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The Best Book Might Be The First Book You Read [BTBA 2020]

Today's Best Translated Book Award post comes from Christopher Phipps, who has been a Bay Area bookseller for years. He worked with DIESEL and East Bay Booksellers in Oakland and can be found slinging tomes these days at City Lights in San Francisco. EEG by Daša Drndić, translated from the Croatian by Celia ...

Karaoke Culture

After taking a few weeks to mull over Dubravka Ugresic’s Karaoke Culture, I took a rainy afternoon and watched a movie with Chinese food. The movie was High Fidelity and I’ve seen it many times, but never have I thought about the final lines so much before. With uncharacteristic selflessness, Rob Gordon explains how to ...

"Karaoke Culture" by Dubravka Ugresic [Read This Next]

This week’s Read This Next title is Karaoke Culture by Dubravka Ugresic, which is translated from the Croatian by David Williams, Celia Hawkesworth, and Ellen Elias-Bursac, and is coming out from Open Letter at the end of the month. I’m really excited about this book—in my opinion, it’s one of the ...

Karaoke Culture

To even write this review is to participate in the Karaoke Culture the Dubravka Ugresic criticizes. To be one of the voices the mass experiment in democratic culture is only one more example of a worldwide culture that is collapsing into parodies of itself as we all become yet another karaoke singer demanding our moment and ...

The Year in Translations (So Far): "Baba Yaga Laid an Egg" by Dubravka Ugresic

Earlier this week I was on the Wisconsin Public Radio show Here On Earth to make some international literature summer reading recommendations. We weren’t able to cover the full list of books I came up with, so I thought I’d post about them one-by-one over the next couple weeks with additional info, why these ...

Baba Yaga Laid an Egg

This is an admittedly biased statement (disclaimer: the first book Open Letter published was Ugresic’s Nobody’s Home, and I was responsible for Dalkey’s publishing Thank You for Not Reading a few years back), but I honestly believe that Dubravka Ugresic is one of the most interesting writers working today. Her books are ...

Latest Review: "Baba Yaga Laid an Egg" by Dubravka Ugresic

The latest addition to our Review Section is a piece on Dubravka Ugresic’s Baba Yaga Laid an Egg. This was published by Grove as part of the “Myths” series, and was translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursac, Celia Hawkesworth, and Mark Thompson. (Each of the three translators did a different ...