Tag Archives: Three Percent

‘The Devil’s Workshop’ by Jáchym Topol – Why This Book Should Win BTBA

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 […]

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Literary roundup: Literature in translation 2013 and Topol’s deviltry

Chad Post has put up this year’s Translation Database at the halfway point (60% or so complete – download the xl here). The list is for US releases so there are a lot of books mentioned here that aren’t on it because they came out in the UK. Here are some random observations on the […]

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Literary roundup: Man Booker International and Amerika’s last page

The shortlist for the biennial Man Booker International Prize has been announced and it’s notably less Anglocentric than previous years with only three of the 10 listed authors writing in English, and one of those was born and raised to the age of 20 in the former Yugoslavia, that being Josip Novakovich (Canada). The other […]

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35th American Literary Translators Association

When the first Annual Conference of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) took place 35 years ago I didn’t really mind that I couldn’t go. I was nine, and barely read English-language writers, even those who filled speech bubbles in comic books. I was interested in other things. Times have changed. Today I would give […]

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Literary roundup: Russian horses, new writers and bodies from Prague

Chtenia’s Summer 2012 issue is out and is devoted entirely to horses, with an essay on the animals’ role in Russian literature as well as translations of equestrian-themed work from Vladimir Mayakovsky, Nikolai Zabolotsky, Vladimir Sorokin and Alexander Kuprin among others. One odd feature of this magazine is that though there is a “Web links […]

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Best Translated Book Award 2012

The finalists for this year’s Best Translated Book Award were announced and Central European books made a strong showing, with three titles on the 10-title shortlist. Last year there were only two finalists from the region whereas this year two Polish writers – Magdalena Tulli and Wiesław Myśliwski – made the cut along with Hungarian […]

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Reading (and writing in) Bulgaria

New books, uncertainty, a seminar and why writers should attend readings in their national folk costume There is a lot of new Bulgarian literature available at Three Percent in connection with the Bulgarian Contemporary Novel Contest run by the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation (EKF) and the America for Bulgarian Foundation. First of all, the 2010 winning […]

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