The Winter 2010 Open Letter Catalog
As some people have noticed, our new Winter 2010 catalog is now available and listed on the Open Letter website.. Totally biased, but I think this is one of our strongest seasons yet, what with Zone, the new Bragi Olafsson novel, the first of a million or so Juan Jose Saer books (one of my absolute favorites! If you ...
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Tertulia at the New York City Cervantes: Sergio Chejfec
Where: Instituto Cervantes, 211-215 East, 49th Street New York, NY Sergio Chejfec (Argentine) is one of the most interesting Latin American writers on the current scene. In 1990 he moved to Venezuela, where he launched Nueva Sociedad, a journal of politics, culture and social sciences. Chejfec has written novels, essays and ...
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Heartbreak Tango
Built on recollections of his small hometown in the heart of the Argentine pampas, Manuel Puig’s Heartbreak Tango is a dizzy and heartfelt pastiche of seduction, jealousy, daydreams, and spoiled hopes in the lives of a self-indulgent and consumptive Casanova named Juan Carlos, his workingman best friend, and the women who ...
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Chip Rossetti on Translating "Saint Theresa and Sleeping with Strangers" by Bahaa Abdelmegid
In our ongoing effort to both make translators more visible, and to provide as much interesting information about international literature as possible, we’re launching a new semi-regular series in which translators talk about something they recently worked on. This could take a few different forms—why they chose ...
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Selected Prose of Heinrich von Kleist
For as little known as he is, for as long ago as he lived and for a short a time as he was alive, it’s amazing the amount of impacting work German short story writer, poet, dramatist, and essayist Heinrich von Kleist produced during his life time. Born in 1777 and dead of suicide in 1811, Kleist suffered the bane of many ...
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FOUND IN TRANSLATION Book Group / Alejandro Zambra's BONSAI
Where: 1644 Haight Street, San Francisco, California 94117 A prizewinning sensation in Chile, Bonsai is the lightest, yet also the most complex, 90 pages you will read this year. Part story of a love affair (yet on the very first page Zambra informs us “in the end she dies and he remains alone”), part ...
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RIT's "The Future of Reading" Conference: A Recap and a Prelude
So last week (was it really just last week?), Rochester Institute of Technology hosted a three-day (and four-night) conference on the “future of reading.” I meant to write about it after seeing Margaret Atwood’s speech (which was surprisingly funny—though the weird thing was, it actually seems funny to ...
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