opinionated commentary on literary matters - from the complete review

       Poetry in ... Germany

       At boersenblatt they have a list (you probably have to click 'Lyrik' ...) of the 25 bestselling volumes of poetry in Germany for the first half (actually through 29 July, so just short of seven full months) of the year -- and, as the accompanying article notes, it is dominated by the classics (or at least dead poets).
       A 1936 Erich Kästner collection tops the list (the publisher noting it consistently sells 7500-10,000 copies a year), but it's Mascha Kaléko who dominates the list with six (!) titles. Collections by Rilke and Ringelnatz, both also long dead, take spots three and four, while Jan Wagner, with a collection in tenth place (!) is the first living author to appear on the list. Eugen Roth, Pablo Neruda, Hilde Domin -- and Homer ! -- are all dead authors who also make the list -- though a few other living ones do too.
       Clearly, contemporary poetry is not hitting the spot in contemporary Germany .....
       As far as Kaléko goes, note that Fomite Press has recently brought out some of her work in translations; see their publicity page, or get your copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.

       Meanwhile, since we're on the topic: twentieth century German poetry was very good indeed -- and, as longtime readers know, I'd argue the peak was the trio of Rilke, Celan, and the underrated-as-poet Brecht. Which I mention because Liveright is admirably bringing out: "the most extensive English translation of Brecht's poetry to date" this December (which still gives them time to design a new cover ?), David Constantine and Tom Kuhn's translations of The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht; see their publicity page, or pre-order your copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk -- surely one the most significant poetry-in-translation events of the year.

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       Book tracking

       At the PowellsBooks.Blog Dear Committee Members-author Julie Schumacher posts Five Reasons to Keep Track of Every Single Book You Read, and as someone who has long kept track of all his book purchases as well as reads (and, for a couple of years now, all the books received/acquired hereabouts) I can certainly endorse her suggestion (if not all these particular reasons).
       I've found it helpful -- and interesting -- and if you go through a lot of books you probably would(/do ?) too.

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       John Calder (1927-2018)

       Sad to hear that another of the grand old men of UK publishing has passed away; see, for example, Heloise Wood's 'Towering' opponent of censorship John Calder dies aged 91 at The Bookseller and Alasdair Steven's Obituary -- John Calder, ground-breaking publisher, co-founder of the Traverse and leading figure at the Edinburgh festival in The Herald.

       I accumulated a fair number of the old Calder titles over the years, as he published an eclectic, impressive selection of authors.
       Alma took over the imprint, and they've been re-issuing some of the titles in a new look.

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       My Struggle: Book Six (The End) review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of the final volume in Karl Ove Knausgaard's grand epic, My Struggle: Book Six -- or, more succinctly, The End (so the UK edition).

       At 1152 pages this is one of the longer titles under review at the complete review -- the longest reviewed this year, in fact, though it is not even the longest major translation appearing this year (Uwe Johnson's Anniversaries has several hundred pages on it). It is also the longest review I've posted in ages -- and that's just for this volume; while books one and two are under review I still have to get to three through five -- and the series-as-a-whole probably also deserves a separate review .....
       Is it worthwhile ? I'd say yes. But, yes, it is a lot -- and, yes, it's a bit (okay, a lot) self-indulgent.

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       German Book Prize longlist

       They've announced the twenty-title strong longlist for this year's German Book Prize, selected from 199 titles (165 submitted, with an additional 34 called in by the judges).
       Quite a few of the longlisted authors have had titles translated into English, including Maxim Biller, Arno Geiger, and Gert Loschütz, and it's nice to see Adolf Muschg's latest make it.
       In his overview in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Andreas Platthaus suggests that among the arguably overlooked titles were the big works by Michael Lentz (over 1000 pages ...) and Steffen Mensching (820pp), as well as Robert Seethaler's Das Feld.
       The shortlist will be announced 11 September, and the winner on 8 October.

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       Dayton Literary Peace Prize finalists

       They've announced the finalists for this year's Dayton Literary Peace Prize -- an award honoring books that treat: "the theme of peace on a variety of levels, such as between individuals, among families and communities, or between nations, religions, or ethnic groups" -- six titles each in the fiction and non categories.
       The fiction list, in particular, looks strong -- though none of these titles are under review at the complete review.
       The winners will be announced 18 September, and honored on 28 October.

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       Complete Dialogue with Death found

       Rozmowy Mistrza Polikarpa ze Śmiercią -- 'Master Polikarp's Dialogue with Death' -- is apparently: "widely recognised as the first masterpiece of Polish literature", but until now:

only 498 verses of the original dialogue were known from a fifteenth-century manuscript.

The ending of the piece had to be (partially) reconstructed from a translation into a Ruthenian, a forerunner of today's Russian, Ukrainian and Belarussian languages.

       But now someone found: "a complete Polish text of 918 verses", and a critical edition will be published soon; see Aleksander Nowacki's report at The First News, Full text of Polish literature's oldest masterpiece found, as well as the (Polish) Życie Uniwersyteckie press release.
       For the fragmentary text -- i.e. all that was previously available -- in its fragmentary (Polish) entirety, see here (my favorite part being the concluding: "(Końca brak)").

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       Bookselling in ... Iceland

       Iceland is widely hailed as a nation of readers and a wonderful literary environment in all respects -- great publishing scene, etc. etc. -- but apparently the situation is not quite as rosy as we've been led to believe: as the Morgunblaðið/iceland monitor report has it, local Book sales continue to drop.
       Down another five per cent last year, and:

Book sales have plummeted in recent years, dropping by 11 percent in 2016 alone, and by 36 percent from 2008 till 2017.

       The title-totals apparently haven't changed that much, nor has book pricing. No, it seems people are just not as into reading any longer.

       Check out for yourself what they consider the most interesting titles of the past few years, as the excellent Icelandic Literature Center site has 'Books from Iceland'-catalogues for the past couple of years that you can browse.

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       FT & McKinsey Business Book of the Year longlist

       They've announced the longlist for this year's FT & McKinsey Business Book of the Year -- fifteen titles, selected from some 500 (unnamed) entries, in the running for the £30,000 prize, with only one (Adam Tooze's Crashed) under review at the complete review.
       I kind of like that they also list five books which were: "near-misses for the longlist" -- or is it cruel to name those ? (I would love to see publishers of these add a sticker announcing 'Just missed making the FT & McKinsey Business Book of the Year longlist' on the covers .....)

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       The Tears of the Black Man review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Alain Mabanckou's slim essay-collection, The Tears of the Black Man, just out in English from Indiana University Press.

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       Getting ready for Anniversaries

       Uwe Johnson's great novel Anniversaries has long been under review at the complete review, but that 2007 review was based on the original German; until now, English-language readers only had access to a radically abridged translation -- but in October New York Review Books is bringing out a complete translation, by Damion Searls, one of the biggest publishing events of the year, and not just of fiction in translation.
       In Publishers Weekly John Maher now reports on some of the prep-work for the unleashing of this tome (or set of tomes, in a nice boxed edition), in how With Anniversaries, NYRB Brings Behemoth of a German Novel Into English
       Among the observations:

The big trick was marketing such a monster of a tome -- and, in the U.S., an obscure one at that -- to booksellers. That's where NYRB's reputation in the business came in handy. "At some level, booksellers who know and like NYRB Classics and are already interested in what we do will hear when we say, 'This is, literally, the biggest book we've ever done,'?" said NYRB publicity manager Nick During. And yet, he added, "We wanted to give people time to get going."

       You've pre-ordered your copy, right ? (At your local bookseller -- or at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.) You know you need that nice boxed set on your bookshelves ..... And it is a damned good book, well worth your time.

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       Lu Xun Literature Awards

       They've announced the winners of the latest set of Lu Xun Literature Awards [鲁迅文学奖], which covers work published 2014-2017, in seven categories.
       There were thirty-four winners; Mei Jia has an overview in China Daily, Lu Xun Literature Prize names 2014-17 winners, while you can find all the winning titles and authors (in Chinese) here.
       Among the winners in the novella-category is a work by Alai, who has had several novels translated into English.
       Four works won the translation awards, including translations of Eduardo Galeano's Genesis: Memory of Fire, a novel by Christophe Ono-dit-Biot, and the complete poetry of Horace -- but the one I'm really curious about is the translation of: "Italian Renaissance poet Ludouico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso in the style of traditional Chinese opera" !

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       Strike Your Heart review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Amélie Nothomb's Strike Your Heart, just about out in English from Europa Editions (and only a year after it appeared in French -- though US/UK publishers haven't otherwise been keeping up with her book-a-year rate; the last of her books to appear in translation came out three years ago).
       Appropriate, too: today is Nothomb's birthday -- her fifty-first !

       (Updated - 14 August): More accurately, it was the day she claims for her birthday: she's always given it as 13 August 1967, and that she was born in Kobe, Japan; the more prosaic reality is that she was apparently actually born 9 July 1966, in Etterbeek, Belgium.

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       V.S.Naipaul (1932-2018)

       The great writer and 2001 Nobel laureate V.S.Naipaul has passed away; see, for example, Rachel Donadio's V.S. Naipaul, Who Explored Colonialism Through Unsparing Books, Dies at 85 in The New York Times and Richard Lea's VS Naipaul, Nobel prize-winning British author, dies aged 85 in The Guardian.
       Several of his works are under review at the complete review:

• Between Father and Son
• Half A Life
• Literary Occasions
• Magic Seeds
• Reading & Writing
• The Writer and the World

       But I had already read practically all of his work before I started the site, which is why there aren't more under review. His most famous work remains A House for Mr. Biswas -- get your copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk -- while among the reviewed titles I think Magic Seeds, in particular, is underrated.
       And don't forget Paul Theroux's wonderful Sir Vidia's Shadow.

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       Rein Raud Q & A

       At estonian world Edith Soosaar has a Q & A with Rein Raud, How can Estonian writers reach the English-speaking market ?
       Among his responses:

Is it plausible to make your living as a full time author ?
No.

       Two of his works are under review at the complete review: The Brother and The Reconstruction.

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       People in the Room review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Norah Lange's 1950 novel, People in the Room, just out in English from And Other Stories.

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       SingLit

       In The Business Times Megan Tan reports on A new chapter for singlit, as: "Singapore literature, affectionately termed "SingLit", is on the rise"; she talks to Edmund Wee of Epigram and Kenny Leck of Math Paper Press.

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       Buddhadeva Bose and ... Henry Miller

       One doesn't see much Buddhadeva Bose in the US, but Archipelago did bring out his My Kind of Girl a few years ago, and Oxford University Press now has a collection of 'English Writings of Buddhadeva Bose', An Acre of Green Grass (see their publicity page, or get your copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk) -- and Granta has an excerpt, with an introduction by Amit Chaudhuri, To Remember is to Live Again, describing a visit Bose took to ... Henry Miller at Big Sur.
       Not exactly a meeting of authors I would have expected, but fun to learn about.

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       The Literary Saloon turns 16

       The complete review is already in its twentieth year, but this Literary Saloon weblog was a later addition, only added in the summer of 2002 -- 11 August, to be exact.
       The lit-blog scene has changed dramatically over these years, from a relatively small community to a much more far-flung one. There seem to be more 'book blogs' -- often review-focused -- than ever, with more niches covered, along with a few juggernaut multi-purpose literary sites that also provide a variety of literary news and coverage, but there still also seems a place for a (part of a site) like this, with its peculiar foci (and, in particular, its international outlook).
       While the site's/my Twitter presence has become a substitute-outlet for some of the smaller bits of news and observation that in the earlier days would have found a place here, the format still has its uses; it'll be interesting to see how/if it holds up (and I can hold it up ...) for another sixteen years (or six ...).
       The weblog also continues to have a surprisingly dedicated audience -- I appreciate the continued interest, and am pleased you continue to find what you find here of some interest/use/entertainment.

       And, of course:

If you want to support the site,
consider becoming a patron:

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       Shanghai Translation Publishing House at 40

       The Shanghai Translation Publishing House, the leading publisher of foreign literature in translation in China, is celebrating its fortieth anniversary, including with an exhibition at the Sinan Mansions through 28 August.
       At Shine Xu Qin writes about the Shanghai publisher's 40th birthday book bash.

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       Translation in ... Malta

       So, in Malta they're trying really hard to make the works of Dun Karm Psaila (1871-1961; author of the Maltese national anthem, and with his own room at the Mdina Metropolitan Cathedral Museum) accessible to readers in other languages -- a matter of such significance to them that:

The pledge to have Psaila translated in five different languages was made in the Labour Party's electoral manifesto.

       In the electoral manifesto ! Politics really is different in some places .....
       James Debono reports on this -- and the difficulties the project faces -- in the fascinating Situation vacant: Mandarin translator for Dun Karm, as, unsurprisingly;

The biggest challenge for the National Book Council with regards to translations is that excluding the English language, there are "very few qualified translators who can translate from Maltese to other languages," [council chairman Mark] Camilleri said.

       Indeed, they realize that:

If we fail to find people who can translate from Maltese to other languages, we will have to unfortunately resort to translating from the English bridge translation, however, this is an option which I am trying to avoid

       Let's hope it doesn't come to that.

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       Crashed review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Adam Tooze on How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, Crashed -- a rare non-translated work, of non-fiction no less, under review, and a book that's actually already (it's just out) getting a whole lot of review-attention.

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       Khoury on Al Aswany

       At Qantara.de Elias Khoury salutes Al Aswany's courage, as he: 'pays tribute to Alaa Al Aswany's new novel as the only comprehensive literary chronicle of the January 2011 Egyptian revolution'.
       The The Yacoubian Building-author's new novel is جمهورية كأن‎ ('The So-called Republic'), which has been out in Arabic for a couple of months -- see also the Dar Al Adab publicity page --, but is not (yet) available in English.
       "Al-Aswany's success is a positive reflection on our narrative literature", Khoury finds.

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       Visa issues at Edinburgh International Book Festival

       The Edinburgh International Book Festival runs 11 through 27 August and expects over 900 authors to appear -- but some of them apparently are having a harder time than others getting there, thanks to British Home Office issues, as, as for example Sian Cain reports in The Guardian, Home Office refuses visas for authors invited to Edinburgh book festival.
       No names, alas, and it's unclear whether any or how many authors would actually be prevented from appearing at the festival, but it's still disturbing.
       Still, admirable of the Home Office to provide a means of festivals avoiding much of this hassle by getting themselves designated a permit free festival -- which, for some reason (?) the EIBF has not applied for ("Barley said that while the festival could apply to be added to the permit-free list, he hoped other festivals across the UK would come together to campaign for a new system" -- fair enough, but why not work the system that's in place currently while trying to change it ?).

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       Hermann Kesten-Preis

       They've announced that the €10,000 Hermann Kesten Award, presented by PEN Germany "for outstanding efforts in support of persecuted writers according to the principles of the Charter of PEN International", will go (on 15 November) to Gioconda Belli this year.
       Several of her works have been translated into English; check out, for example, The Scroll of Seduction (even Entertainment Weekly reviewed this, back in the day ("While the setup is a smidge hokey, once the alternating narratives are established the novel gallops along")) -- see the Harper Collins publicity page, or get your copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.

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       Trilogy review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Jon Fosse's Nordic Council Literature Prize-winning Trilogy -- and the three separate volumes that make up the trilogy:

• Wakefulness
• Olav's Dreams
• Weariness

       Given that the whole trilogy fits in and is published in one thin (147 page) volume in the English translation, even I would normally have just posted the one review -- but the three novellas were published separately, over quite a span (2007, 2012, and 2014), both in the original Norwegian as well as in other Scandinavian languages, and the French also published all three volumes separately, so there are actually a lot of reviews specific to each volume, so it seemed sensible and worthwhile to also offer separate review pages for each (as well as one for the whole thing ...).

       Dalkey Archive Press brought this out in late 2016, and I'm pretty shocked and disappointed at how little coverage it has gotten in the US/UK (essentially none). Fosse has been touted as a Nobel front-runner for a couple of years now, and he is one of the most widely performed living playwrights in the world (yeah, not in the US -- but come on, they're up to volume six of his plays in the Oberon Modern Playwrights series ...), and he's a truly significant author -- also (though this is obviously one of the problems with popularizing his work) because his work is so distinctive: there isn't much fiction like this being written nowadays. Dalkey have done an incredible job bringing out quite a bit of his major work in recent years -- though that too may be part of the problem, too much available at once ...? But maybe/hopefully it is just a question of a critical mass of his work being available and circulating before he finally really takes off in English .....
       With Fitzcarraldo Editions now also jumping on board -- they published Scenes from a Childhood in the UK in May and it's coming to the US in November (see their publicity page, or get your copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk) and they're committed to his larger-scale in-the-works Septology (see the Books from Norway information page), which could be his break-out work (?) -- maybe he'll actually catch on. (Then again, Scenes from a Childhood hasn't exactly been showered with press coverage in the UK so far either .....)
       He's certainly an author that should be more widely read and better known -- and from the sounds of it, given the (re-)use of names and places familiar from Trilogy in Septology, you probably want to check this one out before plunging into that one.

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       Singapore Literature Prize(s)

       They've announced the winners of this year's Singapore Literature Prize(s), and while the official site only has all the shortlisted titles-information at this time, Toh Wen Li's piece in The Straits Times, Jeremy Tiang wins Singapore Literature Prize in English fiction category for novel on leftist movements, has an overview, and lists all the winners (scroll down) -- as the prize admirably has multiple language and form categories. (Some categories did not have 'top winners', however -- no stand-outs in fiction in Malay and fiction in Tamil, for example.)
       Jeremy Tiang's State of Emergency took the English-language fiction prize; see also the Epigram publicity page, or get your copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.

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       Deutscher Science-Fiction-Preis

       The Science Fiction Club Deutschland has announced this year's winners of the German Science Fiction Prize -- to be awarded 22 September -- and the award for best German science fiction novel will go to Marc-Uwe Kling's QualityLand.
       This books has its own website, and there's also some English-language information about both author and book at his agent's site -- where the most interesting thing is where foreign rights to this have been sold to so far (though that 335,000 copies sold so far is also impressive). No English language edition on the horizon yet (though the site notes, in bold type: "Complete English translation available") -- but publishers in Japan, Kuwait (!), and Turkey have it forthcoming; hardly the three languages I would have expected to be first up, translation-wise.

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       Tagore and the US

       A fascinating piece -- with lots of great pictures -- at Scroll.in, as Tisha Mondal and Judy Luis-Watson report on Why the US government maintained records on Rabindranath Tagore -- and what they say (originally published at the National Archives' weblog).
       Among the pictures: a 'Draft of President Kennedy's letter for the centenary celebration of Tagore's birth', and a: 'Memo concerning the need for the United States to position itself prominently in Tagore's centenary celebration'.
       Those were the days .....

       A decent but confusing variety of Tagore works are readily available in the US/UK -- a nice collected edition, or at least more uniform editions would be welcome/helpful. Still, there are even a few Penguin Classics volumes -- get, for example, the Selected Short Stories at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.
       The only Tagore under review at the complete review is Farewell my Friend, though I do hope to get to more.

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       Johannes Mario Simmel reviews

       The most recent additions to the complete review are my reviews of two early novels by bestselling author Johannes Mario Simmel:

• Der Mörder trinkt keine Milch
• Man lebt nur zweimal

       These two 1950 books weren't his first published works, but the only earlier ones -- Mich wundert, daß ich so fröhlich bin and Das geheime Brot have been a bit more lasting; these two seem never to have been reprinted and are barely known. Volumes in the Bären-Bücher novel-series (19 and 21), Worldcat doesn't even list any American library having a copy in their holdings (though an Australian library does have one of them ...); they're among the obscurest/rarest books I've reviewed at the site .....
       Yet Simmel is one of the best selling German-writing authors of all times. His books sold tens of millions, and topped the bestseller lists for months on end; I can recall in 1970s Austria it seemed every household had books of his lying around.
       He was also reasonably well translated into English in the 1960s and 70s, though he never seemed to really break through (though several were reviewed in, for example, The New York Times Book Review). The US editions are now all long out of print, but there are still a lot of copies floating around (get, for example, Double Agent - Triple Cross at Amazon.com).
       He's no must-read great author, but he wrote a lot of very entertaining books -- higher caliber pop fiction, including some solid treatment of more serious themes, usually very capably dressed up as thrillers --, and I've read practically everything of his -- which is why I also have now gotten to these two hard to find apprentice works, and I'm not sorry I did. (But, yes, you're not missing too much with these two.)

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       MT Vasudevan Nair profile

       In the New Indian Express Anil S profiles MT Vasudevan Nair, as The legend turns 85
       The only one of his books I've been able to get my hands on is Bhima.

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       Taiwan Literature Awards for Migrants

       This seems like a pretty neat idea, and this is already the fifth time they've done this, as, as the Taiwan News reports, Winners of Taiwan Literature Awards for Migrants announced, with eight winning pieces chosen from 553 (!) entries.

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       Nirmal Verma's The World Elsewhere

       Nice to see some coverage of how Hindi writer Nirmal Verma's stories from the 1960s give us people in love with loneliness, in Oindrila Mukherjee's piece continuing a Scroll.in 'series on all-but-forgotten books with a journey through Verma's The World Elsewhere and Other Stories'.
       This came out in a Readers International edition -- and even got a review in The New York Times Book Review (though Carolyn See had issues with the: "inept translations from several different persons, caught in the swinging doors of several national idioms, so that finally the language balks" ...) -- but Verma is definitely one of those significant authors that have slipped a bit through the cracks.

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       Cossery comic in Arabic

       At Mada Sherif Abdel Samad writes about how a New Arabic translation gives Golo’s adaptation of Albert Cossery's Proud Beggars more layers of life.
       While Cossery was born in Cairo and later moved to France, Frenchman Golo moved to Egypt in his 20s and lived there for an extended period of time -- making him particularly well-suited, one assumes, to tackle Cossery's work.
       I still prefer the straight prose version -- Cossery's own Proud Beggars -- of course, but see also the Futuropolis publicity page for the original French graphic version.

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       Ricarda-Huch-Preis

       The triennial Ricarda Huch Prize has a decent winners list -- including Nobel laureates Herta Müller, way back in 1987, and Orhan Pamuk the year before he got the Nobel -- and they've now announced that this year's prize will go (on 3 October) to Ferdinand von Schirach.
       Two of his books are under review at the complete review: The Collini Case and The Girl Who Wasn't There.

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       Sara Danius' book on Dylan

       The Swedish Academy is currently embroiled in a far bigger and more institution-threatening crisis (see e.g. Andrew Brown's overview in The Guardian), but as far as their Nobel Prize-picking credibility goes (and let's face it, the fact that they pick the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature is pretty much all anyone cares about) I still think they did the prize and themselves near irreparable harm with their ridiculous 2016 selection. (Not that they haven't shown poor judgment on previous occasions -- including picking two of their own (though that was at least literarily more defensible), not to mention all the authors they've overlooked .....)
       Sara Danius was permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy at the time -- running the Nobel show, and the one who got to make the (jaw-dropping) announcement -- and while she has since left the position and the Academy (as part of the institution's ongoing ex- and implosion), she played a major part in the whole Dylan-spectacular (and was the public face of the Academy while Dylan played them for fools). Presumably in an attempt to defend, justify, and try to explain some of what happened, she's now gotten the jump on the journalists and scholars who want to write the definitive account of the farce that was -- not necessarily setting the record straight, but at least getting her spin out there first -- and written her very own book about it, Om Bob Dylan.
       Apparently originally published in a private Swedish Academy edition this winter, a Christmas present handout they prepare but which was not publicly available, today the commercial edition is coming out, from prestigious Swedish publisher Albert Bonniers; see also their publicity page.
       I'm guessing she treated the Academy deliberations as sacrosanctly inviolable (until the archives are opened, as is tradition, fifty years after the fact) -- it would have been (yet another) scandal if she hadn't -- , so there's probably little insight why they even started down this road (into the abyss ...) by making such a ridiculous selection, but apparently she does get into the whole comedy of errors that ensued (notably Dylan's ... recalcitrance about pretty much everything to do with the prize), as well as the media reactions, and she does try to make a case for why Dylan was deserving. (One almost has to admire her and them for sticking to their guns, and not admitting they made a howler of a mistake -- almost ... if it weren't for just how terrible that mistake was.)
       I do hope she mentions and reveals what she thought of this Dylan-cash-in (where they've now removed the part about charging US$2,500 a copy ...).
       I hope the book does get picked up abroad -- I am rather curious about it (to the extent that I am almost tempted to seek out the Swedish version and bumble through that ...).

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       Royal Society Science Book Prize shortlist

       They've announced the shortlist for this year's Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize
       All six titles are or will be US-available (the Daniel M. Davis and Hannah Fry are only due out in the fall, the Mark Miodownik only next February) -- but god forbid they'd be published under the same titles: Lucy Cooke's The Unexpected Truth About Animals is simply The Truth About Animals (don't want to throw anything unexpected at American readers !), Mark Miodownik's Liquid will be puffed up to Liquid Rules, and Simon Winchester's Exactly is The Perfectionists.
       The winner will be announced 1 October.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       Desirable Body review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Hubert Haddad's Desirable Body, just about out in English in the Yale University Press' Margellos World Republic of Letters-series.
       Fun premise: a man gets his head transplanted onto a new body.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

       New Words without Borders

       The August issue of Words without Borders is now up, with a focus on the: 'Crucible of Languages and Cultures: Writing from Macau', plus some: 'Short Stories from Panama'.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       Kruso review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Lutz Seiler's Kruso, now out in a US edition too.

       This came out from Australian publisher Scribe -- yet another instance of an Australian publisher taking the lead in translation, as has been happening more often in recent years -- but they've had a UK presence for a while, and now also some US distribution. But this book, which has been out for a couple of weeks in the US now, has gotten terribly little attention here (and not that much in the UK either). This despite it having won the German Book Prize !
       Okay, the German Book Prize winners don't seem to have the greatest in-English track record, but still, it was widely praised and a great success in Germany, and it's a good and fairly significant book. What gives ?
       (When I posted the review yesterday, the German edition actually had a better Amazon.com sales rank (1,445,088) than the English US edition (1,756,479) .....)
       For all the apparent greater interest in works in translation, I'm still astonished how many of the significant works that I cover (and the many more that I too can't get to ...) get little or no American print-media notice, with the online community only picking up some of the slack. Disappointing.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

       Children's literature in ... Nepal(i)

       This is pretty neat: The Kathmandu Post reports on World children's literature now in Nepali, as they held an event where:

The 80 participants at the event consisted of academics, authors, editors, librarians, teachers, volunteers and students who over the two days translated 60 children's books.

       They will now be available at the impressive Let's Read ! site, a: 'Digital library of children's books from around the world', available in a variety of languages.
       See also the Asia Foundation information page.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

       'Racist science fiction'

       In an opinion piece in The New York Times Ian Allen argues that: 'To understand why white supremacists back the president, we have to understand the books that define their worldview' -- leading him: Inside the World of Racist Science Fiction.
       Not a great place to be -- including with discussion of the one of these titles under review at the complete review, Jean Raspail's The Camp of the Saints. -- which is apparently: "at the top of the white supremacist best-seller list".

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       Document 1 review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of François Blais' Document 1, recently out in English translation from Bookthug.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

       Nigeria Prize for Literature longlist

       The NLNG Nigeria Prize for Literature rotates through four genres (fiction, poetry, children's literature, and drama) and this year is a drama year -- and they've now announced the eleven-title strong longlist (selected from 89 entries).
       I like how they look ahead to the next stages:

A shortlist of three is expected in September and a possible winner will be announced by the Advisory Board in October.

       'Possible' ? Well, they have failed to award a prize on previous occasions, so .....

       No mention of it in the longlist announcement, but when they announced how many entries there were they also noted:

This year's award will run concurrently with NLNG's Prize for Literary Criticism for which only two entries were received for this year's competition.

       Signs of an underdeveloped critical culture ? Given that the writing- and publishing-sectors seem to be thriving in Nigeria, it's disappointing that the critical sector is lagging. Not the most vital piece, but surely a helpful one for the overall literary culture.

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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       Now the Night Begins review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Alain Guiraudie's prix Sade-winning Now the Night Begins, just out in English from Semiotext(e).

(Posted by: M.A.Orthofer)    - permanent link -

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