The Taker in Time Out New York
This week’s Time Out New York has a great four star review — out of six, but still, a four-star review — by Anderson Tepper of Rubem Fonseca’s The Taker and Other Stories. In short, fragmented vignettes that ring with the hard-boiled edge of crime fiction. Fonseca, 83, has charted his own ...
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Translation and the Academy
Catherine Porter, the new president of MLA, just announced that the theme for next year’s “Presidential Forum” at the MLA convention is “The Tasks of Translation in the Twenty-First Century.” To recognize the importance of translation in the modern world, it suffices to reflect on the number ...
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Dec/Jan Issue of Bookforum
The Dec 08/Jan 09 issue of Bookforum is now available both in print and online. As always, there’s a lot of great stuff, including a review of Saramago’s Death with Interruptions and Olivier Pauvert’s Noir, which sounds pretty cool: The dystopian thriller is narrated by an unnamed white man, who ...
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Latest Review: Twelve Loops
The latest addition to our review section is a piece by Nina Shevchuk-Murray on Yuri Andrukhovych’s untranslated novel Twelve Loops. Andrukhovych does have a couple of books out in English — Recreations (Canadian Institute of Ukranian Study Press) and Perverzion (Northwestern University Press). (I believe ...
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As If We Had Any Doubt
According to a recent report from the University of Manchester, fiction can be just as powerful as facts in teaching people about the world. The report — “The Fiction of Development: Literary Representation as a Source of Authoritative Knowledge” — was written by David Lewis, Dennis Rodgers, and ...
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Blaft Publications and Zero Degree
One translated book I recently had to add to the 2008 translation database is Zero Degree by Charu Nivedita (translated from the Tamil by Pritham K. Chakravarthy and Rakesh Khanna), which was published by Blaft Publications earlier this year. I have to admit that until reading Rakesh Khanna’s comment on an earlier ...
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Best Translated Book of 2008
The panel of international lit fans behind the Best Translated Book of 2008 award is starting its discussions about which titles should make the longlist, but there’s still time for you to get your vote in. Please feel free to enter your recommendations into the comments section, or e-mail them to me at chad.post at ...
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