Have You Been Nookd or Kindled?
Courtesy of old college friend Naomi Firestone of the awesome Jewish Book Council, here’s an insane blog post that seems too insane/amazing to be true from a fellow North Carolinian on the blog Ocracoke Island Journal: Some weeks ago I decided that I wanted to read Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Lou Ann loaned me ...
>
Doña Barbara, Gallegos, and the Backstory of a Book's Lifetime
Our old friend Jeff Waxman of University of Chicago Press and Seminary Co-op up in Chicago turned our attention to this little gem of an article the other day from Publishing Perspectives written by Maggie Hivnor, the Paperback Editor at “U. of Chicago Press, about how Doña Barbara by Rómulo Gallegos, which had been ...
>
Russian Big Book Prize Shortlist Announced
Friend of Three Percent, Lisa Hayden Espenschade, who runs the incredible Russian literature blog Lizok’s Bookshelf posted the shortlist for the über-prestigious Big Book (Bol’shaya Kniga) Prize. Big Book is one of the “big three” Russian literary prizes, along with the Russian Booker and the National ...
>
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 ...
>
Read Russia at BEA 2012
Next week, Book Expo America, “North America’s premier meeting of book trade professionals,” will take over the Javits Center in NYC. This year’s guest of honor at BEA is none other than RUSSIA, your humble author’s area of beloved expertise, and Russia will be the focus of a TON of super-cool ...
>
Will Evans: An Introduction
I’ve been reading the Three Percent blog for over a year now, and now here I am, sitting in Chad’s office, writing a blog post for Three Percent to introduce myself to the Three Percent Army – the cult of translated literature, the gang of literary ruffians who make up the core audience of Three Percent, Open Letter, ...
>
J.K. Rowling, Finland, and Translation
Jill Timbers is a translator from Finnish to English who recently posted on the ALTA listserve about a very curious situation going on in Finland w/r/t the new J.K. Rowling book. I asked her to expand on this a bit, since it’s a situation that raises all sorts of questions about translation quality, profit versus art, ...
>