Interview with Translator Michael Stein
The Japanese Literature Publishing Project recently updated their website to include a RSS feed, which, to me, is absolutely fantastic and essential. I live through my Google Reader, rarely checking in on sites that I don’t subscribe to. Now, it’s much, much easier to keep up with the JLPP folks, who are ...
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More Details on Future Bolano Books
In a post about Time Out New York‘s fall books preview, I referenced the forthcoming Roberto Bolano books that New Directions is bringing out over the next few years, but didn’t include many details. Thanks to the incredibly New Directions Newsletter the full list of upcoming Bolano is now ...
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September Issue of Words Without Borders
The new issue of Words Without Borders is now available online, and this month’s theme is “Reversals”: We’re prolonging summer with another month of flip-flops, as international writers contemplate the reversals of various fortunes. On the air in Sarajevo and under the radar in São Paulo, in chilly ...
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Full Interview with Bragi Olafsson
We conducted this interview a few months ago, but thought we’d run it in its entirety today, since his book is now available and will be shipping to bookstores in the very near future. Bragi Ólafsson was born in Reykjavik, and may be most well known for playing bass in The Sugarcubes, Björk’s first band. After ...
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And Now There Are Two
This morning, the second Open Letter book arrived — The Pets by Bragi Olafsson. Just last week, Kirkus reviewed this, giving it the most positive review I’ve read in quite some time: Icelandic novelist Ólafsson’s English-language debut is part Beckettian or even Kafkaesque black comedy, part ...
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898 Pages Later . . .
2666 is a true masterpiece. I plan on writing something more substantial later, after taking some time to think about the novel, but in the meantime I want to share a couple interesting bits from the “Note to the First Edition” about Bolano’s notes on the novel: In one of his many notes for 2666, Bolano ...
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Next Round of September Translations
This isn’t a reflection on the start of the new school year, or the end of summer, or anything like that, but today’s capsules of forthcoming translations features three fairly bleak books . . . What Can I Do When Everything’s On Fire? by Antonio Lobo Antunes, translated from the Portuguese by Gregory ...
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