So, Sergio Chejfec’s My Two Worlds comes out today, in Margaret Carson’s translation (you’ll have to read it if you want to know what’s up with that picture of a swan). In the meantime, a few reactions have started cropping up; Publisher’s Weekly praises the book as “a significant event” and Kirkus Reviews calls it … More Review round-up: My Two Worlds
It’s been a while since I’ve written anything for the blog, but that’s not to say I haven’t been keeping busy. I just finished the manuscript draft of my translation of Los Planetas, a beautiful, melancholy novel by contemporary Argentinean writer Sergio Chejfec. I’ve also been keeping track of another of his, titled My Two … More The first of many.
I’m a little late getting to the party, but I thought I’d toss in my two cents on the most recent winner of the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, Juan José Campanella’s El secreto de sus ojos. The film is, without question, an immensely enjoyable noirish detective romance – tossed together with a buddy film … More Miscarriages of Justice
So, it’s been a little longer than planned. But the time was not lost – in fact, a few things have come to fruition in the past weeks. As a way of jumping back in, and before I post my review of El secreto de sus ojos, which is on its way, I thought I’d … More Hello, Like Before
I may be way behind on writing reviews, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been reading a few. Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times just published a very positive piece on Vida, the freshman collection of Patricia Engel. In Kakutani’s words, The stories in Patricia Engel’s striking debut collection are like snapshots from someone’s … More In the News: Kakutani on Patricia Engel
In the last session of my last graduate seminar, our professor asked the class when the last time was that we enjoyed a book. It was an unwieldy question, to say the least. Was she talking about that feeling I’ve been calling the Baskin Robbins dilemma, whereby professionalization breeds contempt? Or did she mean that … More My literary brain freeze.
Okay, file this one under miscellany, but I thought it was worth calling out. AcademHack recently posted an interesting piece on the future of books, academia, and digital media. The argument, essentially, is that the time for half measures is over: publishing, in all its many forms, needs to think of completely new paradigms for … More In the News: Academic Privating
When people talk about Fabián Bielinsky, the first thing they usually mention is the mythic quality of the director’s brief, but intensely creative career; the director made only two feature-length and one short film, but all received impressive critical acclaim. Striking a balance between auteur and commercial cinema, his work was poised to take Argentinean … More Director profile: Fabián Bielinsky
Chad Post over at Three Percent has been writing an interesting series of articles on the Future of Reading conference that took place at RIT last week. In the most recent installment, he cited “The Death and Life of the Book Review,” an essay by John Palattella of The Nation, in which the author examines … More In the News: We are all interns now
What was it your mother always said? Be careful what you wish for because you might just get it? For a gaggle of translators stuck at an ill-fated convention in Pablo De Santis’ La traducción, these cautionary words ring ominously true. The novel, which was a finalist for the Planeta prize in 1997, is what … More Babel: Before and After
Heather Cleary 