Why This Book Should Win: The 10 Fiction Finalists
Now that the ten finalists for the 2014 BTBA in Fiction have been announced, it’s worth taking a look back at the reasons “why these books should win” according to the judges and other readers. Below is a list of all ten finalists, with links to their individual write ups along with a key quote from each. ...
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2014 Best Translated Book Awards: Fiction Finalists
All 25 titles on the 2014 Fiction Longlist are spectacular, so I’m sure this was a pretty brutal decision making process. Anyway, here are your final ten books: Horses of God by Mahi Binebine, translated from the French by Lulu Norman (Morocco; Tin House) Blinding by Mircea Cărtărescu, translated from the ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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Arnon Grunberg's "The Quantified Writer" Project
I don’t know much about this Quantified Writer Project, but seeing that it combines two of my favorite things—Arnon Grunberg’s work and neuroscience—I feel like I really should. Here’s the basic description from Arnon’s website: Dutch author Arnon Grunberg and his publishing house, ...
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Arnon Grunberg in The Believer
Arnon Grunberg—author of a number of books, including Tirza, which is one of my favorite Open Letter titles from 2013—has a really fantastic essay about a trip to Thessaloniki in the new issue of The Believer. You need to read the whole long thing, but here’s a bit to entice you: Until recently, wars ...
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Arnon Grunberg on Dubrakva Ugresic
Last week, The Millions ran this excellent piece by Arnon Grunberg on fellow Open Letter author Dubravka Ugresic: The Russian word poshlost, according to a seminal essay by Vladimir Nabokov, has a number of possible definitions — “cheap,” “inferior, “scurvy,” “tawdry” — but is perhaps best grasped by ...
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