Monsieur Pain
According to Roberto Bolaño’s introductory note, the original title of Monsieur Pain was The Elephant Path—a term for those well-worn shortcuts that pedestrians tread, say, across a grassy area between two paved sidewalks, examples of the human tendency to blaze our own trails heedless of the city planners’ best ...
>
A few quick Monday links
Dubravka Ugresic interview at The Rumpus. The Czech Literature Portal. Translators Struggle to Prove Their Academic Bona Fides at The Chronicle of Higher ...
>
The Sebald Lecture: Absent Jews and Invisible Executioners
Where: Kings Place, London N1, United Kingdom Curated by The British Centre for Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia and The Society of Authors WG Sebald’s novels are almost unique among the narrative fiction written by non-Jewish Germans in the postwar period for their depiction of the lives of ...
>
Desert
The lack of any article in the title should immediately tip off the reader: Desert is not about a particular desert, such as the Sahara, or even the desert, that great thirsty body that covers the world in sandy blotches and makes travelers conflate Perrier with Dom Pérignon. Both are certainly integral to the novel, but the ...
>
Why More Foreign Writers Aren't Published in America
Over at Publishing Perspectives, Emily Williams continues her series of articles on scouting with one about why more books aren’t published in English translation. Her focus is more on “large scale houses that compete for high profile submissions” than on the small, indie, nonprofits like Open Letter and ...
>
Edward Hopper
Edward Hopper (Graywolf, 2009) is a complex and striking work of narrative-lyrical poetry, skirting on the epic, that is also one of the more interesting books of poetry to be recently published in English. There are a number of things that make Lawrence Venuti’s translation of Ernest Farrés’s book of poems in the voice ...
>
New Round of French Voices
French Voices is a program that started a few years ago as a way of promoting contemporary French fiction and non-fiction. The goal is to select ten works a year that were published since the year 2000 that represent “new trends in fiction and under-represented perspectives or points of view in non-fiction works” ...
>