008: The Song of Everlasting Sorrow by Wang Anyi

Since Reading the World 2008 is almost here—it technically runs through the month of June, when bookstores across the country display twenty-five translated titles (warning pdf) from fifteen different presses—I thought it would be worthwhile to highlight each of these books on the site. And there’s no ...

The Most Anticipated Galley of the Year?

I’ve been checking my mailbox every 5 minutes, hoping that this strange ritual will result in a ARC of Roberto Bolano’s 2666 mysteriously appearing . . . It’s interesting to see how many posts have popped up about this galley. The most recent is from Michael Orthofer, who recaps some of the others and ...

Estonian Literary Magazine

This actually arrived a few weeks ago (we’ve been a bit busy . . .), but the new issue of the Estonian Literary Magazine is now available both in print and online. Estonian Literary Magazine is published by the Estonian Literature Information Centre, which, in my opinion, is one of the best cultural organizations in ...

2666 galleys on their way

Sancho’s Panza mentions that galleys of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 have begun to surface: So it looks like the fat advance copies of Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666 in English translation have begun arriving in reviewers’ mailboxes. It will be interesting to see how this book is received, after the ...

Congrats to Paul Verhaeghen

Just announced today that Flemish author Paul Verhaeghen has won the Independent foreign fiction prize for his novel Omega Minor. Moving back and forth through the last century, Omega Minor, translated from the Dutch, is a story of love and death on the grandest possible scale. Its whirlwind plot takes in Berlin, Boston, ...

Let Us Now Praise the New York Sun

It’s no secret that we’re huge fans of the New York Sun “Arts+” section and most of the reviewers who write for it. (Especially Ben Lytal, who, in my opinion, has the sweetest gig in all book reviewing.) Since the Sun has yet to penetrate the Rochester market, we usually resort to reading this online. ...

PEN World Voices: Saturday

Well, I didn’t make it to as many PEN events as I had hoped to on Saturday—there are so, so many, and with things starting right after one another it’s really kind of tricky—but the ones I attended were amazing. It actually was an “all German” sort of day . . . First off was a conversation between Ingo Schulze ...

PEN World Voices Festival: Friday

Post-Rusdie/Eco—and post a few celebration drinks—I caught a 6am flight down to New York to attend the rest of the PEN World Voices Festival. (And meet with reviewers and bookstores about our first list, but that’s boring, um, business.) E.J. and I made it to three events yesterday, and have a ton lined ...

Argentine Literature and its Monsters (Part 1/2)

Below is the text of the speech that Carlos Gamerro gave earlier in the week on the history of Argentine literature. I found this really interesting, and am very glad that Carlos is allowing us to publish it here. Tomorrow we’ll publish part 2, which includes a list of all the authors and books mentioned in the ...

We Just Crossed 200!

Thanks to the Knopf/Pantheon/Schocken catalogs that arrived today, we just crossed the 200 translation mark in the official 2008 count! Some good stuff coming out in the fall, including the next Sandor Marai book, Me and Kaminski by Daniel Kehlmann, a new novel by Ingo Schulze, and a retranslation of Kafka’s Amerika: ...

America's Uptight Obsession with Truth and Nonfiction

For me, Kate Foster’s review in the San Francisco Chronicle of Lieve Joris’s The Rebels’ Hour perfectly illustrates some of the ridiculous hangups Americans have when it comes to nonfiction and the representation of “truth.” The Rebels’ Hour is in an interesting postion—it’s ...

More Kertesz

In contrast to Joshua Cohen’s cranky review in Forward, the review of Kertesz’s Pathseeker in the New York Sun (which, at risk of beating a dead horse, has become the premiere daily newspaper for thoughtful reviews of international lit) is much more positive. Slender though it is, The Pathseeker is a ...

This Could Be Really Amazing

Literary Saloon wrote about the English PEN Online World Atlas this morning, and I completely agree with Michael—this is a work in progress, but it could be absolutely amazing. The site’s mission is pretty huge, but if this comes to fruition, this would be one of the most valuable sites on the internet for ...

Kertesz in Forward

Joshua Cohen has a long review of both Kertesz books that have come out so far this year: Detective Story and The Pathseeker. (Before going any further, I think it’s worth pointing out that Cohen rivals Three Percent fave Ben Lytal in the sheer number of literary translations he reviews.) Cohen has mixed feelings ...

The End of CONTEXT?

I’m not sure if this is accurate or not, but a reader just alerted us to the new Dalkey Archive website pointing out that the “blog” is called the CONTEXT Blog, possibly signaling the end of CONTEXT magazine. This may just be speculation on their part, though it is true that the last issue of which came out ...

Very Cool, Very Useful

Thanks to Literary Saloon (Michael Orthofer is always on top of everything!) for pointing out the New Arabic Books site the British Council recently launched. The paucity of info available about Arabic books has been a frequent complaint of many a publisher, so this site should make an immediate difference. The fiction ...

The Digital Future of Books

Ed Nawotka, who writes for PW, Bloomberg, and elsewhere, has an article in the forthcoming issue of Publishing Research Quarterly on Our Digital Future – Rights, Contracts and Business Models that, somewhat ironically, is currently available for free on his website. The article is basically an overview of the current ...

Literary Gate Keepers

This actually came out in last week’s Time Out New York, but Michael Miller’s piece on how a book goes from writer to reader is pretty interesting and touches on some of the knotty issues surrounding publication and publicity. Miller briefly hits on the various gate keepers of book culture: agents, editors, ...

Reading the World 2008 Website

The Reading the World website for 2008 is now online, complete with info about all 25 titles (from 15 different presses), info about participating bookstores, how to sign up, how to get on the mailing list, etc. In case you’re not already familiar with this, RTW is an innovative collaboration between publishers and ...

Association of Asian Studies Conference in Atlanta

This past weekend, I was able to attend the AAS conference in Atlanta and speak on a roundtable about “The Translation and Publication of Contemporary Japanese Literature: Strategies and Resources” put together by the Japanese Literature Publishing and Promotion Center. I’ve written about J-Lit a few times ...

Knowledge of Hell

Antonio Lobo Antunes’s books contain many of the things that are fantastic about contemporary literature; at the same time, these books exemplify a lot of the traits that scare people off from literature in translation. This may sound stupid, but even his name is a problem. Where to shelve it in the bookstore—under ...

Bolano, Bolano, Bolano

So, following up on yesterday’s post about the coverage of Bolano in The Nation and at Bookninja, today Michael Orthofer at the Literary Saloon has info about the anxiously awaited 2666, Bolano’s final book, and supposed magnum opus. How very exciting to find that, at least on the American Amazon.com site, ...

More on IMPAC Shortlist

To follow up on last night’s brief post about the IMPAC Shortlist, be sure to check out the coverage at The Millions to find links to reviews of the books and/or interviews with the authors. (I wanted to do something similar, but this post is better than anything I would’ve come up ...

More Bolano, More Savage Detectives

For fans of his work, it’s great to see that Bolano continues to get great attention. Nazi Literature in the Americas is on display at every bookstore I’ve been in recently, and has been getting decent review coverage, including a long piece in The Nation by Carmen Boullosa, which concludes with a strong ...

Africa Reading Challenge

Thanks to Scott Esposito for bringing our attention to the Africa Reading Challenge starting up at Siphoning Off a Few Thoughts. In recent years I’ve become increasingly interested in reading books dealing with Africa, and so I present the Africa Reading Challenge. Participants commit to read – in the ...

Poetry Magazine and Translations

April is National Poetry Month, so we’ll be highlighting more works of translated poetry over the next few weeks than we normally do. (In case you’re wondering, in the database there are 11 collections of translated poetry scheduled to come out this month.) Interestingly, Poetry magazine’s April issue ...

Translations in the New York Times

We mentioned this a couple weeks back, but this morning, the Literary Saloon has a more factual follow-up to Douglas Kibbee’s claim that translations are on the rise, as evidenced by the increase in coverage for translations in the New York Times Book Review. Michael Orthofer—who both questioned the veracity of this ...

Get your kicks with HermanoCerdo

Although a number of literary blogs populate the web, HermanoCerdo is almost certainly unlike anything else floating around cyberspace. Its “Colaboraciones” page invites the following contributions: “HermanoCerdo acepta colaboraciones de cuentos, reseñas, ensayos, crónicas, traducciones y textos ...

2008 Translations: Fiction

Following up on last week’s post about the Translation Database (downloadable version available via that same link), here’s the next set of capsule reviews of recently released and forthcoming literature in translation. (All previous posts and reviews available here.) Oliver VII, Antal Szerb, translated from ...

2008 Translations: Current List and Minor Analysis

In each of the past few posts about our 2008 Translation Database I’ve promised a complete copy of the current list . . . well finally, here’s an Excel version that you can download, manipulate, sort, etc., etc. This current list is very incomplete. I haven’t received many summer/fall catalogs yet, and ...

Maybe Just a Poor Choice of Words . . .

Not sure how we missed this article by Jane Henderson in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch about how “world literature thrives in translation” (especially considering that Three Percent is listed in the “more information” box), but I have to agree with Michael Orthofer —“thriving” is ...

FILI Spotlight

I’m not sure when FILI—the organization in charge of promoting Finnish literature abroad—redesigned its website, but the results are pretty impressive and definitely worth checking out. I really like the Spotlight feature, which highlights a few Finnish authors, providing short overviews, excerpts in ...

German Book Office Pick for March

Each month the GBO selects a German book in translation to feature on their website. This month they selected How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone by Saša Stanišić, which is coming out from Grove in June. The author will be in the States for the PEN World Voices Festival at the end of April, and this is a title ...

2008 Translations: Dedalus and Peter Owen

In part because of this news about Dedalus being sponsored for the next two years by Routledge Book, and in part because I just received a nice batch of their titles, I’d like to mix things up a bit today and focus on forthcoming translations from two UK presses distributed over here rather than looking at titles from a ...

Writing in Public: A Celebration of Karl Pohrt

I don’t have a lot to report on this conference that took place last week, except to say that the whole thing was pretty amazing and that it’s wonderful to see such a public celebration for a bookseller and his store. Karl is one of the giants in terms of independent bookselling and one of the most ...

Nazi Literature in the Americas

To be honest, there isn’t a whole lot that I feel I have to say about Nazi Literature in the Americas, the latest Bolano book to make its way into English except that everyone should run out, buy it, and read it multiple times because it really is that good. Since New Directions published By Night in Chile in 2003, Bolano ...

Dirda on Bolano

We’ll be posting our own glowing review of Nazi Literature in the Americas later this week, but in the meantime, here’s a bit from Michael Dirda’s review in this week’s Washington Post Let me admit, straight off, that any reviewer might feel hesitant before recommending a book called Nazi ...

Quarterly Conversation #11

The new issue of Quarterly Conversation is now available, and full of interesting pieces including reviews of Lydie Salvayre’s The Power of Flies, Dorothea Dieckmann’s Guantanamo (which won our inaugural Best Translation of 2007 award), and Yousef Al-Mohaimeed’s Wolves of the Crescent Moon. There’s ...

Autumn Hill Books

A relatively young press, Autumn Hill Books is one of those impressive indie presses that gets nowhere near the attention it deserves. Autumn Hill Books is a nonprofit based in Iowa and is closely linked to the writing programs at the University of Iowa, especially the International Writing Program. (Which is no surprise, ...

February Translations: Fiction

I’ve fallen a bit behind on these preview capsules of forthcoming translations, but hopefully will be able to catch up in the next week or so. For anyone interested, all the past write ups of 2008 translations can be found here. And I’ll be posting the current version of the complete database later this week. For ...

Iceland at the Frankfurt Book Fair

The Literary Saloon has a link to this article from the Finnish press stating that Finland lost out to Iceland for 2011 Guest of Honor at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Iris Schwanck, the director of the Finnish Literature Exchange (FILI) was informed on Wednesday of the negative decision by Jürgen Boos, the director of the ...

To Be Translated or Not To Be: Case Studies — Germany

Germany is the next country covered in the PEN/Ramon Llull To Be Translated or Not To Be report. (For anyone interested, all the earlier posts about this report can be found by clicking here.) This section was written by Riky Stock, who is the director of the admirable and ambitious German Book Office. Putting aside the ...

Obituary: Alain Robbe-Grillet

Alain Robbe-Grillet passed away yesterday at the age of 85. A major force in twentieth-century French literature, here’s part of the obit in “The Guardian“: He was the most prominent of France’s “new novelists,” a group that emerged in the mid-1950s and whose experimental works tossed ...

New Issue of eXchanges

The new issue of eXchanges, the online literary translation journal from the University of Iowa is now available online. Few interesting pieces included in this issue, especially Martha Tennent’s translation of Merce Rodoreda’s On the Train, a short story from Twenty-Two Stories, in which “we overhear one ...

To Be Translated or Not To Be: Part III

Continuing our series on the PEN/Ramon Llull To Be Translated or Not To Be report (previous posts can be found here), today I want to write a bit about the second essay in the book—Simona Skrabec’s “Literary Translation: The International Panorama.” Complementing Esther Allen’s introductory ...

To Be Translated or Not To Be: Part II

Following up on my earlier post I want to summarize the statistics that Esther Allen cites in her essay “Translation, Globalization, and English” that open the To Be Translated or Not To Be report from PEN and the Institut Ramon Llull. One of the things worth pointing out is how shoddy all the data is for ...

To Be Translated or Not To Be: Part I

At Frankfurt last year, PEN and the Institut Ramon Llull released a report entitled To Be Translated or Not To Be regarding the “international situation of literary translation.” This report (which is downloadable in pdf format by clicking the link above) has gotten some decent attention online and is one of the ...

January/February Translations: Fiction

I’ve got a lot of January and February books to catch up on in these roundups, so I’m going to try and post two or three summaries this week, including an overview of the poetry books coming out this month and next (there are quite few). As always, the current list of all translated fiction and poetry can be found ...

Ilf & Petrov's Road Trip

Last Friday, the Literary Saloon wrote about a documentary recreating Ilf & Petrov’s trip across America. From The Moscow Times“: In 1935, satirical writers Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov drove from New York to the Mexican border and back in a Ford. They spoke only schoolboy English and couldn’t drive, but ...

Reading the World 2008

(Today is a day in which I list things . . . ) Hopefully most of you are aware of Reading the World, a unique collaborations between publishers and independent booksellers to promote literature in translations throughout the month of June. This program came out of a series of discussions at BookExpo America five (?!) years ...

January/February Translations: Fiction

Listed below is the latest addition to the ongoing project of documenting all works of translated fiction and poetry published in the U.S. in 2008. Earlier posts can be found here, and in a couple weeks I’ll post the current spreadsheet of all titles (currently around 150 going through Apr/May for a host of presses) and ...

Lawrence Venuti on the Business of Publishing Translations

Literary Saloon pointed this out yesterday, but the new issue of Words Without Borders contains a fantastic article by Lawrence Venuti on the business of publishing translations. He wrote this essay for the Frankfurt Book Fair panel on To Be Translated or Not To Be (warning, that links to the entire report in pdf form), a ...

NBCC's Good Reads Winter List

The Winter List of the NBCC’s Good Reads program—where NBCC members recommend the best fiction, nonfiction, and poetry they’ve read recently—is now available online. In addition to simply promoting this list, the NBCC is arranging 15 events in 15 cities to discuss this list and the recent NBCC ...

What's Up With Romania?

From Literary Saloon: We missed their announcement from a few weeks ago, but Jennifer Schuessler recently mentioned it at their Paper Cuts weblog: The New York Times Book Review is now available in Romanian, the only international edition of the NYTBR, licensed to Editura Univers and with a print run of 40,000 to start ...

One Last (?) ACE Funding Update

Despite the apparent good news that most of the Arts Council England funding would be restored, Dedalus and Centerprise ended up on the cutting block [all quotes via The Guardian: In the face of appeals and threats of legal action, Arts Council England has this morning confirmed it is to cut funding from the independent ...

Lots of Love for Lost and a Little Secret about Episode 4

So, the highly-anticipated fourth season of Lost premieres tomorrow night, picking up where last season and its mind-blowing flash forward left off. And I for one can’t wait. (Especially for episode 4 . . . feel free to scroll to the bottom if you want to know why.) I unabashedly love Lost, and over the past few years ...

February Translations: Fiction

Here’s the next installment in the ongoing project to chronicle all works of fiction and poetry coming out in translation this year. More fiction tomorrow . . . Nazi Literature in the Americas, Roberto Bolano, translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews (New Directions, $23.95, 9780811217057) All that really ...

Interview with Eric Lane, Publisher of Dedalus

Aside from feeding my recent obsession, I thought it would be interesting to ask Eric Lane a few questions about Dedalus Books and the impact losing its Arts Council England grant would have on the organization. Eric was kind enough to not only answer all my questions, but to answer them in a refreshingly honest fashion, ...

Chinese Literature Online

After all the ACE info of the past few weeks, it was interesting to find out that it is responsible for this fascinating series on the “State of Internet Literature in China” available at Paper Republic. If you’re not familiar with Paper Republic, it’s the best website out there covering Chinese ...

Minneapolis Book Culture Part II

Meant to post this earlier, but it’s been a crazy day . . . In addition to the presses (Graywolf, Coffee House, and Milkweed), the review publication (Rain Taxi), the literary center (The Loft), and the building for literature (Open Book), the other thing Minn-St. P has are a couple really stellar bookstores. This ...

A Short Guide to Literary Minneapolis

Early this week I took a trip to Minneapolis-St. Paul to visit the various literary organizations located there (which should explain why I haven’t posted much the past few days). For those who don’t know, MSP is a hotbed of nonprofit literary publishing and literary culture in general. Reservations cast aside, ...

NY Sun on Imre Kertész

Benjamin Lytal reviews Imre Kertész’s Detective Story for the New York Sun: “Detective Story” (1977) is another sort of tale altogether — except that, then again, it isn’t. Set in an unnamed Latin American country, the new novel, which was Mr. Kertész’s third in Hungarian, spins a deeply ...

Javier Marias in the NYRB

Scott points out an 8-book overview-review of Javier Marias’s novels in the NYRB. Above all Marìas’s novels are concerned with the processes of telling, with what it means to tell and not to tell, with the bonds we establish or dissolve by telling, with the ways telling may either release us from the past or ...

ACE Funding and Parliament

Today’s update in the ongoing saga of the ACE funding cuts comes from Arcadia and Parliament. First off, a couple of the new people who have signed on in support of Arcadia are Dominick Dunne and Caroline Michel. Which is great in and of itself, but what I find really fun are some of the “Early Day ...

I Think Today Is All About Esposito and Barcelona

Following on the Monzo review, Conversational Reading has an interesting Friday Column by Barcelona author Neus Arques called “On Translations or the Pursuit of the Domino Effect.” Arques recently published her first novel, and discussing the long, winding road to trying to get her book published in ...

Quim Monzo

Scott Esposito of Conversational Reading, reviewed Quim Monzo’s The Enormity of the Tragedy in the Philadelphia Inquirer, hitting upon the fascinating way Monzo takes the setup for a lewd joke (the main character has a permanent erection that’s actually a symptom of a disease leaving him with seven weeks to live) ...

January Translations: Fiction

Following up on my previous posts, here’s another addition to the list of translated fiction coming out this month. Over the past few weeks—thanks in part to the help of Michael Orthofer—I’ve been creating a fairly detailed spreadsheet of all works of fiction and poetry in translation published this ...

A Great Day for Readers of the Sun

Thanks to the Literary Saloon for pointing out the New York Sun‘s new book review archive. Probably a better way to design the navigation for this, but as of now it’s sortable by book title and author, along with review title and reviewer. Hopefully this will help clue more people into the fact that the Sun ...

Lots of Love for Archipelago

One of our favorite presses, Archipelago’s been getting a lot of good attention for a couple of their recent titles: Yalo by Elias Khoury and Autonauts of the Cosmoroute by Julio Cortazar. Specifically, the Khoury book received a great review by Laila Lalami in this weekend’s L.A. Times: bq, With Yalo, Khoury ...

Funding Controversy Continues to Rage in England

There have been a few interesting things happen since last week’s post on the Arts Council England funding cuts to almost 200 organizations. First off, I got a message from Arcadia that the protest letter we posted about was signed by over 500 people, including Doris Lessing, John Berger, Alan Hollinghurst, James ...

The re-transnationalization of literary criticism

Carl Henrik Fredriksson argues for a re-transnationalization of literary criticism in Eurozine, and recalls the almost-impossible-to-believe, and not-so-distant, past of literary criticism in Europe: In fact, during some periods and in some places, the discussion of foreign literature was so extensive and lively that it ...

January Translations: Literary Nonfiction

In the ongoing list of translations coming out in 2008, I have to admit that this category is a bit fuzzy. Not that I came across any, but I wasn’t planning on including translations of technical manuals, cookbooks, etc. By “literary nonfiction,” I’m referring to books for a general trade audience ($60 ...

Omega Minor in the Independent

As mentioned at the Literary Saloon, Matt Thorne has a review of Omega Minor by Paul Verhaeghen in today’s Independent. As Michael Orthofer—who has been praising this book and its break-out potential for quite some time—points out, the book hasn’t been receiving a lot of attention on this side of the ...

Believer #50

The fiftieth issue of The Believer is out and has a couple of pieces on international fiction. The review of Havana Noir from Akashic Books is available online in full, and ends with a decent enough recommendation: “In Havana Noir, better than half the stories are truly gripping, and all of them resuscitate a dark ...

Bonzai and The Private Lives of Trees

There is a series of popular literature in Chile that you can still buy in used book fairs, which color-coded books according to World literature (beige), Spanish Literature (red), and Chilean Literature (brown). There was no Latin American literature. This conception of things made an impression on Alejandro Zambra, who ...

New World Literature Today

The January/February issue of World Literature Today is now available, with a few articles on performance poetry avaialble online. You’ll have to get a copy to read these, but there are a number of interesting articles in this issue, including a piece on Ousmane Sembene, along with “Old Stories and New Voices ...

Censorship of Literature in Iran

This past Sunday, the Guardian ran a very troubling article about a publishing crackdown in Iran: After the 1979 Islamic revolution, the government imposed strict rules on book publishing. Since then, the Ministry of Culture has been charged to vet all books before publication, mainly for erotic and religious ...

January Translations: Fiction (Update)

After posting the initial list of January translations yesterday, I got info about three titles I missed (see below). I’m sure there are a few more, so if you know of anything, please feel free to post it here or contact me. Also, I’ll put up the poetry translations later today, and literary nonfiction tomorrow, ...

PW's 50 under 40

One of the interesting points from Karl Pohrt’s speech is his allusion to the difficulties of getting young people into the book business. As everyone probably knows, working in the book business (as a bookseller, reviewer, mid-list author, editor, etc.) isn’t quite as lucrative as, say, investment banking. ...

Bookslut on Kertesz

Bookslut reviews Imre Kertesz’s Detective Story: As a chronicler of the Holocaust and its aftermath, Nobel Prize-winner Imre Kertesz allows no redemption and no transcendence. If you cry while reading Fatelessness or Kaddish for an Unborn Child, you’ll cry bitter, furious tears, but most likely, you won’t be ...

January Translations: Fiction

As I mentioned earlier, one of my New Year’s resolutions for 2008 is to create a fairly comprehensive list of new translations published here in the States. (I’ll do my best to exclude reprints and retranslations, instead mentioning those separately.) So, here’s the first post highlighting all the works of ...

Halldor Laxness in L.A. Times

On the occasion of the rerelease of The Fish Can Sing, Richard Raynor’s monthly Paperback Writers column features a nice overview of Iceland’s best-known writer, Halldor Laxness: This 1957 novel is narrated by the orphan Alfgrimur Hansson, who tells, in a meandering way, of his relationship with the ...

In Contrast, America Finally Gets Something Right

After reading about the Arts Council England’s troubles, this article in the Louisville Courier-Journal about the recent $20 million dollar increase to the National Endowment for the Arts budget comes as a welcome surprise. The current budget is $144 million, and according to the LCJ, this recent increase is the largest ...

More on Arts Council England Funding Cuts

Last month we wrote about the announcement from the Arts Council England that nearly 200 arts organizations would have their funding cut. (Personally, I was really disappointed to hear this—the ACE always seemed so progressive in it’s multi-year funding, payments to translators, etc.) For most arts ...

Missing Soluch

Despite the fact that Mahmoud Dowlatabadi is considered one of Iran’s greatest writers (according to his Wikipedia entry, “He wrote Kalidar novel which is one of the most important significant of Iranian culture.”), it seems like Missing Soluch slipped through the reviewing cracks when Melville House brought ...

More on the January WWB Book Club

At House of Mirth James Marcus offers a preview of the upcoming Words Without Borders discussion of Zbigniew Herbert’s The Collected Poems 1956-1998, which promises to be quite interesting. Next week, Cynthia Haven and I will be overseeing a Words Without Borders book club—an online conversation, more or ...

First Great Saudi Novel?

Included on our list of best translations of 2007, Wolves of the Crescent Moon by Yousef Al-Mohaimeed got a nice review in the NY Sun this. In fact, Ben Lytal goes so far as to point to this as the “First Great Saudi Novel”: Those Saudi novels that do get published — even those that must be published abroad ...

Obituary: Christian Bourgois

One of France’s most interesting publishers passed away last week. As the director of his eponymous publishing house, Christian Bourgois published a slew of influential world authors, including Roberto Bolaño, Ernst Jünger, Antonio Lobo Antunes, and Enrique Vila-Matas. The Literary Saloon has links to a couple of ...

Ben Lytal's Recommendation

From Ben Lytal’s column in the New York Sun But the book that, this year, I have most wanted to recommend is almost totally unknown. “Missing Soluch” (Melville House, 507 pages, $16.95) is Mahmoud Dowlatabadi’s first novel translated into English, and it has hardly been reviewed at all. I’ve ...

Three Percent Resolution for 2008

Next year, I hope to start the “Best Translations” list a lot earlier in the fall, giving us more time to research, read, recommend, and decide on which to include. One thing that would help though would be a single source of all the original translations published throughout the year. And once again, since this ...

Best Translations of 2007 — The Analysis

Compiling the list of Best Translations was fascinating to me for a number of reasons. One of the first things that struck me is how paradoxical the situation regarding international literature is. Minutes after putting this first seeds of this list online, I started getting enthusiastic e-mails about books that should be ...

Ed Hirsch on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Ed Hirsch reviews a new translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in this week’s NYT Sunday Book Review: There have been dozens of translations of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” over the years. J. R. R. Tolkien’s authoritative edition was a gift to readers, though his own translation now seems ...

New Issue of N+1

Issue 6 of N+1 is now available at—at least according to the descriptions provided in the annotated table of contents—has a few interesting articles. “The Hype Cycle” The problem with hype is that it transforms the use value of a would-be work of art into its exchange value. The important ...

Best Translations of 2007 (Another Update)

Listed below is the latest list of recommendations for the best translated works of 2007. Thanks again to everyone who has posted or e-mailed a suggestion. It’s a pretty impressive list, and, as Angela said in the comments, a bit daunting. If there are any titles anyone would like to add, please post them in the ...

This Is My Hobby Horse

Don’t ask why, but I’ve always been fascinated by Esperanto. In fact, at the first bookstore I ever worked at — Schuler Books and Music — I helped create a mini Esperanto section. Of course these books didn’t really sell, which I blamed on the fact that Esperanto is pretty much a dead language ...

Sign and Sight's Books this Season

This is one of my favorite things on the internet (seriously). Every season, signandsight.com puts out a list of the ‘best books’ that have come out in Germany recently. It’s a great resource for us. Even though the list is usually pretty small, there’s always one book that gets me excited. This ...

George Saunders on Daniil Kharms

It’s a few days old now, but the New York Times review of Daniil Kharms’s Today I Wrote Nothing is worth checking out. Saunders does a good job of explaining how Kharms isn’t simply an “absurdist,” but an author who basically objected to the essential artifice of fiction: All of us who ...

Valles on Herbert

Alissa Valles on the poet she translated, Zbigniew Herbert: Until recently, visitors to Kraków, Poland, might have easily stumbled across a bit of graffiti on the ancient wall surrounding the Old Town. “We Will Fulfill Herbert’s Testament,” the text read, referring to Zbigniew Herbert, a poet of national pride and ...

America, Where We're Always Late

Over at the Literary Saloon, Michael Orthofer makes note of the Biblioasis International Translation Series, and Stephen Henighan’s recent speech about translations.. The thing that caught my eye thought was this bit about Angolan author Ondjaki, whose Good Morning Comrades will be the second book in the Biblioasis ...

Best Translations of 2007 (Update)

Rather than reply in the comments of the earlier post about the idea of a “Best Translations of 2007” list, I thought I’d post a little update and respond to the various questions people have asked about this. First off, I think we should definitely include poetry on this list. At first I was going to list ...

More Barba

The new Words Without Borders “Goodbye to All That: Partings”—includes a translation of the Andres Barba short story Nocturne translated by Lisa Dillman. Lisa’s review of Barba’s Katia’s Sister generated a good deal of interest, but unfortunately this book has yet to find an English ...

New Quarterly Conversation

The Winter ’08 issue of Quarterly Conversation is now available online. This issue has a special “Hispanic Literature” focus, including a piece by Scott Esposito on Enrique Vila-Matas, Marcelo Ballve on Cesar Aira, and Javier Moreno on Rodrigo Fresan. In addition, E.J. wrote a review of Jose Maria Eça ...

Joseph Conrad at 150

The Guardian on Joseph Conrad on the 150th anniversary of his birth: “I have never learned to trust it. I can’t trust it to this day … A dreadful doubt hangs over the whole achievement of literature.” Thus wrote Joseph Conrad, in an essay published in the Manchester Guardian Weekly on December 4 ...

NY Times Top 10 List

The NY Times just posted their Top 10 list for 2007, and the five fiction selections are actually pretty solid: Man Gone Down by Michael Thomas. (Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic) Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson. Translated by Anne Born. (Graywolf Press) The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño. Translated by Natasha ...

Miss Herbert and Translation

A.S. Byatt reviews Adam Thirwell’s Miss Herbert in the Financial Times: Miss Herbert is a thoughtful, and frequently hilarious, study of the nature of literary translation. It is also a work of art, a new form. Juliet Herbert was the English governess of Flaubert’s niece, Caroline. She wrote a translation of ...

NBCC's "Best Recommended"

This morning, the National Book Critics Circle unveiled its Best Recommended list, a monthly list consisting of five works of fiction, of nonfiction, and of poetry, ranked according to votes by NBCC members. John Freeman e-mailed me about this yesterday, and it’s a really intriguing idea. To come up with this list, ...

NYRB's Summer 2008 Titles

One of the most disorienting things about publishing is the time gap between when you first hear about a title and when it actually comes out. It’s really bad from the editing end of things—frequently you first encounter a book two-plus years before it’s published and on bookstore shelves. Even as a pure ...

War and Peace (again) and the Goal of Translation

I know that E.J. already wrote about James Wood’s review of War and Peace, but in reading the article last night, I had a couple of thoughts that I hope are worth sharing. In evaluating the new translation, Wood lays out the two basic translation camps: Literary translators tend to divide into what one could call ...

More End-of-Year Lists

As I mentioned before, I’m a big fan of end-of-the-year lists, even if they do tend to be fairly safe and uninteresting. I prefer the Guardian list because it’s a collection of “best books of the year” as recommended by other writers and cultural figures. This approach seems to lead to more ...

Esther Allen on reader's reports

Esther Allen—traductrice extraordinaire and Executive Director of the Center for Literary Translation at Columbia University—has a piece in The Guardian on reader’s reports. The reader’s report struggles to swim against this current but also has to take it into account. It’s a bit like being ...

War & Peace all the time

I know, I know. We’re always on about this War and Peace thing, but in the upcoming New Yorker James Wood writes one of the best reviews of War and Peace I’ve read from the batch that have followed the latest translations. It’s the good kind of review; the kind that makes you want to pick up the book ...

Andrzej Stasiuk's Dojczland

Signandsight.com has a translated review of Dojczland by the Polish author Andrzej Stasiuk, which is apparently topping the bestseller lists in Poland: As well as scrutinising today’s Germans, this slim volume – just 112 pages – also picks apart the Poles. At first glance it seems to be a travel book. Stasiuk ...

We love 'em too.

The Santa Cruz Sentinel writes a love letter to Edwin Frank and the New York Review of Books Classics series. We couldn’t agree more. via complete ...

Arguments about the Translation Quality of War and Peace

This post on Languagehat.com is fascinating, especially in the context of yesterday’s post on the way reviewers review translations. Over the past few weeks, there’s been an ongoing discussion of the new Pevear and Volokhonsky translation of War and Peace in the i>NY Times Reading Room. According to ...

Daniil Kharms in the NY Sun

It seems like a while since my last Ben Lytal post . . . Thankfully today in the NY Sun he has an interesting review of Daniil Kharms’s Today I Wrote Nothing, edited and translated by Matvei Yankelevich. Kharms was part of the OBERIU—a group of avant-garde, Russian writers, who are often categorized as ...

Translation Centers

There’s never a lack of interesting panels at ALTA, but “The Role of Translation Centers” was one of the best that I’ve ever attended. This panel brought together representatives from a number of different programs/centers to talk about the different things they’re doing, and the roles these ...

Preaching to the Choir — AKA Hating on Book-TV

I frequently complain about how far behind the times the publishing field is when it comes to technology. I’m not talking about e-books or single-copy pod machines (although there is that), but simply about the fact that there’s a frickin’ TV station for cats, yet when it comes to books there’s ...

Suggestions for Next Year

Overall, I think the inaugural Translation Marketplace at the Miami Book Fair International was a huge success. Similar to what happens at fairs like BEA and Frankfurt, I came away re-energized, feeling like what we’re doing is important, vital, and exciting. Aside from Martin Riker’s joke about not wanting his ...

"Latin American Literature in Translation" and "The Portuguese Tale"

These were the two panels I was unable to attend at the Miami Book Fair. Both sounded really interesting, with Aida Bardales (Criticas), Johanna Castill (Atria Books), Valerie Miles (Santillana), Lorin Stein (FSG), Andrea Montejo (agent), and David Unger (author) discussing Latin American literature in the first, and with ...

Boycotts, Bestsellers, and Banned Books

This was the panel that I was on, which makes it sort of difficult to write about. I do want to say that Michael Moore—the Chair of the PEN Translation Committee—did a fantastic job organizing and moderating this panel. He provided a lot of information about the Office of Foreign Assets Control, the recent ...

The Opening Session in Miami — Gloomy, Yet Optimistic

For those who aren’t familiar with the Miami Book Fair International, it’s the brainchild of Mitchell Kaplan, one of the smartest booksellers in America, and owner of Books and Books. The fair is one of the largest and liveliest in America and started in 1984 with the mission to “promote reading, encourage ...

Longenbach on new Dante translation

The University of Rochester’s own James Longenbach has a review of a new translation of Dante’s Paradiso in this Sunday’s New York Times book review: When Dante wrote the poem we call “The Divine Comedy,” he called it simply the “Commedia”: a story, beginning in sorrow and ending in joy, of one ...

Renaudot controversy

Unsurprisingly, there has been some controversy over the Renaudot surprise (Daniel Pennac’s Chagrin d’école was awarded the prize despite being left off the short list). Christophe Donner, who very nearly won the prize, has accused one of the jurors of manipulating the jury’s deliberations, and, as ...

Reimagining the Americas

Last night, Open Letter hosted a panel entitled “Commerce and Culture: The Impact of the Business of Books on the Literature of the Americas.” Moderated by Chad Post, the panel featured Lisa Dillman, who translates from Spanish and Catalan and is a lecturer in Spanish at Emory University; Jack Kirchoff, the book ...

Words Without Borders/Reading the World November Book Club

This month’s Words Without Borders book club is just getting underway, with Michael Orthofer of Complete Review discussing Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s Mandarins, which is published by Archipelago Books.. Orthofer is a book club master, so this should be a lot of ...

Weekly Roundup — November 2, 2007

This week on Three Percent, we: Learned that publishing in Lithuania is lucrative. Wait, what?! That one-legged Lithuanian lesbians don’t deserve arts funding (according to David Cameron). Announced the inaugural Open Letter list. Reviewed Fogwill’s Malvinas Requiem And coveted ...

Why Simenon Isn't Popular in the U.S.

The Guardian has a blog post today about Georges Simenon, praising the roman durs and speculating on his popularity: This relentlessly downbeat canon (the one exception among his straight novels was The Little Saint, which was very loosely based on the life of Marc Chagall) may be one reason why Simenon’s work has ...

So Jealous

Over at the Literary Saloon it appears that Michael Orthofer has received a galley of Nazi Literature in the Americas, the next Bolano book to be published in English. It’s due out from New Directions in February, which is a mere 1 . . . 2 . . . 3 . . . 4 months away. (A third of a year! Good God!) Well, it’s ...

Open Letter Article, Fall List, and Upcoming Event

This is a pretty loaded post, but this morning the new issue of UR’s Currents was released (which explains the above picture) and includes a long overview on Open Letter, including descriptions of our inaugural list of titles. The books don’t come out until Fall 2008 (the first will have a September 26th pub ...

The Publishing History of Lithuania

At the Frankfurt Book Fair, I picked up a number of “Book Publishing in ____” books from various cultural stands. Personally, I’m really interested in the business of publishing and to see how it developed in other countries is quite interesting. (In other words, this could develop into a series of posts . . ...

Robert Fagles Translation Prize

The addition of the Robert Fagles Translation Prize to the National Poetry Series was announced over the summer, and today, the Carcanet Press website has info about the winner: The National Poetry Series announced that Marilyn Hacker has been awarded the 2007 Robert Fagles Translation Prize. Ms. Hacker’s ...

Price, Literary Fiction, and the Desire to Buy

Ron Hogan has an interesting quote over at GalleyCat regarding the how to sell more literary fiction. When a potential consumer says “I can’t afford it,” Godin claims, that’s almost always not true. “What they are really trying to say,” he explains, “is, ‘it’s not ...

More Marai at WWB

The conversation about The Rebels continues today with an interview between Mark Sarvas and Arthur Philips. MS: Perhaps I’m reading too much into your New Yorker review, but the sense that I got was that you were at some pains to say nice things about a lesser work. I’ve mentioned that I think there’s a ...

More Fogwill

I first heard about Fogwill from Javier Molea at McNally Robinson, who insisted that I read him. (I think the phrase Javier kept repeating was “mind-blowing.”) It was a great coincidence to find that Serpent’s Tail had just published Malvinas Requiem (Los Pichiciegos), and an even greater coincidence to find ...

The Guardian on Fogwill

Funnily enough, Chad is going to run a review of Malvinas Requiem this week, and here it is in The Guardian: I’ve just finished reading a truly remarkable book: Malvinas Requiem by Rodolfo Fogwill. Despite first appearing in Argentina shortly before the end of the Falklands War in 1982, the translated edition was ...

And I Thought I Was a Bit Disorganized

According to the Washington Post: About one-sixth of the books, monographs and bound periodicals at the Library of Congress weren’t where they were supposed to be because of flaws in the systems for shelving and retrieving materials, according to a survey to be made public at a congressional hearing today. [. . ...

Taking Newspapers to Task

The Literary Saloon has a nice diatribe this morning about the pervasive “lazy-ass reporting” of translation prizes. Specifically, Orthofer takes the Guardian to task for yesterday’s article on Farouk Mustafa winning the Saif Ghobash Banipal prize for his translation of Khairy Shalaby’s novel The ...

Marai Discussion Continues . . .

It’s never too late to jump into the book group on Marai’s The Rebels that Mark Sarvas of The Elegant Variation is hosting over at Words Without Borders. The most recent post is an interview with David Leavitt, novelist and editor of Subtropics about how he came to excerpt part of The Rebels in his ...

"Facing Pages" Conference and Transitions

This past weekend, I attended Facing Pages 2007 a statewide literary conference organized by LitTAP and sponsored by the New York State Council on the Arts. The entire weekend of activities was fantastic, due in part to the natural beauty of the Adirondacks (the conference took place at the Minnowbrook Conference Center ...

"Facing Pages" Conference and Transitions

This past weekend, I attended Facing Pages 2007 a statewide literary conference organized by LitTAP and sponsored by the New York State Council on the Arts. The entire weekend of activities was fantastic, due in part to the natural beauty of the Adirondacks (the conference took place at the Minnowbrook Conference Center ...

Kurkov in the TLS

Powells reprints a review from the TLS of Andrey Kurkov’s latest novel to be translated into English — The President’s Last Love — which we mentioned briefly a few weeks ago: However, such a determined sense of the outward emphasizes what is often missing from The President’s Last Love: ...

LRB on Life and Fate

The LRB has a review of Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate: Vasily Grossman’s masterpiece Life and Fate is fascinating for many reasons, and one of them is the way in that it is both a pastiche and a personal statement; a conscious, cold-blooded attempt to sum up everything Grossman knew about the Great Patriotic ...

VQR on South America

The interactive map is pretty, yet kind of annoying, but the content of the new issue of Virginia Quarterly Review is pretty great. Entitled “South America in the 21st Century,” this issue has pieces by Daniel Alarcon, Edmundo Paz Soldan, Kristina Cordero, and an excerpt from Bolano’s Nazi Literature in ...

Your Face Tomorrow

The final book of Javier María’s trilogy has at long last been published. Veneno y sombra y adios is the third and lengthy book of Tu Rostro Mañana. At over 700 pages, this final volume completes the series that is close to nine years in the making. While the book is certainly being publicized as María’s ...

Chad Post on KRUI

KRUI, the University of Iowa’s public radio station, held a discussion this morning featuring our own Chad Post; Dedi Felman of Words Without Borders, Matvei Yankelevich of Ugly Duckling Presse, Hugh Ferrer, Associate Director of the International Writers Program, and Keisha Lynn, Project Assistant at the International ...

International Writing Program 40th Anniversary

Starting Sunday, the University of Iowa will be celebrating the 40th anniversary of the International Writing Program with a host of interesting events. Everything kicks off Sunday at 5:00 at Prairie Lights where Daniel Weissbort, Matvei Yankelevich, and Michael Judd will be reading. The complete list of events is ...

War, what is it good for?

We mentioned this a while ago, but Ecco and Knopf are at it again over their competing editions of War & Peace. Things appear to have taken a nasty turn. According to Ecco’s publisher, Dan Halpern: “Knopf was evidently so concerned about our competing translation that they had their translators write a response ...

Czechs still reading

The Czechs are still reading too.

It's All Frankfurt All the Time

With the Frankfurt Book Fair practically here, we’re rushing around the Open Letter offices desperately preparing for all the parties meetings. So things might be a bit quite online for the next few days. But come next week, we’re hoping to provide some image heavy posts about our first trip to the FBF. ...

Germans keep reading

It sounds like the Germans are still

Gym-Jazz en Español

El diccionario de uso español, a new and improved Spanish dictionary published by Maria Moliner, was unveiled this past Wednesday in Madrid. The dictionary has an incredible addition of 12,000 new terms. Moliner based her dictionary off of the Dictionary from the Academia Real, the Spanish equivalent of the Oxford English ...

Dostoevsky in 21st Century Japan

Literary Saloon commented on this earlier, but apparently the new translation of The Brothers Karamazov is a bit hit in Japan. Why? At a lecture in Tokyo in August, Kameyama explored possible reasons for the boom, saying that “Karamazov” depicts the “humble existence” of human beings who find ...

American Idol, but For Books!

Sure it’s innovative, fun, and John Freeman is involved, but I just can’t get on-board with the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award sponsored by Penguin, Amazon, and Hewlett Packard. From today through Nov. 5, contestants from 20 countries can submit unpublished manuscripts of English-language novels to Amazon, ...

Andrey Kurkov and the Translators

The Literary Saloon details what went wrong with the recent translation of Andrey Kurkov’s The President’s Last Love. I loved his Death and the Penguin and A Matter of Life and Death, so it’s too bad that something not-so-good seems to have happened to his latest book. Sometimes the translator just gets ...

Why Translate Poetry?

In James Buchan’s review of Paul Celan’s Snow Part/Schneepart and Other Poems he asks just this: Is there any purpose to translating poetry? A poem does not contain information of importance, like a signpost or a warning notice. If you do not understand what Sereni meant when he wrote “è la mia / sola ...

Translating from Scandinavian languages to French

As Danny points out, it’s a bit strange that this is written in English. It’s an older article, from 2005, but it’s a familiar sounding complaint, despite the fact that it’s a French translator talking about Scandinavian books. After over a quarter of a century in the trade, I have been asked to ...

The State of Publishing

Although the actual event took place last fall, Ed Champion pointed out that the Virginia Quarterly Review now has a podcast and transcript online of “The Business of the Book” panel that was part of LWC}NYC. This event featured four major publishing figures (Jonathan Burhnam, publisher of HarperCollins; Morgan ...

More Love for the NY Sun

I completely agree with the Literary Saloon, the New York Sun is very impressive in its books coverage. Really. I don’t know who reads it, but if you’re interested in reviews of interesting fiction, the Sun is one of the best places to look. ...

Jelinek's Magnum Opus from Yale?

Literary Saloon has some info about the new issue of the New York Review of Books (not available online yet), including a bit about an exchange between Gitta Honegger and Tim Parks on his piece How to Read Elfriede Jelinek. In arguing her point, Honegger references Die Kinder der Toten (The Children of the Dead), which was ...

Metafiction from Sweden

I feel like I’m pretty knowledgeable about international authors, but I have to admit that I’ve never heard of Swedish author Klas Östergren, whose latest novel is reviewed in today’s New York Sun: Klas Östergren is hailed as one of Sweden’s most important living writers. Swedish critics have ...

Editors Buzz Panel

The one panel from Monday that hasn’t gotten a lot of coverage online is the Editors Buzz Panel. Consisting of French, German, and American editors (and Scott Moyers from Wylie—lot more below), this panel was an opportunity to highlight some really interesting forthcoming books. Paul Otchakovsky-Laurens talked ...

Promoting International Literature Online

E.J. already posted about this yesterday, but on Monday there were a series of events at the Deutsches Haus in New York about French and German literature and related to the Editors Trip that took place earlier this year. Anyway, I was on the Promoting International Literature Online panel, which was pretty interesting, ...

LA Times on Sunflower

The LA Times has a review, which we overlooked these many weeks, of Gyula Krúdy’s Sunflowers, out now from the consistently incredible New York Review Books. It sounds fantastic. Here, for example, is one of his translators, the usually sober-minded poet George Szirtes, describing Krúdy’s Sindbad stories ...

Literary Saloon at the Editors Exchange

The Literary Saloon has some coverage of a panel that Chad was on, called ‘Promoting Literature in Translation Online’: While familiar with the sites, it was interesting to hear what they were doing and what they had planned, especially as several of the sites are in the process of being overhauled (or, in ...

France Sure Does Have a Lot of Book Prizes

According to the Literary Saloon, Prix-Litteraires.net is the best place to keep track of all the longlists, shortlists, and winners of the French book prizes. It’s a bit daunting though . . . The Literary Saloon also points out that the longlists for the Prix Médicis and Prix Renaudot have both been announced. ...

Michael Ondaatje on the Internationalism of English Lit

The complete interview is only available in German, but the preview on signandsight.com is pretty intriguing. “Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children (from 1981) changed English literature. Before it, there was an author by the name of G.V. Desani who wrote a novel called All about H. Hatterr (1948). That ...

The Process of Reading

Conversational Reading has a post on Carlin Romano’s review of Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid, a book on the “unnatural yet wonderful” process of reading. Because “the act of reading is not natural” in the sense of “genetically organized,” the brain must ...

Antibooks v. Novels — Just Guess Who's Winning

In the Sydney Morning Herald, Sherman Young argues against buying “antibooks,” those book-like objects that convince us to buy them for their hook. “A hook that contains a life-changing promise, a movie tie-in, a catchy, timely premise or an author who is famous for just about anything except ...

Changes at The Nation

According to PW, Adam Shatz, the book review editor at The Nation for the past four years is leaving for the London Review of Books. John Palatella—formerly of Columbia Journalism Review—will be taking over. Sounds like The Nation plans on keeping up its excellent commitment to book coverage. Some changes ...

Helvetica

We mentioned it Helvetica the movie last month, and today’s NY Sun review has further peaked my interest in seeing this. After watching “Helvetica,” you’ll never look at the world in the same way again. That’s because you’ll suddenly start noticing what this smart, breezy documentary ...

New NYRB

The September 27th issue of the New York Review of Books is now online, and has some interesting articles, including a piece by Christian Caryl on Vladimir Sorokin’s Ice. Over at the Literary Saloon they point out that this issue—the “Fall Books Preview”—is surprisingly lacking in fiction ...

Coming: The Googlization of Everything

I’m a huge fan of Google—especially of the Google Reader, which has revolutionized the way I use the internet—but even so, am really interested in this project that was just announced on if:book. We’re just a couple of days away from launching what promises to be one of our most important projects ...

Reykjavík International Literature Festival 2007

The Reykjavik Lit Festival runs from September 9th through the 15th, and the full schedule of events is available online. As pointed out in this overview, the “biggest” international name is Coetzee, but personally I’d love to see the events with Bragi Olafsson (Open Letter will be publishing his novel ...

Short vs. Long

Personally, I think there’s a place for both—Ben Kunkel’s enormous review of Bolano in the new LRB is worth it, although I tend to prefer short reviews like in The Believer that whet my appetite for a book—but here’s a short (850-words) piece by Michael O’Donnell in defense of ...

Knopf rejections

The New York Times had a really fantastic article about Knopf’s archives at the University of Texas. It details some of the authors and books they’ve rejected: For almost a century, Knopf has been the gold standard in the book trade, publishing the works of 17 Nobel Prize-winning authors as well as 47 ...

Steve Wasserman Interview

Critical Mass has a really interesting interview with Steve Wasserman following up on some of the ideas Wasserman wrote about in Goodbye to All That, a long piece on book reviewing he recently published in the Columbia Journalism Review. Both the article and the interview are worth checking out, and although bloggers will ...

New Bookforum

The new issue of Bookforum is out, with a number of interesting articles available online. There’s a review of Geert Mak’s In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century, Zakes Mda’s Cion, Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s Mandarins, Terézia Mora’s Day In Day Out and Christian Oster’s The Unforeseen. Looks ...

A Bit More on the Sony Reader

At The Book Depository, Mark Thwaite has a longish post on the Sony Reader. Most of it is a recap of this review, which E.J. wrote about last week. Mark does make a couple of interesting comments though: I’d like to question why [Google Books and the Sony Reader] dominate publishers’ thoughts so much. ...

It's How Good?

Michiko Kakutani on Junot Diaz’s Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: a wondrous, not-so-brief first novel that is so original it can only be described as Mario Vargas Llosa meets Star Trek meets David Foster Wallace meets Kanye West. Really. I probably would’ve went with Sabrina the Teenage Age instead of ...

PW on a Couple Translations

This week’s fiction reviews at Publishers Weekly includes a couple reviews of translations worth noting. They gave a starred review to Victor Serge’s The Unforgiving Years, which is forthcoming from New York Review Books, and is a title we’d very much like to review here. The PW reviewer summed it up by ...

The Fall Quarterly Conversation

The Fall issue of The Quarterly Conversation is online now, and features reviews of Gabriel Josipovici’s Goldberg: Variations, Dumitru Tsepeneag’s The Vain Art of the Fugue, and Tadeusz Rozewicz’s new poems. Definitely go and check it ...

Books We Missed

The Observer ran an interesting list (part 2 available here) over the weekend of overlooked titles—“brilliant but underrated novels that deserve a second chance to shine.” To compile the list, they asked fifty celebrated writers nominated their favorite books, resulting in an eclectic group of books ...

On Josipovici's The Inventory

Over at Ready, Steady, Book, there’s an interesting look at Gabriel Josiopivici’s The Inventory (1968) and what it attempts to accomplish. But for Josipovici, incompleteness is itself precisely one of the things that the realist novel shuns by assuming that it already is the perfect vehicle for anything one ...

LibraryThing — Two Years Old

LibraryThing,, the online personal book cataloging/social network for readers is celebrating its second birthday, and posted a bunch of interesting statistics about its success. A year ago we had just hit five million books on our birthday, today we’re just a few hours away from 18 million books. We have ...

More Bolano

The Bolano love just doesn’t stop . . . This week it’s Ben Kunkel in the London Review of Books on The Savage Detectives, Last Evenings on Earth, and Amulet. Bolaño’s desperado image is a large part of his appeal. His revolutionary politics and the personal risk they entailed, the movement he founded, his ...

Red Lights

In her introduction to this new New York Review Books edition, Anita Brookner nails the Simenon “formula”: The formula is simple but subtle. A life will go wrong, usually because of an element in the protagonist’s make-up which impels him to self-destruct, to willfully seek disgrace, exclusion, ruin in his search ...

Naipaul on Walcott in The Guardian

V.S. Naipaul recalls reading Derek Walcott’s poems for the first time in The Guardian But in the strangest way something like that had happened. The young poet became famous among us. He came from the island of St Lucia. If Trinidad was a dot on the map of the world, it could be said that St Lucia was a dot on that ...

My Take on Reading in America

A few days removed from the AP-Ispos survey on reading (or not) in America and John Freeman’s response to this, there are a couple of reactions and ideas that have stuck with me and, I think, are worth fleshing out a bit. First off, John Freeman’s take is not perfect. Obviously, the Reading Room in Las Vegas is a great ...

Branding for Publishers

Yesterday, Joe Wikert wrote an interesting post about publisher brands in response to a “post by Lissa Warren” on the Huffington Post. Quick, name you favorite book. Now, quick, name who published it. Gotcha, didn’t I? It’s a bit cute, but Warren’s point is ...

Big Issues at Calder-Oneworld Classics

There’s a lot that could be written about John Calder—both good ad bad. He’s done a lot for world literature, yet has run into issues at various times involving not making royalty payments, going bankrupt, etc. That said, he’s the perfect representative of a classic, old-school publisher who is ...

Obituary: Edward Seidensticker

As mentioned in the Complete Review, translator from the Japanese Edward Seidensticker passed away at the age of 86. From the obit in The Asahi Shimbun: The professor emeritus at Columbia University in New York translated dozens of Japanese works, but he is perhaps best known for completing a full-length English ...

Simenon in the Philadelphia Inquirer

Frank Wilson’s review of Simenon’s The Engagement is pretty much just a plot summary, but it does point to the aspect of the book that I found most intriguing: Human beings, as portrayed in this novel, range narrowly from the merely ordinary and banal to the mean-spirited, bitter, and grasping. What makes it ...

New World Literature Today

The September issue of World Literature Today is now available, with some content—including the World Lit in Review section—available online. “Endangered Languages” is the focus, and there’s also an article on Estonian crime writing. ...

Our Favorite Cover Design Trend

Cover designs without titles. The Book Design Review brings note to this cover. Unfortunately, the book itself is not notable, but we’re a fan of this movement (seemingly, an all-in wet dream by the designer and a gutsy marketing move, to boot) that one can imagine must have a dickens of a time making it through the ...

Weekly Roundup — August 24

Highlights from the past week: We ran a bit of the New York Times review of Peter Handke’s latest book, which wasn’t nearly as interesting as the fiction roundup NPR featured Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser as a You Must Read This pick; We found some interesting info about a predecessor to ...

Fall Roundup from the San Francisco Chronicle

In today’s San Francisco Chronicle Oscar Villalon has a Fall preview, with a decent—and useful—list at the end of forthcoming titles. Of course most of the books features are the “big” titles—like Alice Sebold’s latest, which is destined to be the kind of crap that I mentioned ...

One Way to Become Famous

Complete Review has a great summary of Canadian “author” Shahir Shahidsaless’s attempt to sue Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi. A Canadian author sued Nobel Peace Prize winner and Iranian human rights activist Shirin Ebadi Thursday, saying she reneged on getting a publisher for a book they had ...

John Freeman on America's Non-Reading Culture

John Freeman—President of the National Book Critics Circle—has a post at his Guardian books blog about the recent report that 25% of Americans didn’t read a book last year. America has always had one of the lowest literacy rates in the western world. The former book review editor of the LA Times, Steve ...

Comments: In Case You Missed Them

After seeing how many interesting comments have been posted in the past few weeks, we thought it would be useful to recap these every so often and make sure the useful info gets doesn’t get lost. First off, as Steve Wasserman pointed out, he will be “assigning books for review” at Truthdig and only ...

Rentrée Littéraire

For anyone interested in French literature, this is a special time of year. And as cited in Complete Review, here are three overview articles (sorry, all in French) of the 700+ titles about to drop: Le Figaro, Libération, and La République des Lettres. If you find any others of interest, please let us ...

Obituary: Qurratulain Hyder

A leading writer of Urdu fiction, Qurratulain Hyder died at the age of 80. Along with her short stories, she was the author of 12 novels. From the BBC: The theme of many of Hyder’s books was the pain caused by the partition of the Indian subcontinent. Her best known novel is the epic Aag ka dariya (River ...

Bulgakov in The Guardian

Over the weekend, The Guardian ran James Meek’s intro to the new edition of A Dog’s Heart by Mikhail Bulgakov. Generally overshadowed by The Master and Margarita, A Dog’s Heart sounds really interesting, especially in Meek’s description of an underground reading that was infiltrated by secret police ...

NY Times Fiction Roundup

There’s a great fiction chronicle Sunday’s New York Times Book Review by Alison McCulloch. A few international writers are featured, including two of my favorites: Jean Echenoz and Robert Walser. Ravel by Jean Echenoz has been getting some decent praise, and Ms. McCulloch calls it a “beautifully musical ...

Peter Handke

The New York Times Sunday Book Review had a review of the latest of Handke’s novels, Crossing the Sierra de Gredos, to be translated into English. It’s not so positive: Handke’s didactic refusal to let us make of his book what we will, his sedulous effort to keep us dizzy and confused, is, more than ...

Weekly Roundup — August 17

Highlights from this week: The St. Louis Cardinals swept the Milwaukee Brewers, and as of this morning, are only 2.5 games out of first. This has absolutely nothing to do with international literature; We took a look at the Espresso Book Machine (Frankenstein machine prints books!), gave a bit of love to DailyLit ...

We're #35!

I’m sure academic offices across the country are abuzz today about the release of the U.S. News and World Report 2008 rankings. I have nothing much to say about this questionable ranking system, except to mention that University of Rochester came in at 35, ahead of University of Wisconsin, University of California-San ...

VP Book Club

This news is a couple days old, but Viking Penguin recently launched a new online resource for reading groups: Unique features of www.vpbookclub.com include the ability to personalize the site’s homepage, regular posts from authors, editors, and sales and marketing people at Viking and Penguin, as well as a ...

Obvious Omission

Yesterday there were two reviews of Bruce Watson’s new book Sacco and Vanzetti: The Men, the Murders and the Judgment of Mankind (one appeared in the New York Times, the other in the New York Sun) and both neglected to mention the best book about S&V — Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die! by Mark Binelli. Seriously, this ...

José Maria Eça de Queirós

Benjamin Lytal is at it again, this time reviewing José Maria Eça de Queirós’ The Maias. He is considered the greatest Portuguese writer, and I was just thinking about checking into him; Agualusa kept bringing him up in The Book of Chameleons. As usual, New Directions is way ahead of me. I wish they weren’t ...

Independent Bookstore Feature

Not sure why we didn’t cotton on to this sooner, but Maud Newton’s running a fantastic series of articles on independent bookstores this month. So far, she’s had: Jim Hanas write on Burke’s Book Store in Memphis, TN; Mark Athitakis on DC’s Books for America; Sean Carman on D.C.’s ...

African Writing

Complete Review, which is active every day of the week, posted over the weekend about Afam Akeh and African Writing, the web magazine he’s editing. This is the first I’ve heard of African Writing, but I’m very impressed. There’s a lot of interesting content, including a list of 50 contemporary ...

Indian Lit Follow-Up

Nice to see The Guardian branching out and choosing Siddhartha Deb write on Indian Literature. As Scott Esposito at Conversational Reading points out, within the past couple months, the New York Review of Books, Harper’s, and the New Yorker have all had articles by Pankaj Mishra on new books from ...

Congrats to the Literary Saloon

Turns out today is the Literary Saloon’s fifth anniversary. Congrats on your first 4,454

Weekly Roundup — August 10

Hightlights from this week on Three Percent: Industry-wide, the big news of the week was the Booker longlist, which has been described as “quiet”; Stuff finally came out from Dalkey Archive. Namely, the Spring 2007 D.A. Annual issue of RCF came out (disappointing), as did CONTEXT 20 Speaking of ...

The Model

Lars Saabye Christensen’s last novel to be translated into English, The Half Brother, won the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize in 2002 (the year after one of my favorite novelists, Jan Kjaerstad), and was shortlisted for the 2005 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. The epic family saga, which runs to some 700 ...

The Open Library

Scott McLemee at Inside Higher Ed has a short interview with Aaron Swartz, who in only 21, has already helped create RSS, developed Infogami, and is working on a new project called The Open Library. Open Library is a new online tool for finding information about books – even (perhaps especially) for titles that are ...

Ambitious Slavic Literary Project

We posted about CONTEXT 20 finally being online yesterday, and today, Complete Review points out a really interesting idea mentioned in the Letter from Macedonia: Pen Centers from eleven Slavic countries selected 110 novels from these countries written from 1989 to the present (ten novels from each country), in October ...

The Literary Translation Situation in Brunei Darussalam

Michael at Complete Review has a great post this morning about the literary scene in Brunei Darussalam. Recently, there was a meeting of high ranking representatives to “express their concern over the future of the literature scenario in Brunei Darussalam.” They proposed for major works of local literary ...

NY Sun on Tolstoy Bio/Essay

The New York Sun has a review of a new essay/biography on Tolstoy’s marriage, featuring photographs taken by his wife, Sophia. It sounds like it has the potential to be a really fascinating book, but Mr. Munson doesn’t really fancy it. It’s doubly unfortunate, then—and a reflection of Ms. ...

Antonio Munoz Molina in the NY Sun

Thankfully, Antonio Munoz Molina’s In Her Absence has been getting at least some good attention. Jon Welch, buyer at Talking Leaves, mentioned this book in glowing terms to me a few weeks ago, and today’s review in the NY Sun—the bastion of excellent reviews of international fiction—makes it sound ...

Aflame Books

Thanks to Complete Review for calling attention to Aflame Books, a new press in the UK dedicated to “Sharp writing from the warm world.” Aflame Books is an independent publisher based in the UK. It publishes, in English translation, works from Africa, Latin America and the Middle East; works whose brilliance ...

Ismail Kadare essay

Scott has a link to an essay on Ismail Kadare, which appears in the Chattahoochee Review. The Palace of Dreams, written in Tirana between 1976 and 1981, takes us into an entirely different universe set at the fictitious crossroads of a twentieth century dictatorship and the fourteenth century Ottoman Empire. Characters ...

Spring 07 Issue of RCF Now Available

Not sure exactly when this came out, but the Spring 2007 issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction now shows up on the Dalkey site as being available. It’s the first “Dalkey Archive Annual” and is made up of excerpts of Dalkey titles. What’s disappointing is that these are all old Dalkey ...

Weekly Roundup — August 3

Highlights from this week on Three Percent: We raved about the ever-fascinating UbuWeb, especially UbuWeb Radio and the Dali movie homage to Raymond Roussel; One of my all-time favorite TV shows is Lost, and I gleefully fed my favorite addiction by posting the new Dharma video, which first aired appeared at ...

New Believer

The new issue of The Believer is now available, and includes an article on Boris Vian and a review of RTW 2007 book Vain Art of the ...

Amazon Takes to Advance Marketing

Amazon Vine is a new program that Amazon.com is launching to put free copies of forthcoming books into the hands of their most vocal reviewers. As they put it: Vine helps our vendors generate awareness for new and pre-release products by connecting them with the voice of the Amazon community: our reviewers. Vine ...

Espresso Book Machine

Back before this blog was live, I posted a couple things about Jason Epstein’s book revolution and the Espresso Book Machine. Well, it’s back in the New York Times today, following a demonstration in a midtown branch of the New York Public Library. The machine, which can “produced a book from digital code ...

Zimbabwe Book Fair

As Orthofer notes at the Literary Saloon it doesn’t sound like this fair is going all that well: By end of business yesterday, about 102 stands had been taken up by more than 80 exhibitors, mainly Zimbabweans. (Whole article available via The ...

The New Yorker, Bringing the International Fiction

Now if they’d only get rid of the lame cartoons, I’d really like the New Yorker. Anyway, on top of the Kunkel review of Robert Walser, this week’s New Yorker includes some pieces from the OBERIU-founding, grand-absurdist Daniil Kharms. Any Kharms books, stories, excerpts you can get your hands on are ...

Bolano in Letras Libres

For all Spanish readers, Letras Libres has a review by Rodrigo Fresan of the last two books by Roberto Bolano to be published posthumously. Hopefully New Directions will bring these out after they finish doing all the others . . . And in case you’re wondering, Nazi Literature in the Americas, is the next one ND is ...

Gunter Grass

Andreas Huyssen reviews Gunter Grass’ memoir Peeling the Onion in The Nation, and really gets into the onion

The Death of Publishers

Mark Thwaite has an interesting post on The Bookseller.com about an ongoing discussion at Mssv about the “Death of Publishers.” The basic sentiment at Mssv is that as soon as it’s as easy to “rip” books (converting them into a digital, transferable format) as it is to rip CDs or movies, ...

The Engagement

At least in terms of output, Georges Simenon is a Herculean writer. He makes Joyce Carol Oates look like a slacker, having written over 400 novels and short story collections in his lifetime. And if that weren’t enough, he added to his mythic stature through fun games like this: In 1927, Georges Simenon, the ...

Village Voice on Robert Walser

I have to admit that I’m hesitant to post anything about the Village Voice on Three Percent, since I’m still pissed about what they did to Ed Park and the books section, and I think that David Blum set the Voice back a decade through his general, overwhelming incompetence. (I mean, really. Check out this article ...

Polish Poetry in the NY Times

Somewhat surprisingly, this weekend’s New York Times Book Review has a full-length review of Zbigniew Herbert’s Collected Poems, which was a RTW book this year. And I can’t disagree with David Orr’s opening sentiment: . . . it’s impossible to know which country has the best writers, let alone ...

Swedish Academy Intrigues

Literary Saloon has an interesting piece about the recent passing of Swedish poet Lars Forssell (1928-2007). The loss of Forssell is one thing, the fact that he was Chair No. 4 on the committee that decides the Nobel Prize for Literature is another . . . All of this is recapped in the article mentioned above, which ...

Crazy Norwegian Poll

Complete Review has an interesting post today about a recent poll in which readers voted on the best Norwegian novel of all time. Ibsen? Hamsun? Undset? Lars Saabye Christensen? Jan Kjaerstad? All losers. The winner was Gert Nygardshaug’s Mengele Zoo, a mystery novel by an author Michael Orthofer hasn’t even ...

Jelinek's Greed

Critical Mass has a review of Elfriede Jelinek’s Greed as part of their “What to Read This Summer” series (which, BTW, is totally backing up my belief that summer reading shouldn’t be limited to craptastic books like The Manny). To me, Jelinek is one of the most controversy-causing Nobel recipients ...

Another Interesting Writer in the Sun

What is it with the books coverage in the NY Sun? Totally makes the daily Times look like a provincial rag . . . Anyway, Benjamin Ivry has a review of Victor Segalen’s Steles, a collection of prose poems just out from Wesleyan University Press in today’s Sun. I personally don’t know much about Segalen, ...

Nadas in the NY Sun

The new Peter Nadas book is out— Fire and Knowledge —and received a nice, thoughtful review from Benjamin Lytal in today’s New York Sun. (I may be repeating myself, but seriously, Ben gets to review the cream of the crop . . . ) The book sounds interesting, but also seems to be one of those mishmash ...