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In the Train

You know those niche documentaries about people who are really into some specialized hobby or interest—old-school arcade games, typography, central Asian throat singing? The ones that make you think: wow, these people are so kooky, they make me seem normal! and yet at the same time you can almost, in a way, see where ...

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 ...

The Year in Translations (So Far): "In the Train" by Christian Oster

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 ...

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 ...

The Unforeseen

In Small Worlds, Warren Motte categorizes Christian Oster as a “minimalist,” placing him in a group with other young French writers such as Jean Echenoz, Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Marie Redonnet, and Eric Chevillard, who “exploit the principle of formal economy in their writing.” Each does so it his/her ...

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 ...