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Interview with Anne McLean [Read This Next]

As part of this week’s Read This Next feature on Julio Cortazar’s From the Observatory, we just posted an interview with translator Anne McLean about this book, Cortazar in general, and the other authors she’s worked on. You can read the whole piece here, and here’s a short excerpt: CWP: As a ...

Egyptian Writers

Last week, The Millions posted a very interesting piece by Pauls Toutonghi entitled Six Egyptian Writers You Don’t Know But You Should. Toutonghi opens by describing a very common problem: In Cairo, in March, the city had a surplus of intellectual energy. Literature, it seemed, might just be at the vanguard of ...

Susan Bernofsky on The Marketplace of Ideas

This week’s Marketplace of Ideas features an hour-long interview with super-translator Susan Bernofsky about Robert Walser, Yoko Tawada, Kobo Abe, and “the uses of literary hybridity.” Definitely worth listening to (and subscribing to on iTunes—this is a consistently good podcast), and Susan’s ...

From the Observatory by Julio Cortazar [Read This Next]

This week’s Read This Next book is From the Observatory by Julio Cortazar. Wonderfully translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean, this will be available from Archipelago Books in early August. In the words of Complete Review’s Michael Orthofer, this book is “striking, odd,” which is just about ...

The Land at the End of the World

Judas’s Asshole. Now that title would have stood out at Barnes and Noble. Think of the cover art possibilities. Margaret Jull Costa explains that this original title of this novel, Os Cus de Judas, comes from a Portuguese colloquialism. When I moved to a town in the Northeast earlier in my life people called it ...

Latest Review: "The Land at the End of the World" by António Lobo Antunes

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Grant Barber on António Lobo Antunes’s The Land at the End of the World, translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa and available from W.W. Norton. Antunes is a long-time favorite of mine. I really love his novel Act of the Damned. And Fado ...

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Three Percent #8: Summer Recommendations

This week, we finish up our John Locke discussion by quoting from his How I Sold 1 Million Ebooks in Five Months, and then move on to discussing good literature, including six book recommendations for the summer. Tom’s Picks: How I Became a Nun by Cesar Aira, translated from the Spanish by Chris ...