2013 Music! [Kaija's Picks]
Because we at Open Letter value deadlines and all things timely, I’m going to keep this short and sweet1 and over a month late to bring to you my ten Best Of 2013 album/song/music picks. As I mentioned on the podcast, I had a particularly hard time choosing 10 albums as a whole (which I cheat on anyway) because there ...
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The Mongolian Conspiracy
Noir is not an easy genre to define—or if it once was, that was a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away; as a quick guess, maybe Silver Lake, Los Angeles, 1935. When two books as different as Rafael Bernal’s The Mongolian Conspiracy (Mexico, 1969) and César Aira’s Shantytown (originally published in 2001 in ...
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Slim Little Stories
Sarah Gerard is a writer who used to work at McNally Jackson Books, but recently took a job at BOMB Magazine. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, Bookforum, the Paris Review Daily, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Slice Magazine, and other publications. Her new book, “Things I Told My ...
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The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra
Some time ago I read this phrase: “The page is the only place in the universe God left blank for me.” Pedro Mairal’s short novel The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra is more about these blank spaces than the usual full ones. It’s a novel where the things that are left out are just as important as the ...
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Kopenhaga
“What if even in the afterlife you have to know foreign languages? Since I have already suffered so much trying to speak Danish, make sure to assign me to the Polish zone . . .” So reads a typical aphoristic “poem” in Kopenhaga by Grzegorz Wróblewski. I use quotation marks in an attempt to indicate that ...
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Sticking with the Italian Theme . . .
We’ve published two Italian books at Open Letter—Aracoeli by Elsa Morante, translated by William Weaver, and more recently, This Is the Garden by Giulio Mozzi, translated by Elizabeth Harris. Since we’ve already posted about Weaver today, it only seems appropriate that we should write up this interview ...
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Antony Shugaar on William Weaver and Translation in General
Using William Weaver’s passing as a launching point, Italian translator Antony Shugaar wrote a really informative, interesting op-ed on translation issues for Monday’s New York Times. There are a lot of great bits I could quote—like the description of FMR magazine, its espresso and prosciutto orders, the ...
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