George Carroll on Translations
Sales rep superstar and international literature enthusiast George Carroll just posted a “destination guide” at NW Book Lovers that highlights a number of great presses, organizations, and books worth checking out. Many of these—like Three Percent, New Directions, the Center for the Art of ...
>
A Muslim Suicide
It is a well-known phenomenon that widespread condemnation of a book will only serve to increase its allure. It then follows that when Ibn Khaldun (a Fourteenth Century historian) attempted to ban Escape of the Gnostic, he may have been doing the text a favor. In a legal opinion, Ibn Khaldun wrote, “the decision regarding ...
>
PEN Center USA Translation Award to Suzanne Jill Levine
The 2012 winners of the PEN Center USA Literary Awards were announced Wednesday, and I’m extremely glad to see that Suzanne Jill Levine won in the translation category for her work on José Donoso’s The Lizard’s Tale, which came out late last year from Northwestern University Press. Unfortunately, we ...
>
Yeah, Paulo, THAT'S What's Wrong with Contemporary Literature
From The Guardian: James Joyce’s Ulysses has topped poll after poll to be named the greatest novel of the 20th century, but according to Paulo Coelho, the book is “a twit”. [. . .] Writers go wrong, according to Coelho, when they focus on form, not content. “Today writers want to impress ...
>
Doña Barbara
Any author who has been both nominated for a Nobel Prize in literature and exiled from his country because of the strength of his criticisms against the nation’s longstanding dictatorship deserves to be taken note of. Rómulo Gallegos in his acclaimed novel, Doña Barbara, hailed as a classic of Latin American literature, ...
>
Life is Short and Desire Endless
The endearingly (and intentionally) peculiar tone of Patrick Lapeyre’s Life is Short and Desire Endless complements the subject matter of the novel very well. Nora Neville, a flighty and immature young woman, flits manically between two men (Murphy Blomdale, a successful American businessman in London and a married French ...
>
Almost Ready to Start Blogging Again
I know it’s been a terribly slow summer on Three Percent, and I apologize for that. Every day I come in with good intentions and 3-4 ideas for posts, but then I get sucked into planning the ALTA conference, or the never-ending deluge of emails, managing interns, printing things to mail, etc., etc. It’s been a ...
>