International Prize for Arabic Fiction Winner
It isn’t up on their site yet, but our man on the inside tells us that the winner of the 2008/2009 International Prize for Arabic Fiction is Yusuf Ziedan for BEELZEBUB. I don’t know much about the book I’m afraid, but here’s the description from the IPAF site: Set in fifth century Upper Egypt, ...
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This Week
Things might be a little slow here at Three Percent this week. I’m going to be in Abu Dhabi attending—and writing about—the book fair. I’m not sure where exactly my articles/reports will appear, but as soon as I have the link, I’ll post it here. As a mini-preview of things to come, after I get ...
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Charlotte Mandell on Translating The Kindly Ones
To complement all the review coverage that Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones has been receiving, Ron Hogan from Beatrice, has posted a piece by Charlotte Mandell about translating this controversial novel: People talk about ‘free translation’—and they usually mean something that I’d judge sloppy or ...
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Fuentes's Recommendations
Since Mexico is the guest of honor at the Salon du Livre 2009, Le Monde has a piece by Carlos Fuentes about five Mexican authors/books he thinks should be more well known. The list includes works by Ignacio Padilla (Shadow without a Name is a really cool book), Pedro Angel Palou (not translated into English), Cristina ...
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NPR and The Sailor from Gibraltar
Jessa Crispin (the woman behind Bookslut) wrote a great reivew of Marguerite Duras’s The Sailor from Gibraltar) for NPR: But this is a novel by the cerebral French writer and filmmaker Marguerite Duras, so nothing much happens at all. And it’s all the more thrilling because of it. There are long philosophical ...
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Some Buzz for The Conqueror
In my opinion, Jan Kjaerstad’s The Conqueror is one of the best books we brought out in our first season. Compelling and engaging, with a brilliant over-arching structure, it’s a novel that’s very literary and very readable, and one that we were really hoping would take off. (Especially since this is part of ...
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Discussion of Review of Brothers
Thanks to Literary Saloon for bringing this to our attention. Over at Paper Republic there’s an ongoing discussion of the recent New York Times review by Jess Row of Yu Hua’s Brothers. It all starts when Bruce Humes raises a few questions about the review: —-Does Jess Row know Chinese? This is never ...
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