Every Good Heart is a Telescope
Poetry always has the feel of mysticism and mystery, or maybe this feeling is a stereotype left over from high school literature class. It is generally the result of confusion, lack of time committed to consuming the poetry, and the general difficulty poetry imposes on the reader. In Víctor Rodríguez Núñez’s ...
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Mia Couto Wins 2014 Neustadt International Prize for Literature
As announced Friday, Mia Couto has won this year’s Neustadt International Prize for Literature: Gabriella Ghermandi, who nominated Couto for the Neustadt Prize, said of him, “He is an author who addresses not just his country but the entire world, all human beings.” Couto is the first Mozambican author ...
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November 2013 Translations Worth Checking Out: The "ORDNUNG!" Edition
Before getting into this month’s list of recommended translations—which is kind of long, mostly because I couldn’t decide on which titles to cut—I want to follow-up a bit on last month’s post about our trip to the Frankfurt Book Fair. Actually, to be more specific, I want to talk about Germans ...
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BCLT Looking for a Director
The British Centre for Literary Translation—located in Norwich at the University of East Anglia—recently launched a search for a new director. You can get all of the information here, but here’s a brief summary of what sounds like one of the coolest translation-related positions ever: Apply now for the ...
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Gushing
Jenn Witte is a bookseller at Skylight Books in Los Angeles I fall in love easily. Books possess me and while reading them I am completely blinded. Is this a terrible quality in a panelist? I wonder, but I’m going to declare that my engagement with these books is fair in that I give them my whole self, one at a time. When ...
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Disgruntled Frankfurt Exhibitors
Last week, Open Letter editor and resident expert in all things Latvian, translated aloud a bit of an article decrying the Latvian stand at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair. I’m paraphrasing here, but the gist of the article was that the stand was lame, boring, the laughing stock of the fair, and not nearly as cool ...
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Weekend Reading: "Viviane" by Julia Deck
Like most people in publishing—or most readers I know—I have approximately a hundred million books on my “to read” shelves. Which in no way stops me from buying more and more books, or, in this case, setting aside everything I “should” be reading to check out a book that won’t be ...
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