While more contemporary Latin American writers have found their way into English translation following the Bolaño phenomenon there are still major talents without a toe let alone a foot in the door and major blank spaces on the map. This brings us to Venezuelan writer Israel Centeno, whose work Aurelio Major, co-founding editor of Granta […]
In 1999 Marcos Giralt Torrente’s novel Paris was the unanimous selection for Spain’s XVII Premio Herralde de Novela by a jury consisting of Roberto Bolaño, Salvador Clotas, Juan Cueto, Ester Tusquets, and the publisher Jorge Herralde. Last week Giralt Torrente won Italy’s prestigious book prize, the Premio Strega Europeo, for his third novel Tiempo de […]
The growth of European crime writing from outside Scandinavia continues and on June 11 four crime writers from the other corners (and center, actually) of Europe will be in London at the London Review Bookshop to talk about their work and, of course, crime. The event is titled “More Bloody Foreigners: Criminally Good Books From […]
“Roberto Bolaño says a poet can stand anything, and it’s worth writing poetry for that reason alone. I don’t know if Bolaño’s right. Still, he doesn’t say that only certain poets can stand anything, so…maybe if I were a poet, even a mediocre one, I might have experienced Mami’s death another way. All I know […]
It’s a novel about the early days of the Russian Revolution, the civil war and the famine that ravaged the Soviet Union. The extremes of hunger and poverty are set off against the high living and obscene wealth of those taking advantage of the Soviet government’s New Economic Policy. A story of love and betrayal […]
The Guardian reports that plans to memorialize the house exiled Austrian-Jewish writer Stefan Zweig lived in London for five years were nixed by English Heritage (EH), the organization responsible for choosing who gets a blue plaque and who doesn’t. An EH spokesperson said that Zweig’s “current profile – which has never been as high in […]
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