Okay, okay. Enrique Vila-Matas is from Barcelona, which is not exactly part of Latin America. But I’ll make an exception to my extremely staunch editorial policy to mention that his latest novel, Dublinesca, was just released by Seix Barral – and has already been slated for publication in English in 2011 by New Directions (US) … More The Literary Dreamscapes of Enrique Vila-Matas
Of all the writers I am excited to see translated from the Spanish, César Aira is one of my very favorites. Aira, who has penned over 50 novels, is known for a writing style he characterizes as a “huida hacia delante” – a flight forward. According to Aira, he writes a page or two per … More Reason No.273 I love César Aira
So, I am going to break with tradition a bit and write about a panel I attended yesterday Friday on the future of reading in the digital age, part of the PEN World Voices Festival. Panelists Ben Okri, Alberto Ruy Sánchez, Thomas Pletzinger and Sergei Sokolovskiy (whose outlandish pronouncements brought a welcome element of performance … More Learning to read (at PEN World Voices)
The Argentinian newspaper Clarín published an interesting story in its cultural section, Ñ (Revista de Cultura), about the translation of poet Juan Gelman‘s text into a sculptural red dress by the well-known Spanish design duo Victorio & Lucchino, which caught my eye because it is an unusual example of what Roman Jakobson has described as … More Juan Gelman in translation
Words Without Borders just published an interesting review of Horacio Castellanos Moya‘s The She-Devil in the Mirror, translated by Katherine Silver for New Directions. According to the reviewer, George Fragopoulos, Moya is a master of the harrowing, if often darkly comic, vitriolic diatribe; his claustrophobic voices exude and drip with despair, violence and abjection. The … More The She-Devil in the Mirror
Exciting! I didn’t know that Juan José Saer‘s El entenado had been translated into English! Apparently I was living under a rock, because Margaret Jull Costa translated it for Serpent’s Tail back in 1991 under the title The Witness. The novel’s narrator is a young man – an orphan – who hangs around the shipyards … More In nomine Patris
While I’m on the subject of weird and winning metafiction from Brazil: did you know that the internationally acclaimed musician Chico Buarque is also a talented novelist? I didn’t – until I read Budapeste (Companhia das Letras, 2003 / Budapest trans. Alison Entrekin for Grove Press, 2005). The novel’s protagonist, José Costa, is a shadowy … More Speaking in Tongues
It took a graceful, witty little number like Luis Fernando Verissimo‘s Borges e os Orangotangos Eternos (Borges and the Eternal Orangutans, trans. Margaret Jull Costa for New Directions) to distract me from the tech frenzy that had gripped me for the past few weeks. And oh, what a sweet dalliance it was. It’s a slender … More That which we call a rose…
Disclaimer: this is a shameless re-post of Laura Miller’s Salon.com article on metadata and iBook sales, plucked from Three Percent, the blog of Open Letter Books. As Chad Post of Three Percent points out, the article is grounded in the idea that, whereas the 20th century was about “sorting out supply,” or ordering information according … More What you really, really want.
Heather Cleary 