For fans of his work, it’s great to see that Bolano continues to get great attention. Nazi Literature in the Americas is on display at every bookstore I’ve been in recently, and has been getting decent review coverage, including a long piece in The Nation by Carmen Boullosa, which concludes with a strong endorsement:
The reader looking for information about Nazi writers who lived—or live—in Latin America had best look elsewhere. Those who want to revel in some lively, picaresque writing charged with hilarity and irony—and to step through the door into Roberto Bolaño’s private and handcrafted tradition—will find reading this book enjoyable, if that’s the right word for watching a parade of monsters go by.
This review is part of a trio of pieces on Bolano that were published in the March 31st issue of The Nation. Marcela Valdes—contributing editor to PW, NBCC board member, and all around awesome person—wrote one on Bolano’s Between Parentheses, a collection of essays, and Forrest Gander—poet, translator, referenced in our earlier Poetry post—has an essay on Bolano’s poetry. (Gander’s piece is only available online to subscribers.)
All three pieces are great on their own, but together this is pretty amazing. It’s great to see a major magazine creating a context for a writer of Bolano’s stature. Rather than doing a one-off, this truly provides readers with a slew of entry points to Bolano’s oeuvre. It’s a great idea, and one that I hope they employ in the future.
On the subject of Bolano, over at Bookninja there’s a conversation between David Orr, Marcela Valdes, and Carmine Starnino about The Savage Detectives. Very interesting and worth checking out.
Now goddess, child of Zeus,
tell the old story for our modern times.
–(The Odyssey, Book I, line 10. Emily Wilson)
In literary translation of works from other eras, there are always two basic tasks that a translator needs. . .
I Remember Nightfall by Marosa di Giorgio (trans. From the Spanish by Jeannine Marie Pitas) is a bilingual poetry volume in four parts, consisting of the poems “The History of Violets,” “Magnolia,” “The War of the Orchards,” and “The Native. . .
This review was originally published as a report on the book at New Spanish Books, and has been reprinted here with permission of the reviewer. The book was originally published in the Catalan by Anagrama as Joyce i les. . .
Hello and greetings in the 2017 holiday season!
For those of you still looking for something to gift a friend or family member this winter season, or if you’re on the lookout for something to gift in the. . .
Three generations of men—a storyteller, his father and his son—encompass this book’s world. . . . it is a world of historical confusion, illusion, and hope of three generations of Belgraders.
The first and last sentences of the first. . .
The Island of Point Nemo is a novel tour by plane, train, automobile, blimp, horse, and submarine through a world that I can only hope is what Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès’s psyche looks like, giant squids and all.
What. . .
Mario Benedetti (1920-2009), Uruguay’s most beloved writer, was a man who loved to bend the rules. He gave his haikus as many syllables as fit his mood, and wrote a play divided into sections instead of acts. In his country,. . .
Kim Kyung Ju’s I Am a Season That Does Not Exist in the World, translated from the Korean by Jake Levine, is a wonderful absurdist poetry collection. It’s a mix of verse and prose poems, or even poems in the. . .
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 construction and powerfully recognizable as a reflection of its modern-day counterpart. Kingdom Cons, originally. . .
Imagine reading a work that suddenly and very accurately calls out you, the reader, for not providing your full attention to the act of reading. Imagine how embarrassing it is when you, the reader, believe that you are engrossed in. . .