three percent – Three Percent

Three Percent #105: Alexievich, Amazon, and Rights

Chad Post — Sat, 31 Oct 2015 15:00:56 +0000

This week’s podcast features a discussion of Nobel Prize-winner Svetlana Alexievich (who Chad helped publish at Dalkey Archive), Amazon’s recent announcement about investing $10 million into translations, and how rights work. There’s a minor rant about Chase Utley (“worst human being on earth”) and a little bit of baseball talk.

In honor of the Mets and Cubs, this week’s music is by Win Win.

Also, just a reminder that because of some difficulties with iTunes, you may need to unsubscribe and resubscribe to the in iTunes at that link, or right here:
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And, as always, feel free to send any and all comments or questions to threepercentpodcast@gmail.com.

The books discussed on this episode include:
Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich
Zone and Street of Thieves by Mathias Énard
Summer of Hate by Chris Krause
Target in the Night by Ricardo Piglia
Rochester Knockings: A Novel of the Fox Sisters by Hubert Haddad

Three Percent #92: Crying in the Sunshine

Chad Post — Thu, 19 Feb 2015 19:47:17 +0000

This week’s podcast features a true roundtable discussion, with Tom and Chad being joined by Caroline Casey from Mark Haber and Jeremy Ellis from Stephen Sparks from and Danish author Naja Marie Aidt ( ) to discuss the American Booksellers Association One of the funniest podcasts to date, they break down what Winter Institute is, why it’s so important for the future of bookselling, and what various publishers get out of attending. They also make fun of all the crappy crutch phrases you find in jacket copy.

This week’s music is the Flaming Lips rendition of

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

Three Percent #91: Translators, Rates, Money, and Unions

Chad Post — Thu, 05 Feb 2015 17:27:56 +0000

Today’s podcast is a special one, featuring PEN Translation Committee co-chair (and talented Czech translator) Alex Zucker to talk about what translators do and should get paid, and to break down where all the money goes in publishing a work of international literature.

In comparison to some other Three Percent podcasts, this one is wall-to-wall information, and is sure to spark a number of debates, discussions, and reactions. Enjoy!

Also, since it’s mentioned on the podcast, here’s PEN’s and their

This week’s music is by The Phantom Band.

Three Percent #88: A Shinier Version of Craigslist

Chad Post — Wed, 14 Jan 2015 20:55:53 +0000

In this week’s episode, Chad and Tom discuss some of the books they read in 2014 and make specific “reading resolutions” for 2015. They also talk about and Tom’s alma mater playing for the National Championship.

Next week, they’ll be discussing Denis Johnson’s so if you have any questions, suggestions, comments, opinions, rants or raves, email threepercentpodcast@gmail.com.

And this week’s music is by Jim Noir—one of the very few musicians Tom’s ever recommended for the podcast.

Three Percent #67: The Tom Podcast

Chad Post — Tue, 17 Dec 2013 14:06:29 +0000

From the choice of the opening song—“Royals” by Lorde—to the main topic of great midwestern bookstores and Wisconsin’s beer culture, this podcast is All About Tom. And it’s fantastic. Mostly because we get to talk about a lot of great bookstores.

Some of the stores mentioned in this podcast are:

(Winnetka, IL)
(Milwaukee, WI)
(Chicago, IL)
(St. Paul, MN)
(Ann Arbor, MI)
(Minneapolis, MN)
(St. Paul, MN)
(Madison, WI)
(Grand Rapids, MI)

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.

Three Percent #64: Thanks for Using All the Umlauts

Chad Post — Thu, 19 Sep 2013 19:55:37 +0000

With Tom back from his relaxing vacation, we decided to catch up and talk about the books we read recently, including Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s mystery series, Juan Gabriel Vasquez’s The Sound of Things Falling, and Rafael Bernal’s The Mongolian Conspiracy, among others. We also talk about Amazon’s MatchBook program, making things as easy as possible for readers, and baseball. Because, baseball.

This week’s music is , from Man Man’s new album On Oni Pond.

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.

European Literature Prize 2012

Sarah Winstein-Hibbs — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 15:00:00 +0000

Congratulations to author and translator Ronald Vlek, whose novel Alsof het voorbij is (The Sense of an Ending, published by Atlas Contact) just won the 2012 European Literature Prize. Initiated in 2011, the Prize selects the best Dutch translations of European literary novels to appear in the last year. For winning the award, the author receives a sum of €10,000, the translator € 2,500.

Barnes’ brief but powerful new novel is “. . . as calm as it is disturbing, as melancholy as it is comical, a novel that can be read on several levels: as a personal outpouring, an account by a man wishing to clear his name, or an assault on the power of memories. A novel that makes the reader doubt everything he thinks he knows about himself.” For Vlek’s translation, the jury expressed equal praise: “Translator Ronald Vlek not only manages to transform the narrator’s language into perfect, measured Dutch, he is remarkably successful in capturing Barnes’ undertone. He meticulously transforms the restrained, sometimes evasive sentences, the lucid images and carefully chosen words into Dutch without ever allowing them to lose any of their connotations.”

Modeled after Three Percent’s Best Translated Book Award, the European Literature Prize is sponsored by the Academic-Cultural Centre SPUI25, the Dutch Foundation for Literature, the weekly magazine De Groene Amsterdammer, and Athenaeum Booksellers. The four other shortlisted titles for the prize are as follows:

Geluk als het geluk ver te zoeken is by Wilhelm Genazino, translated from German by Gerrit Bussink (Atlas Contact)

De kaart en het gebied by Michel Houellebecq, translated from French by Martin de Haan (De Arbeiderspers)

C by Tom McCarthy, translated from English by Auke Leistra (De Bezige Bij)

De waarheid omtrent Marie by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, translated from French by Marianne Kaas (Prometheus)

Eleven independent bookshops selected books for the longlist. The professional jury then pared it down, selected the shortlist, and chose the winner.

Three Percent #20: Everyone in the World Writes in English

Chad Post — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 16:25:35 +0000

In this week’s podcast, Tom and I talk about the strange cases of books/authors that most people don’t think of as having been translated. (Not to give away too much, but we start with Haruki Murakami.) From there, we talk about which authors are most associated with particular countries, the pros and cons of shelving authors by country, and how book discovery does (and might not) work.

And shockingly, we didn’t talk about baseball or the St. Louis Cardinals at all. Seriously.

This week’s music is “Got it All [This Can’t Be Living Now]”: by the oddly punctuated Portugal. The Man.

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.

Three Percent #18: Occupy Everything

Chad Post — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 14:25:46 +0000

This week’s podcast is a mixed bag of stuff. Our main focus is on book events—why from a publisher’s perspective they can be frustrating, what makes them interesting (or not), etc. But we also talk a bit about Occupy Wall Street and books that we hope are in the OWS library.

Oh, and as can only be expected, we talk about the St. Louis Cardinals and the World Series. (This post would’ve been up earlier, but it’s taking a while to recover from last night’s loss . . . Which, in all respects, was an INCREDIBLE game.)

Anyway, the first line of the podcast sums it all up and provides a perfect preview of what to expect.

The music this week is from Grouplove’s Never Trust a Happy Song. It reminds Nate of listening to “120 Minutes” in his youth, and feeling sort of nostalgically sad. I think it’s pretty catchy.

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.

Three Percent #12: Lawsuits and Million Dollar Ideas

Chad Post — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 14:23:56 +0000

For this week’s podcast we decided to talk about a few recent news items, starting with against Apple that “alleges that the publishers and Apple colluded to increase prices for popular e-book titles to boost profits and force e-book rival Amazon to abandon its pro-consumer discount pricing.” Yep.

From there we drift off to talk about a range of things, including a million dollar idea to develop a Spotify for books . . . (If you want to invest in this, just give me a call. Please.)

We also touch on about Dubai’s Dar-El Shams Books opening up a U.S. branch in Boston and the total insanity of doing “market research” for books.

Overall, it’s a pretty solid podcast . . . And if you have any comments, questions, or suggestions for future podcasts, please email me at chad.post[at]rochester.edu.

This week’s music is from the Handsome Furs excellent new album, Sound Kapital.

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.