Translated from German by Joel AgeePublished by University of Chicago Press / Pushkin Vertigo, 1959, 192 pages. Original version published in 1958. The book starts with the narrator travelling to Chur in Switzerland to give a lecture on the art of writing detective stories. The talk is not a success, and the writer meets Dr. …
Category: Books in translation
Of Love and Other Demons: Gabriel García Márquez
Published by Penguin / Vintage, 1995, 160 pages. Original version published in 1994.Translated from Spanish by Edith GrossmanReview by Thomas Peak Once, under a stifling October sun, Gabriel García Márquez, the great Latin American writer, observed the unceremonious wrenching open of a centuries-old tomb. As the sacred stones were smashed into rubble, bundles of luminescent golden …
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Zig-zagging around the world
The Vegetarian by Han Kang, translated from Korean by Deborah Smith / The Summer Book by Tove Jansson, translated from Swedish by Thomas Teal / The Three Daughters of Eve by Elif Shafak / The Black Box by Alek Popov, translated from Bulgarian by Daniella and Charles Edward Gill de Mayol de LupePublishing details belowReview …
Minae Mizumura on the Hegemony of English: from The Claremont Review of Books
Mark A. Heberle reviews Minae Mizumura's The Fall of English, which looks at how English dominates not only science and the internet, but also publishing, and what this means for other languages, especially Japanese. To quote from the article: "This powerful, insightful work analyzes the predicament of world languages and literatures in an age when …
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Voices from Chernobyl—The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster: Svetlana Alexievich
Translated from Russian by Keith GessenPublished by Picador / Dalkey Archive Press, 2005, 240 pages. Original version published in 1997. "Chernobyl is like the war of all wars. There's nowhere to hide. Not underground, not underwater, not in the air." On 26 April 1986, Energy Block No. 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station was …
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Italian Shoes: Henning Mankell
Translated from Swedish by Laurie ThompsonPublished by Vintage, 2009, 247 pages. Original version published in 2006.Review by Susanne Karine Gjønnes We find an aging man, living by himself on a Swedish island, where he has been in solitude since his retirement 12 years back. Once, he made a mistake he regrets so badly he has …
The Neapolitan Novels: Elena Ferrante
Translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein(Publishing details at the end.)Review by Tom Peak The Neapolitan Novels, Elena Ferrante’s four-piece masterwork, is rightly the literary sensation of its time. The epic narrative, sweeping over decades, gallivanting across the life of a neighbourhood—a city—a country—an epoch, rummaging through the lives of the two protagonists, a pair locked …
50 Must-Read Books in Translation
When we started the reading challenge two years ago, we planned to read, between us, a book from every country in the world. Books written originally in English didn't take us very far, so we either read in other languages (French, Spanish, German) or looked for literature in translation. Fortunately, translations into English are growing, …
The Yacoubian Building: Alaa Al Aswamy
Translated from Arabic by Humphrey T. DaviesPublished by HarperCollins, 2004, 272 pages. Original version published in 2002. Peel away the outer layer of an apartment building and you’ll find a microcosm of life: people living in within a small space with their joys, sorrows, triumphs and despair, just a few feet away from each other. …
Ann Morgan on Reading
Ann Morgan considered herself well read — until she discovered the "massive blindspot" on her bookshelf. Amid a multitude of English and American authors, there were very few books from beyond the English-speaking world. So she set an ambitious goal: to read one book from every country in the world over the course of a …
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