December Frankfurt Book Fair Newsletter
The December Issue of the Frankfurt Book Fair Newsletter is now available online and includes a number of interesting pieces. The article on the 10th Anniversary of the German Book Office, which highlights the difficulties of getting German titles published in English translation and the job the GBO is doing to make this ...
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Le Clezio's Nobel Prize Lecture
Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio’s Nobel Prize lecture, In the Forest of Paradoxes, (also available as a pdf file) was released last night. It takes its title and starting point from a provocative passage from Stig Dagerman’s Essaer och texter: How is it possible on the one hand, for example, to behave as if ...
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Best Translated Book 2008 Longlist: Camera by Jean-Philippe Toussaint
For the next several weeks we’ll be highlighting a book-a-day from the 25-title Best Translated Book of 2008 longlist, leading up to the announcement of the 10 finalists. Click here for all previous write-ups. Camera by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, translated from the French by Matthew B. Smith. (France, Dalkey Archive ...
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A Year of Reading
This sounds like an intriguing idea: In 2009 I want to spread my love of reading throughout the world. The Year of Readers aims to bring people who enjoy books together to have fun bringing literature into the lives of others. From the 1st January 2009 until 31st of December 2009 I will be running an international ...
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Kafka's Office Writings
Recently released by Princeton University Press, Kafka’s Office Writings may well be the last of the last of the Kafka texts to appear in English. Kafka’s writings as a professional lawyer with the Workmen’s Accident Insurance Institute, may not seem to hold a lot of promise, but the description of the ...
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And on the Negative Side of Things . . .
On the same day that we try and celebrate literature in translation, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (still trying to bring their website into the 1990s) fired Drenka Willen one of the most influential editors of international literature of the past half-century. She’s responsible for Harcourt’s string of great foreign ...
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Best Translated Book of 2008: The Fiction Longlist
After weeks of reading, researching, voting, taking recommendations, discussing, and passionately defending, we’ve finally come up with our 25-title fiction longlist for the “Best Translated Book of 2008:” The Book of Chameleons by Jos矇 Eduardo Agualusa, translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn ...
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