opinionated commentary on literary matters - from the complete review

The Literary Saloon Archive

21 - 30 April 2009

21 April: 2009 Pulitzer Prizes | Bitterfittan rights sold | 'Chic lit' in Bahasa | Publishing in ... France
22 April: Penguin Books' African endeavors | Publishing ... abroad | Cela the plagiarist ?
23 April: William Gass interview | Chinese literature abroad | Is Meir Shalev the best Israeli novelist you’ve never heard of ? | Max Barry's online novel | A Failure of Capitalism review
24 April: Writing in ... Uganda | New World Literature Today | Chinese Letter review
25 April: Profiles: Anne MacLean - A.S.Byatt - Hilary Mantel
26 April: Los Angeles Times Book Prizes | Arab novel booms ? | Nagai Kafu profile
27 April: Rossica Translation Prize shortlist | Amit Chaudhuri profiles | Chess with the Doomsday Machine | Burma-books reviews
28 April: Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize | French translation prize finalists | Le Clézio reports | PEN World Voices - Tuesday events | António Lobo Antunes profile | Can Xue profile
29 April: Eileen Chang's Little Reunion | PEN World Voices festival report: Resonances: Writers on the Great Works | German critics' choice list - May | Crossing the Hudson review
30 April: PEN World Voices festival report: Anagrama: Celebrating 40 Years | Panel thoughts | Budapest Book Festival a success | The Other City review | Complete Review page at Wikipedia

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       PEN World Voices festival report: Anagrama: Celebrating 40 Years

       Among Wednesday's PEN World Voices festival events was Anagrama: Celebrating 40 Years of Independent Publishing in Spain, moderated by Anagrama publisher Jorge Herralde, and featuring five authors he publishes: Francisco Goldman, A.M. Homes, Siri Hustvedt, Daniel Sada, and Enrique Vila-Matas. Those who attended also got a small, slim hardback 'Deconstructing Anagram' -- basically a list of the authors and titles published by Anagrama (see also the publisher's official site), in various categories; it includes the '39 sobre 10' (the thirty-nine authors Anagrama has published ten or more titles by); at his Moleskine Literario-site Iván Thays (an Anagrama author, not yet available in English) lists the Club 10 de Anagrama (and also offers a nice picture of publisher Jorge Herralde in his office). (Interestingly, despite being so well-known for fostering Spanish-language talent, the top three are foreign authors: Paul Auster (28 titles), Patricia Highsmith (26), and Hans Magnus Enzensberger (21).)
       Despite some translation issues -- Herralde spoke (for the most part) in Spanish, as did Daniel Sada and Enrique Vila-Matas, and the first translator (who couldn't come up with the English word 'publisher', instead sticking to the Spanish 'editorial' ...) was pulled midway through the session -- it was a good introduction to the publishing house and the authors.
       Francisco Goldman said that Anagrama was the publisher he was most proud to be associated with (and, given the fine list of authors there, one can understand why), and compared it to Grove, New Directions, and Farrar Straus and Giroux rolled up into one. He also noted how it had become the pre-eminent publisher of newer Latin American fiction.
       Daniel Sada's Casi nunca sounds intriguing; it's good to hear that Graywolf is bringing it out (see also, for example, the mention at Conversational Reading), and while each of the panelists offered something entertaining (Homes read briefly from her work, Hustvedt described some of the discoveries she had made while researching neurological connections to writing and reading), it was Enrique Vila-Matas who is most the writer-showman and performed best with his playful exposition (see also, for example, the complete review review of his Bartleby & Co.); he's appearing at several more events, which are definitely worth seeking out (including him in conversation with Paul Auster (44 Anagrama titles between them !)). Anagrama has sixteen Vila-Matas titles out; there are only two in English, with a third coming ..... (They also have sixteen Bolaño titles out -- at least we're catching up a bit faster with those in English.)

       Now the pace is also really picking up at the PEN World Voices festival -- today's program already makes for some difficult decisions as to what to skip .....

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       Panel thoughts

       The first part of Leon Neyfakh's piece report that Literati Gathers Around a Big Dinosaur at PEN Literary Gala, Perhaps Symbolically in The New York Observer isn't particularly interesting, but if you scroll down you find:

the Daily Transom thought it’d be fun to ask some of the gala guests for their thoughts on the form. What makes a good panel discussion ? What can ruin one ? How does an effective moderator behave ?

       The responses are worth a look.

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       Budapest Book Festival a success

       At hlo Dániel Dányi reports that Budapest Book Festival breaks all records.
       It ran 23 to 26 April, and Ludmila Ulitskaya was the guest of honor.

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       The Other City review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Michal Ajvaz's forthcoming The Other City.
       This is one of those cases where I might have judged it more harshly because it was close to being a very good book (which makes its failures all the more glaring) -- as opposed to being just your run-of-the-mill mediocre work. (Publishers Weekly also recently reviewed it (scroll down) and found: "Ajvaz's novel is a gorgeous matryoshka doll of unreason, enigma and nonsense -- truly weird and compelling".)
       Dalkey is apparently bringing out more of his work (in which he continues to play similar tricks), and I am curious about them.

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       Complete Review page at Wikipedia

       I was flattered/amused to see that someone has put up a Wikipedia-page for the complete review; I'm curious as to whether it sticks and what it'll wind up looking like.
       (Still a lot one could add -- including quite a bit more under the 'Critical and popular reception', such as The NY Times Book Review's 3 October 2004 mention ("it remains one of the best literary destinations on the Web") or its being named one of Time's 50 Coolest Websites in 2005 .....)

       (Updated - 1 May): Wouldn't you know it ? No sooner said than done, as these mentions too have now been added. (Yeah, I did sort of expect that would happen.)

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       Eileen Chang's Little Reunion

       In Eileen Chang's fractured legacy in the Asia Times Peter Lee reports on how a newly published novel, 小團圓 ('Little Reunion'), by Eileen Chang (張愛玲) -- who passed away in 1995 -- has become a runaway bestseller in the Chinese-speaking world -- even though:

In 1976, Eileen Chang's close friend, Stephen Soong, earnestly advised her not to risk her reputation as a cultural icon -- and her position in the Taiwan literary market -- by publishing an autobiographical novel entitled Little Reunion.

"You might not only lose your reputation, your livelihood in the Taiwan literary arena might end and the goodwill accumulated over many years might be swept away. I'm not saying this just to alarm you. I have a lot of experience in PR, I've seen a lot, and I'm not pulling these fears out of thin air."

       But now the book has finally come out, and:

Little Reunion was published this year in Taiwan (February 24), Hong Kong (February 28) and China (April 8) editions in a whirlwind of publicity and sales.

Little Reunion is on the top of the best seller lists in Taiwan (where it is in its eighth printing) and Hong Kong (sixth printing).

In China, the first printing of 300,000 copies sold out before the official data of publication and a second printing of 100,000 has been ordered. The Taiwan version (in traditional characters) came out a month earlier and has already been bootlegged by China's indefatigable intellectual-property pirates. The false promise of the downloadable text has been used as a lure by China's equally indefatigable propagators of computer malware.

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       PEN World Voices festival report: Resonances: Writers on the Great Works

       Resonances: Writers on the Great Works was a panel held yesterday at which Muriel Barbery, Salwa Al Neimi, José Manuel Prieto, and George Packer discussed:

How does literature stay alive ? How does writing from the past persist, influence and spark contemporary writers and their work ?

       Each author was invited to choose a favorite classic that had inspired their own work, to read a passage from it, and explain their choice. It was a variation on last year's 'Books That Changed My Life'-panel (see my report), but the choices were generally much more closely tied to the authors' recent projects.
       George Packer was the only one whose choice didn't have an obvious connection with a specific work of his, as he described how he found himself somewhat at sea in his Peace Corps years in Togo. Glad for any books that came his way in the out-of-the way spot he was basically lost in, he picked up Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (get your copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk) again, and he found that while it didn't solve his problems it did put them in some perspective. He also mentioned later reading Chinua Achebe's critical piece on the novel that basically ripped it to shreds -- and finding that the book could withstand even such justified criticism, something that impressed him greatly.
       The Elegance of the Hedgehog-author Muriel Barbery mentioned how her husband and her were both completely enamored by Japanese culture, and how one of the benefits of the success of her book was that now they could afford to live there -- as they have, in Kyoto, for over a year now. Before then their only possibility of immersing themselves in Japanese life was through books and movies; she noted her passion for the films of Ozu (which of course play a prominent role in The Elegance of the Hedgehog), but since she couldn't pick a film she chose Okakura Kakuzo's The Book of Tea (get your copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk) -- an early twentieth-century text on the Japanese tea ceremony written specifically for Western audiences (indeed, written in English).
       She admires it (as representative for what she loves about Japan) for its sumptuous slowness, and beauty without tinsel and ornamentation -- as in Ozu's films, with their simplicity and purity that (so Barbery ...) also holds incredible complexity and unheard of depth. It was interesting to learn that The Elegance of the Hedgehog in fact does contain so much of her own philosophy and Japanophilia .....
       The Proof of the Honey-author Salwa Al Neimi (who writes in Arabic, but lives in France -- and spoke in French) described what she had tried to do in her novel: basically she had wanted to prove that modern Arabic language and literature can bear to deal with the erotic (which, she noted, is denied both by many Arabic writers in France (who, she says, believe Arabic is incapable of expressing intimacy and the like) and by Islamists (who think the sacred language can't be used to describe sex or the body)). Specifically, she wanted to prove it by building on older Arabic literature -- and so her choice was the only one of the many texts she used and consulted available in translation, Sheikh Nefzaoui's The Perfumed Garden (get your copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk). She also noted that it was the softest of these books (in 'porn'-terms) .....
       (At the end of the panel she fielded a question as to whether she faced any problems because of her book: she said the only problem was that it was banned in all the Arabic countries except those of the Maghreb and Abu Dhabi -- but while she considered censorship stupid, in this day and age it's hardly a problem any longer: her book can be easily downloaded over the Internet and is widely circulated throughout the region .....)
       The most interesting choice was José Manuel Prieto's, closely tied to his recently released in translation Rex (get your copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk). After getting a scholarship to study engineering in Novosibirsk when he was nineteen -- quite a change for someone from Cuba -- he spent most of the 1980s there, and among the few books he took along were some volumes of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past; as readers of Rex know, that book plays a central role in the novel, as the protagonist uses it as a sort of all-purpose textbook to teach from when he is hired as a tutor. But Prieto plays several games in the book, and there's a great deal of fakery and bluffing going on, and the book Prieto singles out isn't the one Proust is best known for but rather the pastiche-collection The Lemoine Affair.
       Part of the beauty of this choice is that the 'Lemoine Affair' that Proust used as the basis for his pastiches involves fake diamonds (or rather the promise of a method to create artificial diamonds) -- which is also a significant plotline in Rex ... ..

       Despite the need for (near-) simultaneous translation -- three of the four authors made most of their comments in languages other than English -- the panel (moderated by Esther Allen) didn't drag on too much and was both entertaining and informative. It is the sort of exercise that probably lends itself better to the written page -- i.e. would make a good anthology --, especially since there was practically no discussion between the participants, but they each made a decent case for their choices -- and the connections they drew to their recent work was particularly interesting.

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       German critics' choice list - May

       The SWR-Bestenliste -- the German critics' choice list -- for May is now available, with Ralf Rothmann top of the rather odd heap. David Rieff's memories of mom also placed well, as did Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke.

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       Crossing the Hudson review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Peter Stephan Jungk's Crossing the Hudson.

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       Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize

       love german books points me to the announcement that John Hargraves, Recipient of the 2009 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize (for a translation from the German); he gets to pick up the prize 8 June.
       Hargraves won for his translation of Michael Krüger's The Executor; see also the list of all the submitted titles (it was a good Höderlin-year -- three titles translated ! -- and surely Michael Hofmann had to be the odds-on favorite, with four (!) translations in the running).

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       French translation prize finalists

       The French-American Foundation and the Florence Gould Foundation have announced the finalists for their 22nd Annual Translation Prizes for translations from the French published in 2008.
       In the fiction category they are:

• Alison Anderson for The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery
• John Cullen for The Only Son by Stéphane Audeguy
• Jody Gladding and Elizabeth Deshays for Small Lives by Pierre Michon
• Douglas Parmée for Afloat by Guy de Maupassant
• Julie Rose for Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
• Roger Whitehouse for The Beast Within by Emile Zola

       In the non-fiction category they are:

• Ryan Bloom for Notebooks 1951-1959 by Albert Camus
• Matthew Cobb and Malcolm Debevoise for Life Explained by Michel Morange
• Janet Lloyd for Comparing the Incomparable by Marcel Detienne
• Jeremy Mercer for Abolition by Robert Badinter
• Richard A. Rand for Corpus by Jean-Luc Nancy

       The awards will be handed out 26 May.

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       Le Clézio reports

       Nobel laureate Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio appeared in New York in conversation with Adam Gopnik at the 92nd St. Y last Friday, and among the reports now available are those by:

• LaNew-Yorkaise
• James Marcus at Words without Borders
• Anna King at Own This City
• Johanna Safar at France-Amérique (in French)

       (Updated - 29 April): See now also Dedi Felman's report at LitKicks.

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       PEN World Voices - Tuesday events

       The PEN World Voices festival has started and, as usual, it snowballs from a few events early in the week (two yesterday, three today) to an overwhelming number by the end. But even the light schedule today should keep me fairly busy, as I try to take in two out of the three events.
       Resonances: Writers on the Great Works (14:30-16:00), with Muriel Barbery (The Elegance of the Hedgehog), Salwa Al Neimi (The Proof of the Honey), José Manuel Prieto (Rex, which I haven't been able to get my hands on yet ...), and George Packer, sounds like it has some good discussion-potential.
       The A Thousand Deaths Plus One-launch (19:00) with author Sergio Ramírez, translator Leland Chambers, and publisher Bruce McPherson should also be worthwhile -- it's an impressive book, and Ramírez should really be getting more attention: he is one of the leading Latin American authors, and deserves a much larger readership in the English-speaking world. (The complete review-review has been up for a while; somewhat embarrassingly, a blurb from the review also appears on the back of the finished book.)

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       António Lobo Antunes profile

       In The New Yorker Peter Conrad profiles Portuguese author António Lobo Antunes, in Doctor and Patient -- beginning:

The Portuguese novelist António Lobo Antunes discovered his literary vocation while delivering babies, performing amputations, and carving up corpses.

       Conrad also addresses the Lobo Antunes v. José Saramago debate, comparing the two authors:

Saramago is a benign magus whose fictions smilingly suspend reality; Lobo Antunes is more like an exorcist, frantically battling to cast out evil and to heal the body politic. Saramago’s secular parables, set mostly in unnamed or imaginary countries, easily float off into universality. Lobo Antunes remains obsessively local, worrying over the inherited ailments of Portuguese history and the debilities of its culture.

       While granting that Lobo Antunes writes some powerful stuff, I still find myself more of a Saramago man.

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       Can Xue profile

       In The Village Voice Eli Epstein-Deutsch wonders: Is Can Xue the Bruno Schultz of Modern China ?
       Five Spice Street recently came out, as part of the promising Yale University Press Cecile and Theodore Margellos World Republic of Letter series, and I should be getting around to reviewing it ... eventually. Meanwhile, see their publicity page, or get your copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.

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       Rossica Translation Prize shortlist

       As Lizok's Bookshelf notes, they've announced the Rossica Translation Prize shortlist.
       Two of the titles are under review at the complete review:

• The Sacred Book of the Werewolf by Victor Pelevin
• Ice by Vladimir Sorokin

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       Amit Chaudhuri profiles

       In The National Ben East profiles Amit Chaudhuri, in Rhythms of life, while in The Oxonian Review Lakshmi Krishnan interviews him, in The Quiet Rebel.
       Chaudhuri's new novel, The Immortals, is out in the UK (get your copy at Amazon.co.uk), but is only due out at the end of August in the US (pre-order your copy at Amazon.com).

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       Chess with the Doomsday Machine

       MNA announce that Tehran Book Fair to offer English version of Chess with the Doomsday Machine, as:

English copies of Chess with the Doomsday Machine, a Persian novel on the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war will be on sale at the 22nd Tehran International Book Fair.

       (Yes, another 'Sacred Defense'-novel .....)
       The Habib Ahmadzadeh novel has been published in the US by Mazda; see their publicity page, or get your copy from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk. I couldn't elicit a copy from them but chanced across a copy published by Soureh Mehr Publishing House in Tehran -- they printed an English-language edition of 2200, which presumably are the copies they'll be handing out at TIBF. Oddly, the entire text in this edition is printed in italics -- which actually gets to be rather irritating after a while (and at 390 pages this is quite a heap of a novel).
       A review will be up ... eventually.

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       Burma-books reviews

       The most recent additions to the complete review are my reviews of two Burma-related titles:

• Guy Delisle's comic-book Burma Chronicles
• Biyi Bandele's Burma Boy, now out in the US as The King's Rifle

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       Los Angeles Times Book Prizes

       They handed out the the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes on Friday; see the full list of winners and finalists here.

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       Arab novel booms ?

       AFP report that Arab novel booms as Beirut named World Book Capital -- but:

Literary critics agree that new novelists have not yet reached the heights of legendary writers like Mahfuz, the only Arab author to have been awarded the Nobel prize -- in 1988 -- or Sudan's Salih.

"It's good to have new blood, but many works out there cannot be qualified as novels, or are mediocre, relying only on audacity in talking about sex or religion," Idriss said.

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       Nagai Kafu profile

       In The Japan Times Michael Hoffman profiles Japanese novelist Nagai Kafu fifty years after his death, in A literary loner, noting:

There's not much left of Kafu today. Among the major Japanese writers of the early 20th century, he scarcely ranks as a survivor. Natsume Soseki, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Junichiro Tanizaki are the towering names of the period. Kafu, relatively speaking, is a footnote.

       See also the complete review's review of his Rivalry.

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       Profile: Anne MacLean

       At Semana translator Anne MacLean is profiled, in The invisible hand
       Two of her translations made the shortlist for The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize -- and Juan Gabriel Vásquez gives her a ringing endorsement:

MacLean is currently translating Historia Secreta de Costaguana, by Vásquez, who exchanged 200 e-mails with MacLean while she was translating The Informers. He explains that she represents a variety of translator which is almost nonexistent, "the one who, more than being an expert in one language, is obsessed and convinced that his task in life is to stop readers of his own language from dying without having known the readers of the other language".

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       Profile: A.S.Byatt

       Sam Leith profiles A.S.Byatt in The Guardian, in Writing in terms of pleasure -- and:

"She's very unusual for an English person," her friend Philip Hensher says of her, "in that she's quite suspicious of comedy. With most people, sooner or later, every intellectual position comes down to a joke -- it never does with her. This is where I think she fights with Kingsley Amis."

       (Her new novel, The Children's Book, is due out soon in the UK (pre-order your copy at Amazon.co.uk), and not so soon -- October -- in the US (pre-order your copy at Amazon.com).)
       Meanwhile, her sister, Margaret Drabble, takes part in this week's Small Talk-Q&A in the Financial Times .

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       Profile: Hilary Mantel

       Valerie Grove profiles Hilary Mantel in The Times.
       Mantel's new novel, Wolf Hall, is out in the UK (get your copy at Amazon.co.uk) -- and will come out in the US in ... October (apparently they're saving all the British novels for October ...; pre-order your copy at Amazon.com).

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       Writing in ... Uganda

       In the Daily Monitor Dennis D. Muhumuza thinks that Ugandans need to move out of this literary desert -- and that:

The problem is the inexistence of incentives to catalyse the production of the kind of creative works that will shape the social and intellectual lifestyle of this country as well as empower citizens to stand up for their rights.

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       New World Literature Today

       The table of contents -- and a very imited amount of that content -- of the May/June issue of World Literature Today is available online.

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       Chinese Letter review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Svetislav Basara's Chinese Letter.

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       William Gass interview

       William Gass spoke about 'baroque prose' at Columbia University, and Ian Corey-Boulet interviewed him at Spectacle, "Columbia's new online source for all things Arts & Entertainment", which looks like a useful online complement to the Columbia Daily Spectator.
       (There's quite a bit by Gass under review at the complete review; see, for example, the review of The Tunnel).

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       Chinese literature abroad

       Writing for Reuters Ben Blanchard finds that Chinese writers fail to find global voice, as:

Hobbled by censorship at home and ignorance of China abroad, Chinese writers are failing to make a major impact globally, 90 years after a landmark literary revolution.

       Apparently:

"Westerners are attracted to Chinese books which have been banned, even if they are not terribly good works of literature," Chen Jiangong, vice-chairman of the government-linked Chinese Writers Association, told Reuters.

"They are curious about them. So sometimes Chinese authors write simply to shock and be banned so as to appeal to foreigners," he added.

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       Is Meir Shalev the best Israeli novelist you’ve never heard of ?

       In The Jewish Week Eric Herschthal profiles Meir Shalev -- apparently The Best Israeli Novelist You’ve Never Heard Of:

In his home country, Shalev is mentioned in the same breath as David Grossman and Amos Oz, Israel’s two most renowned writers. And though his novels steadily appear in translations abroad (in over 20 languages no less), internationally he is still a lesser-known name. It is perhaps all the more surprising since his work has both literary cachet -- dense as it is with biblical allusions and classic literary themes -- and is also deliriously entertaining. Shalev, to put a finer point on it, is a funny writer.

       Shalev seems to be fairly well-known in the English-speaking world -- though he is much more popular in, for example, Germany (probably the second most popular Israeli author there -- after his cousin, Zeruya Shalev). He'll be appearing at the PEN World Voices festival next week. (There's nothing of his under review at the complete review, but see, for example, A Pigeon and a Boy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.)
       As to the best Israeli novelist you’ve never heard of (at least some of whose works are available in English), I'd probably go with Yoel Hoffmann -- and not just because the galley to his Curriculum Vitae arrived a couple of days ago (pre-order your copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk).

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       Max Barry's online novel

       Matilda points me to Max Barry's new online-novel, Machine Man, that's being presented a page (often a short page) at a time -- closing in on thirty so far.
       As Barry explains on the FAQ page:

It’s "real-time" because you read it as I write it. This isn’t a novel that’s been gathering dust in a drawer, pining for a publisher. It’s being written for the medium.

       (It doesn't appear to be completely real time -- i.e. you can't follow each character he types in -- but fairly close, anyway.)
       His other three novels are under review at the complete review -- Company, Jennifer Government, and Syrup -- and one of the consistent complaints has been that they seem unpolished and rushed -- so it's worrying to hear:

It might suck. It won’t be a polished work. It will be raw and chaotic, and at some point I will probably need to back-pedal furiously to extract myself from a literary dead end. It’s slightly frightening, the idea of being unable to go back and change anything. Usually I rewrite books until they beg me to stop.

       What is fairly clever, however, is that:

Right now it's free. At some point in the future -- probably around the time I decide the story is not going to implode -- the free trial will stop and you can buy the whole thing for $6.95.

       That's probably a good way to hook readers.

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       A Failure of Capitalism review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Richard A. Posner's forthcoming book on The Crisis of '08 and the Descent into Depression, A Failure of Capitalism, which should be getting a lot of attention (and which Posner will be updating regularly at a blog they're setting up, starting a week after publication).
       Given how many Posner titles are under review here this latest one was obviously a candidate to be quickly gotten to (though I haven't entirely been able to keep up with his ridiculously prodigious output over the past couple of years), but I think there's been too great a focus on economics-related titles hereabouts recently -- so many that I found it worthwhile to put up an Index of books on Business and Economics under Review. Still, in these times, it is a fun subject to follow.

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       Penguin Books' African endeavors

       Penguin Books (South Africa) have announced the launch of a 'Penguin African Writers Series', as well as the Penguin Prize for African Writing.
       Unimpressively, the series:

will include, among others, some of the very best books from the iconic Heinemann African Writers Series, which was established in 1962

       And, indeed, the first batch of six is AWS-heavy -- though three of the AWS titles appear to be listed as not in print at Amazon.com (including, surprisingly, Ngugi's Weep Not, Child). A bit more ... novelty would have been welcome, but I suppose it's a start .....
       The prize sounds a bit more promising, and I look forward to seeing how that develops.

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       Publishing ... abroad

       In The Guardian Chris Tryhorn and Richard Wray report that Publishers look to China and India to help them weather recession, as:

Across the world, the appetite for English language books is booming and publishers struggling under the weight of the recession in their core markets of the US and UK are increasingly turning their sights overseas.

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       Cela the plagiarist ?

       It continues: as, for example, Graham Keeley reports in The Times, Spain's Nobel laureate Camilo José Cela guilty of plagiarism (but, of course,they're appealing the verdict ...).
       This interminable case revolves around his 1994 novel, The Cross of St Andrew, but among the oddities of the case is that:

Both authors are dead and the case was launched by Jesús Diaz Formoso, son of the plagiarised author, against José Manuel Lara Bosch, managing director of Grupo Planeta, publishers of Cela’s book.

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

       2009 Pulitzer Prizes

       They've announced the 2009 Pulitzer Prizewinners (and the nominated finalists). As usual, none of the book-category-winners (or finalists) are under review at the complete review.
       Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout took the fiction prize -- beating out two other books by female authors, Louise Erdrich and Christine Schutt.
       None of the three finalists for the Criticism prize were book reviewers.

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

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       Bitterfittan rights sold

       Booktrade.info report that European Bestseller Goes To Constable & Robinson In London Book Fair Pre-empt, as they bought the rights to Maria Sveland's Bitterfittan, which has sold some 200,000 copies in Sweden (and already 20,000 in Germany, where it just came out).
       They translate the title as 'Bitter Bitch', and while that's a decent approximation for what she's trying to convey with the title it is decidedly not a literal translation. Admittedly, the Norstedts foreign rights page tries to sell it as 'Bitter Bitch' as well -- but that's presumably because they know a literal translation would be unprintable in American newspapers (and undisplayable at your local Barnes & Noble). (Let's put it this way: 'Bitter-Pussy' would be closer to the mark, but there's an obvious alternative.) The Germans (and German media in reporting on it) show no such compunctions.
       Andreas Campomar of Constable & Robinson enthuses:

Although Sveland has written Bitterfittan both in anger and sorrow, it is essentially a book about love -- Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook meets Erica Jong's Fear of Flying, but for the twenty-first century.

       Hmmmm. (The protagonist apparently reads and refers to Fear of Flying a lot.)
       See also Maria Sveland's officiella hemsida.

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

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       'Chic lit' in Bahasa

       Well, it's one way of making chick lit more palatable -- translate it into Bahasa, and call it 'chic lit': Bernama reports that More International Chic Literature To Be Translated Into Bahasa.
       Faiz Al-Shahab notes:

"If you are a Malay reader, sometimes you are denied the pleasure of reading chic literature as there are little works by international authors translated into Bahasa Malaysia. So now we will take the readers to the next level with good editorial by doing this translation as well as printing the book locally," he said.

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

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       Publishing in ... France

       At hlo they interview Gallimard editor Jean Mattern, in Books take time.
       Mattern emphasizes the value of the strict fixed-book-price system:

Thanks to this system of fixed prices, French publishing has kept its diversity.

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

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