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 ...
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Mario Vargas Llosa Injecting Imagination and Novelty into Democratic Life [Month of a Thousand Forests]
First up today in the Month of a Thousand Forests series is Mario Vargas Llosa, who you might know from such books as Conversation in the Cathedral or Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, neither of which he chose to include as his “best piece of writing.” Instead he turned to a couple of his more recent books: The ...
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"In Praise of Reading and Fiction" [Vargas Llosa's Nobel Prize Speech]
Although the video version isn’t available yet, the full transcript of Mario Vargas Llosa’s Nobel Prize speech is now available online. Below is the opening, and if you’re interested in reading a Vargas Llosa book because of this, I’d highly highly highly recommend Conversations in the Cathedral. ...
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FSG's "Work in Progress"
As any and all long-time (or probably even short-time) readers of Three Percent know, we pick on publisher websites quite a bit. (See for instance, any and every post about Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.) Most often they deserve it for many of the same reasons that we like to make fun of book ads. I’m totally ripping off ...
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And In Case You Weren't Already Enamored With Translators . . .
Over at the BOA Editions blog there’s a guest post from Idra Novey—poet and translator of The Clean Shirt of It by Paulo Henriques Britto—about “bad girls” and translation: Whenever this happens, I think of an interview I read a few years ago in the New York Times Magazine with the writer ...
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Vargas Llosa honored by the French
Taking advantage of Vargas Llosa being in NYC for the PEN World Voices Festival: The Cultural Counselor of the French Embassy, Kareen Rispal, conferred the insignia of Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters on the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa yesterday in a ceremony in New York. In accepting the honor, Mr. ...
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Vargas Llosa's The Bad Girl
The Guardian has a ‘digested read’ of Vargas Llosa’s The Bad Girl: The most notable event of the summer of 1950 was the arrival in Miraflores of two flamboyant Chilean sisters. I was just 15 and fell in love with the older one, Lily, like a calf. We were inseparable; we held hands, though she teased me ...
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