Discussion of Review of Brothers
Thanks to Literary Saloon for bringing this to our attention. Over at Paper Republic there’s an ongoing discussion of the recent New York Times review by Jess Row of Yu Hua’s Brothers. It all starts when Bruce Humes raises a few questions about the review: —-Does Jess Row know Chinese? This is never ...
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NBCC
Just announced: Roberto Bolano’s 2666 has won the 2008 National Book Critic Circle Award for Fiction. It’s always great to see a translation win a NBCC. (I might be mistaken, but I think the last book to do it was Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl back a few years ago.) Last month, Marcela ...
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2009 Best Translated Book Award Ceremony
Following on last week’s post with some pictures, here’s the video (thanks, Monica!) from the 2009 BTB Award ceremony at which Francisco Goldman told a great story about translating Gabriel Garcia Marquez for Playboy, and I managed to give the wrong award to Barbara Epler. ...
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Congrats to Carmichael's
It’s great when one of my favorite stores wins PW‘s Bookseller of the Year award: Founded in 1978 in Louisville, Ky., by Carol Besse and Michael Boggs, Carmichael’s is still owned by the couple and employs seven other full-time employees plus 13 part-timers. The Besse-Boggs team owns two stores in ...
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April/May Bookforum
The new issue of Bookforum is now available online, and, as always, has some interesting pieces about some interesting works of international literature, including: William Giraldi’s review of Aharon Appelfeld’s Laish: “Being labeled a Holocaust writer might indeed irritate Appelfeld, but no living ...
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Indpendents and What the Kids Are Reading
In the Guardian, Hirsh Sawhney has a piece about how independent publishers of the world are going to save literature: Could literary culture really be breathing its last? Should readers and writers be running for cover? Of course not. But what, then, will save literature from economic disaster? Simple: independent ...
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Five Spice Street
Recently, I happened to be on the same flight as super-translator Michael Henry Heim (who literally speaks more than a dozen languages). We got to talking about books (naturally) and about what we were currently reading, and as it turns out, we had both brought along Can Xue titles for our trip. He was reading Blue Light in ...
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