rochester – Three Percent

Open Letter Pop-Up at Hart's Grocery!

Chad Post — Thu, 29 Jun 2017 17:00:00 +0000

For the first time ever, this Saturday (July 1st), Open Letter Books will have a pop-up shop in Downtown Rochester. From 12-2 and from 4-6, we’ll be outside of displaying a wide selection of our books.

We’ve never done anything like this before, but since it’s the weekend of the it’s the perfect time to bring some great international literature to the people.

And to celebrate all of this, we’ll be selling the books at a pretty significant discount: any title you want for $10, any two for $18, or, any three for $20. That’s basically a 60% discount.

Another incentive: We will raffle off a year’s subscription to Open Letter (ten books!) at 6pm sharp. So swing by before then and enter the drawing!

Not really an incentive, but still: I’ll be there the whole day eating some amazing and probably drinking some beers from one (or many!) of the great local breweries that they stock. While doing this, I’ll happily (if not tipsily) answer questions about Open Letter, publishing, translations, our books, authors, traveling to countries to find titles to publish, and baseball.

Hope to see you on Saturday!

Recent Open Letter Publicity [Justine, Gessel Dome, Ugresic, and More]

Chad Post — Mon, 09 Jan 2017 20:54:49 +0000

I don’t post on social media all that often—unless I’ve been drinking—but do generally try and share all of the reviews and publicity pieces that come up about Open Letter. And as with anything else, this tends to come in waves, including the onslaught of pieces from the past few days that I’ve been sharing. Here’s a rundown of recent publicity for the press and its authors:

Well, first off, the new issue of is dedicated to this Neustadt Laureate, and includes by Alison Anderson, and a piece I wrote about And available only through WLT’s digital edition are by Dubravka, by Emily D. Johnson, and by Dragana Obradović.

Additionally, David Williams—who translated and part of for Open Letter—wrote a blog post for WLT entitled

It wasn’t, however, just the money situation that inhibited me from ever introducing myself as a translator. It was equally that I just couldn’t translate to others what it meant to be a translator, let alone how I, a New Zealander with no Yugoslav roots, came to learn the language formerly known as Serbo-Croatian and translate the work of Ugrešić, one of the great living European writers. Reduced to its essence, the backstory is both fantastic and prosaic: it involves a restless young man who sought adventures on distant shores, came unstuck in a short and sad marriage, the end of which left the no-longer-so-young man searching for meaning that for a time he found in books. In New Zealand, in particular, translating all this to some dudes standing around a barbeque was pretty painful. Over time, I developed a series of useless analogies. I’d say that a translator is like the cinematographer, the author like the director. Or that the translator is like a sound engineer or producer shaping how an author “sounds.” When the dudes at the barbeque still looked puzzled, I’d just say that a translator is like a better class of wedding singer.

And finally, during the Neustadt Festival, a number of people were interviewed by the radio station KGOU, and these pieces are starting to come out online. The first is actually with

by Iben Mondrup, translated from the Danish by Kerri A. Pierce

just posted a review of this, giving it a “B.” (Which I’ll totally take from Michael Orthofer. I’m pretty sure he would fail me in any class I took with him.) The review is mostly summary, but does get at some of the aspects of the character and setting that make this book really interesting:

Mondrup captures the pretentious and often obnoxious (especially the professors) art-school-scene creepily well, with more the more old-fashioned grandfather-figure and the ultimately tamer, crowd-pleasing Ane as helpful counterparts to the purely pretentious, or, for example, the philosophical Vita (a fairly successful sculptor). Justine, meanwhile, is marked especially by her uncertainty. There’s a lot of anger there, too, or frustration, and she vents successfully, and even comes up with some interesting ideas, including ultimately resuscitating her lost project, but for the most part, and for most of the novel, she is flailing.

And I mentioned this in the round up of Open Letter 2016 publications, but it’s worth pointing out this with Iben and Kerri one more time:

Brian S: Iben, I’ve never read de Sade’s Justine, but am I correct in thinking there are some parallels between that and your novel? Or is that coincidence?

Iben Mondrup: If there’s any comparison, it’s all about opposites, the polar opposites of De Sade’s Justine and mine. My Justine is sexual subject, she’s the one who desires, whereas De Sade’s Justine is an object of desire. She (my Justine), is aggressive, she’s going for what she wants as opposed to De Sade’s Justine, who is the target—and eventually the victim—of the desires of the world. She possesses no will.

Kerri Pierce: There’s a funny story, actually, about the graphic on the cover. One of my favorite parts of the book, and one of the editor, Kaija’s, favorite parts as well—which I also think speaks to Justine’s character—is when a one-night stand asks Justine if she’s a lesbian (and his tone is rather dismissive/incredulous) and she responds: “Wolf.”

Brian S: Kerri—I loved that moment in the book. That was brilliant.

Iben Mondrup: Exactly, she sees herself as a predator. A wolf, a lone she-wolf.

by Guillermo Saccomanno, translated from the Spanish by Andrea Labinger

Kim Fay just reviewed this for the and digs into one of the most salient and difficult aspects of the book:

There came a point while I was reading Gesell Dome that I cringed whenever new characters were introduced, wondering what horrible things were going to happen to them. But I somehow knew that, even as a reader, I was not allowed to look away. As I grew weary of horror after horror, all I wanted to do was turn my head—but if I did, then I would become complicit.

By using a narrator who is not shocked, who does not look away from anything, Saccomanno shines a gruesome, graphic light on what people are willing to ignore so that their comfort remains intact. He compounds this with a fearlessness when it comes to rationalization. “We’re not Auschwitz,” the narrator declares, and if someone sexually abuses a few kids, “it’s not the same as Bosnia. Give me a break. There’s no comparison.”

by Antoine Volodine, translated from the French by Jeffrey Zuckerman

Radiant Terminus comes out on February 7th (although copies will go out to this week), but in the meantime, you can read an excerpt on Here’s the opening paragraph from the excerpted section:

The captain was named Umrug. His life had started somewhat chaotically. His father, Choem Mendelssohn, was a bird, and his mother, Bagda Dolomidès, was Ybür.

Also worth noting this comment Brian Evenson made on Facebook when listing his favorite books of the year:

Pleased too that I could write the intro to Antoine Volodine’s exceptionally strong Radiant Terminus, which is out from Open Letter in February. I’ve said before that I think American literature would be much better if more writers were reading Volodine and I still think this: he’s one of my half dozen favorite living writers.

You may also want to check out this “starred” review from

French “post-exoticist” Volodine returns with a dark view of the near future, where science fiction meets a certain kind of horror. [. . .] A landmark of modern dystopianism, portending a time to come that no one would want to live in.

Finally, Rochester’s local alternative paper, ran a piece on Open Letter as a whole, with the amazing headline, “Open Letter Finishes 2016 Strong.” It starts by putting our NEA grant into a local context, then goes on to talk about some recent review coverage and our plans to make 2018—our ten year anniversary—the “Year of Open Letter.”

The last few weeks of December set Open Letter Books up for a great 2017. In mid-December, The National Endowment of the Arts awarded the small literary translation press an Art Works grant of $40,000. This was the largest amount awarded to any Rochester organization this cycle — BOA Editions and George Eastman Museum each received $20,000; the Rochester Fringe Festival received $25,000; and Gateways Music Festival and Geva Theatre Center were each awarded $10,000.

[Redacted]

Chad Post — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 20:33:52 +0000

E.J. and Nate have censored this post for reasons that are probably obvious.

I swore to myself that I would never write about Amazon, pricing, price checking, and the suckery of NPR ever again, but ~~then of course, NPR has to go and run this piece about a “predatory” Amazon.~~

I’m half-tempted to go back to my normal argument that of course they’re predatory, in much the same way all corporations are predatory and take advantage of the system as it exists and tax loopholes and economies of scale and all of that shit. Bottomline: corporations only exist to make money, not to make the world a better place.

Does that disturb me? Hell yes it does. I’m a pretty anti-corporate person, but trying to change the nature of Amazon by complaining that what they’re doing is unfair seems similar to trying to convince people to read translations because it will “make the world a better place.” Not to go all 2002 on this subject, but this is a time when the phrase “don’t hate the playa, hate the game” is pretty fitting.

But I don’t want to talk about Amazon in this post . . . Instead I want to talk about how NPR sucks and is helping make this conversation about Amazon and other corporations really stupid and middlebrow and unproductive.

Let’s start with a little thing called timing. Aside from the bit about Nancy Pearl’s new book series (which no publisher would touch until Amazon decides to publish it at which point everything is EVIL), everything in this article is at least a month old. The Price Check App? We burned that bridge long ago.

And then there’s those pesky little things we call “facts.” This article, which is as typically lazy as all NPR journalism is, implies that the Price Check App applied to books, which is PATENTLY NOT TRUE. But why bother researching things when you can just throw shit at a wall and create a “controversy” by just riding whatever opinions get you the most hits.

But the thing I really want to get at is how this article actually impairs any sort of intellectual discussion about the corporation vs. culture situation. Check this quote from O’Reilly’s publisher, Joe Wikert:

“The word ‘predator’ is pretty strong, and I don’t use it loosely,” he says, “but . . . I could have sworn we had laws against predatory pricing. I just don’t understand why that’s not an issue — because that’s got to be hurting other device makers out there in trying to capture this market.”

Now what should follow this quote? If NPR had any journalistic balls, they would do a bit of research into anti-trust laws, and explain whether Amazon is violating something or not. If not, the discussion could be about whether anti-trust laws need to be updated, or why they’ve been corroded over the past half-century and what that’s resulted int. THAT would be an interesting article, and a fucking useful one.

~~Does NPR go in that direction?~~

~~But Wikert is also well aware that Amazon has made life very convenient for consumers.~~

~~GAAAAGGH! This is not journalism, this is explaining that we need air to breathe. Well done, NPR. Glad no one broke a sweat on that.~~

One last example of the illogical crap that is this article. Dennis Loy Johnson (an amazing publisher and the face of the War Against Amazon), talks about an app he wants to create to promote independent bookstores:

Melville Publishing is trying to develop a number of products to help booksellers. One of them is the “shelf talker,” a digital display that helps customers browse through print books in a brick-and-mortar store but buy e-books from that store’s website instead of Amazon.

Naturally, because everyone at NPR is so tuned in, they realized immediately that when you buy an ebook from an independent bookstore, it’s actually being supplied by GOOGLE, another corporation that is EVIL and should be investigated and could be violating anti-trust laws. Did they ask Dennis whether he’s uncomfortable favoring one corporate behemoth over another?

~~But such devices might be too little, too late. Johnson would prefer to see Amazon investigated for antitrust violations, but he doesn’t expect that will happen anytime soon.~~

Why not? Tell me why no one will investigate them if they’re obviously breaking laws. THAT IS WHAT WE ALL WANT TO KNOW. Explain something useful to me, NPR. Please. Go out and dig around. Learn things. Pass along that knowledge. Just once, NPR, just once. God damn it.

*

OK, I got my heart rate back under control, but ~~then came across about Kodak’s bankruptcy and how Rochester “hasn’t lost its sparkle,” and which may well be the most insincere article I’ve ever read.~~

Thanks to Kodak’s inability to adapt to the world around it, Rochester is getting a ton of attention these days, with most pieces being of the “what will Rochester do without Kodak?” variety. Despite the fact that Kodak’s decline took place many years ago, and this bankruptcy just a formality, questioning Rochester’s future is a valid enough approach to the story.

The problem I’ve had with all of these articles is that they address absolutely none of the actual problems present in Rochester, instead covering up everything with pollyannaish statements about how everything here “sparkles.”

Seriously, Rochester (especially at and around the universities) is a very decent place to live, but the weird segregated nature of the city, the terrible impact of the soulless suburbs, the incredibly high teen pregnancy rate (one of the highest in the country), the laughably bad urban planning, the mismanagement of almost all beautification projects, the fast ferry failure, and the implosion of the city school district are REAL ISSUES. But rather than even mention that Rochester faces a plethora of challenges and has to be very ingenious to save itself from becoming yet another mid-sized American city whose main export is crippling depression, lets just reiterate that we love our hometown because it is wondrous good and filled with unicorns!

Every time I turn around it seems like there’s a new building in the medical center. There are gleaming spaces full of people in lab coats and blinking racks of computers. From new medicines, to computer chips — it feels like it’s all being invented here. People walk together with their heads down in deep discussion and you can just sense them going places no one has ever gone before.

What does this even mean? The U of R Medical Center is stunningly impressive, but I’m pretty sure they don’t make computer chips there. (I know, I know, but this article is intentionally misleading in those juxtaposed sentences, which is exactly why it makes me furious.) So for anyone struggling to survive in a former blue-collar town, they should look ahead to the future with stars in their eyes because people in lab coats walk around talking about “deep” subjects?!?? Are you even serious?

NPR has gone from being the alternative to the crap that is Fox News and CNN and MSNBC to being a voice of middlebrow authority that is absolutely unquestioned by most left-leaning thinkers. Which is a terrible mistake to make, and will only drive the conversation about important issues into a more banal and misguided place.

That is all.

Time for An Announcement [ALTA 2012]

Chad Post — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 18:00:00 +0000

With just around the corner (Kansas City better prepare itself), this seems like a good time to announce that the 2012 conference will take place from October 3-6 right here in Rochester, NY.

We’ll be posting a lot of details about this over the next few months, but I really wanted to share my excitement about being able to host one of the best annual conferences out there. ALTA is the best place to network with other translators, to discuss interesting facets of translation, and to generally have a good time.

ALTA Rochester is going to be amazing, with the host hotel being the and most of the events taking place at the On top of that though, we’ll have a lot of after-hours stuff going on throughout the city, and I’m personally committed to making this one of the most memorable ALTAs ever. (I realize how that might sound, especially considering my unwavering desire to throw a rave in Rochester’s abandoned subway system. But trust me—no one will get hurt.)

For those of you who will be in Kansas City later this month, we should definitely talk about possible panels, etc., etc. And for everyone else—especially translators and NY-based publishing folk—mark your 2012 calendars now.

I’ll post a 2011 ALTA preview next week, and will be sending many dispatches from the conference itself the week after, but in the meantime, be sure to check out

Paul Auster in Rochester

Chad Post — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 18:10:00 +0000

This is for all the CNY folks: Paul Auster will be on campus on September 30th to give a George H. Ford Lecture on “Fiction and Translation.” This event is being co-sponsored by the George H. Ford Lecture Fund, the Department of English, and the Reading the World Conversation Series.

Very cool opportunity to see Auster in an intimate setting (if you consider a room that seats 150 people to be intimate), and I’m sure he’ll have a lot of interesting things to say about translation. He’s always been a big advocate of French—and world—literature, and has published a number of translations, including pieces by Edmond Jabes, Pierre Clastres, Jacques Dupin, and others. (The complete list is available )

The event will take place from 5-6 on Thursday, September 30th in the Hawkins-Carlson Room in the Rush Rhees Library on the University of Rochester’s campus. Should be cool, should be crowded. I recommend getting there early, since there’s no ticketing process . . .

Open Letter Forum: The Ecosystem of Translation

Chad Post — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 21:45:45 +0000

Probably should’ve posted this earlier in the week, but for anyone in Rochester, tomorrow afternoon, we’re hosting a special event from 3-5pm in the Rare Books and Special Collections Room of the Rush Rhees Library. This event is a roundtable discussion on “The Ecosystem of Translation,” featuring Professors John Michael and Claudia Schafer, along with Rhea Lyons and Melissa Schoenberger, two UR students enrolled in the translation certificate program and current Open Letter interns.

This really will be an open discussion with two primary goals: to provide general info about the literary translation programs (current and developing) and the Press, and to start to talk about some of the different issues, experiences, and joys of studying, or working with, international literature.

Should be fun and interesting, and post-discussion we’ll have some appetizers and wine—along with the first printed copies of our inaugural catalog. So if you’re in the area, please come on over . . .

Here’s a pdf version of the flyer for the event.