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August 2010Nobody knows exactly what happened in the small town of Klausen, or rather, everyone knows: a bomb went off on the autobahn, or at a shack near the autobahn, or someone was shooting at the town from a bridge; it all stems from a fight over measuring noise pollution on the town square, or it was the work of eco-terrorists, or Italians. Only one thing is clear: Klausen was now a crime scene.
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September 2010Two scientists, Reitz Steyn and Ben Maritz, find themselves in a “transit camp for those temporarily and permanently unfit for battle” during the Boer War. Unsure whether they are to be conscripted into a commando, allowed to continue their mission, or executed for treason, the men despair at ever returning to their families, until they are sent on a bizarre mission...
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October 2010Sturla Jón Jónsson, the fifty-something building superintendent and sometimes poet, has been invited to a poetry festival in Vilnius, Lithuania, and his latest poetry collection, published on the eve of his trip to Vilnius, is about to cause some controversy in his home country—Sturla is publicly accused of having stolen the poems from his long-dead cousin, Jónas.
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November 2010Saer’s The Sixty-Five Years of Washington is simultaneously a brilliant comedy about memory, narrative, time, and death and a moving narrative about the lost generations of an Argentina that was perpetually on the verge of collapse.
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December 2010Over the course of a single overnight train ride, Francis Servain Mirkovic recounts the violent history of the Zone—the lands of the Mediterranean basin, Spain, Algeria, Lebanon, Italy—and recalls the damage that his own participation in that violence has wreaked in his own life. Mirkovic hopes that this night will be his last in the Zone, that this journey will expiate his sins, and that he can disappear with Sashka, the only woman he hasn’t abandoned, forever . . .
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Susan Bernofsky (Walser’s primary translator) and Barbara Epler (publisher at New Directions) come together to discuss Robert Walser’s lasting influence, the literary passion he inspires, and his recently published “microscripts” . . .
The schedule for the fall 2010 “Reading the World Conversation Series” is now available—featuring a discussion on Robert Walser and his “Microscripts,” a roundtable on the state of international publishing, and a roundtable featuring four international writers from Ledig House, a writers residency in New York that specializes in hosting authors and translators from around the world. Full details within.
“It offers Pilch—a prize-winning Polish novelist and newspaper columnist—a way to get at the absurdity of politics, the unbridgeable gap between public and private life. . . . The result is a vivid tension that is only amplified by the exuberance of the book.”
- FILI Editors' Trip
Last week I had the opportunity to travel to Helsinki, Finland at the invitation of the Finnish Lite... - New Issue of World Literature Today
The September/October issue of World Literature Today is apparently now available. (Stealing from Mi... - Reading the World #6: Forrest Gander
This month we talk with poet and translator Forrest Gander about approaches to translating poetry an... - Triple Canopy and the History-Future of Online Publishing
I've only begun to explore the contents, but the new issue of Triple Canopy -- subtitled "Unplaced M...