The 25 nominees for the Best Translated Book Award will be whittled down to a shortlist in a few days and with each book getting a pitch for why it should win here is mine on Alex Zucker’s translation of The Devil’s Workshop. “Reading The Devil’s Workshop you come up against a remarkable and frightening […]
In The New Republic, Adam Thirlwell reviews Michael Hoffmann’s translation of a collection of Gottfried Benn’s poetry entitled Impromptus: Selected Poems and looks at the obscurity that Benn has fallen into due to his Nazi past. It’s a fascinating article, both for grappling with the moral issues that the reputations of these “disgraced” writers bring […]
In Part I of my interview with Haute Culture Books’ Luis de Miranda the writer and publisher spoke about the uniqueness of his publishing venture. Here the focus is on the books themselves, particularly The Sublimes by Yuri Mamleyev and Flaubert’s Felicity, translated by De Miranda and available as a free download here. Literalab: How […]
B O D Y’s series of European fiction in translation, Saturday European Fiction, kicked off one year ago and has since seen the publication of short stories and novel excerpts from almost every country in Central and Eastern Europe as well as Spain, from authors young and old, living and dead, previously unpublished in English […]
In a publishing world where carving out a unique niche, not to mention publishing unique books, might appear to be increasingly difficult, Haute Culture Books has come along and done just that. With a fascinating selection of fiction that are offerred as exceptional art objects publisher Luis de Miranda is charting a very different course […]
The shortlist for Slovakia’s largest and most prestigious literary award for prose, the Anasoft litera 2014, has been announced (link in Slovak) and it includes a few Literalab favorites among the 10 books selected out of a total of 194. The shortlisted authors include first timer Uršuľa Kovalyk for Krasojazdkyňa (The Equestrienne). You can read […]
This week’s new and newish books offer up some Russian murder, more Russian murder and ah, relief – an unraveling alcoholic Russian life! Well, don’t blame me, read about a school for wizards, S&M or the latest Junot Díaz if you want, but these books all look amazing. The Stone Bridge by […]
“Sometimes we bought newspapers and divided up the pages while we made small talk, hoping to kill time and trying to ignore our reflection in the gigantic mirrors behind the bar, where a dark and twisted version of ourselves looked back at us, mocking us from an alternate world where we—that couple sunk in a […]
“Shatuny [The Sublimes] was first published in Russia only after the collapse of the Soviet system. Before that, it was published in the West. The reaction in the West was unusual. One American reviewer noted that the world was not ready for such a book. I believe now it is perfectly ready for this book.” […]
He stepped into the bushes to fool around a little. “What can I say about Grigory,” he thought later, “when I don’t even know whether I exist?” From The Sublimes by Yuri Mamleyev, translated from the Russian by Marian Schwartz. This highly influential cult classic from 1968 has never before been translated into English and […]
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