The shortlist for the Rossica Translation Prize 2014 has been announced for the best translation from Russian and it’s a pitched battle between five books. Interestingly, only one of the books’ authors is still alive, as one was quite famously killed in a duel (and that in 1837, so he wouldn’t be showing up at […]
At Deutsche Welle there is article about the new Berlin-based publisher Frisch & Co. Run by E.J. Van Lanen the e-book publisher is putting out a fascinating selection of novels in translation from Germany, Austria, Spain, Argentina and Italy. I have just read the debut novel they put out by Argentine writer Carlos Busqued, Under […]
On March 27, Read Russia and The New York Review of Books are co-hosting the book launch of the much awaited An Invitation for Me to Think by Alexander Vvedensky, translated by Eugene Ostashevsky, with additional translations by Matvei Yankelevich. All of these publishers, organizers and translators will be in attendance in NYC at Pravda […]
On the BBC’s “A Point of View” writer Will Self takes on readers and critics who oppose the use of difficult words, and by extension, of difficult art altogether. The main thrust of his critique is that educators, critics and the reading public are demanding that the bar be lowered from a level of reading […]
“I like the bigness and darkness of 19th-century Russian literature. (I brought Crime and Punishment with me on my honeymoon.)” – Roddy Doyle [No word on what his wife brought]. Roddy Doyle, of The Commitments fame, has a brilliant article in The Irish Times on his translation of Gogol’s The Government Inspector currently playing in […]
The day after the ceremony in which he was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize in Prague, Irish novelist John Banville came to the Kafka Society’s basement haunts and, against the backdrop of Kafka’s old library, spoke about his work, murderers (and looking like a murderer), Nabokov, and a number of other things. Below is the […]
The first part of an essay by book jacket designer Peter Mendelsund on his blog Jacket Mechanical covering just what it is his job involves. And he starts with a bang, as it were, questioning some of cover designs for Nabokov’s Lolita because: “It is easy to forget, especially easy given the soft-core Lolita renderings […]
literalab 