Here Comes the Backlash
Last week, I worried that Horace Engdahl’s comments about American literature and the Nobel Prize would result in a bit of an anti-foreign literature backlash. And as Edward Gauvin pointed out in the comments, it’s starting . . . From Adam Kirsch’s article at Slate: All of these criticisms are, of ...
>
Ellen Elias-Bursac on Nobody's Home
The always amazing CALQUE is starting to post a series of translator’s introductions on their website, with one of the first being a piece by Ellen Elias-Bursac on Dubravka Ugresic’s Nobody’s Home. In her work published before the outbreak of war in 1991, three collections of short stories and a ...
>
This Week's Events
This week is probably going to be another slow one for Three Percent, but for good reason. Bragi Olafsson is in town and we’ve stacked up a number of events and readings, beginning tonight. Here’s his official schedule: Reading and Discussion on Monday, October 6th, 8pm Karpeles Manuscript Library 220 North St. ...
>
Interview with Charlotte Mandell
Emprise Review has a nice interview with French translator Charlotte Mandell, who has translated a number of classic authors (Balzac, Proust, Flaubert) along with more contemporary works (Genet, BHL, Littell). She recently completed an excerpt of Mathias Enard’s Zone (which I have in my hands right now), which is ...
>
Latest Review: Mansarda
We wrote about Kis’s Mansarda when we first heard about it a while back when we first heard about Serbian Classics Press, thanks to Michael Orthofer. At long last, we now have a review written by Erik Estep, a librarian at East Carolina University. ...
>
Hate Letter Books
One of the more intriguing books coming out of France this fall is Public Enemies, a series of letters between Michel Houellebecq and Bernard-Henri L矇vy. As described in the Financial Times: Mr Houellebecq is a novelist who – in the words of the American writer John Updike – has a “thoroughgoing ...
>
Boom Goes the Dynamite!
A number of people had emailed or called me about the controversial statements made by Swedish Academy’s permanent secretary Horace Engdahl about American writing, basically stating that the U.S. is too culturally insular to have a writer worthy of the Nobel Prize. (The last American to win was Toni Morrison in ...
>