Frances Riddle Reading Martín Felipe Castagnet [Granta]
In addition to a series of posts about the 25 pieces in the new Granta, I asked a handful of the translators to provide short videos introducing the piece they worked on for the issue and reading a section from it. Up today is Frances Riddle, who translated Martín Felipe Castagnet's "Our Windowless Home." ...
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Polish Reportage [#WITMonth]
Starting in 2021, Open Letter will be launching a "Polish Reportage" series. This came out of a trip I made to Krakow back in 2017 (when the Astros cheated their way to a World Series, which, remember when that mattered?) to attend the Conrad Festival and meet with a variety of authors, editors, and the like. I've always been ...
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Three Percent #178: This Podcast Is Not Contagious
Today's episode is all about small presses. Chad and Tom breakdown, discuss, elaborate on, and praise, Matvei Yankelevich's recent Poetry post 'The New Normal: How We Gave Up the Small Press." This is a rather wide-ranging conversation about grant applications, distribution for small presses, AWP, professionalization, how ...
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Three Percent BONUS EPISODE: Antonia Lloyd-Jones and Sean Bye on Polish Reportage
As part of Nonfiction in Translation Month at Three Percent, Polish translators Antonia Lloyd-Jones and Sean Bye came on the podcast to explain Polish Reportage, talk about some key figures and forthcoming books, and more or less introduce Open Letter's new nonfiction line. Some of the titles mentioned on this podcast ...
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“Ebola 76” by Amir Tag Elsir [Why This Book Should Win]
Today’s first entry into the Why This Book Should Win series is from Riffraff co-owner, Three Percent podcast co-host, and French translator, Tom Roberge. Ebola 76 by Amir Tag Elsir, translated from the Arabic by Chris Bredin and Emily Danby (Sudan, Darf Publishers) Sudanese writer (and doctor) Amir Tag Elsir’s ...
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Three Percent #135: Polish Reportage and a Lot of Sci-Fi Talk
After discussing the incredibly long Dublin Literary Prize longlist, Chad and Tom discuss Polish Reportage, Stanislaw Lem’s book covers, ordering books for Riffraff, and a serial killer. UPDATE: Here’s a link to all of the new Polish Lem covers. And the one for His Master’s Voice. This week’s ...
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“French Perfume” by Amir Tag Elsir [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series is by Najeebah Al-Ghadban. We will be running two (or more!) of these posts every business day leading up to the announcement of the finalists. French Perfume by Amir Tag Elsir, translated from the Arabic by William M. Hutchins (Sudan, Antibookclub) It may be ...
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2013 Susan Sontag Prize for Translation
The 2013 Susan Sontag Prize for Translation was just announced, with Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody receiving this year’s honors for his translation of Benjamin Fondane’s Ulysse. Not much info up on the Sontag site yet, although I think this literally just went online. (I’ve been refreshing that page like a ...
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Susan Sontag 2012 Prize for Translation
The Susan Sontag Foundation recently announced Julia Powers and Adam Morris as the winners of their 2012 Prize for Translation. Every June, the $5,000 prize is awarded to a literary translator under the age of 30 over the course of five months, during which the proposed project must be completed. The award was established to ...
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"Upstaged" by Jacques Jouet [25 Days of the BTBA]
As with years past, we’re going to spend the next three weeks highlighting the rest of the 25 titles on the BTBA fiction longlist. We’ll have a variety of guests writing these posts, all of which are centered around the question of “Why This Book Should Win.” Hopefully these are funny, accidental, ...
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Juan Gabriel Vasquez's "The Secret History of Costaguana"
This may be thanks to Bolano and his massive appeal, but it seems (to me at least), like Spanish literature is going through a sort of a “Second Boom.” Not so much in terms of a shared aesthetic, but in terms of having captured the imaginations of American publishers. In addition to standards like Javier Marias ...
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On Translating for the Stage
Click here for Joanne Pottlitzer’s introduction to her essay. This piece was delivered last month at an event at the Americas Society in NYC. It is my pleasure to share a few words with you on translating for the stage and on the journey of translating José Triana’s Palabras comunes. One of the ongoing debates ...
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Intro to "On Translating for the Stage"
Jon Peede, formerly of the NEA, put Joanne Pottlitzer in touch with me in hopes that we could help publicize her recent essay “On Translating for the Stage.” The essay—which will go up in about 10 minutes—is very interesting, and discusses one of the singular challenge of translating drama. In order to ...
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PEN: Get Super Lit: Comic Books Come Alive on Stage
Where: The Cooper Union, Frederick P. Rose Auditorium, 41 Cooper Sq., New York City Critics like to point out “comic books are not just superheroes,” that they’re also heartrending memoirs, important nonfiction, and even avant-garde art. True. But you can’t throw this baby out with the bathwater because it’s got ...
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2011 Susan Sontag Prize for Translation [Young Italian Translators]
I’ve been meaning to post this for a month now . . . At least there’s still some time before the March deadline: THE 2011 SUSAN SONTAG PRIZE FOR TRANSLATION $5,000 grant for a literary translation from Italian into English: PLEASE POST & DISTRIBUTE PLEASE NOTE: The deadline is March 1, ...
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Susan Sontag Prize Award Winners
Another day, another post that should’ve been written weeks ago . . . (In case you haven’t noticed, today is themed. And this extends beyond the blog to responding to dozens of e-mails I should’ve responded to way back when.) Last month, the Susan Sontag Foundation announced that Benjamin Mier-Cruz won the 2010 award ...
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Genres, Tags, and Why Don't We Subcategorize Books?
Today’s piece in the New York Times on indie rock sub-categorization isn’t particularly interesting . . . although when you apply what’s been happening in music to the world of books, there are a few intriguing outcomes. The main thrust of Ben Sisario’s Times piece is that indie music has atomized ...
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Susan Sontag Foundation Crushes on My Crushes
The call for submissions for the 2010 Susan Sontag Prize for Translation was posted last week, and this year the focus is on translations from Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, and Icelandic. This prize was launched two years ago to encourage the development of young literary translators. Applicants must be under the age of 30 ...
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Susan Sontag Award: Year Two
I don’t think I received a press release about this, but the 2009 Susan Sontag Prize for Translation has been awarded to Roanne Sharp for her proposed translation of La Mayor by Juan Jose Saer. Which is fantastic—we’re actually publishing three Saer books over the next few years, but not this one. . . . At ...
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Sebald on Stage
Thanks to Conversational Reading (and Vertigo before that) for bringing “i-witness” to our attention. From Wales Online Like most of us, Paul Davies and Fern Smith enjoy immersing themselves in a good book. [Ed. Note: That use of “like most of us” signals that we’re not reading a U.S. ...
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Susan Sontag Translation Prize
The Susan Sontag Foundation recently released information about their 2009 translation prize, this time awarding young translators working on Spanish into English projects: This $5,000 grant will be awarded to a proposed work of literary translation from Spanish into English and is open to anyone under the age of 30. The ...
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Susan Sontag Prize for Translation
We posted about the Susan Sontag Prize for Translation when the call for submissions went out, and it was just announced that Kristin Dickinson (who did her undergrad work at the University of Rochester), Robin Ellis, and Priscilla Layne won for their collaborative translation of Koppstoff: Kanaka Sprak vom Rande der ...
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2008 Susan Sontag Prize for Translation
We actually posted about the Susan Sontag Prize for Translation back before Three Percent went live, but with the deadline approaching, I think it’s worth bringing up again, especially since it’s such a cool prize. One of the first activities of the newly-established Susan Sontag Foundation, this Prize for ...
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Hispanic Heritage Month Reading Program
From GalleyCat The Association of American Publishers announced that it has joined forces with Las Comadres Para Las Americas, an informal internet-based group that meets monthly in over 50 US cities and growing, to build connections and community with other Latinas, to launch Reading with Las Comadres. The program is ...
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Hand-wringing about AI, Part III: “We’re Stuck in the Middle”
Back for Part III? Curious if I can land this plane? (ME TOO.) If you missed the earlier pieces, here's Part I, and here's Part II. To recap: we've seen how AI can thrust us into a world of infinite choice by theoretically translating (or eventually writing) any book out there, which is interesting from the point of view ...
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Hand-wringing about AI, Part II: “Write Me an Ad Campaign”
You might want to read "Part I" before going any further, but if you just want a recap, that post is essentially about how AI could translate the world (and/or create millions of new novels), which, on one hand, could be useful in bringing unique, diverse voices to an English audience, but, on one of the many other hands, ...
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“Pink Slime” by Fernanda Trías & Heather Cleary [NBA 2024]
When the National Book Award for Translated Literature longlist was announced the other week, I realized that I hadn't read any of the books on the list for the first time in . . . ages. So I started this series to educate myself before the winner is announced. You can find all the posts in this series ...
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Hand-wringing about AI, Part I: “I Want to Read it All”
Many many moons ago, in a dark bar on a wintry Rochester night, I sketched out a series of eight posts/topics that would roughly correspond with my plan of reading all of In Search of Lost Time (in the semi-recent Penguin set with each of the seven volumes translated by a different translator), and would investigate ...
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Two Month Review Season 23: “Lanark” by Alasdair Gray
Before we get into the selection for next season, I want to remind everyone to vote in our poll for the Best TMR Class. The hypothetical is that you have to sign up for one of these courses being offered based on the books included. "Let the Bodies Hit the Floor" Death in Spring by Mercè Rodoreda; The Physics of ...
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TMR 22.4: “Devotion to Off-Grid Religions” [Praiseworthy]
Emmett Stinson (Murnane) joins Chad W. Post and Kaija Straumanis this week to educate us about Australian culture and literature and things we should keep in mind while reading Praiseworthy. He also participates in a round of the world-famous trivia game: "Australian Baseball Player or Indigenous Australian Writer?" There ...
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A Venn Diagram of Not Reading
“If I actually finish a book, I feel like I deserve a Nobel Prize.” “I can't even guess when I last read a book. But I'd watch movies all day if I could. Especially Marvel ones.” Overheard on a University of Rochester Shuttle “In the last decade, she says, history has toppled from the king of disciplines to a ...
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Eleven Books, Selected
My parents are straight-up hoarders. Not of foodstuffs or other animal attractant stuff; nothing that will quite land them on a nightmare HGTV show (one that airs right after Flipanthropy), but hoarders nonetheless. Of paper, mostly. Checklists from the early 80s show up on the regular. I currently have a gym bag ca. 1993 ...
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TMR 20.1: “Then You Do Not Approve of Nabokov?” [MULLIGAN STEW]
Chad and Brian kick off the new season in near hysterics over the first little chunk of Gilbert Sorrentino's Mulligan Stew. From talking about the rejection letters—and near batshit reader's report—prefacing the book, to all the bad writing about the "flawless blue" sky, to the ever-changing dialog tags in Anthony ...
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“Vladivostok Circus” by Elisa Shua Dusapin & Aneesa Abbas Higgins [Excerpt]
Today's #WITMonth post is a really special one—with a special offer. What you'll find below is an excerpt from the very start of Vladivostok Circus by Elisa Shua Dusapin & Aneesa Abbas Higgins. You might remember Dusapin & Higgins as the winners of the 2021 National Book Award for Literature in Translation ...
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“The Lecture” by Lydie Salvayre and Linda Coverdale [Excerpt]
Today's #WITMonth post is an excerpt from The Lecture by Lydie Salvayre, translated by Linda Coverdale, a wonderfully funny and playful French writer who Dalkey published for quite a while (The Power of Flies, Everyday Life, The Company of Ghosts, Portrait of the Writer as a Domesticated Animal), and might again! Warren ...
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Season Twenty of the Two Month Review: “Mulligan Stew” by Gilbert Sorrentino
As mentioned in this Reading the Dalkey Archive post, Mulligan Stew by Gilbert Sorrentino is going to be the next book featured on the Two Month Review podcast. For anyone new to this podcast, episodes drop weekly—recorded live on YouTube, then disseminated as a traditional podcast through Apple, Spotify, etc.—and ...
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The Visual Success of Women in Translation Month [Translation Database]
Women in Translation Month is EVERYWHERE. Whenever I open Twitter (or X?), my feed is wall-to-wall WIT Month. Tweets with pictures of books to read for WIT Month, links to articles about WIT Month and various sub-genre lists of books to read during WIT Month, general celebratory tweets in praise of Meytal Radzinski for ...
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Anatomy. Monotony. [Reading the Dalkey Archive]
Anatomy. Monotony. Edy Poppy Original Publication: 2005 Original Publication in English Translation: 2018 Original Publisher in English: Dalkey Archive Press Although I’m filing this as a “Reading the Dalkey Archive” post, it’s actually about two books: Anatomy. Monotony. by Norwegian ...
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Re-Reading David Markson’s “Wittgenstein’s Mistress”
This piece by Philip Coleman first appeared in CONTEXT #23. To celebrate the recent release of Wittgenstein's Mistress as part of the Dalkey Archive Essentials series, it seems like the perfect time to revisit this re-reading of David Markson's classic novel about language, memory, grief, and possibly the end of the ...
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“Not Even the Dead” by Juan Gómez Bárcena [Excerpt]
Officially out last Tuesday, Not Even the Dead is a throwback—an ambitious, philosophical, grand novel taking on nothing less than the history of progress over the past four hundred years. In it, Juan—at the bequest of the Spanish government—pursues "Juan the Indian" across time and Mexico, almost catching up to him ...
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“Europeana” by Patrik Ouredník [Excerpt]
Forthcoming in a new "Dalkey Essentials" edition, Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century is an "eccentric overview of all the horrors, contradictions, and absurdities of the past century." It's a book that is mesmerizing in its curious patterns, which at times can sound like Snapple Fun Facts—but tend to be ...
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Ryder [Reading the Dalkey Archive]
Ryder Djuna Barnes Original Publication: 1928 Original Publisher: Boni & Liveright First Dalkey Archive Edition: 1990 This is a baggy novel of excess, and as someone who finds it nearly impossible to keep the thread—or develop a coherent thesis (any and all AI grading systems ...
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“Diary of a Blood Donor” by Mati Unt [Excerpt]
Diary of a Blood Donor by Mati Unt translated from Estonian by Ants Eert (Dalkey Archive Press) AN UNEXPECTED INVITATION A crow was riding the wind that came in low over the beach. Sand blew through the window, landed on my papers, entered my mouth. A yellowish light tainted the room, even my ...
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Mati Unt (1944-2005)
This piece originally appeared in CONTEXT 18, shortly after Mati Unt's passing. It was written by the translator Eric Dickens, Unt's translator, who also left us in 2017. Mati Unt was born in Estonia and lived there all his life. He spent his early years in the village of Linnamäe near the university town of Tartu. His ...
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Zoo, or Letters Not about Love [Excerpt]
Forthcoming in a new "Dalkey Archive Essentials" version (with a different cover than the one depicted to the right), Zoo, or Letters Not about Love, translated from the Russian by Richard Sheldon, is one of Viktor Shklovsky's most beloved works. An epistolary novel written while Shklovsky was in exile in Berlin—and in ...
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Perfect Lives [Reading the Dalkey Archive]
Perfect Lives Robert Ashley Original Publication: 1991 Original Publisher: Archer Fields Press First Dalkey Archive Edition: 2011 Let’s start with the cover. When this first arrived in the mail, I was certain that Ingram had sent it to me on accident. It looks nothing like ...
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An Echo Chamber of One [Sustainability]
Hello! I am ChadGPT, an AI chat generator that has been asked to produce a blog post in the style of Chad W. Post, about the future of publishing. After ingesting over a thousand articles from this website, literally hundreds of thousands of (mostly coherent) text messages, and zero email responses (apparently Chad is 100% ...
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To All the Posts I Didn’t Write Last Year
If I could control space-time (a resolution for 2023 that's about as likely as the others I've made), I would have put in an additional 10 hours of research and data entry into the Translation Database before posting this. But knowing that I'll surely be crunched for time all this week, and next, and the week after, I figure ...
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Time Must Have a Stop
I haven't been feeling much like myself lately. Doubt anyone has, what with COVID time making everything take twice as long and be four times as frustrating, with Putin being, well, a massive, invasive dick, with inflation the highest it's been since I was five years old, and with no spring baseball. [UPDATE: Baseball is ...
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TMR 16.1: “Roberto Bolaño Overview” [2666]
Season 16 is here! At long last, Bolaño's 2666 takes center stage, and Chad and Brian are joined by translator and Bolaño enthusiast, Katie Whittemore. In this opening episode, they discuss the myth-making of Bolaño's biography, they talk about sudden fame, the grind of the artist, and of the way that everything is ...
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Translation Jobs [Granta]
Following on the first two posts about the latest Granta issue of "Best Young Spanish-language Novelists," I thought I'd take another crack at trying to define success, this time through the lens of the translators included in the two issues. This might be the most controversial approach to date (I do have two more that ...
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“Last Words on Earth” by Javier Serena and Katie Whittemore [Excerpt]
Last Words on Earth by Javier Serena, translated from the Spanish by Katie Whittemore (September 21, 2022) Eventually, the professor redirected the conversation toward more exotic subjects: he asked Funes to tell me about negacionismo, a poetic movement Funes had apparently founded as an adolescent in Mexico, where he ...
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Statistical Noise [Granta]
It took a few more days than I had hoped, but I have officially read all twenty-five pieces included in this new Granta issue. (I wonder how many people actually do read it from cover to cover. And what percentage that is of all the copies in circulation. God, I'll bet that number is depressing, whether it's Granta, ...
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The Predictive Success of Listmaking [Granta]
Let's start by saying what really shouldn't need to be said: Being included in one of Granta's "Best Young XXX Novelists" special issues is an incredible honor. These come out once a decade, with four iterations of "best young" British novelists, three for American writers, and, as of this month, two for Spanish-language ...
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Writing about Granta’s “Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists 2”
Just about a decade ago, Granta released their first ever list of "young Spanish-language novelists." This was a momentous occasion for a number of reasons, starting with the point that, until then, only young British and American writers had been featured by the magazine. (There had been three lists of best British ...
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The Hole vs. The Hole vs. Algorithms vs. Booksellers
Although it's still hard to get truly excited about writing—and harder to imagine anyone reading this, given all that's going on in the world—it was pretty fun working on that last post about October titles that I wish I had the time and attention to read. So, why not do it again? Even if these posts are shambolic and ...
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Why I Haven’t Written Any of My Posts
The other night, when I first attempted to write this post, I was shocked to find that the last "real" post I'd written (the nutty Baudrillard in the Time of COVID/Baseball is Back! experiment), posted on July 29th. July! That was almost three months ago. Where did the time go? And why haven't I written anything since ...
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TMR 13.5: “The Accursed Children” [ADA, OR ARDOR]
A family dinner, a picnic in the woods—what could be more innocent? Well, in Ada, or Ardor, everything is tinged with a baseline feeling of "kind of creepy," especially the "passionate pump-joy exertions." Chad and Brian break it all down, talking about Demon, unraveling Nabokovian puns, finding subtle hints about Van's ...
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Five Questions with Michael Holtmann about HOME
As part of our ongoing series of short interviews featuring the people who helped bring great new translations to the reading public, we talked to Michael Holtmann, the executive director and publisher of the Center for the Art of Translation and Two Lines. Before getting into the interview, I wanted to point out ...
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“The Adventures and Misadventures of the Extraordinary and Admirable Joan Orpí, Conquistador and Founder of New Catalonia” by Max Besora and Mara Faye Lethem
In honor of the Catalan Fellowship organized by the Institut Ramon Lllul and taking place virtually this week, I thought I would share the opening of next Catalan title to come out from Open Letter: The Adventures and Misadventures of the Extraordinary and Admirable Joan Orpí, Conquistador and Founder of New Catalonia by Max ...
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TMR Season Thirteen: “Ada, or Ardor” by Vladimir Nabokov
The public has spoken, and the next book to be featured in the Two Month Review is Ada, or Ardor by Vladimir Nabokov! Which is kind of perfect. We follow the thread of Anna Karenina from The Book of Anna by Carmen Boullosa to this novel, originally written in 1969, which opens: "All happy families are more or less ...
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Spanish-Language Speculative Fiction by Women in Translation. [#WITMonth]
Today's post is by Rachel Cordasco, founder and curator of Speculative Fiction in Translation, co-translator of Creative Surgery by Clelia Farris, and is working on a book about speculative fiction from around the world. Despite 2020 being a downright awful year, it has given us several excellent works of ...
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New Spanish Literature: 10 of 30 [#WITMonth]
As part of the buildup to being Guest of Honor at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2021, the Spanish government launched a program last year under the (possibly confusing) name of "10 of 30." The plan is that each year, a new anthology featuring ten authors in their 30s will be released—all of which are translated by Katie ...
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A Very Incomplete List of Books by Women in Translation in 2020 [#WITMonth]
I know that I'm a day behind—trying to make up for that right now—but my goal for Women in Translation Month 2020 is to post something each and every day of the month related to this topic. I'm inviting any and all readers, translators, publishers to contribute to this and, with a lot of luck a bit of work, we should have ...
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Baudrillard in the Time of COVID / Baseball Is Back!
There are two types of people who read these posts: people into international literature who like baseball, and those who don’t. What follows is an experiment—one that might not work at all. Before you get started, you have a choice: 1) if you hate genuine writing about baseball, then click here, where I’ve edited ...
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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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Baseball Is Back!
The other day, the Major League Baseball season—or, rather, “season,” given that it’s 60 games; given that instead of ten teams making the playoffs, sixteen will, which is more than half the league; that every extra inning starts with a runner on 2nd base, which is very weird; and, obviously, COVID protocols and a ...
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“La vita bugiarda degli adulti” by Elena Ferrante
La vita bugiarda degli adulti by Elena Ferrante 283 pgs. | pb | 9788833571683 | €19,00 edizioni e/o Review by Jeanne Bonner If all had gone as planned—which is to say if a global pandemic hadn’t bulldozed our normal lives—this summer, you might have been reading Ann Goldstein’s English translation of La vita ...
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“The Erotics of Restraint: Essays on Literary Form” by Douglas Glover
The Erotics of Restraint: Essays on Literary Form by Douglas Glover 203 pgs. | pb | 9781771962919 | $21.95 Biblioasis Review by Brendan Riley The Erotics of Restraint is an excellent companion—with a no less provocative title—to Mr. Glover’s previous collection, Attack of the Copula Spiders, published in ...
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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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“The Cheffe: A Cook’s Novel” by Marie NDiaye [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. Marcel Inhoff is completing a doctoral dissertation at the University of Bonn. He is the author of the collection Prosopopeia (Editions Mantel, 2015), and Our Church Is Here (Pen and ...
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“The Wind That Lays Waste” by Selva Almada [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. Pierce Alquist has an MA in Publishing and Writing from Emerson College and currently works in publishing in Boston. She is a freelance book critic and writer. She is also the ...
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Three Percent #182: BTBA 2020 Readings
On this special edition of the Three Percent Podcast, you can hear short readings of all fifteen finalists for this year's Best Translated Book Awards. You can find all of the titles here on Bookshop.org (fiction, poetry), and you can still RSVP to see the live awards ceremony on Friday, May 29th at 6pm eastern. This ...
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“Beyond Babylon” by Igiaba Scego [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. Barbara Halla is an Assistant Editor for Asymptote Journal. She works as a translator and independent researcher, focusing in particular on discovering and promoting the works of ...
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“Aviva-No” by Shimon Adaf [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. Adriana X. Jacobs is the author of Strange Cocktail: Translation and the Making of Modern Hebrew Literature (University of Michigan, 2018) and associate professor of modern Hebrew ...
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“The Boy” by Marcus Malte [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. Lara Vergnaud is a literary translator from the French. She was the recipient of the 2019 French Voices Grand Prize and a finalist for the 2019 BTBA. Her work has appeared in The ...
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“The Catalan Poems” by Pere Gimferrer [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. Henry N. Gifford is a writer, emerging translator from German to English, and Assistant Editor at New Vessel Press. The Catalan Poems by Pere Gimferrer, translated from the ...
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“Space Invaders” by Nona Fernández [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. Chris Clarke grew up in Western Canada and currently lives in Philadelphia. His translations include books by Ryad Girod, Pierre Mac Orlan, and François Caradec. His translation of ...
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. . . The Underappreciated Masses . . .
Half of this post is inspired by comments Sam Miller made about this article he wrote about the mystery surrounding Don Mattingly's birthdate and his Topps 1987 baseball card. I'm not sure if these are immutable truths per se, but if you talk to enough people in the book industry, you're likely to encounter two strains of ...
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We’re Still Here . . .
"We live in a world of randomness." —William Poundstone, The Doomsday Calculation It probably goes without saying, but publishing international literature is a precarious business in the best of times. On average, sales for translated works of fiction tend to be about one-third of the average sales for a mid-list author ...
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“The Next Loves” by Stéphane Bouquet [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. Laura Marris is a writer and translator from the French. Recent projects include Paol Keineg’s Triste Tristan (co-translated with Rosmarie Waldrop for Burning Deck Press) and In ...
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Three Percent #181: Unraveling Women and Hard-Working Peasants
A bit of an experimental episode, Chad is joined by five indie booksellers to talk about the "new normal," fears of reopening, what booksellers are doing now, and—most importantly—actual books. The complete rundown of recommendations is below, but one note: please buy these titles from the bookseller who recommended them. ...
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“Territory of Light” by Yuko Tsushima [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. Kári Tulinius is an Icelandic poet and novelist. He and his family move back and forth between Iceland and Finland like a flock of migratory birds confused about the whole “warmer ...
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“The Way Through the Woods” by Long Litt Woon
The Way Through the Woods by Long Litt Woon Translated from the Norwegian by Barbara J. Haveland 320 pgs. | hc | 9781984801036 | $26.00 Spiegel & Grau Review by Hana Kallen How does one heal after the death of a loved one? How does define oneself again after tragedy? Author and anthropologist Long Litt ...
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“The Book of Collateral Damage” by Sinan Antoon [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. Tara Cheesman is a freelance book critic, National Book Critics Circle member & 2018-2019 Best Translated Book Award Fiction Judge. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review ...
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The Winter Garden Photograph by Reina María Rodríguez [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. Anastasia Nikolis recently received her PhD in twentieth and twenty-first century poetry and poetics from the University of Rochester. She is the Poetry Editor for Open Letter Books ...
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“Vernon Subutex 1” by Virginie Despentes [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. Dorian Stuber teaches at Hendrix College and blogs about books at www.eigermonchjungfrau.blog. His work has appeared in Numéro Cinq, Open Letters Monthly, and Words without ...
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“Camouflage” by Lupe Gómez [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. Kelsi Vanada is a poet and translator from Spanish and sometimes Swedish. Her translations include Into Muteness (Veliz Books, 2020) and The Eligible Age (Song Bridge Press, 2018), ...
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“God’s Wife” by Amanda Michalopoulou
God's Wife by Amanda Michalopoulou Translated from the Greek by Patricia Felisa Barbeito 144 pgs. | pb | 9781628973372 | $16.95 Dalkey Archive Press Review by Soti Triantafyllou Why do people get married? Maybe because they need a witness to their lives, someone to watch them do whatever it is that they do. In Amanda ...
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“Animalia” by Jean-Baptiste del Amo [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. Jeffrey Zuckerman is an editor at Music & Literature and a translator from French, most recently of Jean Genet's The Criminal Child (NYRB, 2020). A finalist for the ...
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“Good Will Come from the Sea” by Christos Ikonomou [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. Julia Sanches is a translator working from Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan into English. She has translated works by Susana Moreira Marques, Daniel Galera, Claudia Hernández, and ...
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Three Percent #180: Bookfinity Is the Dumbest Name
Stacie Williams joins Chad and Tom this week to talk about the role of sales reps at this moment in time and then, after she bolts, Chad and Tom poke fun at Bookfinity (which, really, WOW), the confused messaging of #BooksAreEssential as a hashtag, why bookshops shouldn't open, and how Publishers Weakly is funny AND NOT RUN ...
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“Welcome to America” by Linda Boström Knausgård [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. Katarzyna (Kasia) Bartoszyńska is a former BTBA judge (2018 and 2017), a translator (from Polish to English), and an academic (at Monmouth College, and starting this Fall, at Ithaca ...
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“Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead” by Olga Tokarczuk [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. Louisa Ermelino is the author of three novels; Joey Dee Gets Wise; The Black Madonna (Simon and Schuster); The Sisters Mallone (St. Martin’s Press) and a story collection, ...
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Three Percent #179: “Hey! What’s New?”
How is COVID-19 impacting bookstores, publishers, translators, and our general sanity? These are the questions Tom and Chad talk about on this episode—the first in a while, but also the longest ever—along with minor jokes, an appeal to authors and publishers to "read the room," a rant that will likely get Chad in ...
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TMR 11.6: “Adaptations” [THE DREAMED PART]
Chad and Brian go deep into the underlying structure of the second section of Fresan's The Dreamed Part, talking about Penelope's story, her relationship to her parents and the Karmas, and the moment in which she lost her son. We finally get to read about her wrecking house (literally) and see how everything circles back to ...
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“Death Is Hard Work” by Khaled Khalifa [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. Tony Messenger is an Australian writer, critic and interviewer who has had works published in many places including Overland Literary Journal, Southerly, Mascara Literary ...
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Lola Rogers on “The Colonel’s Wife” by Rosa Liksom [The Book That Never Was, Pt. 1]
The Colonel's Wife by Rosa Liksom, translated from the Finnish by Lola Rogers (Graywolf Press) BookMarks Reviews: Five total—Four Positive, One Mixed Awards: None Number of Finnish Works of Fiction Published in Translation from 2008-2019: 65 (5.42/year) Number of Those Translations Written by Women: 40 of the ...
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“Labyrinth” by Burhan Sönmez [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. Tim Gutteridge is a Scottish literary translator, working from Spanish into English. His translation of Miserere de cocodrilos(Mercedes Rosende) will be published later this year by ...
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“Tentacle” by Rita Indiana [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. Tobias Carroll is the author of the books Reel, Transitory, and the forthcoming Political Sign. Tentacle by Rita Indiana, translated from the Spanish by Achy ...
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“A Dream Come True” by Juan Carlos Onetti [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. Spencer Ruchti is an intern at Tin House Books and formerly a bookseller at Harvard Book Store in Cambridge. His writing has appeared in The Adroit Journal, The Rumpus, and ...
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TMR 11.5: “Wuthering Heights Is Weird” [THE DREAMED PART}
Chad reaches a new quarantine low at the beginning of this week's episode (highly recommend checking out the video version), but after a lot of banter and deep dives into international speculative fiction, The Invention of Morel, Lost, and more, Chad and special guest Rachel Cordasco break down the first part of the ...
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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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“Book of Minutes” by Gemma Gorga [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. Nancy Naomi Carlson is a poet, translator, and editor, whose latest book was called "new & noteworthy" by the New York Times. Recipient of two NEA literature translation grants ...
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“The Memory Police” by Yoko Ogawa [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. Tony Malone is an Australian reviewer of fiction in translation, whose site, Tony’s Reading List, has been providing reviews continuously since 2009. His main focus is on Japanese ...
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“China Dream” by Ma Jian [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. Justin Walls is a bookseller based in the Pacific Northwest and can be found on Twitter @jaawlfins. China Dream by Ma Jian, translated from the Chinese by Flora Drew ...
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“Die, My Love” by Ariana Harwicz [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. Josh Cook is the author of the novel An Exaggerated Murder, published by Melville House in March 2015. His fiction and other work has appeared in The Coe Review, Epicenter ...
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“Time” by Etel Adnan [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. Brandon Shimoda is the author of several books, most recently The Grave on the Wall (City Lights), which received the PEN Open Book Award, The Desert(The Song Cave), and Evening ...
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TMR 11.4: “Tulpas” [THE DREAMED PART]
This episode got off to a rough start, with Chad losing his shit over the May IndieNext list [ed. note: he still has not recovered] before Streamyard crashed and the whole episode had to be recorded. In the new, much calmer episode, Chad, Brian, and special guest Patrick Smith talk about tulpas, the night, Fresán writing in ...
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Season 11 of the Two Month Review: “The Dreamed Part” by Rodrigo Fresán
After a slightly longer hiatus than expected, the Two Month Review is coming back! In fact, we're coming back TOMORROW, Thursday, March 5th at 1:30pm. We'll be recording an introductory episode in which Chad and Brian combine their weakened, time-ravaged memories to recap The Invented Part, the first volume in Rodrigo ...
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Three Percent #177: Eight Books
After a bit of banter about how baseball front offices might be as bad at naming things as book people, and a plug for Paul Vidich's The Coldest Warrior, Chad and Tom each draft four forthcoming books from a total of eight different presses that they've both agreed to read and discuss in future episodes. How could this ...
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Jewels in Your Pocket [BTBA 2020]
This week's Best Translated Book Award post is from Christopher Phipps, a manager at City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco. We’ve all been warned repeatedly to never judge a book by its cover, a caution easily and often extended towards judgments based on size. Size matters not, counseled Yoda. Big things come in small ...
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Is It Real? [A January 2020 Reading Diary with Charts & Observations]
It's been sooooo long since I actually wrote something for here . . . I'm not entirely sure how to start! Chad 1.0 would open with something like "$%*# agents" and then go off on a couple individuals who are currently driving me INSANE. Chad 2.0 would come up with some wacky premise that blends ideas behind sabermetrics ...
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Three Percent #176: Dirty Bookshop
After a bit of a hiatus, Chad and Tom return to talk about the two biggest things to happen during Winter Institute: The American Dirt controversy and the launch of Bookshop.org. If you haven't been following the American Dirt debacle, here are a couple pieces to read: Laura Miller's piece in Slate, Rebecca Alter's ...
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“Reading Christine Montalbetti” by Warren Motte
As part of a larger series of initiatives involving Open Letter and Dalkey Archive Press, over the next few months, we'll be running a number of articles from CONTEXT magazine, a tabloid-style magazine started by John O'Brien and Dalkey Archive in 2000 as a way of introducing booksellers and readers to innovative writers ...
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Open Letter Books to Receive $40,000 Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts
Rochester, NY—Open Letter Books at the University of Rochester has been approved for a $40,000 Art Works grant to support Open Letter's Emerging Voice project. This project will result in the publication and promotion of six works of literature in translation from authors with no more than one title already available in ...
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Homestead Horror and Genealogical Angst [BTBA 2020]
This week's Best Translated Book Award post is from Justin Walls, a bookseller with Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon who can be found on Twitter @jaawlfins. Psychological horror/thriller/chiller/etc.—you know the sort, taut with spring-loaded tension and positively oozing dread—is tricky to pull off in a work of ...
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What Did We Have to Talk About, Now That He Was Dead? [CONTEXT]
As part of a larger series of initiatives involving Open Letter and Dalkey Archive Press, over the next few months, we'll be running a number of articles from CONTEXT magazine, a tabloid-style magazine started by John O'Brien and Dalkey Archive in 2000 as a way of introducing booksellers and readers to innovative writers ...
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Three Percent #175: Biggest News Stories of 2019
On this week's episode, Chad and Tom discuss Tom's recent piece on Jean-Patrick Manchette for LARB and talk about which of his books are best to start with, and why there haven't been more breakout international noir authors. Then they pivot to this Publishers Weekly article on the "Top News Stories of 2019," discussing ...
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“The Book of Disappearance: A Novel” by Ibtisam Azem
The Book of Disappearance: A Novel by Ibtisam Azem Translated from the Arabic by Sinan Antoon 256 pgs. | pb | 9780815611110 | $19.95 Syracuse University Press Review by Grant Barber This wonderful, important second novel by Ibtisam Azem in English translation came out just in time for the observance of Women ...
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Dark, Strange Books by Women in Translation [BTBA 2020]
This week's Best Translated Book Award post is from Pierce Alquist, who has a MA in Publishing and Writing from Emerson College and currently works in publishing in Boston. She is a freelance book critic, writer, and Book Riot contributor. She is also the Communications Coordinator for the Transnational Literature Series ...
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Three Percent #174: Devil’s Bargains
Chad and Tom play a short game on this podcast—when Tom isn't ranting about Amazon. They also discuss Bookshop, when the decade officially ends, favorite translations of the past ten years, Chad's upcoming hiatus from writing for Three Percent, and much more. Next episode Chad and Tom will discuss Tom's recent article on ...
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Book 6 [The No Context Project]
If you want the context for the "no context project," check out this post, which lays everything out and applies a 20-80 grading scale to "Book 7." Since I really want to get through these mystery books sooner rather than later--so that I can find out what they are and grade myself--I put aside my Charco reading for a bit ...
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A Couple Turkish Authors [BTBA 2020]
This week's Best Translated Book Award pose is from Louisa Ermelino, who is the author of three novels; Joey Dee Gets Wise; The Black Madonna (Simon and Schuster); The Sisters Mallone (St. Martin’s Press) and a story collection, Malafemmina (Sarabande). She has worked atPeople, Time International, and InStyle magazines ...
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“Beasts Head for Home” by Abe Kōbō
Beasts Head for Home by Abe Kōbō Translated from the Japanese by Richard F. Calichman 191 pgs.| pb | 9780231177054 | $25 Columbia University Press Review by Brendan Riley Crisp, stark, pristine scenes of gaunt settlements, vast wilderness, and tense human encounters fill this 1957 novel by Abe Kōbō, the ...
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Three Percent #173: The Poetry in Translation Episode
Anastasia Nikolis (poetry editor for Open Letter Books) and Emma Ramadan (translator, co-owner of Riffraaff) join Chad and Tom to breakdown ALTA 42, talk about poetry in translation, and go on a handful of minor rants—and one major one. (Thanks, Emma!) The Sarah Dessen controversy pops up, as does this article about ...
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TMR 10.7: “Blossom, Stasis, Spiral, Whoa” [DUCKS, NEWBURYPORT]
This week's Two Month Review was recorded pretty late (on the east coast), so things are a bit loopy. Nevertheless, James Crossley from Madison Books joins Chad and Brian to talk about pages 429-487 of Ducks, Newburyport. They talk a bit about the cultural references in this section—the old movies, Blossom—flip ahead to ...
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Book 7 [The No Context Project]
A couple months ago, while writing about Suzanne Jill Levine and Jessica Powell's translation of Silvina Ocampo's The Promise, I came up with a sort of crazy scheme: But this gave me a grand idea: What if I could review twenty books from twenty publishers in as blind as a fashion as possible? I wouldn’t know ...
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How to Launch a Publishing House [Charco Press]
It's Charco Press month! After stepping away from these "monthly themes" for a minute (or, well, actually, a full month), I'm excited to get back to this, and have a bunch of posts planned out for November. If all goes according to plan (spoiler: HA!) I'd like to post a couple interviews with Charco Press translators, a ...
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Three Percent #172: ALTA 42 Preview
A bit of a disorienting podcast for anyone not attending ALTA, but in this episode, Chad addresses the recent ALTA book fair controversy, and then they go over the general schedule, highlighting a number of interesting-sounding panels, previewing some off-site events, and recommending non-ALTA bars for attendees to hang out ...
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Perversity’s Politics [BTBA 2020]
Today's Best Translated Book Award post is from Hal Hlavinka, a writer and critic living in Denver. His work has appeared in BOMB Magazine, Music & Literature, Tin House, and others. Some books are made of fucking—of cum and cumming, cocks, twats, and tongues, desires of all kinds. A la Gass, literature may arrive ...
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TMR 10.4: “Is it Translatable” [Ducks, Newburyport]
Rhett McNeil (translator of Machado de Assis, Gonçalo Tavares, Antonio Lobo Antunes, and more) joins Chad and Brian to talk about the way in which Ducks, Newburyport is less of a single-sentence and more of a never-ending list, about how it is and isn't like Ulysses, about time in the novel, about Ellmann's playfulness, ...
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Three Percent #171: Can We Go a Week Without an Award Controversy?
This week's podcast is about two kerfuffles: the Booker Prize one and the one between King County Library and Macmillan. There's also some discussion as to why UK book culture allows for critique and small voices to be heard (vs. the American way in which everything is fine), Chad goes on and on about On Becoming a God in ...
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TMR 10.3: “How Do I Promote This?” [Ducks, Newburyport]
Vanessa Stauffer from Biblioasis came on this episode to talk about the Booker Prize, about the jacket copy she wrote for the Ducks galley, about types of moms, about things in the book that pay off and mysteries that remain mysteries, about the ways in which Ellmann is breaking form and the strong feminist perspective ...
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Time Does Not Bring Relief
"History is written by the victors" is one of those cliches that's so obviously true that it requires next to no explanation. But the ability to provide evidence for what the victors do when writing history is usually a bit more circumspect and tricky to get ahold of . . . Last Thursday, the Nobel Prize for Literature was ...
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Three Percent #170: Don’t Give a Million Dollars to a Fascist
This podcast comes in HOT. Lots of talk about how Peter Handke doesn't deserve any award, much less the Nobel Prize. (And if you don't know why, just listen for his quote at the end denying Serb atrocities at Srebrenica by saying "You can stick your corpses up your arse.") Then things transition to an existential conversation ...
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TMR 10.2: “The Fact That” [Ducks, Newburyport]
Due to an unforeseen illness, Chad and Brian ended up going this one alone, and focus mostly on the way that "the fact that" functions, both in building the character and impacting the reader. Chad asks Brian some craft questions, they debate what makes a book "difficult" (and whether this is difficult or just long), more ...
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TMR 10.1: “Brave Publishing” [Ducks, Newburyport]
The tenth season of the Two Month Review gets underway with special guest Dan Wells of Biblioasis talking about how they came to publish Lucy Ellmann's Ducks, Newburyport, and the risks involved in doing a 1,020-page book. They also introduce Ellmann--who has one of the greatest bios ever--and the novel itself. Conversation ...
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TMR 9.10: Monsterhuman by Kjersti Skomsvold (pgs 407-448)
And just like that, season nine of the Two Month Review comes to an end. But first, we have a very nice discussion with Kjersti Skomsvold herself about Monsterhuman, trends in Norwegian writing, autofiction vs. creative nonfiction vs. memoir, authors to read, and much more. (Spoiler: She's just as interesting and charming in ...
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Available Now: THE INCOMPLETES by Sergio Chejfec and Heather Cleary
“A masterfully nested narrative where writing—its presence on the page, its course through time, its prismatic dispersion of meaning—is the true protagonist.” —Hernan Diaz, author of In the Distance “Now I am going to tell the story of something that happened one night years ago, and the events of the ...
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Three Percent #169: Year Two of the NBA for Translated Literature
After an update from Chad about his trip to London and Amsterdam, he and Tom break down the National Book Award for Translated Literature longlist, exposing their general ignorance along the way. (They've read, combined, like two of the ten titles?) Also, sure are a lot of Penguin Random House books on these longlists! They ...
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TMR 9.09: Monsterhuman by Kjersti Skomsvold (pgs 360-406)
Translator Becky Crook comes on this week's podcast to talk about the process of working on Monsterhuman, all the things that she couldn't quite get in there, ones she's very proud of, the reasons why she thinks the book works, and much much more! Only one episodee left! You can watch the Wednesday, September 25 episode ...
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TMR 9.08: Monsterhuman by Kjersti Skomsvold (pgs 316-360)
This week, Brian is AWOL BUT Patrick Smith brings his A-game. He and Chad talk about the self-conscious humor in Monsterhuman, awkward interactions, the shape and evolution of the narrative as a whole, some info about The Faster I Walk, the Smaller I Am, and much more. A very fun episode that opened as awkwardly as ever . . ...
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Smelling Books [BTBA 2020]
This week's BTBA post if from Justin Walls, a bookseller with Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon who can be found on Twitter @jaawlfins. The conceptual artist Anicka Yi's olfactory-based installation Washing Away of Wrongs (2014, created in conjunction with French perfumer Christophe Laudamiel) consists of two ...
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Flash Sale on Open Letter Preorders!
For a few different reasons—mainly that I wasn't able to get the new excerpt from Sara Mesa's Four by Four online until the WITMonth discount code had expired, but also to celebrate The Dreamed Part being on Kirkus's list of "30 Most Anticipated Fiction Books"—we've decided to have a flash sale on all of our ...
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Three Percent #168: The 6% Improvement
On this episode, Chad shares some interesting data about the number of books by women in translation before and after the creation of Women in Translation Month, Tom talks about the most recent Amazon controversy, they breakdown the National Translation Award for Prose Longlist (they'll talk poetry in a future episode), and ...
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“The Nocilla Trilogy” by Agustín Fernández Mallo
The Nocilla Trilogy by Agustín Fernández Mallo Translated from the Spanish by Thomas Bunstead pb | 9780374222789 | $30.00 FSG Review by Vincent Francone Most reviews of The Nocilla Trilogy (written by Agustín Fernández Mallo, recently translated into English by Thomas Bunstead, beautifully packaged by ...
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Three Percent #167: We Could All Do Better
Meytal Radzinski joins Chad and Tom to talk about Women in Translation Month, depressing statistics, Virginie Despentes, nonfiction in translation, hopes for the future, and much more. As always, feel free to send any and all comments or questions to: threepercentpodcast@gmail.com. Also, if there are articles you’d like ...
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Women in Translation by Country
Since I skipped last week, I'm going to post a few WITMonth infographics this week, starting with the three charts below. But first, a bit of methodology and explanation. I was curious about which countries were the most balanced in terms of books in translation written by men and women. We know from the earlier ...
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TMR 9.04: Monsterhuman by Kjersti Skomsvold (pgs 144-180)
Even though the first few seconds ("On today's Two Month Review we'll be talking about . . . ") got cut off, Chad gives his most professional podcast introduction to date, before he and Brian talk about the Nansen Academy, the cyclical nature of chronic illness, the idea of plot points vs. events, and reasons their respective ...
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Reread, Rewrite, Repeat
Some years ago, I was invited on an editorial trip to Buenos Aires, where we were given a walking tour of the more literary areas of the city, including a bar where Polish ex-pat Witold Gombrowicz used to hang out. The tour guide told us a story about how Gombrowicz hated Borges and would frequently, drunkenly, ...
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Percent of Translations Originally Written by Women, 2008-2019
I was planning on posting one of these each week with next to no context, but just to explain what's above, this is a year-by-year breakdown of the percentage of works of fiction in translation originally written by men, by women, and anthologies including both genders. The biggest gap was in 2008 (54.61% ...
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TMR 9.03: Monsterhuman by Kjersti Skomsvold (pgs 92-143)
In this episode, Chad and Brian applaud Kjersti for not getting back together with her ex-boyfriend, talk about circular structures, about the evolution of her written voice, about Antony and the Johnsons, the myth-making behind Babe Ruth, and much more. This week's music is "Patterns Prevail" by Young Guv. Next episode ...
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Three Percent #166: Women in Translation Month 2019
Chad and Tom drop a number of recommendations for Women in Translation month, some that they've read, some that they're planning on reading. They also discuss possible infographics that Three Percent can produce over the course of the month (if you have any other suggestions, please email), and discuss Chad's new plan to try ...
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Two Spanish Books for Women in Translation Month
Like usual, this post is a mishmash of all the thoughts I've had over the past week, mostly while out on a 30-mile bike ride. (I need to get in as many of these as possible before winter, which is likely to hit Rochester in about a month.) Rather than try and weave these into one single coherent post, I'm just going to throw ...
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40% Off All Open Letter Books Written or Translated by Women
Women in Translation Month is always an exciting time to discover, read, discuss, and celebrate books by women from around the world. It was created by Meytal Radzinski back in 2014 (who we're hoping to have on a podcast this month), and has since spawned numerous articles, events, and even the Warwick Prize for Women in ...
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TMR 9.02: Monsterhuman by Kjersti Skomsvold (pgs 46-92)
One of the funniest TMR episodes in weeks, Chad and Brian crack each other up over writerly anxieties, the sharp wit Kjersti displays in this section, the White Claw Phenomenon, writer vs. author vs. journaler, Kjersti's distain for bad poetry (and TV) about chronic fatigue syndrome, pop culture references from the ...
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Info on the 2020 Best Translated Book Awards
We're happy to announce the 2020 Best Translated Book Award! All the relevant information is below. Please let me know if you have any questions. Award Dates In terms of dates, this is subject to change, but currently we’re planning on announcing the longlists for fiction and poetry on Wednesday, April 1st, the finalists ...
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“The Naked Woman” by Armonía Somers
The Naked Woman by Armonía Somers Translated from the Spanish by Kit Maude 168 pgs. | pb | 9781936932436 | $16.95 Feminist Press Review by Rachel Crawford A woman turns thirty, decapitates herself, and after repositioning her severed head onto her neck, wanders through the woods stark naked. In part, this is ...
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Three Percent Bonus: John Erik Riley
To celebrate Norwegian Month at Three Percent, Chad talked with John Erik Riley, author, photographer, editor of Norwegian literature for Cappelen Damm, and member of the "Blindness Circle." They talk about current trends in Norwegian literature, American comparisons for various authors, a couple really long books, Norwegian ...
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TMR 9.01: Monsterhuman by Kjersti Skomsvold (pgs 1-45)
The new season of the Two Month Review starts here! Through the end of September we'll be discussing Kjersti Skomsvold's Monsterhuman, translated from the Norwegian by Becky L. Crook. Marius Hjeldnes from Cappelen Damm joins Chad and Brian to provide a bit of background on Skomsvold, on trends in Norwegian literature, on ...
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Three Percent #165: Disorder in the Book Shelves
This episode of the Three Percent Podcast never gets to its actual topic, but includes minor disagreements about ebooks in libraries and its impact on ebook revenue, more questions about Book Culture's situation, a general sense of malaise, trying to make sense of Dean Koontz, Audible's "Caption" program, a wild idea about ...
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The All or Nothing of Book Conversation
In theory, this is a post about Norwegian female writers in translation. I know it's going to end up in a very different space, though, so let's kick this off with some legit stats that can be shared, commented on, and used to further the discussion about women in translation. Back in the first post of July—Norwegian ...
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Dalkey Archive and Graywolf Press [Norway Month]
I initially had some fun ideas for this post—mostly trying to work in my theory of the "2019 Sad Dad Movement" and Elisabeth Åsbrink's forthcoming Made in Sweden, the pitch for which is "How the Swedes are not nearly so egalitarian, tolerant, hospitable or cozy and they would like to (have you) think"—but I think I'm ...
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Three Percent #164: Rapid Expansion
Chad shares his stupid dreams, Tom questions translators who work for AmazonCrossing and then want indie bookstores to help them out, and they both marvel over Deep Vellum's acquisition of Phoneme Media and A Strange Object (and the launching of the La Reunion imprint). It's a short episode, but filled with great moments, ...
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Three Percent Bonus: Becky Crook
As part of "Norwegian Month" here at Three Percent, translator Becky Crook (The Black Signs, Monsterhuman, Silence: In the Age of Noise, and many more) came on the podcast to talk about her first cover letter, in which ways she's become a better translator over the past half-decade, what to watch out for in contracts, the ...
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Three Percent #163: What Do You Want
Chad and Tom talk about a number of interrelated issues related to the costs of bookstore ownership and being a bookseller. They talk about the recent letter from Chris Doeblin at Book Culture, The Book Diaries, Human Rights for Translators, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Internet and Book Culture, and the ...
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Three Percent Bonus: Ben Lindbergh
In this special bonus episode, Ben Lindbergh of The Ringer and Effectively Wild talks with Chad about his new book, The MVP Machine. They talk about the premise of the book—how player development is the new "Moneyball" and is being driven by players and technology—about the process of co-writing, feedback loops for ...
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“The Book of Collateral Damage” by Sinan Antoon
The Book of Collateral Damage by Sinan Antoon Translated from the Arabic by James Richardson 312 pgs. | hc | 9780300228946 | $24.00 Yale Margellos Press Review by Grant Barber Author Sinan Antoon is an Assoc. Professor at the Gallatin School of Individual Study of NYU. His undergraduate degree was in 1990 from ...
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Three Percent #162: I Am a Wild Rose
Chad and Tom are joined by Mark Haber from Brazos Bookstore and author of the forthcoming Reinhardt's Garden (October 1, Coffee House Press). They talk a bit about Translation Bread Loaf (two thumbs up) and about a special poster for anyone who buys the First 100 from Open Letter, before trying their best to breakdown a ...
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The Five Tools, Part II: Translators [Let’s Praise More of My Friends]
. . . poor translations, he asserted, were the worst crimes an academic or a writer could commit, and a translator shouldn't be allowed to call themselves a translator until their translation had been read by hundreds of scholars and for hundreds of years, so that, in short, a translator would never know if they were a ...
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The Five Tools, Part I: Authors [Let’s Praise My Friends]
One of the most entertaining parts of my past three weeks of travel was the discovery that Norwegians refer to first-time authors as “debutants.” Which, OK, at first, is weird. The first time someone said it aloud, “she’s a debutant author,” I too had the urge to correct them. But then, like any great joke that's ...
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Three Percent #161: Will a French Book Win the BTBA?
Chad and Tom took some time off on Memorial Day to bring you this little podcast about the Best Translated Book Award finalists (winner will be announced at 5pm on 5/29 at BEA/NYRF, and there will be an informal afterparty at The Brooklyneer on Houston starting at 7), about the Man Booker International winner, about the ...
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Autobiography of Death [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Awards. Katrine Øgaard Jensen is a founding editor of EuropeNow Journal at Columbia University and the recipient of several awards, most recently the 2018 National Translation Award in ...
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Four Attempts at Approaches [Drawn & Quarterly]
This post comes to you thanks to a few different starting points: a box of translated graphic novels that Drawn & Quarterly sent me a couple of weeks ago, the fact that Janet Hong translated one of them (see last week’s interview), the fact that I don’t have time this month to read a ton of novels for these weekly ...
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Spiritual Choreographies [Excerpt]
As mentioned last week, in celebration of the imminent release of Carlos Labbé's Spiritual Choreographies, we decided to make Carlos our "Author of the Month." From now until June 1st, you can use the code LABBE at checkout to get 30% off any and all of his books. (Including ePub versions. And preorders.) And to try and ...
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“Melville: A Novel” by Jean Giono
Melville by Jean Giono Translated from the French by Paul Eprile 108 pgs. | pb | 9781681371375 | $14.00 NYRB Review by Brendan Riley In The Books in My Life (1952), Henry Miller, devoting an entire chapter to French writer Jean Giono (1895-1970), boasts about spending “several years. . . . preaching the ...
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Three Percent #160: Double Controversy
One of the calmest podcasts to date featuring two controversial topics: the new Open Letter cover design, and the side-effects of suddenly doubling (or quadrupling) the number of translations published every year. In terms of recommendations, this week Chad is all about the completely wild Bred from the Eyes of a Wolf by ...
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Dezafi [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Awards. P.T. Smith reads, writes, and lives in Vermont. Dezafi by Frankétienne, translated from the French by Asselin Charles (Haiti, University of Virginia) Every year, the BTBA ...
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Transparent City [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Awards. Tobias Carroll is the managing editor of Vol.1 Brooklyn and the author of the books Reel and Transitory. He writes the Watchlist column for Words Without Borders. Transparent ...
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Negative Space [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Awards. Tess Lewis is a writer and translator from French and German. She is co-chair of the PEN America Translation Committee and serves as an Advisory Editor for the Hudson Review. Her ...
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the easiness and the loneliness [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Awards. Laura Marris is a writer and translator. Her poems and translations have appeared in The Yale Review, The Brooklyn Rail,The Cortland Review, The Volta, Asymptote, and elsewhere. ...
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Pretty Things [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Awards. Giselle Robledo is a reader trying to infiltrate the book reviewer world. You can find her on Twitter at @Objetpetit_a_. Pretty Things by Virginie Despentes, translated from ...
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Carlos Labbé [Author of the Month]
In celebration of the release of Carlos Labbé's Spiritual Choreographies later this month--and because of a little surprise we'll unveil soon enough--we decided to make Carlos our "Author of the Month." From now until June 1st, you can use the code LABBE at checkout to get 30% off any and all of his books. (Including ePub ...
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Disoriental [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Awards. James Crossley has stood behind the counter of one independent bookstore or another for more than fifteen years and is currently the manager of brand-new Madison Books in Seattle. ...
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Bride and Groom [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Awards. Ruchama Johnston-Bloom, who writes about modern Jewish thought and Orientalism. She has a PhD in the History of Judaism from the University of Chicago and is the Associate Director of ...
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People in the Room [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Awards. Tom Flynn is the manager/buyer for Volumes Bookcafe (@volumesbooks on all social sites) in Chicago. He can often be found interrupting others' work in order to make them read a ...
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Congo Inc.: Bismarck’s Testament [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Awards. Noah M. Mintz is a translator, a former bookseller, and a PhD student at Columbia University. Congo Inc.: Bismarck’s Testament by In Koli Jean Bofane, translated from the ...
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Architecture of Dispersed Life: Selected Poetry [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Awards. Aditi Machado is the author of Some Beheadings and the translator of Farid Tali’s Prosopopoeia. She is the former poetry editor at Asymptote and the visiting poet-in-residence ...
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A Guesstimation of a Booklist Review-type Post
I alluded to this in an earlier post, but the main reason Three Percent has been light on this sort of content (and heavy on BTBA content, which is all stellar and worth checking out) isn't due to a lack of desire or interest, but a confluence of other events: deadlines for two pieces (one that should be available shortly, ...
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Öræfi: The Wasteland [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Awards. Keaton Patterson buys books for a living at Brazos Bookstore in Houston, Texas. Follow him on Twitter @Tex_Ulysses. Öræfi: The Wasteland by Ófeigur Sigurdsson, translated ...
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Three Percent #159: Publishing in 2025?
Chad and Tom are back to talk about Independent Bookstore Day (and Free Comic Book Day and Record Store Day), the Indie Playlist Initiative, fascists storming Politics & Prose, Alex Shephard's Mueller Report article, how much money Stanford (the Duke of the West?) is wasting on their crappy football program instead of ...
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After the Winter [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Awards. Rebecca Hussey is a community college English professor, a book reviewer, and a Book Riot contributor, where she writes a monthly round-up of indie press books, including many books ...
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Love in the New Millennium [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Awards. Rachel Cordasco has a PhD in literary studies and currently works as a developmental editor. She also writes reviews for publications like World Literature Today and Strange Horizons ...
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Convenience Store Woman [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Awards. Elijah Watson is a bookseller at A Room of One’s Own Bookstore. He can be found on Twitter @wavvymango. Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata, translated from the ...
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Comemadre [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Awards. Aaron Bell is a wage laborer and Doctor of Philosophy. Comemadre by Roque Larraquy, translated from the Spanish by Heather Cleary (Argentina, Coffee House Press) Comemadre ...
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The Governesses [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Awards. Pierce Alquist has a MA in Publishing and Writing from Emerson College and currently works in publishing in Boston. She is also a freelance book critic, writer, and Book Riot ...
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Slave Old Man [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Awards. Sofia Samatar is the author of the novels A Stranger in Olondria and The Winged Histories, the short story collection, Tender, and Monster Portraits, a collaboration with her ...
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The Hospital [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Awards. Justin Walls is a bookseller with Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon and can be found on Twitter @jaawlfins. The Hospital by Ahmed Bouanani, translated from the French by ...
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The Man Between [Genre of the Month]
I've been very lax in writing about the Open Letter author/genre of the month for April: nonfiction. But, there are still a couple of weeks left to share some info about our previously published and forthcoming works of nonfiction. And, as always, you can get 30% any of these books by using NONFICTION at ...
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Bricks and Mortar [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Awards. Tony Messenger is an Australian writer, critic and interviewer who has had works published in Overland Literary Journal, Southerly Journal, Mascara Literary Review, Burning House ...
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Season Eight of the Two Month Review: CODEX 1962 by Sjón
If you're a long-time listener to the Two Month Review podcast, or even a part-time follower of the Open Letter twitter, you've probably already heard that the next season of the podcast (it's eighth?!) is going to be all about Sjón's CoDex 1962. "Spanning eras, continents, and genres, CoDex 1962—twenty years in ...
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Moon Brow [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Awards. Tara Cheesman is a blogger turned freelance book critic, National Book Critics Circle member & 2018 Best Translated Book Award Fiction Judge. Her reviews can be found online at ...
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Three Percent #158: 2019 Best Translated Book Award Longlists
Best Translated Book Award fiction judge Kasia Bartoszynska joins Chad and Tom to talk about the recently released longlists. After providing some insight into the committee's thinking and discussions (and confirming that Chad had no knowledge of the lists beforehand, while not 100% confirming that Chad isn't Adam ...
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Seventeen [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Awards. Adam Hetherington is a reader and a BTBA judge. Seventeen by Hideo Yokoyama, translated from the Japanese by Louise Heal Kawai (Japan, FSG) In August of 1985, Japan Airlines ...
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CoDex 1962 [Why This Book Should Win]
Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2019 Best Translated Book Awards. George Carroll is a former bookseller and a West Coast representative for numerous publishers of translated literature. He is currently the curator ...
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Meet the BTBA Judges!
Tomorrow morning at 10am the 2019 Best Translated Book Award longlists will be revealed over at The Millions. As a bit of a preview, the judges wanted to introduce themselves . . . Keaton Patterson, a lifelong Texan, has an MA in Literature from the University of Houston-Clear Lake. For the past five years, he has been ...
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Mike Trout Floats All Boats
Let's start with what this post isn't going to be. It's not going to be a post about nonfiction in translation even though I declared, just yesterday, that this is "Nonfiction in Translation Month" at Three Percent. That's really going to kick off next week with a post about two true crime books in translation and a weird ...
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Are These Clues? [BTBA 2019]
We are days away from finding out which titles made the 2019 BTBA longlist! In the meantime, here's a post from Katarzyna (Kasia) Bartoszyńska, an English professor at Monmouth College, a translator (from Polish to English), and a former bookseller at the Seminary Co-op Bookstore in Chicago. There are simply too many good ...
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Three Percent #157: Post-Portland AWP
On this atypically subdued episode, Chad recounts some of his adventures in Portland at the AWP conference, and speculates about why this was his favorite one to date. Tom helps illuminate some of the mysteries behind IndieBound and what might be next for independent stores trying to capture some online sales. (And how this ...
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Interview with Damion Searls about Anniversaries [Part I]
Assuming that I'll be reading Anniversaries slowly but surely over the next four months, I thought it would be fun to talk to translator Damion Searls about the book along the way. If all goes according to plan, these monthly installments will develop into a rich conversation about the book, translation issues, and much ...
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Blogging Like It’s 1967 [Anniversaries, Volume 1]
Tomorrow afternoon we'll run the first of several interviews with Damion Searls, translator of the first complete version of Anniversaries to appear in English. If things go according to plan, each month we'll dig deeper and deeper into this massive book, a twentieth-century masterpiece that weighs something ...
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Three Percent #156: The Netflix of Titles
On this week's podcast, Chad and Tom talk laugh about how HarperVia conceives of itself, praise this year's National Book Award for Translation judges, give some spotty analysis of the Man Crankstart (?) Booker International longlist, the idea of an International Writers Hall of Fame (vote here), the one NCAA Basketball ...
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BTBA-Eligible Books from Japan [BTBA 2019]
We're exactly 24 days away from finding out which titles are on the 2019 BTBA longlist! (It will be announced at The Millions, and I [Chad] won't know what's on it until everyone else finds out. I'm so excited! I love being completely in the dark about this.) If you're interested in joining the conversation about which books ...
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Joshua Cohen on Jakov Lind [Author of the Month]
Our featured author of the month is Jakov Lind, an author whose biography, as you'll read below, is absolutely fascinating. To celebrate his work, we're offering 30% off on Landscape in Concrete and Ergo all month—just use the code LIND at checkout. Joshua Cohen (The Book of Numbers, Witz) wrote an amazing ...
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Three Percent BONUS EPISODE: Interview with Edwin Frank of NYRB
Following a trip to India to speak at the Seagull School of Publishing, Edwin Frank sat down to talk about Uwe Johnson's Anniversaries and NYRB's overall editorial history, including surprise hits, books he wishes more people read, and much more. A brilliant reader, publisher, and thinker, this episode will be of great ...
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Which Living Writers Are Sure-Thing Hall of Famers?
Last Thursday, I must've sent two dozen people a variation on that question above, usually in the form "Name me ten living 'Hall of Fame' writers." No explanation, no context, nothing. I was curious as to who people would name, what biases would come through, which authors would start debates. And I figured I could get a ...
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Three Percent BONUS EPISODE: Interview with Nick During of NYRB
To supplement NYRB month on Three Percent, Chad and Anthony talked to Nick During, publicist for New York Review Books, about the marketing of Anniversaries by Uwe Johnson, the struggles to get attention for reprints, Henry Green's eternal rediscovery, and much more. (Including Nick's ratings of the impact of various ...
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Three Percent #155: All Statistics Are Baseball Statistics
After a brief foray into Baseball Prospectus 2019 and Power Ball by Rob Neyer, Chad and Tom get down to business, analyzing Chad's statistically-based, very lukewarm take on translation production in 2018. They come up with innumerable, very rational reasons for the dip in translations that tend to revolve around ideas ...
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NYRB Classics: Some Stats [Strategies for Publishers]
This month, I'm going to switch things up a bit. Initially, I was going to leave Canada behind and focus on one single book: Uwe Johnson's Anniversaries. But, well, this is 1,600 pages long, and I have to proof a couple things this month, and reread some books for my class, and go to AWP, and catch up on Deadly ...
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“The Faerie Devouring” by Catherine Lalond [Quebec Literature from P.T. Smith]
Before starting this month's focus on Quebec literature, I asked P.T. Smith to recommend a few books for me to read, since he's one of the few Americans I know who has read a lot of Quebec literature. But rather than hoard these recommendations or write silly things about them, we decided it would be best if P.T. wrote weekly ...
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Coach House Books & Marie-Claire Blais [2018 Redux]
I've really, really enjoyed Quebec Month here at Three Percent. I had the chance to read the Catherine Leroux book I've been wanting to read, encountered some other really great books and presses I probably would've missed if I hadn't forced this on myself, and got to run a few really cool interviews and excerpts. On top of ...
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“The Employee” by Guillermo Saccomanno [Excerpt]
You have three days left to take advantage of Guillermo Saccomanno's status as "Open Letter Author of the Month." Through Thursday night, you can get 30% off both of his books via the Open Letter website by using the code SACCOMANNO at checkout. With so many positive comments coming in about 77, I thought I'd give you a ...
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“Next Episode” by Hubert Aquin [Quebec Literature from P.T. Smith]
Before starting this month's focus on Quebec literature, I asked P.T. Smith to recommend a few books for me to read, since he's one of the few Americans I know who has read a lot of Quebec literature. But rather than hoard these recommendations or write silly things about them, we decided it would be best if P.T. wrote weekly ...
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Interview with Dimitri Nasrallah of Esplanade Books
Continuing our month-long series of Quebec literature, below you'll find an interview with Dimitri Nasrallah, writer, translator, and editor of Esplanade Books, the fiction imprint of Véhicule Press. Later this afternoon we'll be running an excerpt from one of their forthcoming titles. Chad W. Post: I want to ask you ...
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Three Percent #154: Celebrity Translators
After an update about Chad's computer files and subscriptions, Tom talks about Amazon leaving NYC and they both get into a long discussion about translator Molly Ringwald (who you might also recognize from Riverdale). Chad tries to order a book from IndieBound (where do these books process from?) and then they talk a bit ...
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Véhicule Press/Esplanade Fiction & BookThug/Book*Hug [P.T. Smith Redux]
This really is the P. T. Smith-inspired post. As you likely know, Patrick has been writing weekly posts for Three Percent this month about some of his favorite works of Quebec literature. (See this post and this one.) He's one of the few Americans I know (maybe the only one?) who is deep into Quebec lit, so deep in fact that ...
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Biblioasis [Catherine Leroux Redux]
Last December, when I was working on this post about Quebec fiction, I came up with the idea of having themed months running throughout 2019. Which is why January was all about Spain, February about Quebec, and March about Uwe Johnson's Anniversaries. (Which might kill me and/or lead me into an insane rabbit-hole of ...
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“Go Figure” by Réjean Ducharme [Quebec Literature from P.T.]
Before starting this month's focus on Quebec literature, I asked P.T. Smith to recommend a few books for me to read, since he's one of the few Americans I know who has read a lot of Quebec literature. But rather than hoard these recommendations or write silly things about this, we decided it would be best if P.T. wrote a ...
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Three Percent #153: Winter Beats and Breaks
At the top of this episode, Tom explains why he and Chad fell off the biweekly schedule for a bit, but then they come back strong, talking about Winter Institute, the Independent Publishers Caucus, minimum wage, this wild New Yorker article that doesn't quite do enough, but makes Chad angry, and Hanif Abdurraqib's Go Ahead ...
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QC Fiction [Canada Redux]
I think I might have mentioned this in an earlier post, but now that we’ve put Spain to bed with a week dedicated to each of the four major languages—Castilian, Catalan, Galician, and Basque—we’re turning our attention to the North. As in the Great White. Canada: home of poutine, reasonable political leaders (now that ...
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Guillermo Saccomanno [Open Letter Author of the Month]
In celebration of the release of 77 on Tuesday, February 12, we’ve decided to make Guillermo Saccomanno this month’s featured author. Like what we did for Volodine last month, we’re offering 30% all orders for Gesell Dome and 77 (use SACCOMANNO at checkout), and will be running a series of excerpts from his books. ...
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Why Are Patreon [Time for a Basque Rundown]
I promise I’ll be back on schedule soon—this computer situation is really taking it’s toll . . . I’m currently writing on my iPad, using a Bluetooth keyboard and feeling like a gross millennial working out of a third-wave coffee shop, saying NO! to Large Computer, and proving that Jobs is Genius and that 2019 is about ...
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Three Percent BONUS EPISODE: Interview with Jonathan Dunne
As part of this month's ongoing series of posts about literature from Spain, I talked to author, translator, and publisher Jonathan Dunne, whose Small Stations Press has produced more translations of Galician literature into English than anyone else. On this bonus episode of the Three Percent Podcast, we talk about how to ...
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Why Are Preview Lists [Galician Literature + Positivity]
I've been trying sooooooo hard to be positive in 2019. So hard. Stay optimistic in light of distribution issues. Don't worry about sales too much, because I'm 250% certain Anthony is going to take us to the next level. Ignore the fact that Lit Hub listed Night School as one of the best reviewed "nonfiction" books of the ...
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“Tell Them of Battles, Kings, & Elephants” by Mathias Énard
Tell Them of Battles, Kings, & Elephants Translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell 144 pgs. | pb |9780811227049 | $19.95 New Directions Publishing Reviewed by Grant Barber Énard is a Very Important Author indeed. He belongs on the stage with Pamuk, T Morrison, Morante, Okri, Delillo, J. Marías, ...
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“Eleven Sooty Dreams” by Manuela Draeger [Excerpt]
As we posted about last week, in honor of Radiant Terminus being the next featured Two Month Review title, Antoine Volodine is our "Author of the Month." So, if you want to buy any of his books, you can get 30% off by using the code VOLODINE at checkout. (And yes, that applies to print AND ebooks.) Last friday we ...
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“The Gradual Disappearance of Jane Ashland” by Nicolai Houm
The Gradual Disappearance of Jane Ashland by Nicolai Houm Translated from Norwegian by Anna Paterson 228 pgs. | pb | 9781947793064 | $15.95 Tin House Books Review by David DeGusta Nicolai Houm’s novel “The Gradual Disappearance of Jane Ashland,” translated from the Norwegian by Anna Paterson, opens with ...
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Three Percent #152: Seven (Or So) Insights
Getting back on schedule for the new year, Chad and Tom convene to talk about two articles: "7 Publishing Insights Revealed by Last Year's Top 100 Bestselling Books," and "Virginia Woolf? Snob! Richard Wright? Sexist! Dostoyevsky? Anti-Semite!" They also talk a bit about YA books and the precipitous decline in reading as ...
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Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven [Excerpt]
In support of Antoine Volodine as our featured "Author of the Month," throughout the day we'll be posting excerpts from the three books of his Open Letter has already published. (Next week we'll run excerpts from forthcoming ones . . . ) First up is Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven, translated from the ...
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Why Are Meritocracy [Two Castilian Books]
I have two books that I want to talk about this week, and one related publishing/cultural issue, but before I get into all of that, I thought it would be interesting to dig a bit into some of the data from last week's "Spain By the Numbers" post. As I mentioned in that same post, over the course of this month, I'm going to ...
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Books from Spain [By the Numbers]
I alluded to this in an earlier post (or two?), but one of the things I'd like to do on Three Percent this year is highlight a different group of books every month. It could be a particular country—like this month—or a set of publishers, or a single publisher, or single author. Regardless of the specifics of a particular ...
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9 x 9 x 9: Everything Comes to an End
The other day I saw someone on Twitter asking haters of "best of" lists what changes they would institute to make these things more palatable. I thought about this for longer than I'd like to admit because a) circa-2001, I used to love year-end recaps. This was the era of "Best Week Ever" and other clip shows that were ...
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Three Percent #151: A Time for Gifting
After a long conversation about a rather strange Rochester gathering of arts organizations, Chad and Tom get down to business: recommending their favorite books of 2018. Except, rather than just make a list, they decide which of their friends or relatives should receive each of these titles. Then they talk about a couple ...
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Books about Death [BTBA 2019]
Today's Best Translated Book Award post is from George Carroll, retired publisher rep living in Seattle, rooting for the Sounders, and kicking ass in our Fantasy Premier League league. In his preface to Best European Fiction 2016, Jon Fosse wrote “But crime fiction is not literature; it is the opposite of it . . . for ...
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“Quo Vadis, Baby?” by Grazia Verasani
Quo Vadis, Baby? by Grazia Verasani Translated from the Italian by Taylor Corse and Juliann Vitullo 180 pgs. | pb | 9781599103662 | $15.00 Italica Press Review by Jeanne Bonner The last time I wrote about Grazia Verasani’s Quo Vadis, Baby? (Mondadori, 2007) I was researching an article for Literary Hub ...
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Three Percent #150: Canadian Publishing
This week, Kevin Williams of Talonbooks out of Vancouver, British Columbia joins Tom and Chad to talk about the state of publishing in Canada. He recaps his career in the book business—as a bookseller, distributor, agent, and publisher—and provides a lot of insight into the Canadian funding structures, the not-so-great ...
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The Fault in Our Numbers
the cigarette consumed itself inside her body, her extraordinary body, 70 percent water, 30 percent smoke, and I could not understand it —The Nocilla Lab (Sales(S) x List Price(P)) x Readership® – Fixed Operating Expenses(FOE) – Printing(PR) – Author Payment(AP) – Translator Payment(TP) – Marketing Costs(MC) = ...
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Three Percent #149: I Have Some Advice
LIVE PODCAST! Well, sort of. Tom was in Rochester, so he and Chad recorded a spontaneous podcast while being in the same room as one another. (And with eight-month-old Aleks, who makes an appearance.) They talk about bookstores Tom visited on this trip, the National Book Awards, and J Franz's now infamous "rules for writers." ...
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Three Percent #148: The Hottest Trend
Sticking more or less to their biweekly schedule, Chad and Tom reconvene to talk about a couple recent articles, the challenges of being a literary nonprofit, interesting books they're reading, humblebrags about the Words Without Borders and PEN galas, and more. Surprising lack of sports talk this week, although there is a ...
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Holiday BTBA Overview [BTBA 2019]
It's Best Translated Book Award build-up time, which lasts, like four months . . . Anyway, here's Kasia Bartoszynska's overview of a number of exciting titles vying for the BTBA 2019! The holiday season is not yet upon us, but for us judges, there’s an exciting new gift in the mail almost daily, in the form of packages ...
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Three Percent #147: Helping Listeners One Translation Heuristic at a Time
This week's episode is mostly inspired by an email from a listener about evaluating translations, and although Tom and Chad don't provide the hardest and fastest rules, they do have an interesting conversation about how they read and judge translated books. They also follow up on a few different threads from earlier episodes ...
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“Mamma’s Boy” by David Goudreault
Mamma's Boy by David Goudreault Translated from the French by JC Sutcliffe 192 pgs. | pb | 9781771663823 | $20.00 Book*hug Review by Rafael Sanchez Montes This incredibly fun novel is a first-person account and confession by the unnamed protagonist, who offers his side of the story to what he ...
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My Struggle, Part I: Confusion and Value
As part of my "Deep Vellum Month" experiment, I decided to move from the toponymy—and topography—of Iceland to geography. Or rather, "geography," as in the Geography of Rebels by Maria Gabriela Llansol. Like with most of the books I've been reading of late, I knew basically nothing about this book before picking it ...
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Three Percent #146: The Conspiracy Theory Episode
An all-banter episode that touches on an array of topics, from ranking ideas on how to save indie bookstores, to The Great American Read's (embarrassing) top 10 vote getting books (are we sure Outlanders doesn't include people riding on dragons?), the Frankfurt Book Fair, self-censorship, QAnon + Marlins Man, a book scam, ...
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The Icelandic Connection
If you're a long time reader of Three Percent and/or literature in translation, I'm sure you've heard of Deep Vellum, and probably know most of their history. But to kick off my series of posts about their September/October books—and to put the numbers below in context—it's probably worth a quick recap. Back in the ...
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Two Month Review #6.2: The Book of Disquiet (sections 1-39)
This is one of the most Two Month Review podcasts yet. Chad, Brian, and Tom Flynn (Volumes Books in Chicago) come together to discuss the first forty-six pages (sections 1-39) of the complete version of Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet. In addition to breaking down the philosophy and literary style representing ...
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It’s the Postseason! [Welcome to October]
It's been too long since I last posted a comprehensive update of where we are with translations this year. Which is why I spent most of today updating the Translation Database. There are probably still a number of books to be added before the year is out, but we're getting close to having a pretty stable—and pretty ...
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A Frozen Imagination
Over the course of the eleven years that Three Percent has existed, we've published approximately 300 posts about Iceland. We even held a special "Icelandic Week" when Iceland was Guest of Honor at the 2011 Frankfurt Book Fair. In addition to highlighting a ton of authors and musicians, we tried to record a Brennivín ...
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Missed Opportunities (Here’s the NBA Translation Post I Promised)
Per usual when I'm writing these posts, I'm standing in front of my TV with the St. Louis Cardinals game on in the background, dwelling on what this season could've been. Sure, as I type, they have a .5 game lead for the final wild-card slot, but their odds of making the playoffs are only at 68.1%—far from a ...
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Publishing Strategies of Rediscovery
A few years ago, New Directions reissued three Clarice Lispector books (and one never-before translated one) with covers that combined into one giant portrait. Although it was preceded by the publication of a new translation of The Hour of the Star—by Ben Moser, who had recently written an all-encompassing biography of ...
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“The Great Passage” by Shion Miura
The Great Passage by Shion Miura translated from the Japanese by Juliet Winters Carpenter 222 pgs. | pb |9781477823071 | $14.95 AmazonCrossing Reviewed by Talia Franks Shion Miura’s The Great Passage chronicles the construction of a dictionary also called The Great Passage, which is a comprehensive catalog ...
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The Simple Pleasures of Reading
My initial plan for this post was to do a huge data dump for Women in Translation Month, but Meytal Radzinski already went and totally crushed it. She has all the best graphs, pie charts, breakdowns, overviews, recommendations, and more. Go click on that link and spend a day reading everything she has to say. I looked over ...
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BTBA 2019: Juries, Dates, Request for Your Books
Earlier this week, Patrick Smith sent out the email below to as many publishers as possible, letting them know about this year's Best Translated Book Award juries. In case you didn't get this--or, if you're a translator or author who wants to make sure your book is submitted--I'm reposting it all here. (And, we will have a ...
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“The Bottom of the Jar” by Abdellatif Laâbi
The Bottom of the Jar by Abdellatif Laâbi translated from the French by André Naffis-Sahely 220 pgs. | pb |9781935744603 | $17.00 Archipelago Books Reviewed by Brendan Riley For English language readers, like this reviewer, whose literary sense of North Africa is delimited by periodic forays into the ...
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August 2018 Newsletter
Celebrate Women in Translation Month with 40% Off All Open Letter Books Written by Women OR Translated by Women Women in Translation Month is always an exciting time to discover, read, discuss, and celebrate books by women from around the world. It was created by Meytal Radzinski back in 2014, and has since spawned ...
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The Very Pleasant Post
Usually I try and make the first post of the month one that's based around some sort of statistical analysis of what's going on with literature in translation. Since this is Women in Translation Month (#WIT2018), it would make a great deal of sense to run a bunch of data about women writers in translation, women translators, ...
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A Whole Lot of Blather
I'm back from Ireland! I was there for the past two weeks as part of a University of Rochester Travel Club trip for which I served as the "academic host" and gave four different lectures--two on Ulysses, one on Irish humor, and one on the relationship between contemporary Irish literature and language. I think they all went ...
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“Katalin Street” by Magda Szabó
Katalin Street by Magda Szabó translated from the Hungarian by Len Rix 248 pgs. | pb | 9781681371528 | $15.95 NYRB Classics Reviewed by Jason Newport What is a woman, or her ghost, to do for herself? This is the question that haunts Hungarian author Magda Szabó in her three novels ...
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Selection Bias, Best Translations, and Where Are the Women in Translation From?
A couple weeks ago, Boyd Tonkin, the excellent critic and founder of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize--the inspiration for the Best Translated Book Award, and now the Man Booker International--released a rather unattractive looking book called The 100 Best Novels in Translation. It's pretty obvious what's ...
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Is this All Fox-y Enough? (Two Month Review: #5.02: FOX by Dubravka Ugresic – Blog Post)
Last week, Chad, Brian, and returning special guest Tom Flynn of Volumes Bookcafe broke down some of the bigger elements of the introductory section of Dubravka Ugresic’s Fox, including the all-important question: is Ugresic’s fox metaphor fox-y enough? We’ll take our own look at some segments of this opening section ...
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9 Books Likely to Win the 2019 Best Translated Book Award
I'm just back from a poetry reading that's part of Rochester's The Ladder literary conference . . . actually, it was a poetry reading PLUS short stories (which are the poetry of novel writing), which is neither here nor there, except that a few of us played a sort of drinking game? Actually, we just straight up played a ...
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9 Comp Authors for Dag Solstad, Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace the Listicle
So much has happened over the past two weeks! Given all that I want to say about Dag Solstad's books and the people who review them, I'm going to rush through a few general comments about recent publishing events. First off: the New York Rights Fair and BookExpo. This year marked the first ever NYRF and the "newly ...
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The Crime in the Data
A couple weeks ago, writer Kári Tulinius asked me for some information on how prevalent crime novels are in what gets translated. As with most statistics related to literature in translation (and/or the book industry in general), the correct answer was, "uh . . . no idea. Maybe a lot? Sure seems like it . . . So, yeah." I ...
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“Snatching Bodies” by Rodrigo Fresán [New Fiction]
To celebrate the release of The Bottom of the Sky (which happens to be Open Letter's 100th title!), we wanted to share this "bonus track" to the novel. He initially wrote this story as a sort of explanation for one paragraph in The Bottom of the Sky, and then had it anthologized in collection of “dysfunctional family” ...
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“Paraguayan Sea” by Wilson Bueno [Why This Book Should Win]
And with this post, we're done! All the longlisted titles have been featured in the Why This Book Should Win series. Thanks to everyone who contributed, and for this particular post, thanks to Raluca Albu from BOMB. Paraguayan Sea by Wilson Bueno, translated from the Portunhol and Guarani by Erin Moure ...
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May Is a Month of Grading
The Best Translated Book Award Finalists were announced earlier this week, and following up on my earlier post looking at the representation of various languages on the BTBA longlists, I thought I'd take a second to highlight the publishing houses (#NameThePublisher) that have historically done the best on the BTBA ...
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2018 Best Translated Book Award Finalists
May 15, 2018—Ten works of fiction and six poetry collections remain in the running for this year’s Best Translated Book Awards following the announcement of the two shortlists at The Millions website this morning. Featuring a blend of contemporary writers and modern classics, of writers from cultures around the world, ...
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“The Last Bell” by Johannes Urzidil [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series (almost done!) is from Abe Nemon who writes essays and reviews of old and out-of-print books at OldBookAppreciator.com, as well as daily bios of obscure authors on their birthdays on Twitter at the handle @bookappreciator. The Last Bell by Johannes Urzidil, translated ...
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“The Magician of Vienna” by Sergio Pitol [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series is from P.T. Smith. A full-time writer of WTBSW entries. The Magician of Vienna by Sergio Pitol, translated from the Spanish by George Henson (Mexico, Deep Vellum) Books that are part of a series have a tough time getting the recognition they deserve, in general and ...
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“August” by Romina Paula [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series is from BTBA judge and University Bookstore bookseller Caitlin Baker. August by Romina Paula, translated from the Spanish by Jennifer Croft (Argentina, Feminist Press) I initially picked up August because of its beautiful cover and then I read the first ...
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“Beyond the Rice Fields” by Naivo [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series is from reader, reviewer, and BTBA judge P.T. Smith. Beyond the Rice Fields by Naivo, translated from the French by Allison M. Charette (Madagascar, Restless Books) Naivo’s Beyond the Rice Fields is the first Malagasy novel ever translated into English. That’s ...
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“Savage Theories” by Pola Oloixarac [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series is from George Carroll, former and future BTBA judge, soccer fanatic, world literature correspondent for Shelf Awareness, and curator of litintranslation.com. Savage Theories by Pola Oloixarac, translated from the Spanish by Roy Kesey (Argentina, Soho Press) I would ...
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“I Am the Brother of XX” by Fleur Jaeggy [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series is from BTBA judge, reader, and reviewer P.T. Smith. I Am the Brother of XX by Fleur Jaeggy, translated from the Italian by Gini Alhadeff (Switzerland, New Directions) Instant love is well and good. Confident and rejection is the same, if you’re the one doing the ...
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“Suzanne” by Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette [Why This Book Should Win]
The Why This Book Should Win entry for today is from literary translator Peter McCambridge, fiction editor at QC Fiction (a new imprint of the best of contemporary Quebec fiction in translation) and founding editor of Québec Reads. Suzanne by Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette, translated from the French (Québec) by Rhonda ...
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What if Writers Were Treated Like Soccer Players?
Told you I'd be back soon to catch up on these weekly posts! Next week I'll put together a recap linking to all of the posts in the series so far, and including a line or two about what they cover. And then, in addition to writing about one (or two) new books, next week I'll also post a May overview with some more data, a ...
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“Bergeners” by Tomas Espedal [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This book Should Win series is from BTBA judge Patrick Smith, who is scrambling to finish covering all the books in this series. If you want to write about one of the remaining few, please get in touch! Bergeners by Tomas Espedal, translated from the Norwegian by James Anderson (Norway, Seagull ...
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“Iron Moon: An Anthology of Chinese Worker Poetry” [Why This Book Should Win]
This Why This Book Should Win entry is from Raluca Albu, BTBA judge, and editor at both BOMB and Guernica. Iron Moon: An Anthology of Chinese Worker Poetry, translated from the Chinese by Eleanor Goodman (China, White Pine Press) “Iron Moon” is an anthology of Chinese migrant worker poetry that transports ...
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“Incest” by Christine Angot [Why This Book Should Win]
Today's second Why This Book Should Win post is from Bradley Schmidt, a translator of contemporary German literature, most recently of Philipp Winkler’s Hooligan (Arcade), who also teaches writing and translation at Leipzig University. More at bradley-schmidt.com. Incest by Christine Angot, translated from the ...
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“Fever Dream” by Samanta Schweblin [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series is from former BTBA judge and founder of the Literary License blog, Gwendolyn Dawson, who lives in Houston, TX and is a practicing lawyer. She is a longtime supporter of literature in translation and all literary arts. Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin, translated from ...
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“My Heart Hemmed In” by Marie NDiaye [Why This Book Should Win]
With the May 15th announcement of the finalists just over a week away, these Why This Book Should Win entries are coming fast and furious. This one is by Lori Feathers, BTBA judge and co-owner of Interabang Books. My Heart Hemmed In by Marie NDiaye, translated from the French by Jordan Stump (France, Two ...
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“The Iliac Crest” by Cristina Rivera Garza [Why This Book Should Win]
First Why This Book Should Win entry for today is from Tim Horvath. Tim Horvath is the author of Understories (Bellevue Literary Press) and Circulation (sunnyoutside), as well as fiction in Conjunctions, AGNI, Harvard Review, and elsewhere. He teaches in the Creative Writing BFA/MFA programs at the New Hampshire ...
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“Third-Millennium Heart” by Ursula Andkjær Olsen [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series is from poet, translator, editor, and BTBA judge, Aditi Machado. Third-Millennium Heart by Ursula Andkjær Olsen, translated from the Danish by Katrine Øgaard Jensen (Denmark, Broken Dimanche Press/Action Books) What’s a translated book got to do to ...
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“Old Rendering Plant” by Wolfgang Hilbig [Why This Book Should Win]
Now that the new website is up and working, we can start catching up on the Why This Book Should Win series. (And I can go back to writing my unhinged weekly missives about literature in translation.) Today's first post is from Joseph Schreiber, writer, editor at 3:AM Magazine, maintains literary blog, ...
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“Hackers” by Aase Berg [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series is from BTBA judge and Greenlight Bookstore bookseller Jarrod Annis. Hackers by Aase Berg, translated from the Swedish by Johannes Göransson (Sweden, Black Ocean) Stark and minimal, Hackers thrums with a biology inherent to Berg's poetics, an exoskeleton of ...
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“Compass” by Mathias Énard [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series is from former BTBA judge and founder of the Literary License blog, Gwendolyn Dawson, who lives in Houston, TX and is a practicing lawyer. She is a longtime supporter of literature in translation and all literary arts. Compass by Mathias Énard, translated from the ...
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“I Remember Nightfall” by Marosa di Giorgio [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series is from BTBA judge and Greenlight Bookstore bookseller Jarrod Annis. I Remember Nightfall by Marosa di Giorgio, translated from the Spanish by Jeannine Marie Pitas (Uruguay, Ugly Duckling Presse) Dark, ethereal, and sensuous, Marosa di Giorgio's prose ...
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“For Isabel: A Mandala” by Antonio Tabucchi [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series is from BTBA judge Jeremy Keng. For Isabel: A Mandala by Antonio Tabucchi, translated from the Italian by Elizabeth Harris (Italy, Archipelago Books) The photographer shifted positions and lit another cigarette in his long ivory holder. He seemed uneasy. Silent, he ...
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“Chasing the King of Hearts” by Hanna Krall [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series is from Ruchama Johnston-Bloom, who writes about modern Jewish thought and Orientalism. She has a PhD in the History of Judaism from the University of Chicago and is the Associate Director of Academic Affairs at the London center of CAPA: The Global Education ...
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“Return to the Dark Valley” by Santiago Gamboa [Why This Book Should Win]
Final entry today in the Why This Book Should Win series is from BTBA judge and curator of “Reader-at-Large,” Tara Cheesman. Return to the Dark Valley by Santiago Gamboa, translated from the Spanish by Howard Curtis (Colombia, Europa Editions) One of the characters in Return to the Dark Valley is a “crazy and ...
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“Directions for Use” by Ana Ristović [Why This Book Should Win]
Today’s poetry entry into the Why This Book Should Win series is from BTBA judge—and Riffraff co-owner—Emma Ramadan. Directions for Use by Ana Ristović, translated from the Serbian by Steven Teref and Maja Teref (Serbia, Zephyr Press) Very occasionally, reading a book in translation can feel like I’m ...
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“You Should Have Left” by Daniel Kehlmann [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the “Why This Book Should Win” series is from Jenny Zhao, an undergrad student here at the University of Rochester. You Should Have Left by Daniel Kehlmann, translated from the German by Ross Benjamin (Germany, Pantheon) The premise of You Should Have Left is a familiar one, not all that different ...
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“Radiant Terminus” by Antoine Volodine [Why This Book Should Win]
Today’s “Why This Book Should Win” fiction entry is from Rachel Cordasco, former BTBA judge, and curator of Speculative Fiction in Translation. Radiant Terminus by Antoine Volodine, translated from the French by Jeffrey Zuckerman (France, Open Letter Books) In Radiant Terminus, we have a novel that disturbs ...
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Spanish Literature Is Our Favorite Scene
Last week, the 2018 longlists for the Best Translated Book Award were released and were loaded with books translated from the Spanish. Eight works of fiction and one poetry collection. Nine titles total out of the thirty-seven on the combined longlists. That’s just a smidge under 25%. Twenty-five percent! One-quarter of the ...
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“Astroecology” by Johannes Heldén [Why This Book Should Win]
This morning’s poetry entry into the Why This Book Should Win series is from BTBA judge—and Riffraff co-owner—Emma Ramadan. Astroecology by Johannes Heldén, translated from the Swedish by Kirkwood Adams, Elizabeth Clark Wessel, and Johannes Heldén (Sweden, Argos Books) Johannes Heldén’s Astroecology is an ...
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“Affections” by Rodrigo Hasbún [Why This Book Should Win]
Mark Haber of the BTBA jury and Brazos Bookstore has today’s fiction entry in the “Why This Book Should Win” series. Affections by Rodrigo Hasbún, translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes (Bolivia, Simon & Schuster) There is a lot to be said for subtlety, the quiet ability to tackle the heavy ...
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“Remains of Life” by Wu He [Why This Book Should Win]
This afternoon’s entry in the “Why This Book Should Win” series is from BTBA judge Adam Hetherington. Remains of Life by Wu He, translated from the Chinese by Michael Berry (China, Columbia University Press) I’m not sure how to define historical fiction. How true does regular fiction need to be to become ...
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“Before Lyricism” by Eleni Vakalo [Why This Book Should Win]
This morning’s entry in the “Why This Book Should Win” series is from BTBA judge and Riffraff co-owner, Emma Ramadan. Before Lyricism by Eleni Vakalo, translated from Greek by Karen Emmerich (Greece, Ugly Duckling Presse) I would happily and readily make the argument that of all the books on the BTBA poetry ...
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“Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller” by Guðbergur Bergsson [Why This Book Should Win]
This afternoon’s entry in the “Why This Book Should Win” series is from writer and Russian translator, Andrea Gregovich. She also interviews literary translators about their new books for the Fiction Advocate blog. Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller by Guðbergur Bergsson, translated from Icelandic by Lytton Smith ...
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“The Invented Part” by Rodrigo Fresán [Why This Book Should Win]
Between now and the announcement of the BTBA finalists on May 15th, we’ll be highlighting all 37 longlisted books in a series we call “Why This Book Should Win.” The first post is from BTBA judge and Ebenezer Books bookseller P.T. Smith. The Invented Part by Rodrigo Fresán, translated from the Spanish by Will ...
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A Quantum Spiral by Another Name (Part VII, Pgs 201-236)
Last week, Chad and Brian were joined by Rachel S. Cordasco of Speculative Fiction in Translation as they discussed Part VII, “Global Autumn,” of Georgi Gospodinov’s Physics of Sorrow. This section hits us from too many angles, from the relatable hilarity of having a phobia of being asked “how are you?” to trying ...
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Best Translated Book Award 2018: Fiction Longlist
Incest by Christine Angot, translated from the French by Tess Lewis (France, Archipelago) Suzanne by Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette, translated from the French by Rhonda Mullins (Canada, Coach House) Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller by Guðbergur Bergsson, translated from the Icelandic by Lytton Smith (Iceland, ...
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Best Translated Book Award 2018: The Longlists!
April 10, 2018—Celebrating its eleventh consecutive year of honoring literature in translation, the Best Translated Book Awards is pleased to announce the 2018 longlists for both fiction and poetry. Announced at The Millions, the lists include a diverse range of authors, languages, countries, and publishers. On the ...
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Two Month Review: #4.08: The Physics of Sorrow (Part VII: “Global Autumn”)
This week, Rachel Cordasco from Speculative Fiction in Translation and the Wisconsin Historical Society Press joined Chad and Brian for a fun conversation about part VII of Georgi Gospodinov’s The Physics of Sorrow. They talked about how this book invokes a variety of memories, hotel rooms, Eastern European self-deprecating ...
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Two Month Review: #4.06: The Physics of Sorrow (Part V: “The Green House”)
In addition to ripping on Chad and the poor showing by the Michigan State Spartans in the NCAA Tournament, Brian Wood and Tom Flynn (from Volumes Bookcafe) discuss the morality of animals, how this section of The Physics of Sorrow focuses more on the “animal” side of the minotaur, the mixture of lightness and sorrow in ...
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9 Moments That Make “Tomb Song” the Frontrunner for the National Book Award in Translation
Tomb Song by Julián Herbert, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney (Graywolf Press) Moment Number One “Technique, my boy,” says a voice in my head. “Shuffle the technique.” To hell with it: in her youth, Mamá was a beautiful half-breed Indian who had five husbands: a fabled pimp, a ...
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Two Month Review: #4.05: The Physics of Sorrow (Part IV, Pgs 119-150)
This week, Patrick Smith joined Chad and Brian to talk about time capsules and their potential danger, nostalgia and the urge to collect, aliens, Chernobyl, and more. It was a very fun part of the book to discuss, and the three of them made the most of it, really digging into how The Physics of Sorrow is constructed, while ...
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Pathways to Discovering the Obscure?
The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter by Matei Calinescu, translated from the Romanian by Adriana Calinescu and Breon Mitchell (New York Review Books) When I first started reading The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter by Matei Calinescu, translated from the Romanian by Adriana Calinescu and Breon ...
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Obsessive Empathetic-Somatic Syndrome and You (Part III)
On this week’s Two Month Review blog post, we’re exploring Part III: “The Yellow House” from Georgi Gospodinov’s The Physics of Sorrow. As was unanimous from the conversation between Chad, Brian, and Nick last week, this is where the magic of the book and the skill of Gospodinov as a writer truly start to shine. And ...
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Two Month Review: #4.04: The Physics of Sorrow (Part III, Pgs 73-118)
To up the Bay Area sports content, we invited Nick Buzanski of Book Culture to come on and talk about one of his favorite sections of Georgi Gospodinov’s The Physics of Sorrow. They talk about community and storytelling, seeing movies in person, Gospodinov’s humor and beautiful writing, Gaustine’s wild ideas, sexy books ...
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Context Is Everything
Given the length of yesterday’s post, I’m just going to jump right into things, starting with this handmade Excel spreadsheet showing the three-year rolling average of the total number of translations published in the first quarter (January-March) of every year since 2008. That’s not the most illuminating ...
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Everyone Needs an Editor
Before I get into the meat of this post—which is basically just a bunch of quotes and a handful of observations—I wanted to check back in on something from an earlier essay. Back in January, I wrote about Leïla Slimani’s The Perfect Nanny and basically assumed that it would be a best-seller. (There was also a lot of ...
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Two Month Review: #4.03: The Physics of Sorrow (Part II, Pgs 59-72)
Caitlin Baker of the University Book Store in Seattle joined Chad and Brian to talk about this very short section of Georgi Gospodinov’s The Physics of Sorrow. Mostly they talk about the constant conflicts between kids and their parent in myths. And eating children. But it’s not as gruesome as all that! Mostly they have a ...
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Less Than Deadly Serious
Every spring, I teach a class on “World Literature & Translation” in which we read ~10 new translations, talk to as many of the translators as possible, and then the students have to choose one of the books to win their imaginary “Best Translated Book Award.” It’s a great exercise—trying to explain why they ...
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Two Month Review: #4.02: The Physics of Sorrow (Part I, Pgs 1-58)
Chad and Brian are joined by Tom Roberge of Riffraff (and the Three Percent Podcast) to discuss the first section of Georgi Gospodinov’s The Physics of Sorrow. They talk about the book’s general conceit, the minotaur myth, Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, Eastern European history, fascism and communism, and much ...
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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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Making the List [BTBA 2018]
This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is from Tara Cheesman, a freelance book critic and National Book Critics Circle member whose recent reviews can be found at The Rumpus, Book Riot, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Quarterly Conversation. Since 2009 she’s written the blog Reader At Large (formerly BookSexy ...
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Two Month Review: #4.01: The Physics of Sorrow (Introduction)
The new season of the Two Month Review kicks off now with a general overview Georgi Gospodinov’s The Physics of Sorrow, one of the most beloved books Open Letter has ever published. Brian’s on the lam, or in witness protection, or something, so Open Letter senior editor Kaija Straumanis stepped in to talk about one of the ...
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Interview with Madame Nielsen
The following is an excerpt from an interview that was conducted by David Damrosch and Delia Ungureanu—both of Harvard University—with Madame Nielsen in Copenhagen this past July. If you would like to see the entire piece, email me at chad.post [at] rochester.edu David Damrosch: Across your career, your several ...
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The Translation Industry Is Frozen
Before getting into the February translations, data on what’s being published (or not being published), and all the random stuff, I wanted to point out a few modifications to the Translation Database at Publishers Weekly that were recently implemented. First off, when you’re entering a title, you can now ...
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Never Fact-Check a Listicle
Back when I kicked off my 2018 Translations series I chose to include Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi as the fourth book from January I would read and review. And why not? It won the 2014 International Prize for Arabic Fiction1 and came with pretty high praise. “A haunting allegory of man’s savagery against man ...
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The Best Sports Novels Match Sport and Style
On some old episode of NPR’s All Songs Considered, Robin Hilton and Bob Boilen talked about their unique irresistible song elements. Those bits in songs that aren’t the main hook, or even an integral part of the song itself, but, when they appear, automatically make you like a particular song. Like, for me, if ...
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A Best-seller Should Be Divisive
When I came up with my plan of reading (and writing about) a new translation every week, I wanted to try and force myself to read books that I would normally just skip over. There are definitely going to be months filled with books by New Directions, Coffee House, Dalkey Archive, etc., but to write about just those titles ...
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In Favor of Translator Afterwords
As dumb as the content might be, there’s something to be said for hot takes in the sports world. Or maybe not the takes themselves—again, always dumb, always misguided, always loaded with bad suppositions and overly confident writing—but rather the situation in which you get to dissect and dismantle a hot take. It’s ...
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Tabucchi in Portugal: On Tabucchi’s “Viaggi e altri viaggi” [an essay by Jeanne Bonner]
Jeanne Bonner is a writer, editor and journalist, and translator from the Italian now based in Connecticut. In the fall, she began teaching Italian at the University of Connecticut where she is also working on several translation projects. You can find out more about Jeanne and her work at her website here. It’s a travel ...
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It’s 2018 and Where Have the Translations Gone?
Now that the Translation Database is over at Publishers Weekly, and in a format that makes it both possible to update in real time1 and much easier to query, I want to use it as the basis of a couple new regular columns here at Three Percent. First off, I want to get back to running monthly previews of translations. But, ...
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I Don’t Know If Hilbig Actually Uses the Word “Pace” Anywhere in His Novel Old Rendering Plant [BTBA 2018]
This week’s BTBA post is from Adam Hetherington. He lives and works in Tulsa, Oklahoma and is the author of the forthcoming novel Ontogeny Is Beautiful. My clever idea was to very briefly quote him in the title of this blog, then claim that any extended quotation does him a disservice. I was going to tell you ...
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Two Month Review #3.10: Death in Spring (pgs. 119-150)
Here it is, the infamous live recording at McNally Jackson! There was a great turnout to hear Brian, María Christina, and I work our way through our thoughts about Death in Spring, Rodoreda’s overall stature, the banning of the color yellow, and much more. We had a great time doing this, and thanks again to McNally ...
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The Size of the World
The Size of the World by Branko Anđić translated from the Serbian by Elizabeth Salmore 208 pages | pb | 9788661452154 | $10.99 Reviewed by Jaimie Lau Three generations of men—a storyteller, his father and his son—encompass this book’s world. . . . it is a world of historical confusion, illusion, ...
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BTBA Gift Guide [BTBA 2018]
This post was compiled by BTBA judge P.T. Smith. From now until the announcement of the long list, we’ll be running one post a week from a BTBA judge, cycling through the nine of us. To launch those posts, just in time for the holidays (just in time, yes), here’s a gift guide. These are books that have stood out to ...
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Two Month Review #3.9: Death in Spring (pgs. 69-118)
Mara Faye Lethem joins us this week to talk about Catalonia’s scatological obsession, the challenges of the current political situation, Max Besora’s wild novel, and Rodoreda’s triumphant return to the best-seller list. Then they get into a more autobiographical reading of this section of Death in Spring, a section ...
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Two Month Review #3.8: Death in Spring (pgs. 28-68)
This week, fresh off a publication in the Boston Review, Jess Fenn (JR Fenn) joins Chad, Brian, and Best Translated Book Award judge Patrick Smith (P.T. Smith) to talk about the second part of Death in Spring. They trace a few motifs, talk about dystopias and literary world-building, and much more. Another very informative ...
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Two Month Review #3.7: Death in Spring (pgs. 1-27)
Welcome to one of the strangest villages in all of fiction! Now that Chad and Brian have gone through the stories, they turn their attention to Rodoreda’s Death in Spring, which was published posthumously in 1986. They’re joined by Catalan researcher and translator Meg Berkobien and Anastasia Nikolis, who you ...
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Two Month Review #3.6: Selected Stories (pgs. 208-255)
After yelling at Skype a bunch, Chad, Brian, and special guest Tom Flynn of Volumes Bookcafe discuss the merits of some of Rodoreda’s final stories, especially “The Thousand Franc Bill,” “Paralysis,” and “The Salamander.” Then they manage to slightly diss groups upon groups of ...
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Two Month Review #3.5: Selected Stories (pgs. 144-207)
After doing a bit of a deeper dive into the situation in Catalonia—and discussing the LIVE recording that will take place on December 12th at the new McNally Jackson—Chad and Brian are joined by George Carroll to talk about this batch of Rodoreda’s stories. Although a couple of the stories discussed in this ...
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Looking at Some Rodoreda Criticism [Two Month Review]
Coming up on this Thursday’s Two Month Review podcast I join Brian Wood and George Carroll to talk about some of the stranger, more war influenced, Rodoreda stories. Specifically, we talk about “Before I Die,” “Ada Liz,” “On a Dark Night,” “Night and Fog,” and ...
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Two Month Review #3.4: Selected Stories (pgs. 103-143)
Things are a bit rough for Chad the morning after the Open Letter gala, but he powers through and talks about this new phase of Rodoreda’s stories. He and Brian break down some of the more challenging of her stories, including “Noctural” and “The Bath,” and talk about what does and doesn’t ...
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Trying to Understand "Nocturnal" [Two Month Review]
Coming up on this Thursday’s Two Month Review podcast Brian and I go it alone and talk about six Rodoreda stories: “The Beginning,” “Nocturnal,” “The Red Blouse,” “The Fate of Lisa Sperling,” “The Bath,” and “On the Train.” On that podcast, we ...
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Two Month Review #3.3: Selected Stories (pgs. 51-102)
This week, Mark Haber of Brazos Bookstore and the Best Translated Book Award committee joins Chad and Brian to talk about the next seven stories in Mercè Rodoreda’s collection. Although they touch on a number of them, a lot of time is spent focusing on “Carnival” and the literary antecedents to Rodoreda. ...
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Two Month Review #3.2: Selected Stories (pgs. 1-50)
This week, Chad and Brian dive into the first six stories in Mercè Rodoreda’s Selected Stories and call up Quim Monzó, arguably the most important contemporary Catalan author, to talk about the precision and emotionality in her work. They also talk about Catalan literature as a whole, A Thousand Morons, Catalan ...
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Two Month Review #3.1: Reunited! (Intro to Mercè Rodoreda)
Brian Wood is BACK. Complete with a poem he wrote in his time away from the Two Month Review . . . In the introduction to season three, Chad and Brian talk about Catalan literature (briefly), Mercè Rodoreda’s career and comps, possible approaches to discussing Rodoreda’s stories, and more. As noted ...
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Two Month Review #2.10: 17, composition book (Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller, Pages 361-411)
Here it is—the infamous LIVE recording of the Two Month Review! Chad and Lytton travelled all the way to Brooklyn to record this episode as part of the “Taste of Iceland Festivities.” As a result, they recap the book as a whole and reflect on the speech from Iceland’s First Lady that prefaced the ...
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Two Month Review #2.9: fourteen, fifteenth book, 16. notebook (Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller, Pages 306-360)
Icelandic novelist and poet Kári Tulinius joins Chad and Lytton this week to talk about three of the darkest sections of Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller and the history of this novel’s reception in Iceland. They also talk about the recent scandal that brought down the Icelandic government—and how it ties into Tómas ...
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Wojciech Nowicki Tour!
This evening, at Volumes Bookcafe in Chicago, Wojciech Nowicki’s U.S. tour for Salki kicks off. A four-city tour spanning the next ten days, this is your one opportunity in 2017 to meet the author of the book about which Andrzej Stasiuk said, “Your skin will crawl with pleasure from ...
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Two Month Review #2.8: this is the eleventh book, my 12th composition book, book 13 (Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller, Pages 282-305)
CORRECTION: Throughout this podcast, we joke about having recorded the final episode of the season live at Spoonbill & Sugartown last weekend. This is a lie! The live event will take place THIS SATURDAY (September 30, 2017) as part of the Taste of Iceland events. Eliza Reid, Iceland’s First Lady, will start things ...
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Two Month Review #2.7: tenth composition book (Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller, Pages 238-281)
This week Patrick Smith (Best Translated Book Award judge, The Scofield) joins Chad and Lytton to talk about this incredibly powerful section of the book, which raises all sorts of topical ideas about adhering to national myths and the problems of masculinity. This is also the section where Hitler shows up, and where a ...
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Two Month Review #2.6: IX. class A, tenth composition book (Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller, Pages 200-238)
This week Norwegian translator and ALTA Fellowship recipient David Smith joins Chad and Lytton to talk about the next forty pages of Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller. The two sections covered this week are wildly different from one another, opening with a much more fragmented, poetic bit then transitioning through a hilarious, yet ...
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“Kingdom Cons” by Yuri Herrera
Kingdom Cons by Yuri Herrera translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman 220 pgs. | pb | 9781908276926 | $13.95 And Other Stories Reviewed by Sarah Booker Yuri Herrera is overwhelming in the way that he sucks readers into his worlds, transporting them to a borderland that is at once mythical in its ...
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Two Month Review #2.5: tómas's seventh composition book, 8. (Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller, Pages 140-199)
This week author and translator Idra Novey joins Chad and Lytton to talk about one of the most challenging sections of the book so far. Not only is there a proliferation of children whose voices constantly interrupt Tómas’s thoughts, but there are a few more unsettling bits that raise questions about what we should ...
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Another take on “The Invented Part” by Rodrigo Fresán
The Invented Part by Rodrigo Fresán translated from the Spanish by Will Vanderhyden 552 pgs. | pb | 9781940953564 | $18.95 Open Letter Books Reviewed by Tiffany Nichols Imagine reading a work that suddenly and very accurately calls out you, the reader, for not providing your full attention to the act of ...
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Two Month Review #2.4: fifth composition book, VI. (Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller, Pages 69-139)
This week, Jacob Rogers—translator from the Galician and bookseller at Malaprop’s in Asheville, North Carolina—joins Chad and Lytton to talk about Tómas Jónsson’s next two “composition books.” Included in these sections are a long bit about the “board” and the general ...
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Perceived Humiliations, The Board, and the Dangers of Desire [Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller]
On this week’s Two Month Review podcast, we’ll be discussing the fifth composition book and VI (pages 69-139) from Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller. As a bit of preparation, below you’ll find some initial thoughts, observations, and quotes. You can also download this post as a PDF document. As always, ...
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Two Month Review #2.3: IV composition book (Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller, Pages 32-68)
In this episode—covering Tómas Jónsson’s fourth composition book—a number of the themes of the overall novel are put on display: Tómas’s relationship to his body, the way he tries to create a narrative for himself, possible injustices he’s suffered during his life, the way his lodgers are like ...
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The Body, Biographies, and Workplace Injustice! [Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller]
On this week’s Two Month Review podcast, we’ll be discussing the IV composition book (pages 32-68) from Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller. As a bit of preparation, below you’ll find some initial thoughts, observations, and quotes. You can also download this post as a PDF document. As always, you can get ...
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Women in Translation Month [Throwback No.2]
As many of you may have noticed already, August is widely considered Women in Translation Month (look for the #WITMonth hashtag basically anywhere). Since Open Letter has published its fair share of baller women authors over the past ten years, we thought we’d take a few posts to highlight a handful of our all-time favorite ...
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Two Month Review #2.2: Biography through Third Composition Book (Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller, Pages 1-31)
This week, Ph.D. candidate Anastasia Nikolis joins Chad and Lytton to talk about the real meat of Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller—chamber pot usage! They also discuss the way our grumpy narrator’s mind works, the way he finds beauty in ambiguity, how Lytton translated a very specific word game, and a couple cues to ...
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A Simple Story: The Last Malambo
Leila Guerriero’s A Simple Story: The Last Malambo chronicles the unique ferocity of a national dance competition in Argentina. The dance, called the malambo, pushes the physical and mental limits of male competitors striving to become champions of not only the historical craft of the dance, but for their families and ...
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The Biggest Update to the Translation Databases Ever (And Some More Women in Translation Data)
OK, I’m supposed to be packing for my summer vacation right now, so this is going to be a lot shorter than it otherwise would be. But! I just updated the Translation Databases! Not just the spreadsheets for 2016 and 2017, but every spreadsheet I’ve ever run. There’s up to date info on 2008-2018 AND new ...
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Women in Translation Month [Throwback No.1]
As many of you may have noticed already, August is widely considered Women in Translation Month (look for the #WITMonth hashtag basically anywhere). Since Open Letter has published its fair share of baller women authors over the past ten years, we thought we’d take a few posts to highlight a handful of our all-time ...
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Where (and When) Are We? [Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller]
On this week’s Two Month Review podcast, we’ll be discussing the Biography, first composition book, second book, and third composition book (pages 1-31) from Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller. As a bit of preparation, below you’ll find some initial thoughts, observations, and quotes. You can also download this ...
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Two Month Review #2.1: Introduction to Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller
And with this episode, we launch the second season of the Two Month Review! Over a ten-week period, we will be breaking down Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller by Guðbergur Bergsson, helping explain and explore what makes this book (often referred to as “Iceland’s Ulysses”) so influential and interesting. This ...
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Women in Translation Month 2017
I just finished entering in all the data for the Translation Database (super huge mega astonishing absolute extreme update to come), I thought I’d run a few quick reports for Women in Translation Month. First off, the big one: For the data I’ve collected between 2008-20181 only 28.7% of the translations in the ...
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"Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller" Reading Schedule [Two Month Review]
The first episode in the new season of the Two Month Review will release on Thursday, and in case you haven’t already heard, for the next ten weeks we’ll be discussing Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller by Guðbergur Bergsson. We have a Goodreads group set up to talk about about this, so feel free to join in and ...
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The Little Buddhist Monk & The Proof
Aira continues to surprise and delight in his latest release from New Directions, which collects two novellas: the first, The Little Buddhist Monk, a fairly recent work from 2005, and The Proof, an earlier work from 1989. There are a number of similarities to be sure—they both revolve around the sudden but intense ...
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Two Month Review #12: The Author Himself!
As a special bonus episode, both Rodrigo Fresán and Will Vanderhyden joined Chad and Brian to talk about The Invented Part as a whole, the first season of the Two Month Review, what’s next in the trilogy, technology’s revenge on Rodrigo, David Lynch, and, how to write jacket copy. Feel free to comment on ...
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Two Month Review #11: "The Imaginary Person" (The Invented Part, Pages 441-552)
We did it! After two months, eleven episodes, and a half dozen different guests, Brian and Chad finished their discussion of Rodrigo Fresán’s The Invented Part! Joining them this week to wrap things up is Valerie Miles, translator, publisher, co-founder of Granta en Español, and editor of A Thousand Forests in One ...
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Interview with Rodrigo Fresán (Part V)
If you’d rather read this podcast in one document, just dowload this PDF. Otherwise, click here to find all four of the earlier pieces along with a bunch of other Two Month Review posts about The Invented Part. Special thanks to Will Vanderhyden for conducting—and translating—this ...
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Class
The thing about Class is that I don’t know what the hell to think about it, yet I can’t stop thinking about it. I’ll begin by dispensing with the usual info that one may want to know when considering adding the book to their “to read” list. Written by Francesco Pacifico. Translated by Francesco Pacifico. Published ...
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Airplanes, Hyphellipses, and What's Next? [The Invented Part]
On this week’s Two Month Review podcast, we’ll be discussing the seventh, and final, part of The Invented Part (“The Imaginary Person,” pages 441-552). As a bit of preparation, below you’ll find some initial thoughts, observations, and quotes. You can also download this post as a PDF ...
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Two Month Review #10: "Meanwhile, Once Again, Beside the Museum Stairway, Under a Big Sky" (The Invented Part, Pages 405-440)
It’s another 2MR review with just Chad and Brian! Similar to the last guest-less podcast, this one goes a bit off the rails . . . Although this time around it gets a lot darker, as they talk about Chekov, Girl, Night, Swimming Pool, Etc., a scream descending from the skies, John Cheever’s writing prompt, and much ...
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I See You [The Invented Part]
On this week’s Two Month Review podcast, we’ll be discussing the sixth part of The Invented Part (“Meanwhile, Once Again, Beside the Museum Stairway, Under a Big Day,” pages 405-440). As a bit of preparation, below you’ll find some initial thoughts, observations, and quotes. You can also ...
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Two Month Review #9: "Life After People, or Notes For a Brief History of Progressive Rock and Science Fiction" (The Invented Part, Pages 361-404)
On this week’s Two Month Review, Tom Roberge from Riffraff and the Three Percent Podcast joins Chad and Brian talk about 2001: A Space Odyssey, Pink Floyd, potential errors and non-errors, cultural touchstones that serve to define friendships, the overall structure of this chapter of The Invented Part, and Tom’s ...
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Interview with Rodrigo Fresán (Part IV)
This is the fourth of a five-part interview with Rodrigo Fresán. Earlier parts are all avialble on the Three Percent website (I, II, and III), as are all other Two Month Review posts. Special thanks to Will Vanderhyden for conducting—and translating—this interview. Will Vanderhyden: The narrator of ...
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"Tomás Jónsson, Bestseller" Release Day!
Fans of challenging, cerebral, modernist epics, rejoice! Today marks the official release date of Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller by Guðbergur Bergsson, a masterpiece of twentieth-century Icelandic literature, the fifth Icelandic work Open Letter has published to date. This is a book that is sure to launch a thousand ...
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Structure, Time, Memory, and the Sadness of a Disillusioned Writer [The Invented Part]
On this week’s Two Month Review podcast, we’ll be discussing the fifth part of The Invented Part (“Life After People, or Notes for a Brief History of Progressive Rock and Science Fiction,” pages 361-404). As a bit of preparation, below you’ll find some initial thoughts, observations, and ...
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Two Month Review #8: "Many Fêtes, or Study for a Group Portrait with Broken Decalogues" (The Invented Part, Pages 301-360)
On this week’s Two Month Review, Chad and Brian talk about F. Scott Fitzgerald and Tender Is the Night, puzzles, how to properly introduce the show, the Modern Library list of top 100 novels of the twentieth century, Booth Tarkington, and much more more. Feel free to comment on this episode—or on the book in ...
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The Inverted Part [Two Month Review: The Invented Part]
On this week’s Two Month Review podcast, we’ll be discussing the fourth part of The Invented Part (“Many Fêtes, or Study for a Group Portrait with Broken Decalogues,” pagest 301-360). As a bit of preparation, below you’ll find some initial thoughts, observations, and quotes. You can also ...
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Two Month Review #7: "A Few Things You Happen to Think About When All You Want Is to Think About Nothing" (The Invented Part, Pages 231-300)
This week, Jonathan Lethem (Motherless Brooklyn, Chronic City) joins Chad and Brian to talk about The Writer’s trip to a hospital, where he assumes something horrible is happening, which is countered by a gushing forth of new story ideas. Jonathan tells of his own experience coming up with one of his most famous books ...
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Portraits of Rage and Mortality [Two Month Review: The Invented Part]
On this week’s Two Month Review podcast, we’ll be discussing the third part (“A Few Things You Happen to Think About When All You Want Is to Think About Nothing”) of The Invented Part . As a bit of preparation, below you’ll find some initial thoughts, observations, and quotes. You can also ...
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Two Month Review #6: "The Place Where the Sea Ends So the Forest Can Begin: Part 3" (The Invented Part, Pages 208-230)
This week, Speculative Fiction in Translation founder and Best Translated Book Award judge Rachel Cordasco joins Chad and Brian to talk about the nature of time, deals with the devil, conflagrations, and writerly desires, or, in other words, the third part of “The Place Where the Sea Ends So the Forest Can Begin” ...
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Interview with Rodrigo Fresán (Part III)
You can read the first part of this interview here, the second here, and you can click here for all Two Month Review posts. Special thanks to Will Vanderhyden for conducting—and translating—this interview. Will Vanderhyden: Your fiction wears its influences on its sleeve, but not only do you fully ...
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Who Wants to Be a Writer? [Two Month Review: The Invented Part]
On this week’s Two Month Review podcast, we’ll be discussing the third chapter of the second part (“The Place Where the Sea Ends So the Forest Can Begin”) of The Invented Part . As a bit of preparation, below you’ll find some initial thoughts, observations, and quotes. You can also download ...
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Two Month Review #5: "The Place Where the Sea Ends So the Forest Can Begin: Part 2" (The Invented Part, Pages 99-207)
This week’s episode is all about Penelope and her experiences with the Karmas. (And a Big Green Cow.) A lot of the Odyssey, Wuthering Heights, and William Burroughs are in this section, which is hilariously dissected by Brian, Chad, and their guest, Tom Flynn, the manager of Volumes Bookcafe in Chicago. One of the ...
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Let's Get Weird [Two Month Review: The Invented Part]
On last Thursday’s Two Month Review podcast we covered the opening to the second section of The Invented Part, and coming up later this week we’ll be covering pages 99-207—the second section of “The Place Where the Sea Ends So the Forest Can Begin.” As a bit of preparation, below you’ll ...
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Two Month Review #4: "The Place Where the Sea Ends So the Forest Can Begin: Part 1" (The Invented Part, Pages 46-98)
This week, author and journalist Mark Binelli joins Chad and Brian to discuss the first part of the second section of Rodrigo Fresán’s The Invented Part. In “The Place Where the Seas Ends So the Forest Can Begin,” we meet The Young Man and The Young Woman, who are making a movie about The Writer after his ...
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Interview with Rodrigo Fresán (Part II)
You can read the first part of this interview here, and you can click here for all Two Month Review posts. Special thanks to Will Vanderhyden for conducting—and translating—this interview. Will Vanderhyden: Now, this is a question that, in a way, the book takes as its point of departure—so it might make ...
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Two Month Review #3: "The Real Character" (The Invented Part, Pages 1-45)
This week, Jeremy Garber from Powells Books joins Chad and Brian to discuss the first section of Rodrigo Fresán’s The Invented Part. This section, entitled “The Real Character,” introduces us to the main character of the book—known here as The Boy, and later as The Writer—as well as some of the ...
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Interview with Rodrigo Fresán (Part I)
As you hopefully already know, for the next two months we’ll be producing a weekly podcast and a series of posts all about Rodrigo Fresán’s The Invented Part. All grouped under the title “Two Month Review,” this initiative is part book club, part exercise in slow reading, and part opportunity to ...
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The Worlds of João Gilberto Noll: Adam Morris in discussion with Scott Esposito
Join us at City Lights Booksellers on May 18 for a reading from Atlantic Hotel, along with an intriguing conversation delving into modern-day Brazil, Noll’s influences (including Clarice Lispector), his mysterious protagonists, and the challenges of translating his labyrinthine, twisty sentences into English. When: May ...
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“The Invented Part” by Rodrigo Fresán
The Invented Part by Rodrigo Fresán translated from the Spanish by Will Vanderhyden 552 pgs. | pb | 9781940953564 | $18.95 Open Letter Books Reviewed by Chad W. Post Given all the Two Month Review posts and everything else, hopefully you’ll have heard of Rodrigo Fresán’s The Invented Part by now. But ...
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Two Month Review #2: Introducing Rodrigo Fresán's "The Invented Part"
Translator Will Vanderhyden joins Chad and Brian to provide an overview of Rodrigo Fresán’s work—especially The Invented Part. They discuss some of his earlier works (including Kensington Gardens, which is available in an English translation), different pop culture touchstones running throughout his oeuvre, ...
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Three Percent Podcast Launches "Two Month Review"
After six years and almost one hundred and thirty episodes, the Three Percent Podcast is expanding to include new weekly “Two Month Review” mini-episodes. Each “season” of the Two Month Review podcasts will highlight a different Open Letter book, reading it slowly over the course of eight to nine episodes. ...
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Why These Fiction Finalists Should Win [BTBA 2017]
We’re just over a week away from the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award winners1, so it’s a good time to start ramping up the speculation. Tomorrow I’ll post about the poetry finalists, and give updated odds on the entire shortlist on Thursday, but for today, I thought it would be worthwhile to ...
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Win a Copy of "Salki" by Wojiech Nowicki from GoodReads!
As you can see below, we’re giving away 15 copies of Nowicki’s Salki via GoodReads. Translated by University of Rochester graduate Jan Pytalksi, Nowicki’s book has been praised by the likes of such literary luminaries as Andrzej Stasiuk, who said, “It all blends here unexpectedly: that past and memory ...
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“A Spare Life” by Lidija Dimkovska [Why This Book Should Win]
Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...
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“Extracting the Stone of Madness” by Alejandra Pizarnik [Why This Book Should Win]
Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...
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“tasks” by Víctor Rodríguez Núñez [Why This Book Should Win]
Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...
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“War and Turpentine” by Stefan Hertmans [Why This Book Should Win]
Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...
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“Moshi Moshi” by Banana Yoshimoto [Why This Book Should Win]
Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...
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“Doomi Golo: The Hidden Notebooks” by Boubacar Boris Diop [Why This Book Should Win]
Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...
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“Eve Out of Her Ruins” by Ananda Devi [Why This Book Should Win]
Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...
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Reading the World Conversation Series with Bae Suah
On May 1st, South Korean author Bae Suah (Recitation, A Greater Music, Nowhere to Be Found, and the forthcoming North Station) will be in Rochester, NY for TWO Reading the World Conversation Series events. The first will take place in the Humanities Center at Rush Rhees Library on the University of Rochester’s ...
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“Zama” by Antonio Di Benedetto [Why This Book Should Win]
Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...
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“The Young Bride” by Alessandro Baricco [Why This Book Should Win]
Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...
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“Oblivion” by Sergi Lebedev [Why This Book Should Win]
Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...
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“Angel of Oblivion” by Maja Haderlap [Why This Book Should Win]
Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...
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“In Praise of Defeat” by Abdellatif Laâbi [Why This Book Should Win]
Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...
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Some Recent Open Letter Publicity
We don’t post these updates near as frequently as we should, but here’s a rundown of some interesting recent publicity pieces for our books. Frontier by Can Xue, translated from the Chinese by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping Interview between Can Xue and Porochista Khakpour (Words Without ...
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“Why This Book Should Win” So Far . . .
Unless someone surprises me with a new write-up, we don’t have any Why This Book Should Win posts for today. That leaves fifteen books to be covered next week, leading us right into the April 18th announcement of the BTBA fiction and poetry finalists. But for today, I thought I’d just post links to all twenty of the ...
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“Thus Bad Begins” by Javier Marías [Why This Book Should Win]
Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...
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“Berlin-Hamlet” by Szilárd Borbély [Why This Book Should Win]
Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...
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“The Thief of Talant” by Pierre Reverdy [Why This Book Should Win]
Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...
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“Among Strange Victims” by Daniel Saldaña París [Why This Book Should Win]
Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...
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“Night Prayers” by Santiago Gamboa [Why This Book Should Win]
Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...
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“On the Edge” by Rafael Chirbes [Why This Book Should Win]
Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...
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“In the Café of Lost Youth” by Patrick Modiano [Why This Book Should Win]
Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...
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“Last Wolf and Herman” by László Krasznahorkai [Why This Book Should Win]
Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...
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“Of Things” by Michael Donhauser [Why This Book Should Win]
Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...
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“Instructions Within” by Ashraf Fayadh [Why This Book Should Win]
Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...
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“Umami” by Laia Jufresa [Why This Book Should Win]
Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...
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“Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was” by Sjón [Why This Book Should Win]
Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...
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“The Queue” by Basma Abdel Aziz [Why This Book Should Win]
Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...
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“Super Extra Grande” by Yoss [Why This Book Should Win]
Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...
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“Chronicle of the Murdered House” by Lúcio Cardoso [Why This Book Should Win]
Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...
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“Memoirs of a Polar Bear” by Yoko Tawada [Why This Book Should Win]
Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...
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“Ladivine” by Marie NDiaye [Why This Book Should Win]
Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...
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“My Marriage” by Jakob Wassermann [Why This Book Should Win]
Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...
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“Vampire in Love” by Enrique Vila-Matas [Why This Book Should Win]
Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...
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“Wicked Weeds” by Pedro Cabiya [Why This Book Should Win]
Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and ...
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BTBA 2017 Fiction Longlist Clues [Day One]
Next Tuesday, March 28th, over at The Millions, this year’s Best Translated Book Award longlists will finally be unveiled. So let the countdown begin! This really is a great time of year for international fiction—the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize Man Booker International Longlist was released last week, as ...
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PEN Translation Awards
This morning, PEN America announced the winners of all its literary awards, including two for literature in translation: the PEN Translation Prize for a book-length translation of prose into English, which was won by BTBA judge Tess Lewis for her translation of Angel of Oblivion by Maja Haderlap, and the PEN Award for Poetry ...
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Likes of the Future Are Shaped by Likes of the Past
As in past weeks here’s a PDF version of this post, which might be a lot easier to read. Two years ago, Yale University Press released The Dirty Dust, Alan Titley’s translation of Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s Cré na Cille, a supposedly “untranslatable” masterpiece of Irish literature. This past ...
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Translation Lab 2017
Attached below is all the necessary information and details for for anyone interested in applying for the Translation Lab at Writers Omi at Ledig House. A couple of our translators have participated in this in the past, and they absolutely loved it. So if you’re at all interested, you should definitely ...
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BTBA 2017, This Issue: The Body
This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is by Lori Feathers, an Assistant Managing Editor at Asymptote, freelance book critic and member of the National Book Critics Circle. Follow her online @LoriFeathers. For more information on the BTBA, “like” our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter. And check back here ...
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"Moonstone" by Sjón [BTBA 2017]
This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is by Mark Haber of Brazos Bookstore. For more information on the BTBA, “like” our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter. And check back here each week for a new post by one of the judges. Small in size and epic in scale, Moonstone is Sjón’s fourth ...
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Translating Cuban Literature in the Twenty-first Century [BTBA 2017]
George Henson is a translator of contemporary Latin American and Spanish prose, a contributing editor for World Literature Today and Asymptote, and a lecturer at the University of Oklahoma. For more information on the BTBA, “like” our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter. And check back here each week for a ...
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Chronicle of the Murdered House by Lucio Cardoso [Biographical Note]
The pub date for Chronicle of the Murdered House by Lúcio Cardoso, which is translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson, with a biographical note from Ben Moser officially came out on Tuesday, December 13th. To celebrate the release of this Brazilian masterpiece, we’ll be running a series ...
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Chronicle of the Murdered House by Lucio Cardoso [Early Reviews]
The pub date for Chronicle of the Murdered House by Lúcio Cardoso, which is translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson, with a biographical note from Ben Moser officially came out on Tuesday, December 13th. To celebrate the release of this Brazilian masterpiece, we’ll be running a ...
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Chronicle of the Murdered House by Lucio Cardoso [Excerpt]
The pub date for Chronicle of the Murdered House by Lúcio Cardoso, which is translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson, with a biographical note from Ben Moser officially came out on Tuesday, December 13th. To celebrate the release of this Brazilian masterpiece, we’ll be running a series ...
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Polar Bears and Cyborg Turtles: Some Non-Human Narrative Perspectives [BTBA 2017]
This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is by reader, writer, and BTBA judge Rachel Cordasco. For more information on the BTBA, “like” our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter. And check back here each week for a new post by one of the judges. I’ve only come across two books this year that ...
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Thus Bad Begins [BTBA 2017]
This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is by Mark Haber of Brazos Bookstore. For more information on the BTBA, “like” our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter. And check back here each week for a new post by one of the judges. Thus Bad Begins by Javier Marias, translated from the Spanish by ...
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The Architecture of Time, Space and Imagination by Monica Carter
Monica Carter is a freelance critic whose nonfiction has appeared in publications including Black Clock, World Literature Today, and Foreword Reviews. She curates Salonica World Lit, which is a virtual journal dedicated to international literature and culture. For more information on the BTBA, “like” our ...
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The Subsidiary
The Subsidiary by Matías Celedón translated from the French by Samuel Rutter 208 pgs. | pb | 9781612195445 | $21.95 Mellville House Publishing Reviewed by Vincent Francone The biggest issues with books like The Subsidiary often have to do with their underpinnings—when we learn that Georges Perec wrote La ...
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BTBA Favorites So Far by Jennifer Croft
This week’s post is by Jennifer Croft who is the recipient of Fulbright, PEN, MacDowell and National Endowment for the Arts grants and fellowships, as well as the Michael Henry Heim Prize for Translation. She holds a PhD from Northwestern University and an MFA from the University of Iowa. She is a founding editor of The ...
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Still Time to Participate in the 2nd Annual Open Letter Celebration
As hopefully everyone knows, we’re taking advantage of the travel day in the NLCS to throw a little fundraising party for Open Letter. If you’re in Rochester, you should definitely come out to the German House tonight at 8 for food, booze, palm readings, music, and presenations by Rochester visionaries. Tickets ...
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Early Gems in the Hunt for the Best Translated Fiction of 2016! [BTBA 2017]
This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is by Lori Feathers, anAssistant Managing Editor at Asymptote, freelance book critic and member of the National Book Critics Circle. Follow her online @LoriFeathers. For more information on the BTBA, “like” our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter. And check back ...
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"One of Us Is Sleeping" by Josefine Klougart [An Open Letter Book to Read]
This is the third entry in a series that will eventually feature all of the titles Open Letter has published to date. Catch up on past entries by clicking here. Last week’s entry was a pretty solid Chad rant involving the incredible Maidenhair by Mikhail Shishkin. Definitely check that one out. By contrast, this ...
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"Neo-Noir, Violence, and Argentine Resort Towns" w/ Andrea G. Labinger
“Neo-Noir, Violence, and Argentine Resort Towns” Translator Andrea G. Labinger (recipient of a PEN Heim award for Gesell Dome) and Kaija Straumanis (editor, Open Letter Books) discuss the Dashiell Hammett Award-winning novel Gesell Dome, a neo-noir set in an Argentine resort town during the off-season. When the ...
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Maidenhair by Mikhail Shishkin [An Open Letter Book to Read]
This is the second entry in a series that will eventually feature all of the titles Open Letter has published to date. Catch up on past entries by clicking here. Last week’s entry was about Gesell Dome by Guillermo Saccomanno. Maidenhair by Mikhail Shishkin, translated from the Russian by Marian ...
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Read Local: Supporting Rochester Presses and Making Events Fun Again
Although we referenced Read Local in the write up of Josefine Klougart’s tour, I haven’t really explained what it is here, or why I think it could be a really exciting thing for Rochester. Just to as not to bury the lede, the first Read Local event is Friday, September 23rd at 6pm at Nox Cocktail Lounge. ...
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“Death by Water” by Kenzaburo Oe
Death by Water by Kenzaburu Oe translated from the Japanese by Deborah Boliver Boehm 432 pgs. | pb | 9781101911914 | $16.00 Grove Atlantic Reviewed by Will Eells Death by Water, Kenzaburo Oe’s latest novel to be translated into English, practically begs you to read it as autobiography. Like The ...
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Three Percent #115: From the BTBAs to the Soccer Pitch
This week’s podcast opens with Chad and Tom discussing the 2016 Best Translated Book Award winners and their thoughts on how to evaluate books for the prize. Then, in a separately recorded podcast, Chad and visiting guest George Carroll talk with Juan Villoro about his new book on soccer, God Is Round. Also, due to ...
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Why This Book Should Win 2016 [COMPLETE]
It took a bit longer than planned, but we did it! There are now “Why This Book Should Win” write-ups for all 35 books that were longlisted for the 2016 Best Translated Book Award. Browse through these, find a few to read, and tune in to The Millions tomorrow at 7pm to find out who won. To make it easier to ...
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"Silvina Ocampo" by Silvina Ocampo [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series, is by Katrine Øgaard Jensen, BTBA judge, journalist, writer, and translator from the Danish. She previously served as editor-in-chief of Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art and as blog editor at Asymptote and Words without Borders. She is currently an editor at the ...
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“Minute-Operas” by Frédéric Forte [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series, is by Becka Mara McKay, BTBA judge, author (A Meteorologist in the Promised Land, Happiness Is the New Bedtime), translator (Laundry, Blue Has No South, Lunar Savings Time), and director of the Creative Writing MFA at Florida Atlantic University. We will be running two (or ...
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“Sea Summit” by Yi Lu [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series, is by Becka Mara McKay, BTBA judge, author (A Meteorologist in the Promised Land, Happiness Is the New Bedtime), translator (Laundry, Blue Has No South, Lunar Savings Time), and director of the Creative Writing MFA at Florida Atlantic University. We will be running two (or ...
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"The Black Flower and Other Zapotec Poems" by Natalia Toledo [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series, is by Katrine Øgaard Jensen, BTBA judge, journalist, writer, and translator from the Danish. She previously served as editor-in-chief of Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art and as blog editor at Asymptote and Words without Borders. She is currently an editor at the ...
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“The Four Books” by Yan Lianke [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series, is by Monica Carter, former BTBA judge and writer whose fiction has appeared in The Rattling Wall, Black Clock, Writers Tribe Review, and other publications. She is a freelance critic whose work has appeared in World Literature Today, Black Clock and Foreword Reviews. She is ...
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“The Nomads, My Brothers, Go Out to Drink from the Big Dipper” by Abdourahman A. Waberi [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series, is by Tess Lewis, BTBA judge, writer, translator from the French and German, and an advisory editor of the Hudson Review. We will be running two (or more!) of these posts every business day leading up to the announcement of the finalists. The Nomads, My Brothers, ...
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“The Body Where I Was Born” by Guadalupe Nettel [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series is by Charlotte Whittle, translator, and editor at Cardboard House Press. We will be running two (or more!) of these posts every business day leading up to the announcement of the finalists. The Body Where I Was Born by Guadalupe Nettel, translated from the ...
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“Load Poems Like Guns,” compiled and translated by Farzana Marie [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series is by Deborah Smith, BTBA judge, translator from the Korean, and founder of Tilted Axis Press. We will be running two (or more!) of these posts every business day leading up to the announcement of the finalists. Load Poems Like Guns: Women’s Poetry from Herat, ...
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“The Big Green Tent” by Ludmila Ulitskaya [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series is by Stacey Knecht, BTBA judge and translator from the Czech and Dutch. We will be running two (or more!) of these posts every business day leading up to the announcement of the finalists. The Big Green Tent by Ludmila Ulitskaya, translated from the Russian by ...
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“The Things We Don’t Do” by Andrés Neuman [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series is by Tiffany Nichols, who will start her Ph.D. studies this upcoming fall and is a contributor at to Three Percent. We will be running two (or more!) of these posts every business day leading up to the announcement of the finalists. The Things We Don’t Do by ...
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“The Story of My Teeth” by Valeria Luiselli [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series is by Amanda Bullock, BTBA judge and director of public programs at Literary Arts, Portland. We will be running two (or more!) of these posts every business day leading up to the announcement of the finalists. The Story of My Teeth by Valeria Luiselli, translated ...
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“The Sleep of the Righteous” by Wolfgang Hilbig [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series is by Hal Hlavinka, bookseller at Community Bookstore. We will be running two (or more!) of these posts every business day leading up to the announcement of the finalists. The Sleep of the Righteous by Wolfgang Hilbig, translated from the German by Isabel Fargo ...
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“Signs Preceding the End of the World” by Yuri Herrera [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series is by Stephen Sparks, former BTBA judge and bookseller at Green Apple Books on the Park. We will be running two (or more!) of these posts every business day leading up to the announcement of the finalists. Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera, ...
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“A General Theory of Oblivion” by Jose Eduardo Agualusa [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series is by George Carroll, former BTBA judge, sales rep, and international literature editor for Shelf Awareness. We will be running two (or more!) of these posts every business day leading up to the announcement of the finalists. A General Theory of Oblivion by José ...
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“One Out of Two” by Daniel Sada [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series is by Lucina Schell, editor of Reading in Translation. We will be running two (or more!) of these posts every business day leading up to the announcement of the finalists. One Out of Two by Daniel Sada, translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver (Mexico, ...
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“Empty Chairs” by Lui Xia [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series is by Jarrod Annis, BTBA judge and bookseller at Greenlight Books, We will be running two (or more!) of these posts every business day leading up to the announcement of the finalists. Empty Chairs: Selected Poems by Liu Xia, translated from the Chinese by Ming Di ...
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“Sphinx” by Anne Garréta [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series is by Joseph Schreiber, who runs the website Rough Ghosts, and is a contributor at Numéro Cinq. We will be running two (or more!) of these posts every business day leading up to the announcement of the finalists. Sphinx by Anne Garréta, translated from the ...
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“A Science Not for the Earth” by Yevgeny Baratynsky [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series is by Jarrod Annis, BTBA judge and bookseller at Greenlight Books, We will be running two (or more!) of these posts every business day leading up to the announcement of the finalists. A Science Not for the Earth: Selected Poems and Letters by Yevgeny Baratynsky, ...
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“I Refuse” by Per Petterson [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series is by Joseph Schreiber, who runs the website Rough Ghosts, and is a contributor at Numéro Cinq. We will be running two (or more!) of these posts every business day leading up to the announcement of the finalists. I Refuse by Per Petterson, translated from the ...
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"Rilke Shake" by Angélica Freitas [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series, is by Tess Lewis, BTBA judge, writer, translator from the French and German, and an advisory editor of the Hudson Review. We will be running two (or more!) of these posts every business day leading up to the announcement of the finalists. Rilke Shake by Angélica ...
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“Nowhere to Be Found” by Bae Suah [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series, is by Tony Malone, founder of Tony’s Reading List. We will be running two (or more!) of these posts every business day leading up to the announcement of the finalists. Nowhere to Be Found by Bae Suah, translated from the Korean by Sora Kim-Russell (South Korea, ...
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“The Meursault Investigation” by Kamel Daoud [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series, is by Gwen Dawson, founder of Literary License. We will be running two (or more!) of these posts every business day leading up to the announcement of the finalists. The Meursault Investigation by Kamel Daoud, translated from the French by John Cullen (Algeria, ...
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“Beauty Is a Wound” by Eka Kurniawan [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series, is by Kevin Elliott, BTBA judge and bookseller at 57th Street Books. We will be running two (or more!) of these posts every business day leading up to the announcement of the finalists. Beauty Is a Wound by Eka Kurniawan, translated from the Indonesian by Annie ...
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“The Story of the Lost Child” by Elena Ferrante [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series, is by Betty Scott from Books & Whatnot. We will be running two (or more!) of these posts every business day leading up to the announcement of the finalists. The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein (Italy, ...
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“Wild Words: Four Tamil Poets” edited by Lakshmi Holmström [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series, is by Deborah Smith, BTBA judge, translator from the Korean, and founder of Tilted Axis Press. We will be running two (or more!) of these posts every business day leading up to the announcement of the finalists. Wild Words: Four Tamil Poets, edited and translated ...
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Contribute to the “Why This Book Should Win” Series
As you’ve probably noticed, the Why This Book Should Win series has basically taken over the website. Our plan is to highlight all 35 titles longlisted for the Best Translated Book Awards before the announcement of the finalists on Tuesday, April 19th. Most of these posts are written by BTBA judges, although a number of ...
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“The Complete Stories” by Clarice Lispector [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series, is by Amanda Nelson, BTBA judge and managing editor of Book Riot. We will be running two of these posts every business day leading up to the announcement of the finalists. The Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector, translated from the Portuguese by Katrina Dodson ...
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“Berlin” by Aleš Šteger [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series, is by P.T. Smith, BTBA judge, writer, and reader. We will be running two of these posts every business day leading up to the announcement of the finalists. Berlin by Aleš Šteger, translated from the Slovene by Brian Henry, Forrest Gander, and Aljaž Kovac ...
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"Arvida" by Samuel Archibald [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series, is by Heather Cleary, BTBA judge, writer, translator, and co-founder of the Buenos Aires Review. We will be running two of these posts every business day leading up to the announcement of the finalists. Arvida by Samuel Archibald, translated from the French by Donald ...
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“Mirages of the Mind” by Mushtaq Ahmed Yousufi [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series, is by Jason Grunebaum, BTBA judge, writer, and translator. We will be running two of these posts every business day leading up to the announcement of the finalists. Mirages of the Mind by Mushtaq Ahmed Yousufi, translated from the Urdu by Matt Reeck and Aftab ...
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“War, So Much War” by Mercè Rodoreda [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series, is by Mark Haber, BTBA judge and bookseller at Brazos Bookstore. We will be running two of these posts every business day leading up to the announcement of the finalists. War, So Much War by Mercè Rodoreda, translated from the Catalan by Maruxa Relaño and ...
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“Murder Most Serene” by Gabriell Wittkop [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series, is by Ben Carter Olcott, who is a writer, editor of the KGB Bar Lit Magazine, and a bookseller at 192 Books. We will be running two of these posts every business day leading up to the announcement of the finalists. Murder Most Serene by Gabrielle Wittkop, ...
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“Moods” by Yoel Hoffmann [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series, is by Kate Garber, BTBA judge and bookseller at 192 Books. We will be running two of these posts every business day leading up to the announcement of the finalists. Moods by Yoel Hoffmann, translated from the Hebrew by Peter Cole (Israel, New Directions) Moods ...
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“Tram 83” by Fiston Mwanza Mujila [Why This Book Should Win]
This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series, is by Rachel Cordasco, who writes for Book Riot and runs the site Bookishly Witty. We will be running two of these posts every business day leading up to the announcement of the finalists. Tram 83 by Fiston Mwanza Mujila, translated from the French by Roland ...
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“The Physics of Sorrow” by Georgi Gospodinov [Why This Book Should Win]
This is the first entry in the Why This Book Should Win series, which will highlight each of the 35 “longlisted”: titles for this year’s Best Translated Book Awards. Tom Roberge of Albertine Books wrote this piece. The Physics of Sorrow by Georgi Gospodinov, translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel ...
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2016 BTBA Fiction Longlist
It’s here! The twenty-five best translations of 2015 according to our esteemed panel of judges. As mentioned in the earlier post, we will be highlighting each of these titles on the site starting this afternoon, and finishing just in time for the April 19th announcement of the ten finalists. The winners will be ...
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"Unshaven and Often Drunk" [BTBA]
I know the BTBA announcements will be taking place tomorrow morning, but we have one last preview post for you. This is from judge Mark Haber, who works at Brazos Bookstore in Houston—one of the best stores in the country. Enjoy and tune in tomorrow to find out what made the longlists! If you’ve ever had your ...
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Thank You, Katy Derbyshire, For Not Finger-Wagging
Many of you will have read or seen Katy Derbyshire’s recent article in the Guardian on women in translation. I braced myself for paragraphs of commentary on how publishers of literature in translation could “be better” than they are, and was already feeling that defensive twinge build up in my jaw. BUT, Katy ...
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Preparing to Read "Diorama" by Rocío Cerón [RTWBC]
Yesterday I wrote a long preview of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, the Reading the World Book Club fiction book for March. Today, I’m switching over to our poetry selection—Diorama by Rocío Cerón, translated from the Spanish by Anna Rosenwong (Phoneme Media.) As always, you can post your thoughts and ...
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Introducing "The Vegetarian" by Han Kang [RTWBC]
As previously announced, the fiction book we’re reading for this month’s Reading the World Book Club is The Vegetarian by Han Kang, translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith. Since I already read this one—taught it in my class last year, more on that below—I thought I’d start out this ...
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Lina Wolff in Rochester [Spring 2016 RTWCS]
Next Wednesday, March 2nd, at 6:30 pm, the amazing and local Rochester restaurant ButaPub will be hosting the first Reading the World Conversation Series (RTWCS) event for Spring 2016. This first RTWCS of 2016 welcomes Swedish author Lina Wolff to discuss her new novel, Bret Easton Ellis and The Other Dogs, with Brian ...
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Souffles-Anfas: A Critical Anthology
Anyone with any interest at all in contemporary Moroccan writing must start with Souffles. A cultural and political journal, Souffles (the French word for “breaths”) was founded in 1966 by Abdellatif Laâbi and Mostafa Nissabouri. Run by a group of artists and intellectuals, Souffles was a written fight for democratic ...
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Latest Review: "Souffles-Anfas: A Critical Anthology from the Moroccan Journal of Culture and Politics" ed. by Olivia C. Harrison and Teresa Villa-Ignacio
The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Emma Ramadan on Souffles-Anfas: A Critical Anthology from the Moroccan Journal of Culture and Politics, ed. by Olivia C. Harrison and Teresa Villa-Ignacio. Emma herself is a literary translator from French. She has a BA in Comparative Literature and Literary Translation from ...
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Emma Ramadan on "Monospace": Part I [RTWBC]
Since I admittedly know very little about contemporary poetry, I asked translator Emma Ramadan if she would be willing to write something about this month’s Reading the World Book Club poetry title, Monospace by Anne Parian. What she sent back is posted below. It’s thoughtful, extremely helpful in approaching the ...
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Three Percent #110: The Weight of Things
Adrian Nathan West joined this week’s podcast to talk about Marianne Fritz and his translation of The Weight of Things, the first novel in the recently launched Reading the World Book Clubs. Additionally, we talked about Twelve Stations by Tomasz Różycki (the RTWBC poetry selection this month), the ABA Winter ...
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Introducing Rafael Chirbes [RTWBC]
For anyone who missed this in my earlier posts, the fiction book for February’s Reading the World Book Club is On the Edge by Rafael Chirbes, which is translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa and published by New Directions. As a way of introducing Chirbes, I thought I’d post this bio and interview ...
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Variations on a Theme: Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s "Tram 83" [BTBA 2016]
This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is from Heather Cleary, translator of Sergio Chejfec, Oliverio Girondo, professor at Sarah Lawrence, and co-founder of the Buenos Aires Review. For more information on the BTBA, “like” our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter. And check back here each week for a ...
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Updated 2014, 2015, & 2016 Translation Databases
I just uploaded new versions of 2014, 2015, and 2016 translation databases to our master translation database part of the website. There are two big updates worth noting here, before getting into some of the breakdowns: 1) I added over 150 titles to the 2016 database, so this is starting to look a little bit more robust ...
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Literature on Location: Part III [BTBA 2016]
This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is from Stacey Knecht and is basically a follow-up to her earlier posts. For more information on the BTBA, “like” our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter. And check back here each week for a new post by one of the judges. I was four, not five, as I’d always ...
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Why Are We Ignoring "Apocalypse Baby"'s Most Important Twist? [BTBA 2016]
This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is by Kate Garber, bookseller at 192 Books. For more information on the BTBA, “like” our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter. And check back here each week for a new post by one of the judges. I have yet to find a review of Apocalypse Baby by Virginie ...
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"Loquela" Is the Book You Should Be Reading
This is another one of those posts. One in which I wrote a long-ass essay/diatribe that I decided to delete so as to “focus on the positive.” In this case, I was on a roll about how sick I am of the literary field anointing four-five international authors a year and writing endless articles/listicles about ...
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Kaija Straumanis Wins the AATSEEL Award for "Best Literary Translation into English"
Last month we got the news that Kaija Straumanis—our editor and graduate of the University of Rochester’s MA in literary translation program—had won the AATSEEL1 Award for the Best Literary Translation into English for her translation of Inga Ābele’s High Tide. As part of their annual conference, ...
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Book Club Intro for "Twelve Stations" by Tomasz Różycki [RTWBC]
Before getting into the poetry side of our Reading the World Book Clubs, I just want to remind everyone that you can share your thoughts and comments about these books/posts in three different ways: in the comments section below, on the Reading the World Book Club Facebook Group, and by using #RTWBC on Twitter. For this ...
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Seven Books by Women in Translation [My Year in Lists]
Rather than devolve into posting clickbait featuring cats, penguins, hedgehogs, corgis, and books, like other BuzzHole sites, I’m going hard for the rest of the week, starting with seven books by women in translation. The gender disparity in terms of women in translation has been fairly well documented—see the ...
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The Best Poetry Books from 2015 I Should Read [My Year in Lists]
Before getting into today’s list, I want to point out a new trend in the Great Listicle Explosion of Book List-Making of 2015™: the “overlooked list.” This has probably been going on for as long as people could count to ten (a prerequisite for list-making), but I had overlooked it (yes, groan) until I ...
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This Place Holds No Fear
Heiner Resseck, the protagonist in Monika Held’s thought-provoking, first novel, This Place Holds No Fear, intentionally re-lives his past every hour of every day. His memories are his treasures, more dear than the present or future. What wonderful past eclipses holding your newborn for the first time or meeting the woman ...
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Latest Review: "This Place Holds No Fear" by Monika Held
The latest addition to our Reviews section is a piece by Lori Feathers on Monika Held’s This Place Holds No Fear, translated by Anne Posten and published by Haus Publishing. Lori Feathers is a freelance book critic. Follow her on Twitter @LoriFeathers. (And Anne, if you’re reading this, THIS is why I gave you a ...
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Four Books From Underrepresented Countries [My Year in Lists]
Yesterday I posted a bit of a screed against lists, followed immediately by a list of the six translations everyone’s talking about. My hope is to produce a bunch of lists featuring literature in translation from 2015, all organized by various rubrics that can allow you to find a handful of recommendations with a ...
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The Six Water-Cooler Fiction Translations of 2015 [My Year in Lists]
Following on my last post, here’s the first entry in my manic series of year-end lists. To kick this off, I thought I’d start with the list of the six books in translation that were the most talked about this year. I did some really heady numerical analysis to determine this—searching Facebook mentions, ...
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This Was Going to Be a Hater’s Guide [3 Books]
After reading this excellent Hater’s Guide to the Williams-Sonoma Catalog yesterday (for a typical highlight, scroll down the “cookie press”) I really wished we could do something this for publishing. Like, make ignorant, funny jokes about the finalists for the National Book Awards. Or the Hater’s Guide to Literary ...
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"A Raskolnikoff" by Emmanuel Bove [BTBA 2016]
This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is from Jason Grunebaum, senior lecturer at the University of Chicago, and translator from the Hindi. For more information on the BTBA, “like” our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter. And check back here each week for a new post by one of the judges. When ...
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Submission [BTBA 2016]
This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is from Tom Roberge from New Directions, Albertine Books, and the Three Percent Podcast. He’s not actually a BTBA judge, but since he’s helping run the whole process, he thought he’d weigh in and post as well. For more information on the BTBA, ...
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Rambling Jack
“Rambling Jack—what’s that?” “A novel. Novella, I guess.” “Yeah, it looks short. What is it, a hundred pages?” “Sorta. It’s a duel language book, so really, only about… 50 pages total.” “50 pages?” “Including illustrations.” “And this—what is it… Dalkey Archive—they want 14 bucks ...
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Border Crossings and a Third Language [BTBA 2016]
This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is from Heather Cleary, translator of Sergio Chejfec, Oliverio Girondo, professor at Sarah Lawrence, and co-founder of the Buenos Aires Review. For more information on the BTBA, “like” our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter. And check back here each week for a ...
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The Things We Don't Do
Many authors are compared to Roberto Bolaño. However, very few authors have the privilege of having a Roberto Bolaño quote on the cover of their work; and at that, one which states, “Good readers will find something that can be found only in great literature.” You will find this on the covers of Andres Neuman’s works. ...
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Help Open Letter By Buying the Books for My Spring Class
As you probably know already, Open Letter Books is a non-profit publishing house. Which means that a) I go out of my way to help the field of translation/publishing as a whole (see: Best Translated Book Award, this blog, the translation database, and a dozen other things that don’t benefit us financially, but which I ...
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Women in Translation, Part I: Fourteen Countries
Over the past few months, with the help of two fantastic interns, I’ve updated the Translation Database to include the sex of every author and translator in there.1 It was a brutal task, hunting down information about all of these people, scanning bios for gendered pronouns and then entering all of this into the ...
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Still Hating on DraftKings [3 Books]
Rather than reinvent the ranting wheel (I don’t know what that is, but it sounds fun), I’m going to preface this preview of three new books with a couple of updates from last week’s post. First off, DraftKings. I spend way too much of my mental time hating all over this stupid company. I should just stop. ...
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Anne Garréta and William Burroughs [BTBA 2016]
This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is from Tom Roberge from New Directions, Albertine Books, and the Three Percent Podcast. He’s not actually a BTBA judge, but since he’s helping run the whole process, he thought he’d weigh in and post as well. For more information on the BTBA, ...
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French Concession
Who is this woman? This is the question that opens Xiao Bai’s French Concession, a novel of colonial-era Shanghai’s spies and revolutionaries, police and smugglers, who scoot between doorways, walk nonchalantly down avenues, smoke cigars in police bureaus, and lounge in expensive European hotels. The woman is Therese ...
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Latest Review: "French Concession" by Xiao Bai
The latest addition to our Reviews section by Emily Goedde on French Concession by Xiao Bai, translated by Chenxin Jiang and published by Harper Collins. Emily Goedde received an MFA in literary translation from the University of Iowa. She is now a PhD candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University ...
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Books (In Translation) About Books [BTBA 2016]
This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is from Amanda Nelson, managing editor of Book Riot. For more information on the BTBA, “like” our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter. And check back here each week for a new post by one of the judges. Jose Alberto Gutierrez is a garbage truck driver in ...
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2015 Goncourt Longlist As Described by Google Translate
The longlist for this year’s prix Goncourt was announced today, and includes the latest book by Open Letter author Mathias Énard. (We’re having someone read Boussole for us right now. Hopefully I’ll have more info about that in the near future.) Here’s the complete list of finalists, which also ...
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Three Articles on Three Great Indie Presses: Graywolf, Coffee House, Europa
Yesterday I posted a little summary on two great translators, so it’s only appropriate that today I post about three great pieces that have come out about three of my favorite presses over the past few days. First up was this Vulture piece by Three Percent favorite Boris Kachka (BORIS!!) on Graywolf Press. ...
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The Cold Song
Linn Ullmann’s The Cold Song, her fifth novel, is built much like the house about which its story orbits: Mailund, a stately white mansion set in the Norwegian countryside a few hours drive from Oslo. The house, nestled into the forest and cloaked in mist, belongs to the past; it has been the summer home of the Brodal ...
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On Universality: Childhood Confusion and Displacement in Literature [BTBA 2016]
This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is Kate Garber, bookseller at 192 Books. For more information on the BTBA, “like” our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter. And check back here each week for a new post by one of the judges. We know there are many connections to be made in themes and characters ...
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On Juan Villoro's "The Guilty" [BTBA 2016]
This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is by Mark Haber of Brazos Bookstore. For more information on the BTBA, “like” our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter. And check back here each week for a new post by one of the judges. In the last few years I’ve read a lot of literature in translation, ...
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A Dilemma
In Joris-Karl Hyusmans’s most popular novel, À rebours (Against Nature or Against the Grain, depending on the which translated edition you’re reading), there is a famous scene where the protagonist, the decadent Jean des Esseintes, starts setting gemstones on the shell of a tortoise. The tortoise, of course, is ...
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Latest Review: "A Dilemma" by Joris-Karl Hyusmans
The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Christopher Iacono on A Dilemma by Joris-Karl Hyusmans, translated by Justin Vicari, and out from Wakefield Press. (We love you, Wakefield!!!) Here’s the beginning of Chris’s piece: In Joris-Karl Hyusmans’s most popular novel, À rebours (Against Nature ...
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Asymptote Summer 2015 Issue
This post is from current intern, soon to be Literary Translation grad student, Daniel Stächelin. From Mexican poet José Eugenio Sánchez and Danish poet Naja Marie Aidt, to Albanian author Ismail Kadare, among others, Asymptote’s Summer 2015 issue features some mind-bendingly vivid nuggets of literary and existential ...
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Antoine Volodine in the Paris Review
It’s been a nice couple of months for Antoine Volodine, publicity-wise. First, he had this long essay appear in The New Inquiry. Then Music & Literature honored the publication of Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven with a week of Volodine-related content. And now, the Paris Review has an interview with ...
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Three Percent #101: Awards for Authors versus Awards for Books
This week Tom and Chad discuss the merging of the Man Booker International Prize with the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the waning interest in Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook Book Club, and the Women’s World Cup of Literature. There are also rants about Sevenevens, praise for the Minions movie, and more soccer ...
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Canada vs. Germany [Women's World Cup of Literature: CHAMPIONSHIP]
OK, here we are, at the final match of the first ever Women’s World Cup of Literature. If you missed any of the earlier games, or just want to read about all the incredible books that were included in this tournament, just click here. The Championship pits two very different books against one another. On one side ...
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Colombia vs. Germany [Women's World Cup of Literature: Semifinals]
Oryx & Crake by Margaret Atwood is already set to represent Canada in the WWCOL championship, so now we’re ready to find out who she’s going to face off against between Colombia’s representative (Delirium by Laura Restrepo) or Germany’s (The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine by Alina ...
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Twenty-One Days of a Neurasthenic
Twenty-One Days of a Neurasthenic is not a novel in the traditional sense. Rather, it is a collection of vignettes recorded by journalist Georges Vasseur in his diary during a month spent in the Pyrenées Mountains to treat his nervous condition. Vasseur’s friends and acquaintances provide the material for his journal ...
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Spain vs. Costa Rica [Women's World Cup of Literature: Second Round]
This match was judged by Katrine Øgaard Jensen, blog editor at Asymptote. You can follow her on Twitter at @kojensen. For more information on the Women’s World Cup of Literature, click here or here. Also, be sure to follow our Twitter account and like our Facebook page. And check back here daily! This match ...
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Ecuador vs. Cameroon [Women's World Cup of Literature: Second Round]
This match was judged by Margaret Carson, who co-chairs the PEN America Translation Committee and crunches numbers for Women in Translation (WiT). For more information on the Women’s World Cup of Literature, click here or here. Also, be sure to follow our Twitter account and like our Facebook page. And check back ...
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Germany vs. Côte d'Ivoire [Women's World Cup of Literature: Second Round]
This match was judged by Kalah McCaffrey, a Young Adult literary scout at Franklin & Siegal. You can follow her on Twitter at @moheganscout. For more information on the Women’s World Cup of Literature, click here or here. Also, be sure to follow our Twitter account and like our Facebook page. And check back ...
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Japan vs. Ecuador [Women's World Cup of Literature: First Round]
This match was judged by M. Lynx Qualey, who runs the Arabic Literature website, and can be found on Twitter at @arablit. For more information on the Women’s World Cup of Literature, click here or here. Also, be sure to follow our Twitter account and like our Facebook page. And check back here daily! Yoko ...
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South Korea vs. Spain [Women's World Cup of Literature: First Round]
This match was judged by Mythili Rao, producer for The Takeaway at WNYC. For more information on the Women’s World Cup of Literature, click here or here. Also, be sure to follow our Twitter account and like our Facebook page. And check back here daily! What a brutal match. These two novels hold nothing back. Read ...
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Sphinx
Founded in 1960 by such creative pioneers as George Perec, Raymond Queneau and Italo Calvino, the Oulipo, shorthand for Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, came about in when a group of writers and mathematicians sought constraints to find new structures and patterns on their own writing. Anne Garréta’s visionary debut ...
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USA vs. Nigeria [Women's World Cup of Literature: First Round]
This match was judged by Sal Robinson, a graduate student in library science and co-founder of the Bridge Series. For more information on the Women’s World Cup of Literature, click here or here. Also, be sure to follow our Twitter account and like our Facebook page. And check back here daily! It seems hardly fair ...
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Canada vs. Netherlands [Women's World Cup of Literature: First Round]
This match was judged by Hannah Chute, recent recipient of her MA in literary translation from the University of Rochester. For more information on the Women’s World Cup of Literature, click here or here. Also, be sure to follow our Twitter account and like our Facebook page. And check back here daily! Oryx & ...
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Energize Your Happy [Or: Why It's Important for Literary Translators to Go Do Stuff]
This is a bit of a risk, posting something among all the commotion surrounding the Women’s World Cup of Literature, but I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately and wanted to finally write about it. I’m writing this post from Venstpils, Latvia, where I’ve had the pleasure to spend these first two ...
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China vs. New Zealand [Women's World Cup of Literature: First Round]
This match was judged by Florian Duijsens, a senior editor at Asymptote, fiction editor at SAND Journal, and teacher at Bard College Berlin. You can follow him on Twitter at @neonres. For more information on the Women’s World Cup of Literature, click here or here. Also, be sure to follow our Twitter account and ...
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Côte d'Ivoire vs. Norway [Women's World Cup of Literature: First Round]
This match was judged by Hal Hlavinka, bookseller and events coordinator at Community Bookstore in Park Slope. For more information on the Women’s World Cup of Literature, click here or here. Also, be sure to follow our Twitter account and like our Facebook page. And check back here daily! I’ll be up front and ...
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My Best BEA Moment [Some June Translations]
Every May, 20,000 or so publishing professionals gather at BookExpo America to a) try and create buzz for their fall books, b) court booksellers and librarians, c) attend panels of minimal import, and d) bitch and moan. Mostly it’s just d, to be honest. Publishing people love to complain about everything. The Javitz ...
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Translation Breadloaf and My Copyright Talk
As if three trips to New York and one to Torino weren’t enough, I just a few minutes ago arrived in Ripton, VT, where I have the honor of being able to participate in (and generally witness) the first ever Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference. (A.K.A. Translation Loaf.) Since this was organized by Jen ...
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Announcing the Women's World Cup of Literature!
Last summer, to coincide with the Real Life World Cup, we hosted the World Cup of Literature, an incredible competition featuring 32 books from 32 countries, and ending with Roberto Bolaño’s By Night in Chile (Chile) triumphing over Valeria Luiselli’s Faces in the Crowd (Mexico). It was glorious. Since the ...
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BEA Translation "Buzz" Panels: Crime Fiction
Following on my earlier post about the “buzz” panel on general fiction in translation, here’s some info about the one that Tom Roberge will be moderating on Friday morning, which will be featuring all crime novels. BEA Selects Crime Fiction in Translation Fricay, May 28th, 10:30am Eastside ...
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BEA Translation "Buzz" Panels: Adult Fiction
So, this year, for the first time ever, BookExpo America is sponsoring two panels highlighting forthcoming works of fiction: one featuring general fiction, the other focusing on crime and thrillers. (Naturally, I’m moderating the first one and Tom Roberge is doing the other.) The one on general adult fiction will ...
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BTBA Festivities!
This is just a reminder for any and everyone in the New York area—especially those of you who are attending BookExpo America. The official announcement of this year’s Best Translated Book Award winners will take place tomorrow, Wednesday, May 27th, at 2:30pm at the Eastside Stage in the Jacob Javitz Center. ...
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What Makes a Reader Good at Reading? [Some May Translations]
In a couple weeks, the IDPF Digital Book Conference will take place in New York under the theme of “Putting Readers First.” As part of this Ed Nawokta (Publishing Perspectives founder and international publishing guru of sorts), Boris Kachka (Hothouse author and former BEA frond-waver [sorry, inside joke]), Andrew ...
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Life Embitters
Last year, NYRB Classics introduced English-language readers to Catalan writer Josep Pla with Peter Bush’s translation of The Gray Notebook. In that book, Pla wrote about life in Spain during an influenza outbreak soon after World War I, when he was a young law student and aspiring writer. Readers got to meet many of the ...
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The Physics of Sorrow
“Your bile is stagnant, you see sorrow in everything, you are drenched in melancholy,” my friend the doctor said. bq. “Isn’t melancholy something from previous centuries? Isn’t some vaccine against it yet, hasn’t medicine taken care of it yet?” I ask. Georgi Gospodinov’s The Physics of Sorrow was an ...
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2015 Best Translated Book Award Fiction Finalists
Following on the announcement of the poetry shortlist, here’s the list of the ten titles that made this year’s shortlist. As mentioned elsewhere, the two winning books will be announced at BookExpo America at 2:30pm on Wednesday, May 27th, at the Eastside Stage in the Jacob Javitz Center. Following that, we ...
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