Tag Archives: Open Letter Books
The Poetics of Pain and Return: Zou Jingzhi’s “Ninth Building,” Translated from Chinese by Jeremy Tiang
The mesmerizing power of “Ninth Building” comes from the mixture of the quotidian, run-of-the-mill activities humans undertake and the violent, absurd practices promoted by political propaganda during the Revolution. Described from a passive, observant, sometimes sarcastic perspective, suicide, beatings, permanently damaging diseases, fatal accidents, and pangs of loss, guilt, and regret bleed into the mundane activities of a child playing, card games, pranks, harvest, lumber, brigade duties, and composing and performing music.
Bulgarian Women Who Run With the Wolves: An Interview with Nataliya Deleva and Izidora Angel
Nataliya Deleva’s Four Minutes is a profound, heart-breaking meditation on the notions of home and homelessness, with their myriad manifestations and implications in our contemporary world. An orphanage in post-communist Bulgaria provides the physical and psychological coordinates of the narrator’s existence and of the book’s loose narrative frame. Called simply and anonymously “the Home,” this […]
Immigrant Song: “My Brother’s Suitcase: Stories About the Road,” Translated from Bulgarian by Ekaterina Petrova
By Izidora Angel No matter where you go, you always carry your loneliness with you, even that unconscious black loneliness that bubbles up beneath the youthful optimism. Zoya Marincheva, “Meridians and Demons” (from My Brother’s Suitcase) That Bulgarian even exists to translate from is a kind of miracle. Despite the country’s rich history dating back […]
Notes from the “Empire of Stupidity”: Dubravka Ugrešić’s “The Age of Skin,” translated from Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursać
By Ena Selimović On a recent bike ride in East Bay, northern California, I hear a voice from the direction of a foldout chair and turn to see a maskless woman waving a clipboard. She tells her masked audience of two that she is trying to get something added to a local ballot. She repeats, […]
Shifting Sands: Mercè Rodoreda’s “Garden by the Sea,” Translated from Catalan by Maruxa Relaño and Martha Tennent
By Eva Dunsky In Garden by the Sea, translated by the mother-daughter team Martha Tennant and Maruxa Relaño, Rodoreda writes a slow burn towards catastrophe. Rodoreda, who is considered one of the most important Catalan writers of the 20th century, wrote often about Catalan society in the years before and after the Spanish Civil War, […]
In Defense of the Minotaur: Georgi Gospodinov’s The Physics of Sorrow, Translated by Angela Rodel
Reviewed by Stiliana Milkova “I imagine a book containing every kind and genre,” declares the first-person narrator of Georgi Gospodinov’s novel The Physics of Sorrow. And then he elaborates, “From monologue through Socratic dialogue to epos in hexameter, from fairy tales through treatises to lists. From high antiquity to slaughter house instructions. Everything can be […]