logo

Why This Book Should Win – La Grande by BTBA Judge Scott Esposito

This post is courtesy of BTBA judge, Scott Esposito. Scott Esposito blogs at Conversational Reading and you can find his tweets here. La Grande – Juan Jose Saer, translated by from the Spanish by Steve Dolph, Argentina, Open Letter Books Juan Jose Saer was a towering figure in Argentine literature. Over the ...

BTBA 2015: Things That Have Caught My Eye by Scott Esposito

This post is courtesy of BTBA judge, Scott Esposito. Scott Esposito blogs at Conversational Reading and you can find his tweets here. As we work our way through the 500-some new translations released in 2014, I’m going to repost on a few books that have stood out for me so far. This list is not exhaustive at all, and it ...

Aurora Venturini, Then and Now [Month of a Thousand Forests]

So, we have 18 authors left to cover in the Month of a Thousand Forests series, and you have 15 days left at which to get the collection for only $15. (Just enter FORESTS at checkout.) First up today is Aurora Venturini, who kicks off the whole anthology, and who published her first book in 1942 and her most recent book in ...

A Few Good Reviews

Over the past few days, a few great reviews for Open Letter authors popped up online, all of which are worth sharing and reading. First up is P.T. Smith’s review for Full Stop of Sölvi Björn Sigurðsson’s The Last Days of My Mother, translated from the Icelandic by Helga Soffía Einarsdóttir: As a ...

GoodReads Giveaway: "La Grande" by Juan José Saer

Juan José Saer was one of the greatest Spanish-language writers of the past hundred years. When he passed away in 2005, he was working on La Grande, a novel that brings together a number of characters from his earlier works in an exploration and ends with one of the greatest final lines in literature: “With the rain ...

Excerpt from "La Grande" by Juan Jose Saer

Steve Dolph’s translation of Juan Jose Saer’s massive La Grande won’t be available until next spring, but for those of you who can’t wait to sample what may well be his magnum opus, you can check out Two Lines for a long sample: Tomatis continues: Mario Brando considered himself an ...

Scars, Scars, and More Scars

Over at Numéro Cinq (“A Warm Place on a Cruel Web”) there’s a great feature on Scars by Juan José Saer, a book that I recently claimed in an interview was my “favorite Open Letter book ever.” (And which I qualified by saying that my mind will change by the time the interview is over . . . My ...