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“The Discomfort of Evening” by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld [#WITMonth]

In an amazing coincidence, we were already planning on running this excerpt from The Discomfort of Evening today as part of our Women in Translation Month coverage, and lo and behold, the book just happened to win the International Man Booker this morning! Congrats to Marieke Lucas Rijneveld and Michele Hutchison, and to ...

Dutch Guest of Honor at the Beijing International Book Fair

The Beijing Book Fair kicks off this week, and The Netherlands is this year’s Country of Honor. In order to celebrate this, the always industrious Dutch have put together Open Landscape-Open Book a pretty sizable program to promote Dutch literature. Although the Netherlands is the guest of honour this year, we ...

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 ...

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 ...

Open Letter Spring 09 Catalog: Rupert by Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer

Info about the first three books from the spring 2009 Open Letter list can be found here. Today we’re covering our June title, Rupert: A Confession by Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer. The premise of this book is that Rupert has been accused of a terrible crime (which isn’t revealed in full until the very end) and has to ...

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, ...