By Isabella Pinto Translated from Italian by Rebecca Walker The long-awaited English language version of Tiziana de Rogatis’ Elena Ferrante’s Keywords, recently published by Europa Editions, has been made possible thanks to the work of translator Will Schutt. The volume is ordered thematically by keyword, and is divided into seven chapters, preceded by a comprehensive […]
By Philip Graham The discovery of contemporary Bulgarian literature has been one of the great gifts of my recent reading life. Though the books I’ve read can be quite varied, they seem connected by a combination of humor and soulful melancholy, a literary territory where trouble can perhaps best be endured by sad or […]
By Gabi Reigh “Creativity requires a state of grace,” Magda Szabó wrote in her 1987 novel The Door. “So many things are required for it to succeed—stimulus and composure, inner peace and a kind of bitter-sweet excitement.” Szabó’s life was not short of excitement, “bitter-sweet” or otherwise. She lived through the Second World War (which […]
By Mark Polizzotti Engaging with the life of a person you’ve never met can be an odd and disorienting business, and few know this better than biographers. What would push an otherwise sane adult to devote months, years, even decades to ferreting out the minutiae of someone else’s existence? And what is the strange alchemy […]
By Sevinç Türkkan Modern Turkish literature in English translation has always been meager. The Turkish language and culture with their liminal position across the imaginary East-West divide have been a cause for anxiety, reluctance, and uncertainty for publishers. It is, however, encouraging to see that contemporary writers other than the giants of Turkish letters in […]
By Emma B. B. Doyle The title of Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season (La temporada de huracanes), translated by Sophie Hughes, takes its name from the many months in Mexico when you can look up at the sky and expect it to explode at any moment. This reliable forecast of disaster carries a similar tension to […]
By Kelsi Vanada My favorite books of translated poetry to hold in my hands are no ordinary paperbacks: they are made of cardboard and screen-printed cardstock and hand-sewn signatures, crafted by independent publisher Cardboard House Press (CHP)’s Cartonera Collective in Phoenix, Arizona. I delight in handling them, rotating them to read the poems placed horizontally […]
By Nathan Dize Gaza is a name capable of conjuring many ideas: statelessness, precarity, violence, tenuous and embargoed freedom, occupation, colonialism, and the list goes on. The name has also become synonymous with contested sovereignty in an era of postcolonial globalization, where, despite their supposed ephemerality, words like “settlements” and “camps” are imbued with a […]
By Robin Munby “I was definitely getting a taste for them, kisses from girls and gay gauchos” (132), says China, the eponymous narrator of The Adventures of China Iron, reflecting on the previous evening’s drunken orgy. Though set in the mid-19th century, you would be hard-pressed to find much common ground between the “erotics of […]
By Neal Baker Across several graphic novels and two collections of wordless comics, Marion Fayolle has demonstrated her surreal imagination and her inclination toward visual comedy and metaphor. In The Tenderness of Stones, translated in English by Geoffrey Brock, she brings her practice to the personal. Written during and about the decline of her father’s […]
By Sophie Drukman-Feldstein The translator’s sin is that of breaching the mythology which surrounds the individual authorial voice. The literary world erases the translator in order to preserve the liberal ideal of individual genius. And yet this erasure is not a distinctive problem of translation, but rather an expression of the worker’s alienation from the […]
By Griffin Nosanchuk Ángelo Néstore has already accrued a vast array of accolades at the age of thirty three. He works as a poet, actor, and professor in the Department of Translation and Interpreting at the University of Málaga in Spain. His collection of poems Actos Impuros won the 32nd Hyperion Poetry Prize. His poems […]
By Sergio Gutiérrez Negrón Caribbean literary archives are very much like those metaphoric sea shores where the leftovers of shipwrecks of the past constantly wash up. A few years ago, in an important anthology of Puerto Rican narrative published in Venezuela, novelist Marta Aponte Alsina put it best when she wrote that the literary critic […]
By Nataliya Deleva Faces on the Tip of My Tongue is a book difficult to describe in one sentence. It caught my attention at its launch event in London when my thoughts dissolved into a conversation with the co-translators Sophie Lewis and Jennifer Higgins. It was presented as a book about people on the fringe […]
Content Warning: Ableism By Julia Peterson When I decided to read Not A Clue, I was hopeful – perhaps naïvely – that it would offer a new take on a frustrating and overdone premise. The story is set in a psychiatric hospital in Paris, where a doctor has been murdered and six patients are suspected […]