Esther Tusquets and Social Criticism [Month of a Thousand Forests]
Up next in our ongoing Month of a Thousand Forests series. is Esther Tusquets, author of Stranded, The Same Sea as Every Summer, and Love Is a Solitary Game, to name a few of her titles that are available in English translation. Below you’ll find an excerpt from the interview with her, and a bit from her story, ...
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Scott Cheshire on Plotless Novels
Electric Literature has a lengthy piece by Scott Cheshire on “plotless novels” that a lot of Three Percent readers would probably appreciate. Especially Max Frisch fans. The article is worth reading in its entirety, and excerpting it doesn’t do it justice, but here are a few paragraphs to draw you ...
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Carlos Fuentes and Nationalist Writing [A Month of a Thousand Forests]
I’m going to start off today’s Month of a Thousand Forests entries with Carlos Fuentes—one of the greatest writers of all time. When I was at Dalkey Archive, we reprinted a few of his novels, including Where the Air Is Clear and Terra Nostra, which is excerpted below. I don’t love all of ...
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Why Won't English Speakers Read Translations?
I don’t know the answer to that, and neither does Hephzibah Anderson, writing for the BBC, but she does summarize some of the arguments related to publishing literature in translation, and gives up heaps of praise to Pushkin Press, along with Open Letter, Words Without Borders, and a few others. Some call it the ...
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Eduardo Mendoza and Barcelona Mysteries [A Month of a Thousand Forests]
The second author up today in the Month of a Thousand Forests series is Eduardo Mendoza. Rather than quote from his interview, I’m just running part of the bio that Valerie Miles wrote for him along with a bit from The Truth about the Savolta Case. As with all the other posts in this series, if you order A Thousand ...
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Rafael Chirbes's "Crematorium" [A Month of a Thousand Forests]
I’m going to have to double up on these for a while in order to catch up and make sure we cover everyone before the end of September, so expect a lot of “Forests” over the next week or so. Rafael Chirbes is up first today. I’ve been interested in his works for a while, and just today gave his newest ...
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The Last Days
Spoiler alert: acclaimed writer Stefan Zweig and his wife Lotte kill themselves at the end of Lauren Seksik’s 2010 novel, The Last Days. It’s hard to avoid spoiling this mystery. Zweig’s suicide actually happened, in Brazil in 1942, and since then his fans have wondered what life must have been like for him in his ...
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