In this case, I was on a roll about how sick I am of the literary field anointing four-five international authors a year and writing endless articles/listicles about them at the expense of all other books. About how the field has become a bunch of yeasayers who would rather join a chorus of “this book is the best!” instead of reading adventurously and actually finding out about books that haven’t been ordained in this way. About how reviewers don’t seem to take many risks anymore, and would rather pander, cheerleading style, for more retweets and favorites. People don’t seem as curious anymore, as willing to go out and find their own little books to champion. Maybe it’s because social media has ramped up our social anxieties to an insane degree, but it feels like people just want to be nice and safe and all in accord. Dissent is death on Twitter.

Fuck all of that. And fuck me for wasting twenty minutes trying to flesh out the argument . . . Instead, I’ll tell you about one of those books that adventurous, non-conforming readers would absolutely love: by Carlos Labbé, translated from the Spanish by Will Vanderhyden.

I just reread this book in preparation for a conversation with him at Wild Detectives in Dallas, and was re-wowed by the multilayered linguistic world that he creates in his novels. This is a book that owes a lot to Juan Carlos Onetti’s work (especially A Brief Life) as well as to Julio Cortázar and other Latin American works that are set in universities. I’m not going to lie: It’s a complicated book, with multiple narrators, events that recur in new contexts providing the book with a certain instability (or, reversing that statement, granting it with a certain remix texture transforming scenes into motifs that Labbé picks up and plays with in increasingly interesting ways), novels within dreams within novels. It’s a book about how art is created and how it is transformative, and there’s basically nothing like it that’s being written today.¹

Rather than do a “normal” sort of reading and conversation—with Carlos reading for 10 minutes, then answering some general questions—we tried to create a way to introduce everyone to the text by asking questions, then, at three different occasions, reading separate bits from the book. I can’t reproduce that here, but I do think that it was a really great introduction to how to approach the book and that everyone who attended will enjoy the novel that much more, and have a new appreciation for it. Which is maybe what literary events should be?

We started by talking about the first main thread of the book, the sections entitled “The Novel,” which occurs every other chapter and are always in italics. This thread is about “Carlos,” a young writer trying to write a detective novel about an albino girl who is being stalked and hires a detective to try and protect her. That doesn’t end well though . . . From the very first paragraph of Loquela:

Carlos looked at his notebook and reread the last page: anticipating that the killer—whoever it was—would defend himself, the man had retrieved the gun. His head pounded and his knees were shaking. There’s a dead girl lying inside, he thought. He’d never fired a gun. His vision clouded over, his whole body pulsed as the door opened slowly from inside. He decided to fire first. And he did. The albino girl let out a soft cry and fell at his feet. He was the killer.

The bulk of “The Novel” sections are about Carlos trying to make this manuscript work. He talks about it with Elisa, he tries to figure out the plot holes, he rewrites certain events (like when the car tries to run over the albino girl), and he receives a letter from Violeta Drago (more on her in a bit).

In writing the novel, Labbé (to distinguish him from the fictional Carlos) wanted to include some of the thoughts and ideas that went into writing such a novel, which led to the second set of sections: “The Recipient.” These sections take the form of a diary in which a student writes about the novel he’s writing about Carlos. This is some At Swim-Two-Birds shit right there. These bits are more theoretical, touching upon the way ideas and books (like Onetti’s A Brief Life) influence your way of structuring events and writing about them. Here’s an abridged excerpt from one of these parts.

Things are happening.

I’ve been imagining a detective story. It occurred to me that I could write a novel of innumerable pages about a girl who, frightened because a man is apparently following her, contacts a detective to help her. She and the detective become friends, they flirt. He ends up obsessed with her and follows her everywhere. I want to sit down every afternoon, take advantage of the dead hours of summer to write. On one of those afternoons the inspiration comes to me. [. . .] That story of the girl who gets stalked by the same guy she is paying to protect her has been coming back to me every since my cousin told it at our uncle and aunt’s country house last Sunday. [. . .] That Sunday my cousin Alicia and I talked almost all afternoon. I told her I wanted to live alone that next year and she invited me to come check out her home-studio on Calle Bustamente, she could rent me a room there. And that’s where I’m writing this now. She also told me about her friend Violeta. Bored of living in the cesspool of Santiago (my cousin’s words), she moved to another city—I can’t remember which one—for a couple of years. She met a guy there, a classmate at the university, with whom she went out and then broke up. The guy was unhinged and wouldn’t leave her alone, calling her on the phone every night, following her through the streets, buzzing the intercom at her apartment and not saying anything when she answered. One day, desperate, it occurred to her to ask a professor friend from the university for help, and he managed to get the guy expelled, but that was worse: one time the guy, furious, almost hit her with his car, and another time he almost pushed her into the city’s river. She loved where she was living, but in the end Violeta had to go back to Santiago. What she doesn’t know is if the guy followed her here or if she just had the terrible luck of encountering another psychopath. Alicia was very worried when she told me this, her friend is receiving letters that are making her paranoid, lately she thinks she sees that guy on every corner. There aren’t many girls like Violeta, according to Alicia, and that’s why men go crazy for her. This is a story I’d love to be able to write.

The third narrator/set of sections in the book is written by Violeta and is entitled “The Sender.” (If it isn’t clear yet, these sections rotate throughout, in this order: The Novel, The Recipient, The Novel, The Sender, The Novel, The Recipient . . . ) Violeta is an albino student who is troubled by He Who Is Writing a Novel, a fellow student who seems obsessed with her.

There are two things worth noting about Violeta. 1) in her youth, Violeta invents a magic land called Neutria. This shows up in all three sections, sometimes as a paradise, sometimes as a university, sometimes as a real location.

What comes next is the moment in which my childhood multiplies into details I’d love to recount and cannot. Most of them were lost the instant we played together, the rest are still there, in Neutria, and you can see them for yourself. Sometimes Neutria was the land of semi-divine emperors, of infinite cruelty or kindness, whose slothful and obese courtiers, in contrast, engaged in decadent melodramas. Other times it was a simple village where farmers, shepherds, and foreigners traded honey, cheese, bread, or fruit for a song or an entertaining story. Or it was the nexus of activity for stylized spies, convertibles, casinos, firearms, hotels, highways, and femme fatales. And in the middle of all those adult faces appears a boyish one, yours, insistently inquiring what it is that we’re playing, and coldly I reply that we’re playing the city of Neutria, not expecting you to make fun of us: you talk to yourself—my mother says people who talk to themselves are lunatics. Alicia gets up, says again that it isn’t make-believe, that Neutria exists; it’s a beautiful place, incredible, we travel there on long weekends with our parents. It’s so much fun that we like to recall everything that happened there. That’s what we’re doing, remembering all the wondrous things, not inventing them.

2) At the university, she’s involved with a professor who promotes “Corporalism,” a set of literary beliefs that are intentionally hazy, but generally involve doing extreme things with your body while a writer observes and writes your flesh into the text, and also involves some quasi-Barthesian rhetoric. From the “Corporalization Manifesto”:

The reader lives and the author has died, we’ll proclaim, though our goal will be to resuscitate him, to give him what he never had: body, flesh, presence. And what will die instead is the text, the artistic product that escapes from our hands and becomes merchandise: all the time we spent spilling our blood across the page is transformed into food for publishers, newspapers, critics. That’s why we’re anemic, that’s why we need to suck up the humors of others and end up dissolved in foreign books, that’s why we die every time we read, in handwriting that is not our own, a sentence that belongs to us.

So there’s that. The last part of Loquela starts to revolve around this group, their actions and beliefs, reflecting back on everything that came before. Like I said before, this is layered. It’s a book in which there are “rabbit hole moments,” when the spiral of narrative levels is simply dazzling. And there’s this thing that happens towards the end, where there’s basically a series of beginnings, a sort of loop of possible events. For me, it starts to read like the best of electronic music. (Or anything by )) Ideas and threads resurfacing in new contexts, textures that you can lose yourself in, spaces that seem utterly alien and exciting. (Not surprising that Labbé is a )

For a book that opens with an ending, I guess it makes sense for me to wrap this up by going back to the title, Loquela. It’s a strange, slippery word first used by Ignatius de Loyola way back in the middle ages, and then adopted by Roland Barthes:

Loquela is a word that designates the flux of language through which the subject tirelessly rehashes the effects of a wound or the consequences of an action: an emphatic form of the lover’s discourse.

And that’s really what Loquela is: the flux of language around death and love. It’s a book I hope you buy and that I hope we can talk about. I don’t get it, but the experience of rereading it—in which every paragraph reframed the whole book, convinced me it was about something else—was exhilarating. It may never get it’s own hashtag trend, or be a best-seller, but great literature never really does.

¹ Books like this—ones that present the new, the different—are ones that excite me and, I think, used to excite a large number of literary readers before the Twitter-agree-o-verse came into being. Now, instead of reading challenging, unique things that expand your ways of thinking, people wear “Art Should Comfort the Disturbed and Disturb the Comfortable” t-shirts and miss the irony.

First off, DraftKings. I spend way too much of my mental time hating all over this stupid company. I should just stop. Just ignore them. Mute every single commercial interruption. (Because no matter what you’re watching, there’s a 90% chance an ad for DraftKings will show up and crap all over your TV screen. There should be a law.) That said, I really appreciated Drew Magary’s column,

I signed up for DraftKings and was immediately bombarded with dozens of options for wasting my money. There is a baseball game, in case you simply can’t wait until the weekend and have to lose your money RIGHT NOW THIS INSTANT. There were four million different football pools to join, the most expensive of which had a $5,300 entry fee. And there was a “limited time offer” wherein the site offered me extra credit if I put my deposit in before the clock ran down. PRESSURE’S ON . . . [. . .]

As for the game itself, it’s like any other casino game: fun right up until the moment you don’t win. I drafted my two lineups, talked myself into those lineups winning me a million bucks, and eye-banged both lineups all Sunday long.[. . .] You can talk yourself into being a football wizard who knows just the right matchups to exploit for sleeper picks that week, but I can assure you that you are bullshitting yourself, and that DraftKings is counting on you to bullshit yourself.

Yup. As if Fantasy Baseball/Football isn’t already the worst. That game—which I am truly addicted to now, thanks almost entirely to Jacob Knapp of Curbside Splendor who got me into his fantasy baseball league for book people and then bounced me from the playoffs, THANK YOU FOR BEING EVIL—is a game of nightmares. Did I set my lineup correctly? Which order should I set for my waiver wire pickups? Is that guy going to break out, or is his hamstring made of string cheese? Why am I caring about the Jacksonville Jaguars training camp when no one in their right mind cares about the stupid Jacksonville any—ARRGH! It’s like some evil genius invented this to torment his family: “You think you’re so smart and understand numbers and sports, don’t you? Well here, here’s a game mixing exactly that and pitting you against all of your peers—figure it out, puzzle-boy!”

Since I sometimes feel the need to lather up some rage, I wasted four minutes of my life yesterday watching this:

These people are the worst. The way she says, “well, since he’s actually good at his hobby.” The way he poses with the belt and the check. Oh my god, it’s all so awful. My eyes are burning just from thinking about it. This is what DraftKings has created. This couple. Their houses. The “baby machine” that they’re about to start up if he wins another million dollars with his “hobby” and “skills”, which have also “earned” him the “respect” of his “Wifey’s” family.

OK, I’m done. All the DraftDemons have been purged. I will never write of this again. Next week I’ll have some fresh material about some other minor, totally ignorable thing that’s gotten stuck in my brain.

*

But before going onto this week’s books, I have to go back to last week’s post one more time.

As with this week, when I was putting that together, I was looking for some common theme to group the three books. Bolaño became the thread between Sada’s One Out of Two and Neuman’s The Things We Don’t Do, but Piglia’s Target in the Night was a bit of an outlier. (Aside from being Spanish, which is why I chose it.)

WELL. I started reading that book, and right away found the connection between it and Sada’s book—twins!

Tony Durán was an adventurer and a professional gambler who saw his opportunity to win the big casino when he met the Belladona sisters. It was a ménage à trois that scandalized the town and stayed on everyone’s mind for months. He’d sow up with one of the two sisters at the restaurant of the Plaza Hotel, but no one could ever tell with which because the twins were so alike that even their handwriting was indistinguishable. Tony was almost never seen with both at the same time; that was something he kept private. What really shocked everyone was the thought of the twins sleeping together. Not so much that they would share the same man, but that they would share each other.

There. The triangle is complete.

by Naja Marie Aidt. Translated from the Danish by K. E. Semmel (Open Letter)

Naja is just starting her book tour, which will include stops in Chicago, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Dallas, and Houston. She’s already done events in Rochester (video coming soon!), at the Brooklyn Book Festival, as part of the Fall for the Book celebration, and, just yesterday, at in Park Slope with Valeria Luiselli. So, if you haven’t already read Naja’s book, this is a perfect time to

At her events here in Rochester, Naja always asked me to “pitch” the book, as she wasn’t sure how exactly to describe it. Since this is a book with a strong plot, I’d generally start there, explaining how it’s about Thomas, a stationery-store owner whose dad died in prison and who left behind a mysterious package that gives Thomas the hope that he can change his life forever, but which ends up bringing about one awful occurrence after another. This is a real page-turner, functioning in some ways like a mystery novel, but also very literary, written in precise, enchanting prose. It’s also very character-driven, with all of these people—each one a little bit awful, but very recognizable—fully-fleshed out, concrete and compelling.

Although the plot totally pulls you along, it’s these characters and the discomfort that they inflict on the reader that really drew me into the book. Thomas is kind of an asshole. You don’t exactly regret that shit falls apart for him—he sort of deserves it. But his girlfriend isn’t that much better, and his sister? Man. That’s that thing that Naja does better than anyone: She creates characters who are a bit too honest with each other about their internal thoughts and feelings. It’s as if she peels back all the layers of niceness that we inhabit in the real world and exposes the underlying desires and reactions we all have, and which aren’t always the most pleasant. In some ways, her writing reminds me of Nathalie Sarraute’s. (Speaking of, I’ll have to feature the sometime soon.)

by Valeria Luiselli. Translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney (Coffee House)

Although I’ve been championing Valeria’s work for a few years (see the original World Cup of Literature championship match), and despite the fact that she literally just did an event with Naja and was on a panel with Andrés Neuman a couple weeks ago, I have yet to meet her. Which is why I’m really excited about this year’s conference later this month. Valeria will be there, in conversation with no less. I’m going to fanboy out that entire day, I guarantee it.

Rather than try and explain The Story of My Teeth, I’m going to let Stephen Sparks (from and co-author of the Best Translations of the Century (So Far) book that we’re working on) take it away with he did with her for The White Review:

Valeria Luiselli’s second novel, The Story of My Teeth, was commissioned by two curators for an exhibition at Galeria Jumex, a Mexico City art gallery funded by Grupo Jumex—a juice factory. Written in a series of weekly installments that were published as chapbooks to be shared with factory’s employees, the project endeavoured to bridge the gap between the art world and that of blue-collar workers. Several employees gathered to talk informally about the exploits of Gustavo “Highway” Sánchez Sánchez, the larger-than-life auctioneer at the heart of The Story of My Teeth, The book club’s conversations were recorded and subsequently emailed to Luiselli as MP3s, and those conversations informed her subsequent installments. As the author puts it in the afterword, “The formula, if there was one, would be something like Dickens + MP3 ÷ Balzac + JPEG.” The following exchange, which typifies Luiselli’s willingness to lay bare artifice and to expose “the many layers of its making,” captures the spirit of her work—and the charm of the writer herself.

SS: You populate The Story of My Teeth with characters who share names with several contemporary writers. For instance, Yuri Herrera becomes a female police officer, etc. This kind of playful adjustment of reality is one of the more interesting formal elements in a novel full of interesting formal elements, and I wonder just how you came to the decision to blur the boundaries of reality and fiction like this.

VL: I had one question in mind when I decided to, quite literally, drop names of real writers into the narrative tissue of The Story of My Teeth. I wanted to explore how names modify the context into which they are placed, as well as how context re-frames names. In many ways, this was a process akin to using ready-mades in art. I found and used names of people, whose value and meaning both altered and were altered by context. While I was writing the novel, I engaged with procedures common to contemporary art, and looking for narrative or literary analogies to those procedures. Using names the way I did was a kind of narrative transposition of ready-mades. I basically used a series of writers—including myself—as if they were ready-mades or found objects, and did what many have done before me: dislocate them from their traditional context and relocate them to another, or decontextualise them and repurpose them, in order to reflect upon their value—be it use value, exchange value or symbolic value. If a reader has no idea who Yuri Herrera is, to use your example, then nothing in the narrative tissue around that name is altered. Yuri Herrera is just a policewoman. If, on the contrary, the name bears a certain weight by virtue of the many associations it has for the reader, then both the name and the narrative around it suffer a kind of indent. The name weighs more heavily and the narrative around it takes a different shape, and also envelopes the name more tightly. But the mere fact that this effect depends completely on the reader’s pre-conceptions of a name and its associations says a lot about the ultimate value, content or meaning of names. I see names as objects in this novel: objects that vary in value and meaning depending on a series of circumstances, both intrinsic and exterior to the book itself. The novel is a map, but it takes different readers to very different places, depending on what they bring to it.

Read the full interview

by Marianne Fritz. Translated from the German by Adrian Nathan West (Dorothy Project)

This may well be the most intriguing jacket copy I’ve read in a while. (Should’ve used this in our recent podcast.)

The Weight of Things is the first book, and the first translated book, and possibly the only translatable book by Austrian writer Marianne Fritz (1948–2007). For after winning acclaim with this novel—awarded the Robert Walser Prize in 1978—she embarked on a 10,000-page literary project called “The Fortress,” creating over her lifetime elaborate, colorful diagrams and typescripts so complicated that her publisher had to print them straight from her original documents. A project as brilliant as it is ambitious and as bizarre as it is brilliant, it earned her cult status, comparisons to James Joyce no less than Henry Darger, and admirers including Elfriede Jelinek and W. G. Sebald.

My knee-jerk reaction when I see something referred to as “untranslatable” is to cry Nonsense! and bust out all sort of practical versus theoretical reasons why everything’s translatable, just maybe not in the way the speaker has in mind.

But then I Googled Marianne Fritz’s later works and found this:

Yep. That. Amazing.

I’m going to end with a mini-rant . . . Do you think that if Fritz were a man her “impossible to translate” project would still be considered untranslatable? Given the statistics about gender in translation that we’ll be releasing shortly (spoiler alert! the numbers aren’t very good, with women authors representing just over 26% of all works of fiction published in translation since 2008) I have a feeling that Martin Fritz would have all his works in English and be celebrated as a genius. Stealing from Kaija who stole it from somewhere else, it’s possible this is one of those “great book, Marianne, but let’s see if one of the men will write it” situations. Or maybe not. But when 75% of all books published in translation are by men—a significant percentage of which are garbage—it raises certain questions.

I’ve been on a private rant of late about how the mainstream media will only ever focus on one female literary author (in translation) at a time, something that would never happen to male authors. First it was Ferrante, then Lispector, now Luiselli. I doubt it’s a conscious thing, but I wouldn’t be surprised if somewhere, in the back of their minds, editors look at what books they’re reviewing and thing, “well, we have one woman on here—good enough!”

Open Letter won’t be publishing all women anytime soon—our scheduling is impossible that way and we do have some amazing male authors signed on—but I applaud And Other Stories for committing to a Instead, what I can do is spend more of these posts promoting the books by women that do make their way into English. There’s some great stuff out there—in addition to Ferrante, Lispector, Luiselli, etc.—and we should make a concerted effort to highlight it here.

Before getting to the books themselves, I have to jump on the bandwagon of hating all the insufferable DraftKings and FanDuel commercials. I’ve been complaining about these for months, but with the start of the new football season we’ve now reached the pure saturation point. I’m not even sure there are other commercials or products out there anymore. Even when I check Twitter I’m greeted with a “sponsored post” about how “Parvez” won $100,000 and I could too!

That’s one of my big beefs with the ludicrous way these sites advertise themselves: the winners featured on these commercials are always moronic looking Patriots fans, piss drunk in a bar, wearing their baseball hat backwards, looking cross-eyed at the screen (sometimes not even at the right one), fist pumping the air and screaming like dumb New Englanders scream, then getting a massive oversized check. The overall message? You’re not as dumb as this fucking guy, are you? Just look at him. EVEN HE CAN WIN AT THIS. (Note: DraftKings is from Boston, which is a city that type-casts itself, and why it must be so easy for them to find stupid looking people to be in their crappy ads. Why waste your time casting someone who appeals to your target demographic when you can just hire the demographic!)

And it’s only going to get worse. The NCAA is freaking out since this isn’t considered gambling, therefore allowing people to play this “daily fantasy draft contest” with college football and basketball players. DraftKings signed a $250 million deal with ESPN that will lead to it being “integrated” into ESPN’s sites. They raised an additional $300 million in July. All because regular fantasy isn’t good enough anymore—we Americans need things to be more immediate and more oversized! WE WANT KING SIZED FANTASY!

What changes this from a dumb rant into something sadder is that all the money lost by the suckers trying to outwit “Jimmy from Watertown Mass” will benefit a corporation operating just barely on this side of shady. At least with the lottery, the poor are preyed upon to help fund schools and shit. It’s still awful, but at least the money doesn’t go to someone who says things like “Once they try it, they like it. It’s sticky.” Gross. Just gross.

So fuck their ads. I hope all of those oversized checks catch on fire and some Russian teenagers hack the shit out of their site.

Well, that, or that these “games of fantasy skill” get outlawed in every state. Either or.

Now, to the happy stuff!

by Daniel Sada. Translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver (Graywolf Press)

Sada made a lot of waves back in 2012 with Almost Never, a novel that’s basically 328 pages of foreplay. It’s a great novel, and I’m really excited that Graywolf is going on with him. (Although saddened by the fact that he died back in 2011. I would love to have brought him to Rochester.) This novel is about identical twins who do everything together, until a man enters the picture . . .

Sada’s writing style reminds me a bit of Alejandro Zambra’s—there’s something direct, anti-metaphorical linking the two in my mind—but is also quite unique, fun to fall into the rhythms of and, I assume, a beast to translate. (Which is why Katie Silver deserves such accolades—for this and all her works.)

Now, how to say it? One out of two, or two in one, or what? The Gamal sisters were identical. To say, as people do, “They were like two peas in a pod,” the same age, the same height, and wearing, by choice, the same hairdo. Moreover, they both must have weighed around 130 pounds—let’s move into the present—: that is, from a certain distance: which is which?

If none of that sells you on the book, maybe the Bolaño quote on the back will: “Of my generation I most admire Daniel Sada, whose writing project seems to me the most daring.” It’s amazing, and very admirable, how many people Bolaño helped out and wrote about. And it’s not a surprise that us publishers keep putting his quotes on all of our books, knowing that he’s probably the one Spanish-language author outside of Gabriel García Márquez who normal Americans might recognize. Which brings me to:

by Andrés Neuman. Translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia. (Open Letter)

Front cover: “Good readers will find something that can be found only in great literature.”—Roberto Bolaño. Quotes from this statement of Bolaño’s—made when he was on the jury for the Herralde Prize, a statement included in Between Parentheses—are also on Andrés’s earlier books from FSG. It even kicks off this amazing And will be forever!

I actually asked him about this quote when we were in Chicago—and before we sang karaoke at the bar, which, by the way, Andrés is really good at, although he’s not as good of a singer as he is a ping-pong player—and he talked about how unfortunate it was that Bolaño didn’t get to live long enough to see if his proclamation came true. “Maybe he would’ve hated my later novels.” I can’t believe that would be true, but I understand the anxiety.

Andrés followed that up by telling a story about playing chess with Bolaño, who was super serious when it was his turn to play, then, after making his move, would jump around playing air guitar to the loud music of a Mexican punk band . . .

I really loved hanging out with Andrés and Naja Marie Aidt over the past two weeks, and, I have to say, even though it sounds cheesy and clichéd, that these visits sort of reinvigorated my interest in books and publishing. We all need a jolt sometimes, and coming in contact with literary geniuses is one great way to make that happen.

by Ricardo Piglia. Translated from the Spanish by Sergio Waisman. (Deep Vellum)

No Bolaño quote! But there is one from Robert Coover, which is really cool, and actually references

The only Piglia I’ve read is The Absent City, which was inspired by Macedonio’s The Museum of Eterna’s Novel (The First Good Novel), and which is brilliant and narratively complicated in an Onetti, Labbé sort of way.

Although it sounds like this book brings back some of the themes from his earlier novels—life in Argentina during the Dirty War—it also sounds like much more of a definable, noir novel. This is a book that Tom Roberge will be raving about at some point. And I probably will too—just check this bit from Sergio Waisman’s intro:

Experimenting with form, innovating with narrative, recounting gripping tales that revolve around a central plot, Target in the Night starts as a detective novel, and soon turns into much more than that. Piglia takes the genre of the detective story and transforms it into what can be called, using Piglia’s own term, “paranoid fiction.” Everyone in the novel is a suspect of a kind, everyone feel persecuted.

OK, as soon as I’m done with Home, I know what I’m going to pick up . . .

First up is P.T. Smith’s of Sölvi Björn Sigurðsson’s translated from the Icelandic by Helga Soffía Einarsdóttir:

As a book of drinking, endless binges of drinking, and of constant comedy, The Last Days of My Mother is a perfect book to drink to, reminding you of the shame that follows the pleasure, but comfortably letting you know that you aren’t drowning like the protagonists. In the opening pages, Sölvi Björn Sigurðsson’s two protagonists, Mother/Eva and son/Trooper, do not have the same self-censorship that most of us have, and their adventure is all the better for it. Neither seems to manage happiness, but with Eva dying, Trooper sets himself the goal “to make Mother happy during the last days of her life.” [. . .]

Their efforts only resemble plans because for the vast majority of the novel, they are in varying stages of drinking, drunk, very drunk, stoned, and planning their next drink. Throughout it all, there is dark, brutal comedy, hysterically playful comedy, and immediate switches to the serious, the poignant, without pain from whiplash. The emotional, the ongoing sadness of loss, of dead hopes, isn’t a contradiction to humor; instead they exist together, and the closer they come, the less Eve and Trooper struggle. Comedy, with all its nuances, is sometimes impossible to communicate between two people who speak the same language, so translator Helga Soffía Einarsdóttir keeping it so alive proves great skill. Last Days is a book funny enough that my housemates laughed at my laughter while otherwise quietly reading, without reading a word.

Drinking novels are familiar, death of a family member novels are familiar, dark comedies, familiar, but Last Days brings something new: a mother and son with absolutely zero boundaries between each other.

Sticking with Full Stop, there about Can Xue’s latest novel, translated from the Chinese by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen:

The Last Lover is not an easy read. But it is incandescent and engrossing if you are okay with losing your sense of self for a few hours. Here is how I experienced it.

Hour one: I sit in a coffee shop with a paperback copy and a cup of ginger tea. The prose is dense, peculiar. The characters are given to sudden declarations.

Hour two: I am astonished to realize that I have only read less than fifty pages.

Hour three: My head hurts. I feel like I have been translating. I have stopped tweeting.

Hour four: I succumb to the book. I let it carry me. My cup is empty. I do not question anything that happens in the novel: wolfish faces; floating couples; inexplicable transformations; the motif of heads separating from bodies and hovering there, as if still connected. Nor do I question the characters’ reactions, who take all of these surreal developments gamely, as they must, as we accept the eerie faces we sometimes see in the periphery of our vision.

Hour five: I sit up and feel as though I have emerged from dreaming. I look around myself surreptitiously, suspicious that the world has flipped over while I was reading. It seems impossible that I could crawl so deep within this novel and have everything remain the same. I feel betrayed. There is a scene in The Last Lover in which the characters enter a gambling city, which is both under- and aboveground. The tunnels underground are full of smoke, which all the residents of the gambling city are used to breathing. Where is my smoke? Where are my slot machines?

And over at “Numero Cinq,“http://numerocinqmagazine.com/2014/08/04/the-decomposition-of-continuous-movement-review-of-juan-jose-saers-la-grande-richard-farrell/ Richard Farell writes up Juan José Saer’s translated from the Spanish by Steve Dolph:

Consider hospitality. Imagine, say, a cookout, on a Sunday afternoon, with old friends gathered around a pool deck. Meat sizzles on the grill. It is autumn, but a last gasp of summer heats the day and warms the water. The party’s host, Willi Gutiérrez—a screenwriter, a sophisticated man of letters—has been living abroad in Europe for the last thirty years and has recently returned to his native Argentina. Decades have passed since many of the guests assembled here have broken bread together. The convivial atmosphere of the party crackles with laughter, with clanging wine glasses, and with stories. But just beneath that welcoming surface hides a mystery, swirling down like a river, faster and deeper as the party courses above. This mystery is one of ontology, of the deep, mystical, convoluted experience that is life, with all its secrets, its intrigue, its tragedies and its triumphs. At the very bottom, on the murky river floor where memory resides, where so much has been lost to time—betrayals, desires, the forgotten war, love, passions—here we find the source material for Juan José Saer’s La Grande. Saer reassembles the fragments. He reconstructs experience through memory, where nothing is ever quite what it appears, and yet where everything that appears is luminescent, like gold flakes panned from the silt, polished, crafted and forged into a ring.

In La Grande, Saer masterfully creates a fictional world at once brimming with life, detail, and imagery. Recursive themes appear, connect, and eventually assemble into a story. For nearly 500 pages, La Grande patterns many different but deeply connected narratives across those thirty years, two continents and dozens of characters. The novel opens as Gutierréz leads Nula on a walk along the Parana River, toward a café in the countryside. Saer always evokes place through movement and memory, and as they walk, the young wine merchant becomes mesmerized by his older friend, who has reentered this world—abandoned for thirty years—as if no time has passed at all. Nula wants to understand Gutiérrez. Who is he? Why did he leave? Why has he returned? Saer may not directly answer these questions, but they constitute the main impulse of the novel. [. . .]

Flannery O’Connor once remarked that a good story resists paraphrase. La Grande isn’t about parties, wine sales, sex or even ultimately about Argentine history. And yet it contains all of these and so much more. The experience, the joy, of reading this book comes from an appreciation of Saer’s ability to keep these various pieces in motion. Saer-as-maestro teases apart story lines, only to carefully reconnect them hundreds of pages later, so that, by novel’s end, when the various actors have gathered at the party in Gutiérrez’s home, “even the things that are familiar to us are unfamiliar, if only because we’ve allowed ourselves to forget the mysterious things about them.” The mundane becomes strange, significant, filled with meaning, so that each story, each character, each plot step even, appears consequential. Nothing is ever wasted.

1) Yes, that is a copy of Ricardas Gavelis’s which is published by Open Letter; and,

2) Yes, that is Open Letter editor Kaija Straumanis, whose series of “Headshots” have gone totally viral (over 3 million visits to her page in just over 24 hours).

Congrats to Kaija! Hopefully some percentage of these visits will or or

Inga Ābele, born in 1972 in Riga, has written plays and screenplays, collections of poetry, stories and novels. Her play Dark Deer was staged in Latvia, at the Stuttgart State Theatre, the Bonner Biennale, and in Greece, being made a feature film in 2006. Iron Weed was staged in Latvia, Denmark, and Finland; Jasmine premiered in Latvia and was staged in Lucerne. Her poetry collections include Night Pragmatist and a collection of prose poems, The Horses of Atgazene Station. Her 2001 novel, Fire Will Not Wake You, was published in Lithuanian in 2007. Her story collection Notes During the Time of Snow won the Annual Award for Literature in 2004, and another collection, Still Life with Pomegranate, was published in French translation in 2005. Ābele’s 2008 novel High Tide was published in in Swedish translation in 2009 and in English translation in 2013.

I’m going to interrupt here to remind you that Open Letter was the press that published High Tide, and it was translated by our editor, Kaija Straumanis.

In other words: You should really (You can even get the ebook directly from our site for a mere $9.99.)

This interview is as much about Inga’s life out in the country as it is about Lativan literature, but, and I’m sure Kaija can back this up, Inga’s living arrangement sounds pretty ideal:

Seven years ago Ābele left Riga to live in deep in the forest near Sigulde, site of an ancient castle, with her hot-air balloonist partner, Gunars Dukste. [. . .] They live on a smallholding that belonged to a baron in the 1800s: wild boars come at night to dig up the lush grass with their snouts and eat it. A tower is set up for a neighboring hunter who hasn’t had any luck yet. They’ve built a perfect, snug house on the foundations of what was once the cattle shed, with the weathered old outbuildings still standing about, a great stack of wood ready for winter. Gunars takes haunting photos of the countryside of Latvia while floating over it.

Another interruption: Gunars’s book of hot air balloon photos will be available in English in the not-too-distant future. (Kaija also translated this.) More info on that in a future post.

And finally, about Inga’s forthcoming books:

She is finishing up a novel titled The Wicker Monk, which has been three years in the writing. The “wicker” in the title comes from the way in Latgale, where the protagonist lives a life of celibacy, everything is woven together for strength, large families hold together. After that she has a contract to write a historical novel about collectivism in the 1950s in Latvia, due to be finished in 2015.

Maybe Open Letter will bring out one-both of these in the future . . . But for now—check out High Tide: it’s a that combines lush, provocative prose with a gripping plot about a love triangle and a killing. (Although this plot is told in semi-reverse chronological order . . . so the killing only makes sense at the end of the book. It’s like an anti-mystery novel, I suppose.)

Because I’ve had a very stressful and involved week of cataloging, catching up with, and responding to every single submission Open Letter has received since essentially July of last year, I’m a little on the edge right now when it comes to submitters repeatedly asking about their translation samples. And by on edge I mean I had a few minutes of snapping this morning, and thus decided that a nice, public rant about the whole submission process was wholly appropriate. And by appropriate I mean god damn necessary.

The ideal situation would be for people who submit to our press, or to any other press, to understand a little something about the process behind it and how the world does not revolve entirely around their samples. It’s so much more than one person with a questionable fashion sense and a warm carton of orange juice sitting in a back room with stacks upon stacks of “slush pile” material to sort through. At least for us it is.

Open Letter is not unlike many small, independent presses in that we are, essentially, a three-person operation (this not including semester- or summer-long interns). As editor, it falls into MY duties to receive every single submission sent to Open Letter. It doesn’t matter if you address an email or envelope to Chad, or to Nate, because it’s all going to end up on my desk and in my inbox. And I get to look at every single one of them. And because I am, surprisingly, a polite and considerate person by nature, I reply to every. Single. One of them. And because I am, surprisingly, just ONE person, it’s going to take me a while to get back to every query.

So, first and foremost, if you’ve ever submitted—not just to us, but to any press—and have yet to receive a reply to your query: BACK. OFF. Seriously. Take 20 deep breaths, count to 10, go for a walk, make yourself a sandwich, a tasty one. But honestly, please just back off. We’re working on it.

In my case, I get the feeling there are people who think that all we do is sit around playing round after round of Bejeweled, waiting—nay, PRAYING—for a new submission—THEIR submission—to come in so that we may finally be freed from our shackles of boredom and finally, thankfully, do some real work around here.

NOPE! SURPRISE! I actually play Bingo Bash.

We receive, on average, 10 submissions a week. That’s 30 a month. Each submission generally consists of a 20-35 page sample—let’s average that to 30 pages. At the moment, I have approximately 186 emails flagged that contain submissions. If 15 (which is a generous number) of these emails are only inquiries, meaning they had no actual submission attached to them, this leaves 171 submissions I have to get through.

In turn, this means that I have approximately 5,130 pages of translation sample submissions to read. Throw in the hard-copy submissions for good measure and that number jumps up to almost 6,000 pages of text. And then I have to prepare around 200 responses, one for each submitter.

Now, if I were to read even 100 pages of submissions per day, I would have them all done in 60 days. Before I branch out to the next part of my rant, I’d like to take a quick moment to point out that I ACTUALLY READ THE SUBMISSIONS. With the exception of the ones that I know won’t work for Open Letter within the first five pages of the sample, I ACTUALLY READ WHAT YOU SEND US. This may not be the most time-effective way to do things, but as a, I don’t know, human with a heart, I figure that people have spent time working hard to make these translations into something that a publisher might be interested in—and I at least owe it to them to legitimately look at the text and make a proper assessment of whether or not it will for our press. So, even though it may take 1000 times longer than skimming pages or simply pretending to read whatever comes across my desk, I’M SORRY FOR DOING MY JOB AND FOR BEING THOROUGH.

You may think: Hell, reading 100 pages a day is nothing in the grand scheme of things, and what is this Kaija person doing? Clearly not editorialing, or reading my submission, or responding to it. And I bet she’s super bad at bingo, even though it’s a game of pure chance and has nothing to do with skill.

GUYS! I get it. You submitted your samples and it’s been days/weeks/months and you have yet to get a response. And for that I’m sorry, I really am. I’ve been wanting and trying to catch up with submission responses as best as I can since the first day I started working at Open Letter. But things happen, things come up, things have to be put aside for the time being.

Maybe what I need to do is lay out some of the things that I, personally, have been doing the past six months instead of reading 6,000 straight pages of submissions and being helpful and polite and responsive and getting back to people about their translations within 24 hours of their sending them:

-Open Letter recently (and once again) moved its offices on campus. Something that required a few days of packing, and moving, and having everything in boxes while we were able to rustle up (read: able to steal) enough furniture for everyone. And during which time my work computer completely broke. The computer that has ALL THE THINGS ON IT.

-Foreign rights catalogs. I look at every last paper-cutting one of them. Both the print and electronic versions. The latter of which are less paper-cutty. While one part of finding new authors or works is about receiving submissions, the other part is in doing our own research, be it at book fairs, editorial trips, from the MA in translation students, or, yes, in the catalogs.

-I translate as well. No joke! That means that I’m well familiar with battling my own literary demons, so to speak, and am working on translation projects of my own—both as a requirement of my employment contract with Open Letter, as well as independently.

-Another of my responsibilities is to attend several day-long, out-of-office, and at times out-of-state conferences throughout the year. Like MLA. And AWP. And BEA. And sometimes book fairs, like the ginormous Frankfurt Book Fair, to name one. And, heads up, the 2013 ALTA conference is right after Frankfurt this year, and you can bet your ass that instead of having time and steeping myself in submissions, I’m going to be dragging my exhausted, jetlagged self to Indiana to get my literary translation panel on. And I should mention we planned ALTA 2012 in Rochester. This ALTA. The one that took us an entire year to put together.

-Have I mentioned Open Letter publish books? Like, ten of them a year? This may not seem like a lot, but hear me out. Since I started at Open Letter in September, I’ve edited or helped work on six Open Letter titles (this is not counting the two titles I helped input edits and proofs for in the final layout stage). This means that, over the last six months, I’ve read, edited, and helped work on over 1,000 pages of (awesome) Open Letter titles that will be coming out soon. And you can safely multiply that number by at least four to get 4,000. Each book gets an average—AVERAGE—of at least four passes before we send the final copies to print. Meaning I’ve been reading the same six books four times over for the past six months, and then keeping up correspondence with authors and translators in order to meet deadlines and keep the editorial calendar rolling.

Those things aside, we’re also responsible for our own mailing. Every envelope, box, whatever that you receive with an Open Letter return label on it has been lovingly prepared by our own hands and dragged to the campus post office. Yeah—those stacks of subscriber and review copy envelopes don’t move themselves, and USPS sure doesn’t do us any favors.

And people submitting samples are upset or annoyed and wondering why they’ve yet to receive a response from me?

Really?

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And just in case people are starting to entertain the thought of “Why don’t Chad or Nate help out with reading the submissions? Couldn’t they help?”

No. No they could not. That’s not to say they don’t have any input on samples, or that I don’t pass samples I think may be worth looking more at on to either of them for a second opinion, but trust me. Their lists are probably a shitton more complicated than mine.

“Then what about the interns you sometimes have? Can’t they help?”

No. No they could not. That’s why they’re interns.

Kidding in that regard. We do ask interns and students to do reader’s reports for us all the time, but still, I have to look at all of them and consider or reject them. The interns and students are not the final step to that process.

Yes, it’s incredibly exciting and exhilarating that Open Letter receives so many independent submissions from translators, in the same manner it’s great to hear about new projects from agents and publishers, as it solidifies the fact that there are other people out there like us who are madgeek obsessed with literature and want to maximally share with everyone the books they think are awesome, and we get to learn and find out more about literature from around the world (FACT: something everyone should be doing more of).

But—and I’m sorry if this hurts your heart—all too often there are myriad things on our plates that are far more pressing and at that given moment more important than being able to get through every single translation submission and responding to them. If I have a manuscript due to layout in a week, I’m going to spend that entire week working on that and, yes, not responding to every email and postal delivery marked “submission.” A monkey dressed in a fairisle sweater and shitting bricks of gold couldn’t get me away from my desk a week before a due date—so don’t think your submission will.

(Sidenote: but make that a [non-golden-brick-shitting] in a cardigan and all bets are off. Just look at them.)

But what if your submission is the next great book? It would be our loss that we didn’t get to your submission in time, right? Sure, why not! Go with that. Things happen, or rather, don’t sometimes. And they either work out, or they don’t. Again, in our case, I do what I can to get to these submissions when I can. I’m not ignoring them, I’m not putting them off, I’m not pointing and laughing at them; I just can’t get to all of them as fast as you or I would like me to. On that note, calling the office and asking What’s Up and Why Haven’t I Gotten a Response is not going to help anyone. It’s not going to help me respond faster to the 20 email reminders you’ve sent in the last three months. It’s not going to make reading your submission any more pleasant, or pleasant in general. Don’t be that submitter. And please don’t expect me to stroke your ego and send you emails every week reminding you that I remember you (because I do) and saying how sorry I am that I have yet to get to your submission, but that I’m sure it’s great and I’ll let you know ASAP. You get only one of those ever. ONE.

One of the last things I supposed anyone could say is that I’ve wasted however much time I had to waste to throw down this post about being on the edge and dropping F-bombs all over the office this morning. But a) I’m justified in my actions; b) I feel better now that I’ve gotten this off my chest; and c) don’t be like that. Of course, I don’t mean to discourage anyone from submitting their translation samples, truly. Keep submitting en masse, please. It’s fun. For real. I like reading new things. If your submission isn’t for Open Letter, that’s very unfortunate, but I do appreciate the time you’ve taken to prepare and submit your hard work. If it’s possible for me to make a suggestion for a more appropriate press you should consider submitting to, I’ll try. But, most importantly, I’ll read your submission. I promise.

So—I look forward to hearing from you.

Translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt. University of Oklahoma/Chinese Literature Today. $24.95

Jonathan Stalling of — which really probably definitely shouldn’t be abbreviated as “CLT” . . and yes, I am 12 — spent a good 10-15 minutes of MLA explaining to me why this book was so awesome. I forget all the plot details, but I do remember the bit about an executioner taking someone apart over a series of pages . . . So, to go along with the almost nauseating amounts of meat mastication in Pow!, readers coming to Mo Yan post-Nobel Prize also have the option to read about the “gruesome ‘sandalwood punishment,’ whose purpose, as in crucifixions, is to keep the condemned individual alive in mind-numbing pain as long as possible.”

I have to say, the more I read about Mo Yan’s books, the more I dig him . . . And I’m really looking forward to reading this before teaching Pow! in my Translation & World Literature class this spring.

Generally, I’m not a huge fan of book trailers, but I have to admit, the one that CLT did for this is really pretty elegant and cool in an anime sort of way.

I have more to post about Chinese Literature Today, but I’ll save that for later. For anyone interested in checking this out,

Translated from the French by Jody Gladding and Elizabeth Deshays. Archipelago Books. $18.

The only thing I know about Pierre Michon is that one of his earlier novels, Small Lives, which is also published by Archipelago, is loved by basically everyone.

For a while I was creating a playlist on Spotify of songs with numbers in them. Things like “Water” by Poster Children, or “Slow Show” by The National, or “Airplane Rider” by Air Miami (a personal favorite), or “Universal Speech” by The Go! Team, or whatever. I’m not sure why, but there’s something about people yelling out numbers (or referencing a particular age, as in The National song) that does it for me. It’s one of my “secret cues” that cause me to almost always love a song. (That and hand clapping. And sing-along choruses.)

I don’t think that same thing works for me with book titles. But Fifty Shades of Gray? Maybe this is some sort of subconscious tic . . . (Like A Thousand Morons! Or A Thousand Peaceful Cities.)

Translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel. Open Letter Books. $15.95

A few months back, Zack called Nate and I to talk a bit about plans for his book and marketing and all that. In the course of the conversation, he told us about his elderly friend who was anxious to get a copy of his book.

“She called me the other day and said she’s seen it on the table at the bookstore and was really excited for me. I told her that it couldn’t possibly be my book. That my book hadn’t been printed. But she was convinced. ‘No, no, it was your book, Zack. And it’s pretty dirty!’ Only then I realized she was talking about Fifty Shades . . . “

All books containing a number and the color “gray” are the same! If only we could somehow use this to our advantage . . . Should’ve included that choker necktie on the cover.

That said, Zack’s book does have a spot of banging in it. It’s more of a nostalgic, romantic book than an erotic one, but there is something sexy about a good number of the scenes. Especially the conversations between the protagonist and his now-missing wife that take place while he’s photographing her . . .

So yes, if your sister/mother/grandmother/aunt is done with that other series, recommend 18% Gray to them. Besides, is WAY hotter than (Although he might not be quite as loaded.)