NBCC
Just announced: Roberto Bolano’s 2666 has won the 2008 National Book Critic Circle Award for Fiction. It’s always great to see a translation win a NBCC. (I might be mistaken, but I think the last book to do it was Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl back a few years ago.) Last month, Marcela ...
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Jakov Lind = Georges Perec?
(Open Letter) (Harvard Book
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Congrats to Carmichael's
It’s great when one of my favorite stores wins PW‘s Bookseller of the Year award: Founded in 1978 in Louisville, Ky., by Carol Besse and Michael Boggs, Carmichael’s is still owned by the couple and employs seven other full-time employees plus 13 part-timers. The Besse-Boggs team owns two stores in ...
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April/May Bookforum
The new issue of Bookforum is now available online, and, as always, has some interesting pieces about some interesting works of international literature, including: William Giraldi’s review of Aharon Appelfeld’s Laish: “Being labeled a Holocaust writer might indeed irritate Appelfeld, but no living ...
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Indpendents and What the Kids Are Reading
In the Guardian, Hirsh Sawhney has a piece about how independent publishers of the world are going to save literature: Could literary culture really be breathing its last? Should readers and writers be running for cover? Of course not. But what, then, will save literature from economic disaster? Simple: independent ...
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Five Spice Street
Recently, I happened to be on the same flight as super-translator Michael Henry Heim (who literally speaks more than a dozen languages). We got to talking about books (naturally) and about what we were currently reading, and as it turns out, we had both brought along Can Xue titles for our trip. He was reading Blue Light in ...
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Bacacay: The Polish Literature Weblog
The Polish Cultural Institute in New York recently launched Bacacay, a new blog with info on Polish literature for English-language readers, translators, reviewers, publishers, and so on. Even though the site is brand new, Bill Martin has done a great job putting together some really interesting, informative posts, such as ...
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