Next week we’ll be back to normally scheduled book talk. Specifically, Chad and Tom will be talking with Alex Zucker about translator’s fees, forming a translators guild, and other financial aspects of publishing international literature. In the meantime, feel free to email us at threepercentpodcast@gmail.com with any questions or comments.

As always you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes by clicking . To subscribe with other podcast downloading software, such as Google’s , copy the following link. And you can email us with complaints and comments at threepercentpodcast@gmail.com

This week, Tom is joined by Nate, and they grit their teeth to discuss The Master (P. T. Anderson) and Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino), after having forced one another to finally watch each other’s favorite movies of the year. Also on the docket are the likes of: Rust & Bone, Magic Mike, Killer Joe, Moonrise Kingdom, Argo, and, god help us, Lincoln. (And no one, at any point, talks about soccer.)

This week’s music is the theme song to Tom’s favorite: .

As always you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes by clicking . To subscribe with other podcast downloading software, such as Google’s , copy the following link.

Supplementing this podcast, we’ll be posting the top 10 lists for all four participants over the course of the day, giving you a wealth of music to check out over the holiday break. To help you out, Spotify users can click here to find a 108 track playlist of our collective favorite songs.

Enjoy the holidays and we’ll be back in a few weeks!

As always you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes by clicking . To subscribe with other podcast downloading software, such as Google’s , copy the following link.

Tom and I (Nate) each picked our top five, and, as you can see, it turned out to be quite the diverse list of movies. The rundown, with handy previous, is below.

Tom’s Picks

-Best Popcorn Movie: Drive Angry, directed by Patrick Lussier

-Best Adaptation: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, directed by Tomas Alfredson

-Best Movie That I Feel Foolish for Not Having Seen Earlier: Night Watch, directed by Timur Bekmambetov (Russia, 2004)

-Best Foreign Film: Animal Kingdom, directed by David Michôd (Australia)

-Best Foreign/Action Film: 13 Assassins, directed by Takashi Miike (Japan)

Nate’s Picks

-Best Popcorn Flick That’s Surprisingly Impressive and Recommendable: Rise of the Planet of the Apes, directed by Rupert Wyatt

-Best Movie That I’m Cocksure Is One of the Best of the Year (but we’re doing this podcast before the movie has played anywhere near me, so, honestly, I haven’t seen it): The Artist, directed by Michel Hazanavicius (France)

-Best Documentary Film, a.k.a., the Best Movie Made by Errol Morris This Year: Tabloid, Directed by Errol Morris

-Second Best Movie of 2011 (or, maybe, the first): Drive, directed by Nicolas Winding Refn

-First Best Movie of 2011 (or, maybe, the second): Melancholia, directed by Lars von Trier

Oh, and this week’s intro/outro song is “A Real Hero (feat. Electric Youth)” by College, off the Drive soundtrack.

If you enjoy this podcast, please pass this along to your podcast-listening friends and rate us on iTunes. And if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, feel free to email me at chad.post[at]rochester.edu.

As always you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes by clicking . To subscribe with other podcast downloading software, such as Google’s , copy the following link.

Click here to see Chad’s complete list (with commentary) and click here for Will Cleveland’s. Also, click here to listen to the special Spotify playlist we made with some of the songs from these albums.

This week’s intro/outro music was going to be R. Kelly’s “Trapped in a Closet” (this will make sense after you listen to the podcast . . . sort of), but instead, Nate made up a pretty rad mash-up of some of the songs we talk about.

If you enjoy this podcast, please pass this along to your podcast-listening friends and rate us on iTunes. And if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, feel free to email me at chad.post[at]rochester.edu.

As always you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes by clicking . To subscribe with other podcast downloading software, such as Google’s , copy the following link.

Both have interesting things to say and good jokes to make, so I think you’ll enjoy this as much—if not more so—that our usual fare.

Quick notes: As mentioned at the end of the podcast, we’d like to do a special “mailbag” episode in a couple weeks, so please send in any comments or questions you might have. And we can range far and wide on this, so anything you want us to talk about—translation fees, Spanish wine, women’s professional soccer (seriously, I’m a junky)—just let me know at chad.post[at]rochester.edu.

This week’s music is by Four Tet. If it were up to me, we would have a podcast just featuring all my favorite Four Tet songs . . . “My Angel Rocks Back and Forth,” “Unspoken,” “Everything Is Alright,” “This Unfolds” . . .

Here’s a bit from Nate and E.J. about our covers:

What immediately struck me about Open Letter Books was its strong yet minimal visual presence. Was there a conscious decision, early on, to make these books objects as well as books? And what were the major influences when it came time to flesh out how the catalog should look and feel?

Nathan Furl: Independent of any design, production, and marketing choices, printed books will always be objects, whether you care or not, so it’s really a question of how much attention you pay to those objects you’re making. For us, we knew early on that we’d like to give the books, as well as the larger personality of Open Letter, some sort of cohesive look—a family of materials and an identity that somehow all make sense together and, hopefully, that do a service to the books, the content, and the press as an entity. It’s not an uncommon idea, but I think it’s a great one for smaller publishers, especially, because it takes advantage of their nimbleness in order to achieve something that feels larger than any of the individual parts. As it turned out, successfully creating and agreeing upon that look for our first season was a real challenge. Eventually, we turned to a fantastic designer named Milan Bozic, who was a friend of E.J.’s. Milan built the foundation of our look by designing the covers for our first two seasons. With that difficult piece in place, we’ve been been working hard at it ever since. (I’ve designed a handful of covers, as well as all the interiors, catalogues, posters, etc., which we aim to fit within our larger personality, too. And, over the past season, E.J. has been designing nearly all of our the newest covers.) I should mention, too, that creating a whole visual identity for us isn’t a goal in itself. The point of all this, first and foremost, is to use any tools at our disposal to get English-language readers excited about international literature and to get our books into as many people’s hands as we can.

E.J. Van Lanen: There was definitely a conscious decision to think about the books as objects. There’s something that Dave Eggers said once that I really felt applied to us, and I’m paraphrasing, and misremembering, but when he was asked about the design of the McSweeney’s books, he said that they wanted their books to not only win readers in the bookstores, but to win on people’s bookshelves too–to be irresistible once they’re home. It’s one thing to get there, and it’s something else again to get picked up and read.

So we had this sort of idea from the outset. Our first decision on that front was to do our books paper-over-board, which is pretty common in a lot of book markets around the world, but isn’t so prevalent here, with the idea that this would be a way to stand out from the crowd. And we did; but it didn’t last, unfortunately, because although we were selling the books at paperback prices, people tended to think that the books would be expensive. It’s a hardcover format, and the natural tendency, after years of training by big publishers, is to expect hardcovers to cost thirty dollars. Maybe one day we’ll go back to that format, but I think the designs we have work really well on paperback as well.

For the look, we were really fortunate to work with a great designer, Milan Bozic, who works for HarperCollins, to develop the designs for our first 12 books. We wanted to have a look that would feel coherent from one book to the next, so that eventually our books would have some sort of Open Letter-ish feel to them, but we didn’t want to do something so rigid that we’d get bored with it or be trapped in a format that wasn’t really working or that we didn’t like. We also knew we didn’t want to use any photographs, nor could we afford to pay an illustrator. So, we sent Milan these parameters, which on reflection sound pretty limiting, along with descriptions of the books and a few ideas for images and asked him to see what he could do. Of the first six designs he proposed, I think three or four—The Pets, The Taker, Nobody’s Home—had this bold, sparse, graphical feel to them. And although they’re very different designs, they felt as though they somehow belonged together, I suppose because they all came from Milan and this was a mood he was in at the time. We asked him to continue on in this direction, and after the first 12 books were published, the mold had been set. Milan is far, far too busy for us now, and, frankly we couldn’t afford to pay him what he really deserves, but because the original notion was so strong, and so flexible, we’ve been able to approximate that look, with varying success to be sure, in his absence.

Click to read the full piece and to see some Really Big jpgs of our covers.