opinionated commentary on literary matters - from the complete review

       Luis Goytisolo (1935-2026)

       Sad to hear that Antagony-author (and brother of the great Juan) Luis Goytisolo has passed away; see, for example, EFE report.

       Back in 2009 there were (strong) rumors that Luis was a finalist for the Nobel Prize (see my discussion at the time), and in retrospect it seems plausible; one wonders what his chances would have been if Antagony had been available in English by then, and he had a somewhat stronger international presence .....
       See also the Agencia Literaria Carmen Balcells author-page for information about more of his books (as he remains woefully under-translated into English).

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       James Joyce Archive

       An article about how James Joyce Archive brings 'unreadable' literature to life by Gillian Minaker at The Brock News is a fun reminder of this amazing work.
       The James Joyce Archive isn't his actual archive, but rather a sixty-three volume facsimile edition of all of Joyce's work and manuscripts, published in 1978 by Garland Publishing (list price at the time: US$4,995.00; apparently only 250 copies were published); they recently acquired a set at Brock University, occasioning the article.
       With online capabilities -- such as the James Joyce Digital Archive -- the printed version perhaps isn't as special and useful as once it was; still .....

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       Tanizaki Jun'ichirō profile

       At nippon.com Yamanaka Takeshi has a profile of Tanizaki Jun’ichirō: A Writer in Pursuit of Transcendent Beauty.

       Quite a few of Tanizaki's works are under review at the complete review:

• Devils in Daylight
• The Gourmet Club
• In Black and White
• In Praise of Shadows
• Longing and Other Stories
• The Maids
• Red Roofs & Other Stories
• The Siren's Lament

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       Publishing in ... Australia

       Via, I am pointed to the Kill Your Darlings post where they: '"asked publishers, agents, booksellers and writers" Should We Be Publishing Fewer Books in Australia ?
       Interesting responses from those in the industry.

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       Australian Landfall review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Egon Erwin Kisch's 1937 account of making Australian Landfall.

       Much of this deals with the trials he was subjected to as the government wanted to keep him out as an 'undesirable alien', a rather famous and still-remembered case (not least because of the ridiculous 'language-test ' that could be used to weed out undesirables). Too much about that resonates all too strongly still in the present-day 'alien'-hostile climate.

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       Passenger to Frankfurt review

       The second-most recent addition to the complete review is my review of the late Agatha Christie stand-alone, Passenger to Frankfurt, which for some reason I forgot to mention when I posted it a few days ago.
       (Sure, arguably it's forgettable -- but not that forgettable; sorry about that.)

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       Sergio Pitol profile

       At Mexico News Daily Alan Chazaro profiles the author, in How Sergio Pitol, one of Mexico's most influential writers, gave Xalapa its literary fame -- interesting not least because it points me to the Sergio Pitol Traductor-series published by the Universidad Veracruzana. Only twenty titles, but an interesting selection.

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       Indian literature, domestically and abroad

       At Times Now Girish Shukla argues that: 'a long pattern shows Indian readers embracing their own writers only after Western juries approve, and the habit carries real costs', in Why India Reads Its Authors Only After the West Approves Them (presumably paywalled -- but see e.g.).
       Not a new argument/complaint -- and not quite so straightforward as it's made out here: I think Shukla is flat-out wrong in claiming: "English translation is largely commissioned when international attention makes it viable"; as I often complain, many, many works written in Indian languages are translated into English and published in India itself but are hard to find in the US/UK, not getting published or distributed abroad.
       Shukla also suggests:

Publishers, knowing that domestic acclaim moves little, underinvest in exactly the literary fiction that prizes abroad later reward, an irony that outsources India's literary risk-taking to foreign juries.

       More problematically:

International juries reward what travels: Partition, borders, family, the themes legible from outside. The Indian books that do not travel, the office satire, the bureaucratic comedy, the untranslatably local, remain unvalidated and therefore, by the pipeline's logic, unread. The West's approval does not just select India's stars. It quietly edits India's sense of its own literature.

       Sigh. It's exactly those books that "do not travel" that I want to see/read.

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       Hershel Parker (1935-2026)

       Melville scholar Hershel Parker recently passed away; see now, for example, the tribute at Northwestern University Press or the obituary (presumably paywalled) at The New York Times.
       See also the publicity pages for volume one and two for his Melville-biography at Johns Hopkins University Press.

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       Roderick Literary Award shortlist

       James Cook University has announced the shortlist for its Margaret and Colin Roderick Literary Award, an A$50,000 prize "given to the best Australian book of the year that deals with any aspect of Australian life" -- making for a diverse list "including a picture book, memoir, poetry, YA and literary fiction, and an academic study".

       They've been giving out this award since 1967; previous winners include True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey (2000; he also won for Oscar and Lucinda in 1988) and The Tyrant's Novel by Thomas Keneally (2003; he also won for The Daughters of Mars (2012)).

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       Georg-Büchner-Preis

       The German Academy for Language and Literature has announced the winner of this year's Georg Büchner Prize, the leading German author prize, and it is The Fox and Dr. Shimamura-author Christine Wunnicke.
       She gets to pick up the €50,000 prize on 24 October.

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       Wales Book of the Year

       Literature Wales has announced the winners of its Wales Book of the Year awards, with the overall and fiction award in the English category going to A Room Above a Shop by Anthony Shapland, and the Welsh language fiction award going to Tri by Sonia Edwards (and the book of the year and poetry category prizes in Welsh going to Mae by Mererid Hopwood).

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       The book market in ... the US

       At Publishers Weekly Jim Milliot reports that in the US Print Book Sales Flat in First Half of 2026, with unit sales down 0.3 per cent -- though both adult (5.7%) and children's (5.3%) fiction saw gains (YA, down a staggering 25.65, not so much ...).
       Nice also to see sales numbers for the bestselling books, with one I've never heard of topping the list, Theo of Golden by Allen Levi having sold 1,197,952 copies in the first half of the year.

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       The book market in ... Germany

       The Börsenverein has released a summary of the latest figures, looking at the German market in 2025 (and the first half of 2026); Christina Schulte has an overview of Buchmarkt 2025: Die offiziellen Zahlen at Börsenblatt, but they also have a lengthy English-language press release emphasizing Reading literacy declining, Need for action is growing: Young people are buying fewer books.
       Yes: "The number of book buyers aged 10 to 15 fell by 30.6 percent in 2025 compared to the previous year", which is probably ... not great. Still:

Turnover for young adult titles grew in comparison to the previous year by 4.8 percent and 9.6 percent for new adult titles. The number of consumers in both genres also increased by 8.8 percent compared to 2024 and 47.5 percent since 2021.

       (Don't ask me what a 'new adult title' is; I honestly do not want to know.)
       For all the talk of there being too many books, the number of titles published declined considerably: "In 2025, 52,644 new titles were published; 9.8 percent less than in 2024 (58,346)" -- but, as they point out, that's also because backlist seems to be holding up impressively: "More than half of the books sold in 2025, that is 57 percent, were backlist titles".
       Fewer translations were published (8,465 titles, down from 8,756 in 2024), and fewer licenses for translations abroad were sold.
       And things are not looking up:

After the first six months of 2026, turnover in the central sales channels is down by 4.1 percent compared to the same period in 2024, while sales are down by 4.5 percent.

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       Premio Strega

       They've announced the winner of this year's Premio Strega, the leading Italian literary prize, and it is I convitati di pietra, by Michele Mari, which received 190 of the 643 votes cast; Platone, by Matteo Nucci, was the only other one of the six finalists to get over a hundred votes ((152).
       See also the Einaudi publicity page for I convitati di pietra -- and translator Brian Robert Moore reports that his translation is forthcoming from And Other Stories, "provisionally titled The Stone Guests".

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       And Other Stories profile

       At The Observer Ellen Peirson-Hagger profiles the publisher, in The rise of And Other Stories, the small press that went global.
       With two International Booker Prize winners in a row and lots of other great books, And Other Stories has been on a very nice run; quite a few of their titles are under review at the complete review, and I always look forward to seeing their titles.

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       'AI and the Future of Writing'

       At The Yale Review James Surowiecki spoke with Ayad Akhtar, Daniel Kehlmann, and Meghan O'Rourke as they considered AI and the Future of Writing.
       Lots of the usual points and arguments, but still of some interest. And Kehlmann notes:

I do think that novelists will soon be in the same situation the poets are in already; we are doing this for a much smaller number of people. And people will not stop reading our literary fiction because they’re reading AI-generated literary fiction; they will stop reading our literary fiction because they will engage with other entertainment formats created by AI -- chief among them, artificial friends. I think the big thing, the big deal of the future, will be those artificial people who know us really well, who talk to us all the time. It is something I’m worried about, and I think this is where readers will go.

       (I suspect 'artificial friends' will be a very big thing in the future, too, but I don't know that they will cannibalize novel-readership; while people enjoy interactive engagement -- sometimes even with real, rather than artificial people -- reading (novels, etc.) is a different kind of (and passive) engagement; I think people mostly want their tales (including also movies, TikTok videos, etc.) pre-packaged and simply presented to them rather than something they have to constantly respond to and interact with. (That said, I suspect that the overall interest in novels (much less literary fiction) is diminishing and the audience for them getting smaller, and that this trend will continue (and probably accelerate, given what one hears about the young'uns no longer being able to read longer texts of any sort).))

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       Biblioteca Eco

       As Unibo Magazine reports, Eco Library opens in Bologna, as they've opened the Biblioteca Eco at the University of Bologna.
       For a start:

The “Eco Library” currently holds over 32,000 volumes from Eco’s home and study in Milan. The collection will be completed in the same location with the arrival of the books from his country house in Monte Cerignone, in the Marche region.

       Neatly: "It is organised into thematic rooms that allow visitors to explore the main areas of Eco's thought", as:

Before the move, the original collection was studied, analysed and documented in detail in Eco’s Milan home, with the aim of preserving the organisation he had designed. The library was examined and mapped shelf by shelf, recording the position of the volumes, the thematic sequences and the juxtapositions between authors and disciplines. This made it possible to preserve, in the new Bologna location, the principles of organisation that had shaped the original library.

       For more background, see also the 2021 Unibo Magazine article about the preparations for Umberto Eco's library at Unibo

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       Erich-Fried-Preis

       They've announced the winner of this year's Erich Fried Prize, and it is Tram 83-author Fiston Mwanza Mujila.
       This Austrian author-award is notable for having only a single juror, a new one chosen every year, who decides who gets the prize; the juror, in turn, is selected by a three-member panel from the Internationalen Erich Fried Gesellschaft; this seems to have worked out pretty well so far -- the prize has a very solid list of winners.
       The selecting juror this year was Daniela Seel, selected in turn by Pegah Ahmadi, Hanna Engelmeier, and Olga Grjasnowa.

       Mwanza Mujila gets to pick up the €15,000 prize on 11 November.

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       Shahrnush Parsipur (1946-2026)

       Very sad to hear that Iranian author Shahrnush Parsipur has passed away; see, for example, the report at ArtReview.

       Her Women without Men was longlisted for this year's International Booker Prize; her Touba and the Meaning of Night is also under review at the complete review.

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       Constantijn Huygens-prijs

       They've announced the winner of this year's Constantijn Huygens Prize, a leading Dutch author prize, and it is Your Story, My Story-author Connie Palmen.

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       The Boy Friend review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Sandy Wilson's musical-hit (back in the day), The Boy Friend.

       While I await the arrival of my books from the US (the ship is docking in Bremerhaven tomorrow; the books should be here by the end of the month) and try to figure out my review-copy plan (not much coming in at the moment) I'm going through the books on site, which include many of my father's from the 1960s-1980s, concentrated in areas that are generally of lesser interest to me. Still, lots of finds that I can't pass up -- like this. Had no idea that this was such a popular musical (much less that Philip Larkin loved it -- while John Guare, asked: "Is there anything you'd change about The Boy Friend ?" answered: "Nothing. It's perfect. Why would you change it ?") or the associated trivia, including that Julie Andrews made her American stage debut in it, and that Ken Russell made a movie version (starring Twiggy !) -- how could I not know that ? (You can find clips of the musical numbers on YouTube.)
       And my 1972 (movie tie-in) paperback is a Penguin -- list price 25p !

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       CWA Daggers

       The Crime Writers' Association has announced the winners of its Daggers-awards, with The Death Of Us by Abigail Dean taking the Gold Dagger, and David Hackston's translation of Antti Tuomainen's The Winter Job winning the Crime Fiction in Translation Dagger.

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       Climate fiction (not) at The New Yorker

       Environmental Communication has published To Delight and Misinstruct: Strategic Environmental Narratives in New Yorker Fiction (warning ! dreaded pdf format !), where the authors looked at "474 short stories published between 2014 and 2023 in The New Yorker" -- and find that:

climate change exists in just 10.1% of these stories and freshwater pollution, marine pollution, air pollution, deforestation, species extinction / biodiversity loss, or toxic waste exists in 15.6%.

       Also:

When present, these environmental problems are mostly marginalized and minimized; structural culprits -- governments, corporations, and the wealthy -- are rarely assigned responsibility; and pro-environmental actions and behaviors are rarely modeled.

       A variety of interesting details surface in the course of the study, such as when they look at instances of characters engaging in: "pro- and anti-environmental individual behaviors" and find 50.2 per cent (!) of stories include a character who eats meat (while only 3.8 % have a character who litters). Also interesting: a chart comparing: 'The presence of climate change in the top five national newspapers, popular films, and the short stories of The New Yorker' (Figure 9).

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       Moss review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Klaus Modick's Moss.

       Bellevue Literary Press brought this out in English in 2020 (and I did get a copy of the translation, but don't have it at hand), but mine is the 1984 first edition from Haffmans Verlag, bought sometime around then because it was already clear that pretty much anything they published would be of interest. (The novel(la) has since been re-published first by Rowohlt and now Kiepenheuer & Witsch.)

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       HKW Internationaler Literaturpreis

       The German Haus der Kulturen der Welt has announced the winner of its international literary prize, one of the leading German prizes for a contemporary work in translation, and it is Timea Tankó's translation of Visky András' Kitelepítés, published (in German) as Die Aussiedlung; see also the Suhrkamp publicity page; hlo also has a short excerpt from the novel in English.

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       AI and writing

       At The Guardian David Shariatmadari considers How AI is changing language.
       As Peter Stockwell notes:

“If you want something that’s very familiar and very mediocre and entirely functional, it’s amazingly good at that.”

[...] “AI is really good at the lower levels. It’s learned lots of our syntactic structures and so everything looks well formed and grammatical. But, the higher up you go, the less good it is.” The arc of a story is particularly hard for AI to get convincingly right.

“If you’ve got an AI to write a narrative, it can do a pretty good job of having a sequence of events and something happen at the end. But it wouldn’t be a very tellable narrative,” he continues. “Nothing startling or interesting would happen. And if there is anything startling, it will generally look like a mistake, rather than a brilliant twist.”

       (I continue to think that much too little is made of the fact that many readers are perfectly satisfied with something: 'very familiar and very mediocre and entirely functional' and that much (successful, sales-wise) 'human'-written fiction that is published can be described that way as well.)

       Relatedly, via, I'm pointed to this preprint from a couple of months ago that doesn't seem to have gotten too much attention yet, StoryScope: Investigating idiosyncrasies in AI fiction (warning ! dreaded pdf format !), where the authors look at: "whether AI-generated stories can be distinguished from human ones without relying on stylistic signals, focusing on discourse-level narrative choices such as character agency and chronological discontinuity" (i.e. whether we can stop focusing on the (over)use of em-dashes or words/phrases arranged in groups of three as supposed give-aways that a text is AI-written) -- and:

We find that AI-generated stories cluster in a shared region of narrative space, while human-authored stories exhibit greater diversity. More broadly, these results suggest that differences in underlying narrative construction, not just writing style, can be used to separate human-written original works from AI-generated fiction.

       Amusingly, too, for example, they find that: "Claude produces notably flat event escalation, GPT over-indexes on dream sequences, and Gemini defaults to external character description". See also the more detailed analysis in the paper itself, such as that:

Claude has the most distinctive narrative profile of the five LLMs. Its stories are defined by its restraint: event intensity escalates less than in any other source, and narrative voice is the most uniform. Claude takes a reverent/continuist approach to literary tradition, honoring and extending storytelling conventions rather than subverting or challenging them (62% of Claude stories vs. 39–56% across other sources). It favors epilogues and avoids dream sequences, producing careful, consistent stories that favor quiet endings over ’avalanche’ endings.

       Meanwhile, for example: "GPT centers on socially-oriented storytelling: gossip and rumor as a plot mechanism"
       (I note that this analysis is also very helpful to 'authors' in deciding which LLM they should use, depending on the type of story/novel they want to 'write'.)

       Anyway, fascinating stuff -- but maybe they should have gone with a different name than 'StoryScope' since that already seems to be taken by quite a few other ventures as well, which might make for some (or considerable) confusion (e.g.).

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       Granthabarsha Fellowships

       As reported at The Sentinel Assam, Assam Publication Board Announces ‘Granthabarsha 2025 Fellowship’.
       It's not a huge amount of money -- ₹50,000 per person/manuscript -- but they hand out a lot of these -- 49 this year, selected from 547 manuscripts submitted by 512 authors -- and this seems a great way to support local authors.

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       Bernd Rauschenbach (1952-2026)

       Sad to hear that Bernd Rauschenbach, who has done so much for Arno Schmidt and at the Arno Schmidt Stiftung has passed away; see, for example, the obituary by Tilman Spreckelsen in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

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       EBRD Literature Prize

       The European Bank for Reconstruction and Developement has announced the winner of its EBRD Literature Prize -- "for a work of literary fiction from an economy where the Bank invests" -- and it is People and Trees, by Akram Aylisli (tr. Katherine E. Young); see also the Plamen Press publicity page.

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       John Hodgson Q & A

       At the American Library of Congress' '4 Corners of the World'-weblog they have Nevila Pahumi's Q & A with Ismail Kadare-translator John Hodgson, in Conveyances: Ismail Kadare, Albania's Beloved Modern Novelist, in Translation.
       Hodgson also recommends: "Besides Kadare, readers should read Fatos Lubonja" (and also mentions that Kadare and Lubonja: "are famously not quite on good terms") -- but sadly far too little is available by other Albanian authors.

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       The West End Horror review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of A Posthumous Memoir of John H. Watson, M.D. -- yes, a Sherlock Holmes story -- by Nicholas Meyer, The West End Horror.

       (I know I probably shouldn't be bothering with this sort of stuff, but I did enjoy Meyer's The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, back in the day, -- and I find it hard to resist novels which allow me to add to my favorite index, that of Real (and Fictional) People in Works of Fiction, as Meyer stuffs a fair number into this one.)

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       Bukhman International Booker Prize

       For a while it was the Man Booker International Prize, more recently it's just been the International Booker Prize and now it's the Bukhman International Booker Prize, as Bukhman Philanthropies have announced that they are upping their support for the prize, making a ten-year commitment to fund it -- generously, too, as: "the prize fund for the winning title will double from £50,000 to £100,000, split equally between the author and translator or translators".
       (For a while, from 2019 on, the Bookers were funded by the Crankstart Foundation, and it is kind of disappointing that they didn't insist on naming rights as well, so we didn't have the Crankstart International Booker Prize.)

       The Booker-folk have also released the news, along with the announcement of who will be doing the judging for the 2027 prize: Katie Kitamura will chair, with the other judges being: Patrick McGuinness, Caleb Azumah Nelson, Olga Ravn, and Tessa Thompson.
       The longlist will be announced 16 March 2027, and the shortlist on 15 April.

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       Prémio Camões

       They've announced the winner of this year's Prémio Camões, the most important Lusophone author award, and it is Lídia Jorge; see also, for example, the report at the Portuguese American Journal, Writer Lídia Jorge awarded prestigious Camões Prize.
       Not much of her work has been translated into English but, for example, Liveright did bring out her The Wind Whistling in the Cranes a few years ago; see their publicity page.
       See also the Literarische Agentur MertinWitt Jorge page, with extensive information about her books (and their rights-status) -- where they note also that there's a: "Full English translation by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson available" of her Misericórdia” but apparently no US/UK publisher has picked that up yet (!).

       (Updated - 4 July): I'm not paying enough attention to my own posts: it's been a great summer for Jorge, as she recently also picked up the Austrian State Prize for European Literature (see my previous mention) -- and Misericórdia has apparently been picked up, by Archipelago !

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       New Murakami novel (in Japanese)

       Shinchosha has released a new novel by Murakami Haruki, 夏帆: The Tale of KAHO; see their publicity page, or the official press release.
       See also the Kyodo report, Japanese author Haruki Murakami releases 1st novel in 3 years, where they report that: "The first print run will total 250,000 copies".
       They also explain that:

The novel compiles and reimagines his four-part "Kaho" series, which was published in the literary magazine Shincho from June 2024 to March 2026.

       No word on when we can expect the (inevitable) English translation.

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       Commonwealth Short Story Prize

       There's been a considerable to-do about one of the regional winners for this year's Commonwealth Short Story Prize looking a lot like AI had played a role in its writing. The Commonwealth Foundation looked into it and judged that: "After a thorough consultation with our judges and careful consideration of all available information, we are satisfied that AI was not used to write the winning stories" (yes, there were concerns about some of the other regional winners as well ...). They've now doubled down in naming this year's winner -- and, yes, it's the story all the original fuss was about. See also, for example, Ella Creamer's report in The Guardian, Short story accused of being AI-written wins overall Commonwealth prize.
       Leaving aside the AI-debate, I do note that a lot of the commentary once that became a question/issue noted that the story in question was ... stylistically problematic, regardless of who/what wrote it. The judges clearly thought otherwise.
       I am also impressed/baffled by the fact that the winning title was selected from "7,806 entries across the Commonwealth". How on earth does one judge a prize with that many entries ?

       (Updated - 4 July): There has been a lot of commentary about this -- see now, for example, Jannatul Naym Pieal making the case for What Jamir Nazir's Commonwealth win tells us about literature in the age of AI -- and of particular interest is Will Oremus' Q & A with the prize-winning author at The Atlantic, Thoughts on AI, From a Prizewinning Writer Accused of Using AI.

       (Updated - 5 July): See now also Sneha Bhura's TNN Q & A with the award-winning author, 'Are we saying a piece of writing can’t be that polished unless AI wrote it ?' : Jamir Nazir.

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       Greenlandic literature

       The Czech Měsíc autorského čtení -- 'authors' reading month' -- sounds pretty awesome in any case, but impressively this year the country featured is Grónsko -- Greenland !
       As Alexis Rosenzweig reports in his Q & A with Pavel Drábek, the festival's international programme director, at Radio Prague International, Greenland's: "little-known literary scene will be showcased through around 30 events in Brno and five other cities". Thirty events ! Very impressive.
       And An African in Greenland-author Tété-Michel Kpomassie will make an appearance as well !

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       'Most Anticipated Books' of (the second half of) 2026

       At the Literary Hub they now have their list of Most Anticipated Books of 2026, Part Two -- i.e. for the rest of the year. 258 books !
       Obviously not nearly everything of interest (Vollmann's A Table for Fortune doesn't make the cut, for example ...), but certainly a decent/useful overview, especially of the major titles coming out.

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       New World Literature Today

       The July-August issue of World Literature Today is now out, featuring: 'Iranian Literature: Persian Antecedents & Contemporary Culture'. (See also the Persian literature under review at the complete review.)
       As always, don't forget to check out the extensive book review section.

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       William T. Vollmann profile

       As already widely linked to, at his big reader bad grades Alexander Sorondo has a profile of the author, in "We Always Leave Things Unfinished"
       I'm looking forward to seeing Vollmann's A Table for Fortune -- see the Arcade publicity page -- and it's interesting to hear that:

New York Review Books was interested, but they weren’t willing to assume full legal liability in case some of the living people that Vollmann depicts as characters in the novel decided to sue.

       And then also that Vollmann sold it to Arcade for us $10,000 -- hey, he might actually earn out that advance .....

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       Un-Slop Fiction Prize

       Via I'm pointed to the announcement that the results are in for the Hyperstition Unslop AI fiction writing contest -- you can read the winning entry ('The June') and all the other finalists and semi-finalists via the links at that page.
       An interesting experiment, whose basic rule was:

Your final submission must be a 500 to 10,000-word short story, generated entirely by AI. No human-written prose and no post-generation editing. To verify this, you will submit your full prompt harness / setup alongside your story.

       No human-written prose !

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

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       Such a Strange Lady review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of A Biography of Dorothy L. Sayers by Janet Hitchman, Such a Strange Lady.

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

       Ursula K. Le Guin Prize shortlist

       They've announced the shortlist for this year's Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction, a US$25,000 prize for "a single work of imaginative fiction". Translations are eligible, and one of the nine shortlisted titles is a translated work.
       The winner will be announced 21 October.

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

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       Translating ... Korean into Chinese

       At The Chosun Daily Hwang Ji-yoon looks at some length at how Korean Literature Workshop Targets Chinese Market's 10 Million Potential.
       The 'potential'-number comes from the fact that, apparently: "Chinese bestsellers often exceed 10 million copies, a scale far beyond that of other markets".
       Poet Son Taek-su and Blowfish-author Jo Kyung-ran participated in the workshop.
       Interesting to see Son's response to one question:

While a free translation might make the message more accessible, a literal translation, though slightly unhelpful, could spark new imagination in readers.

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

       Krasznahorkai László Q & A

       At The New Yorker Merv Emre has a Q & A with the Satantango-author and Nobel laureate, in László Krasznahorkai Writes Because He Fails (presumably paywalled, but see e.g.) -- where he admits: "I am not a reader of my own books. I would never voluntarily reread any of them.".
       Among his other observations:

When I was young, when I thought about the future, I naturally concluded that the world was unacceptable. The only possible solution was to rebel against it. There is a saying which I would like to slightly modify, or add my own interpretation to: The young person who does not rebel has no heart. And the old person who rebels is ridiculous. Although I do not consider the viewpoint that I am espousing ridiculous, it does mean that one has to rebel for the sake of the clarity of ideas. Somehow, we have to get back the definitions of what is what. We have to once again decide what evolution means, what is God, and so on.

If we do not look at these concepts anew and from a different perspective, then we don’t really have much of a chance, because wherever we end up we will simply be moving while standing in place, and only moving as much as the Earth moves with us.

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

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       Ingeborg Bachmann Preis

       They held the read-aloud-and-be judged-to-your-face Ingeborg Bachmann Prize over the weekend, and Lena Schätte won the main prize, for her text 'Was wir tragen'; you can read it here (warning ! dreaded pdf format !).

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

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       Прэмія Гедройця longlist

       Pen Belarus has announced the longlist for its Jerzy Giedroyc Literary Award; see also the Naša Nìva report, Longlist of nominees for Jerzy Giedroyc Literary Award for the best Belarusian book of 2025 announced.
       As publishing freely is ... difficult in Belarus at the moment, submissions tend to be published abroad -- or, as is the case with several of the longlisted titles, theirs is 'encrypted participation'.

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

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       Canadian literary posthumity

       Carole Gerson has recently published a book on Literary Life After Death: Commemorations of Writers in English-Speaking Canada -- see the Concordia University Press publicity page -- and at The Conversation she offers an overview of her findings, in Literary life after death: How authors are remembered across Canada -- with titbits such as that: "L.M. Montgomery enjoys the greatest number of memorial sites".

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

       Writers' Union of Moldova awards

       The Writers' Union of Moldova handed out their annual awards; see, for example, the Radio Moldova report, Literary elite awarded at Moldova Writers' Union Gala 2026.
       Val Butnaru won the prose award, apparently for his novel Insomnia; see also the Editura ARC publicity page.

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

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       Emily Wilson Q & A

       Emily Wilson Q & A has a new book out -- Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys Through Ancient Literature; see the publicity pages from Liveright and Profile Books -- and at Publishers Weekly Henry Carrigan now has What Do Cardi B and Aristophanes Have in Common ? PW Talks with Emily Wilson.
       Among her responses:

Translators really care about truth. I want to give someone a very authentic experience that is very much like being immersed in the original. So, what is fidelity to the original ? Playing it safe isn’t always fidelity if the original isn’t playing it safe.

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

       Book sales in France in 2025

       The French publishers' association, the Syndicat national de l'édition, has reported on the French book market for 2025 and the numbers aren't great; see their summary (you can also download the full report here).
       While fiction sales were up slightly, overall volume was down, to 419.6 million -- and the start of 2026 has apparently continued the downward trend ("Les premiers mois de 2026 accentuent encore davantage la tendance du secteur, affichant une baisse en valeur et en volume qui n’épargne aucun segment, pas même la littérature", and see also the recent Le Monde article (presumably paywalled), where they note: "Book sales have fallen by an average of 8% since January 1, with a disastrous May").
       For all the worry about there being too many books, the number of new titles published -- 36,119 -- is down considerably from the 2019 peak (44,660).
       Translation-rights-sales are also down, to 13,517 (down 5.3 per cent compared to 2024) -- with Italian (12%), Spanish (10%), and Chinese (9%) the biggest markets (ahead of English, with 7% -- pretty much the same as German and Dutch).

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

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       Claire Fuller Q & A

       This week's 'The books of my life'-column at The Guardian features Claire Fuller.
       Among her responses:

The book I could never read again

Last year I read and loved Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry but I’d never read it again because it’s 843 pages and there are too many other books I want to read.

       She also admits: "I missed out on nearly all the classics when I was younger so last year I decided to read one a year". Admirable that she's looking to the classics -- but at one a year she's not going to be getting to too many .....

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

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