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 ...
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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 ...
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Nothing Adds Up Until You Overthrow the System
It's weird trying to write this today, May 31st, with all that's going on across the country—and around the world—right now. The images of our overly-militarized, super aggro, disgusting police officers running unarmed people over, throwing women to the ground, shooting teenagers with pepper balls and rubber bullets (that ...
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“Will and Testament” by Vigdis Hjorth [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. Elisa Wouk Almino is a Los Angeles-based writer and literary translator from Portuguese. She is the translator of This House(Scrambler Books, 2017), a collection of poetry by Ana ...
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The Lives of Things
Imagine a world where objects, utensils, machines, or installations (OUMIs) take on lives of their own, independent of their owners. A world where skin grafted to the palms of our hands identifies us as a particular category, A-Z, that grants us absolute power over others (those below us) or renders us perfectly subservient ...
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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, ...
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