Chad vs. Skype/Moneybookers
Admittedly, this has absolutely nothing to do with international fiction, but since it is related to this week’s podcast and is incredibly hilarious, I feel like I have to share. Here’s the setup: Back in 2008, I bought credit on Skype to call some people in India for an article I was writing. After doing the ...
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2014 Hemingway Grant Winners [Spoiler Alert: We Made the List!]
Back in mid-December, the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the U.S. announced the 2014 fall session winners of the Hemingway Prize publishing grant. Among the nine titles receiving support is Antoine Volodine’s Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven, translated by J. T. Mahany and forthcoming late spring ...
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Thousand Times Broken: A Conversation with Translator Gillian Conoley [Part II]
The writer Henri Michaux had two great missions in life: to explore the darkest parts of human consciousness, and record what he found in those explorations in the clearest possible way. That’s according to Gillian Conoley, who recently published the first English translations of three of Michaux’s books. Thousand Times ...
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Thousand Times Broken: A Conversation with Translator Gillian Conoley [Part I]
The writer Henri Michaux had two great missions in life: to explore the darkest parts of human consciousness, and record what he found in those explorations in the clearest possible way. That’s according to Gillian Conoley, a poet, the founding editor of Volt, and a translator who teaches at Sonoma State University. She’s ...
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The Madmen of Benghazi
Reading a genre book—whether fantasy, science fiction, crime, thriller, etc.—which begins to seem excessively, stereotypically bad, I have to make sure to ask myself: is this parodying the flaws of the genre? Usually, this questioning takes its time coming. In Gerard de Villiers The Madmen of Benghazi, it happened on the ...
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50/50: Fifty Books in Translation from Fifty Presses [Our 2014 Year-End Book List]
Last week I wrote a post that, among other things, included a brief rant on year-end book lists (one of our favorite things to rant about here). Already before the post’s draft stage, I had been scheming up the foundation to a more translation-inclusive year-end list than the other lists out there this year, and soon ...
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Open Letter Awarded National Endowment for the Arts Grant
For those of you who haven’t yet seen the Facebook posts and re-posts, we are thrilled (and grateful) that Open Letter has once again received an Arts Works grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). The grant awarded to the press for 2015 was one of the largest awarded this year. From the press release ...
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