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NEA grants and Open Letter

The National Endowment for the Arts just announced its 2010 winners of the Literature Fellowships for Translation Projects. And there’s a few Open Letter connections this year. First, Charlotte Mandell won a grant to translate Mathias Enard’s Zone (“The narrative unfolds during a train journey from Milan ...

Bread Loaf and Slow Days on Three Percent

I’m leaving this afternoon for a three-day visit to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference (giving a presentation on Open Letter, state of translations in America), so I probably won’t be posting much this week. I’ll try and post my reviews of Robert Bolano’s The Skating Rink and Tanguy Viel’s ...

Thirlwell on Hrabal

I don’t usually like to re-post things that have appeared on The Literary Review, mainly because I think our site and Michael’s have an audience Venn diagram that looks more like a single big circle than two overlapping ones, but this is too good to pass up. This weekend, Adam Thirlwell had a piece in The ...

Latest Review: Beauty Salon by Mario Bellatin

The latest addition to our review section is a piece by Larissa Kyzer on Mario Bellatin’s Beauty Salon. Bellatin’s a pretty interesting author (see this post about the recent NY Times profile) and hopefully a bunch more of his books (especially Flores) will come out in the near future. ...

Mario Bellatin in the New York Times

This is a few days old now, but it was great to see Larry Rohter of the New York Times do a special feature on Mexican novelist Mario Bellatin. Bellatin—and his books—are really interesting. Even the opening story in the piece is awesome: A few years ago the Mexican novelist Mario Bellatin attended one of ...

Mathias Enard in Le Monde

Next fall we’ll be bringing out Zone, a 517-page, one-sentence book by Matias Enard that was all the rage in France last fall and, at least from the sample I’ve read, is utterly amazing. (Here’s a Chicago Tribune article about the book, and here’s a thoughtful review that ran at Quarterly ...

Latest Review: Landscape in Concrete by Jakov Lind

The latest addition to our review section is a piece by Nigel Beale on Jakov Lind’s Landscape in Concrete. Usually we don’t run reviews of our own books (which initially seemed like a good idea, but sort of doesn’t make sense, since Open Letter books are as interesting as a lot of the titles we do review, ...