This week’s music is “Simulation Swarm” by Big Thief.

If you like what you hear, review, rate, and support us on

You can watch next week’s episode (June 22nd, 9am ET) which will cover through page 136 in Never Did the Fire and page 152 in Catching Fire live on YouTube , and watch all previous seasons on our��.

��DZ����Ƿ�������and����for random thoughts and information about upcoming guests.

Be sure to order Brian’s book,��, which is available at better bookstores everywhere thanks to BOA Editions. And all of Katie’s translations, especially����,��and her forthcoming��

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This week’s music is “It Was Us” by Arms and Sleepers.

If you like what you hear, review, rate, and support us on

You can watch next week’s episode (June 1st) live on YouTube , and watch all previous seasons on our��.

��DZ����Ƿ�������and����for random thoughts and information about upcoming guests.

Be sure to order Brian’s book,��, which is available at better bookstores everywhere thanks to BOA Editions. And all of Katie’s translations, especially����,��and her forthcoming��

This week’s music is “Monday” by The Regrettes.

If you like what you hear, review, rate, and support us on

You can watch next week’s episode (June 1st) live on YouTube , and watch all previous seasons on our��.

��DZ����Ƿ�������and����for random thoughts and information about upcoming guests.

Be sure to order Brian’s book,��, which is available at better bookstores everywhere thanks to BOA Editions. And all of Katie’s translations, especially����,��and her forthcoming��

Katie, Brian, and Chad will be back live on May 25th to cover up to page 68 in��Never Did the Fire��and to page 78 in��Catching Fire.

This week’s music is “No Blade of Grass” from the new(ish) Bodega album.

If you like what you hear, review, rate, and support us on

��DZ����Ƿ�������and����for random thoughts and information about upcoming guests.

Be sure to order Brian’s book,��, which is available at better bookstores everywhere thanks to BOA Editions. And all of Katie’s translations, especially����,��and her forthcoming��

This week’s music is “Age of Anxietyt I” from the new Arcade Fire album.

If you like what you hear, review, rate, and support us on

Also: use code 2MONTHREVIEW at the for 10% off everything. (Lies! Discount only applies to books—no bundles, no tote bags, etc.)

Next week’s episode will be available on 5/14 to Patreon supporters, and will drop wherever you get your podcasts on Wednesday, May 18th. Unlike other episodes, it’ll consist of two interviews related to Eltit and the books rather than a breakdown of the next sections. We’ll be back to normal on May 25th!

��DZ����Ƿ�������and����for random thoughts and information about upcoming guests.

Be sure to order Brian’s book,��, which is available at better bookstores everywhere thanks to BOA Editions. And all of Katie’s translations, especially����,��and her forthcoming��

In this episode, they contextualize Eltit and this particular book, talk about intentional ambiguity, Franco and Pinochet, action vs. analysis, bad and hard to eat rice, and more.

Also, Katie sings.

This week’s music is “Impossible” from the new Röyksopp album.

If you like what you hear, review, rate, and support us on Patreon!

Also: use code 2MONTHREVIEW at the for 10% off everything.

You can watch next week’s episode (May 11th) live on YouTube��, and watch all previous seasons on our��.

��DZ����Ƿ�������and����for random thoughts and information about upcoming guests.

Be sure to order Brian’s book,��, which is available at better bookstores everywhere thanks to BOA Editions. And all of Katie’s translations, especially����,��and her forthcoming��

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Before getting into the books for this season, we have a couple of announcements. First off, we now have a , so please please follow us.

Also, following the trend of podcasts everywhere, we’ve launched a with some really fun bonuses for supporters, including access to a Discord channel, a book from my personal library, merchandise, a chance to vote on future seasons, and an opportunity to come on an episode. The funds from this will go to get Brian and Katie microphones, help support them for doing this every week, and, if all goes well, we’ll be able to put on a special TMR event/party this fall. Thanks in advance for your support, and we promise it’ll be worth your while.

Now, on to the books!

Many of you will recognize the man�� (or his hands?) in the photo to the left as Daniel Hahn, translator, writer, editor, critic, and literary citizen extraordinaire, who was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2020, won the International Foreign Fiction Prize in 2007 (for José Eduardo Agualusa’s��The Book of Chameleons) and the International Dublin Literary Award in 2017 (again for an Agualusa book,��A General Theory of Oblivion), and set up the Translators Association First Translation Prize. He was the national program director for the British Centre for Literary Translation, teaches workshops and seminars on a very regular basis, and is affiliated with every great translator-centric organization.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg! Seriously, Danny is one of a kind, a true ambassador for international literature, and one of the nicest and most talented translators out there. If you ever have a chance to meet him, or watch him on a panel, or attend one of his workshops—do it!

There are any number of books Danny’s translated that would be great for the podcast (like the bio of Arsène Wenger perhaps?! Go Gunners!), but this two-book package that just came out from Charco Press is IDEAL.

When Danny agreed to translate����by Diamela Eltit, he also agreed to write a “translator’s diary”‘ on Charco’s site about the experience, giving readers the opportunity to get a glimpse behind the curtain as he worked his way through this quite experimental novel. That blog became Catching Fire, which came out at the same time as the Eltit, and is the perfect companion piece for this season.

So, instead of reading one difficult book, we’re going to try an experiment and read both ��and����simultaneously. There isn’t a one-to-one correspondence between the novel and Danny’s diary, but I think that we’ll be able to bounce ideas off of the two texts in a very interesting way. Also, given that these books are relatively short, the per-week reading burden for this season is quite low . . . Which is good, because I’ve tried to read Eltit several times in the past and . . . her work was way beyond my comprehension at the time.

That said,�� sounds right up my alley:

A literary icon in Chile and a major figure in the anti-Pinochet resistance, Diamela Eltit gets renewed attention in the English language in a novel of breakdowns. Holed up together, old, ill, and untethered from the revolutionary action that defined them, a couple’s bonds dissolve in their loss of a child and their loss of belief in an idea. What is there left to have faith in when the structures we built, and the ones we succumbed to, no longer offer us any comfort or prospect of salvation?

There are four other Eltit books available in English translation: Sacred Cow, translated by Amanda Hopkinson (Serpent’s Tail, 1995),��The Fourth World, translated by Dick Gerdes (University of Nebraska, 1995), E. Luminata, translated by Ronald Christ (Lumen Books, 1997), and Custody of the Eyes, translated by Helen Lane and Ronald Christ (Lumen Books, 2005). She’s received a number of big prizes over the course of her career, including, most recently, the Chilean National Prize for Literature (2018), Carlos Fuentes Prize (2020), and the FIL Award (2021).

I don’t know much more about her, although I’ve always thought of her as a true cult author—one who has had a large influence on the more avant-garde writers, such as Mónica Ramón Ríos and Carlos Labbe. Which is why I’m particularly excited to dig into this. Katie and Brian will explain Eltit to me, I’ll get to learn a lot about an author I feel like I should really love, and we get to talk to and about one of my favorite translation people.

So here’s the schedule! (Dates are for the live , the audio will be available approximately a day later.)

:����Never Did the Fire��1-20;��Catching Fire��1-24

:��NF��21-44;��CF 25-52

: Bonus Episode

: NF��45-68; CF 53-78

: NF��69-90; CF 79-105

June 8: NF 91-108; CF����106-130

June 15: NF 109-136; CF 131-154

June 22: NF��137-156; CF 155-186

Get your copies now, and get ready! And if you like what we’ve done in the past, please consider supporting us through our .

Some books are made of fucking—of cum and cumming, cocks, twats, and tongues, desires of all kinds. A la Gass, literature may arrive in different shades of blue: some the color of morning, an erection at sunrise, a shadow sexual tension undispersed by the night; others darkened to purple in their perversions, heavy, overwrought, fit to burst. For the prude, such books might be vulgar; the aesthete: garish; the reactionary: obscene; the fanatic: forbidden.

The state versus Molly Bloom deemed her language “unparlorlike.” In the UK, the Obscenity Act of 1959 sunk its teeth in Mr. Lawrence for a few “fucks” and “cunts.” Naturally, Nabokov, fine purveyor of pedophilia and incest, won his share of bans, for works that stand at the outer edge of linguistic profundity, and his public’s decency. Then, for a time, it seemed the dam had broken, as we moved into this century, unmoored by neo-liberalism, cavorting all we like between the pages, with naught but the odd local library acting the iron-clad censor.

So enter our fresh fallen world: in America, with 30% of our neighbors unmasked as bigots, white supremacists, and, for what seems like something of a first, self-styled vulgarians, untethered, finally, by a reality star’s innate vulgarities; and abroad, with all manner of buffoons, conmen, and plutocratic libertines taking the reins across every hemisphere, their pale faces framed, dead-eyed, on all of our screens, grinning through their malice. And, though the Left has historically held the mantle of obscenity in art and cultural life, that pride increasingly seems property of the Right, the alt-right, the fascists, who bear it happily against calls for decency, normality, and truth. Where once perversity was an aesthetic and political tool for critiquing power, for digging into its cracks to expose any rot, the obscene has now been subsumed by power itself. The emperor is naked, and his subjects adore it.

What’s to be done? Well, down with decency, I say, and bring back a version of truth-telling fiction that doubles down in its most vulgar strategies. And what better weapon to bring to this struggle against the arch xenophobes than books from outside our borders.

—a slim, strange 2016 novel by Spanish author Juan José Millás, and translated this year by Thomas Bunstead and Daniel Hahn for Bellevue Literary Press—traffics in a kind of perversity that flickers between comedy and domestic horror and, ultimately, economic alienation. The protagonist, Damián Lobo, recently fired from his job, spends all day imagining himself a celebrity on an extended TV interview. Early in the novel, the imaginary interviewer starts a line of questioning that brings Damián to the subject of his adopted Chinese step-sister, two years his senior. What starts as a sequence of questions lining up an adolescent crush in an unusual family arrangement, quickly drops into out-and-out incest. As the story progresses, Damián flees a petty theft by hiding in a wardrobe, which is in turn delivered to a family’s home. There, he becomes something like a phantom servant, cooking and cleaning and spying on the father’s hapless affair with a co-worker, until his phantomhood reaches a kind of violent apotheosis. It’s a novel where perversion leads to alienation in an absolute sense: from the bonds of a family via incest; from one’s own labor through capitalism’s rapacious march; and from personhood through a total disengagement with the world. In the end, all that’s left is a male gaze, obsessive, extreme, detached from life’s logic.

In —a 2015 novel by Argentine writer Pola Oloixarac, newly translated from the Spanish by Roy Kesey for Soho Press—sex underlies the techno-evolution of capitalism, as a form of exchange, currency, and domination. A few apt scenes: the story opens on the Canary Islands in 1882; the intrepid explorer, Niklas Bruun, arrives to the hidden village of Mahan, where a fertility rite begins that will forever connect the Europeans “into the genetic history of the island in a torrent of semen and blood.” The novels second storyline introduces Cassio, a young hacker in the 80s, by-way-of the fuck that founded him. His mother, Sonia Liberman, has an affair with a Brazilian man, for whom she is exclusively a sexual object, and, naturally, a lack of protection and care leads us right to young Cassio, who grows into his own passages as an incel, for a time. In the final section, set in Bariloche, the now-techno-futurist hub of South America in 2024, a young female professional wears VR glasses and watches two Komodo dragons ravage a blonde woman in explicit detail, and masturbates. Each of the novel’s narrative strands uses sex as its own distinct critique of our ideological past, present, and future—be it colonialist, chauvinist, or techno-utopic. The sexual is always political, and this wonderful, maximalist little novel wields ribaldry like a gun aimed at capitalism’s amoral heart.

by José Eduardo Agualusa, translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn (Angola, Archipelago Books)

In Why Geography Matters, Harm de Blij writes that Americans have a dangerous geographic ignorance of other countries, particularly China. And if we’re iffy on China, we’re totally clueless about Africa, and worse, we don’t care.

So it’s satisfying that two of my favorite books on the BTBA longlist are set in sub-Saharan Africa—Tram 83 (Fiston Mwanza Mujila / Roland Glasser / Deep Vellum) and A General Theory of Oblivion (Jose Eduardo Agualusa / Daniel Hahn / Archipelago Books)—Democratic Republic of Congo and Angola, respectively. Both books are also on the Man Booker International Prize—you know, the other translation prize.

The basic plot of A General Theory of Oblivion is that a light-sensitive agoraphobic walls herself and her white German Shepherd in her Luandan apartment for 30 years, eventually living off roof garden fruits and vegetables and the pigeons she traps, using diamonds as bait.

Outside her building, Angola is approaching the tail end of the War of Independence.
Dark and brutal when it needs to be, sensitive and thoughtful when it should be, the book is a bit of a riffle shuffle. It’s the callbacks,¹ for a lack of a better word that I loved most in A General Theory of Oblivion. Characters who seem like one-offs or throwaways re-enter the book as major characters. It all leads to a denouement, minus all of the chuckles of, say, Comedy of Errors.

If the book title isn’t enough to entice you, the chapter titles should be:
Our Sky is Your Floor
The Substance of Death
On the Slippages of Reason
The Subtle Architecture of Chance
About God and Other Tiny Follies

Daniel Hahn’s translation is up with the best of his work. Is there anyone as consistently good as Hahn?

The reason A General Theory of Oblivion should win the Best Translated Book Award, or at least advance to the shortlist, is that the number one seed, the other book translated from the Portuguese shouldn’t be a shoe-in. Seriously—Villanova beat North Carolina. Leicester City could win the Premier League.

¹ My favorite part of the television series Arrested Development was the callbacks. Well, second to the classic lines:

Michael (to GOB): Get rid of The Seaward.

Lucille: I’ll leave when I’m good and ready

I made a fool of myself with one of the series writers, now novelist Maria Semple at a book tradeshow. Rather than tell her I that was excited/interested in her book Where’d You Go, Bernadette, I asked her a raft of questions about how they writers built callbacks into the episodes

– Eduardo Halfon, translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman and Daniel Hahn
Bellevue Literary Press