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The Literary Saloon Archive

11 - 20 December 2018

11 December: Banipal Prize shortlist | JQ Wingate Prize longlist | Boyd Tonkin's global best for 2018 | Bullseye ! review
12 December: PEN America Literary Awards longlists | WLT's 75 Notable Translations of 2018 | Man Booker judging panel | Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature | The Tale of Cho Ung review
13 December: Highest-paid authors | Reading in ... Canada | Worst of the year ?
14 December: Rentrée de l'hiver | Decals review
15 December: Sheikh Hamad Award for Translation and International Understanding | Wilhelm Genazino (1943-2018) | The Embalmer review
16 December: El País' 50 books of the year | Athens Prize for Literature
17 December: Nakamura Fuminori Q & A | When I was Old review
18 December: International books-of-the-year lists | Underrated Russian writers ?
19 December: PEN Translates awards | Words without Borders favorite reads | EEG review
20 December: Best translated books in ... India | Mabati Cornell Kiswahili Prize shortlist | Caine Prize judging panel | The Plotters review

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       Best translated books in ... India

       The Times of India has a list of nine of The best translated books of 2018 in India (plus a 'special mention' non-Indian title).
       Great to see these titles available in English -- but frustrating how few are/will be readily available in the US/UK. Poonachi will be published in the US, and we'll probably see some of the rest -- but given that they're already translated, it's disappointing that there isn't more interest from publishers.

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

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       Mabati Cornell Kiswahili Prize shortlist

       The Mabati Cornell Kiswahili Prize for African Literature has now announced its shortlists -- three fiction titles and three poetry in Kiswahili, selected from 116 entries.
       Great to see a prize like this which focuses on writing in an African language.
       The winners will be announced in January.

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

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       Caine Prize judging panel

       They've announced the judging panel for the prestigious short story prize, the Caine Prize for African Writing.
       Peter Kimani will chair the panel, which also includes Sefi Atta, Margie Orford, Olufemi Terry (a previous winner of the prize), and Scott Taylor.
       The shortlist will be announced in May, and the winner will be announced 8 July.

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       The Plotters review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Kim Un-su's The Plotters.
       It'll be interesting to see how this Korean thriller -- which has attracted a decent amount of pre-publication buzz -- does, and whether it broadens interest in Korean fiction in English translation. Despite now coming out with a splash -- from Doubleday (US), Random House Canada, Fourth Estate (UK), and Text (Australia) -- it's taken a while to make it into English; in France they're already a couple of books ahead, most recently with his Jab ! (see the Serge Safran éditeur publicity page).

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

       PEN Translates awards

       They've announced the PEN Translates autumn 2018 awards, funding part or all of the translation costs for sixteen projects, translations from fifteen languages and twelve countries.
       Among the well-known authors whose titles are getting support are Krasznahorkai László and Marie Darrieussecq, but there are also quite a few new authors with some interesting-sounding works.

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

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       Words without Borders favorite reads

       Words without Borders collects Our Favorite International Reads from 2018 (and What We'll Be Reading in 2019) -- an interesting selection (and preview of some promising-sounding titles).

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       EEG review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Daša Drndić's EEG -- out already in the UK, from MacLehose Press, but American readers will have to wait until March for the US-New Directions edition.

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       International books-of-the-year lists

       Among international books-of-the-year lists we now also have:

• The best Canadian fiction of 2018 at CBC
  
  
• "Some of our leading authors' favourite books of 2018" at the (South African) Sunday Times, in: Books of the year 2018
  
  
• The Brittle Paper Booklover's Guide: African Books of 2018
  
  
• "A shelf-load of Australian writers" select: The best books of 2018 ... and a few more as well at the Sydney Morning Herald, and Nicole Abadee selects The 17 best books of 2018 at the Australian Financial Review
  
  
• Los mejores libros españoles de 2018 at El Mundo -- where they agree with El País (see my previous mention) and say Manuel Vilas' Ordesa tops the lot

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       Underrated Russian writers ?

       At Russia Beyond Georgy Manaev suggests these are 5 underrated Russian writers.
       Only one of them has a title under review at the complete review -- Gaito Gazdanov's The Spectre of Alexander Wolf -- and he seems to be enjoying something of an English-language renaissance. Meanwhile, I'm not sure re. the top choice that: "Not many people know Lermontov as a prose writer"; I would have guessed that in English Lermontov is mainly known for A Hero of Our Time.

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       Nakamura Fuminori Q & A

       At nippon.com they have Author Nakamura Fuminori in Conversation with His French Translator, Myriam Dartois-Ako.
       The Cult X author's novel The Gun has been made into a film, directed by Take Masaharu, which came out in Japan last month; no word yet on a US or UK release; see also the official movie site.
       This isn't the first of his books to have been made into a film -- in fact: "It's the fifth. There have been three this year alone."

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

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       When I was Old review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Georges Simenon's When I was Old -- notebooks from the early 1960s.

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       El País' 50 books of the year

       El País has published their annual list of the top 50 books to appear in Spain in the past year, as selected by critics and writers; see 1-30 and 31-50.
       Book of the year is Manuel Vilas' Ordesa; see the Alfaguara publicity page or get your copy at Amazon.es. None of Vilas' work appears to be available in English translation; his previous novel was titled: Lou Reed era español.
       The rest of the top fifty are an interesting mix -- including lots of classic works in translation, including Dante (4th), the collected poetry of Ingeborg Bachmann (11), Ezra Pound's Cantos (36), as well as some letter-collections: the Hannah Arendt-Gershom Scholem correspondence (13) and Kafka's letters (18).
       Three of the titles are under review at the complete review:

• 14. The Order of the Day, by Éric Vuillard
• 17. Crashed, by Adam Tooze
• 39. The Writer and the World, by V.S.Naipaul

       An interesting variety, in any case -- and some promising-sounding recent Spanish-language fiction, some of which we'll hopefully get to see in translation sooner or later.

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

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       Athens Prize for Literature

       Fiction-finalist Theodoros Grigoriadis alerts me to this year's Athens Prize for Literature, a leading Greek literary prize that selects both a best Greek novel and the best fiction in translation.
       They've now announced this year's winners, and Kostas Logaras' Τα πουλιά με το μαύρο κολάρο won for best novel; see also the Εκδόσεις Καστανιώτη publicity page
       Beating out, among others, books by Margaret Atwood and Elena Ferrante, a translation of Aleksandar Gatalica's The Great War won best foreign work -- a novel that already won the leading Serbian literary prize, the NIN Award, and which Istros published in English translation a few years ago; see their publicity page, or get your copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.
       See also the report at Grigoriadis' weblog.

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

       Sheikh Hamad Award for Translation and International Understanding

       The Qatari Sheikh Hamad Award for Translation and International Understanding is in a league of its own, handing out prizes for translation into and from Arabic. The top five categories pay out a total of $200,000 each ($100,000 for the winner, $60,000 for the runner-up, $40,000 for a third-place finisher), while ten others apparently each pay out $100,000 to (just) the winner.
       They've now announced this year's prizes -- though not yet at the official site, last I checked, but The Peninsula covers all the winners (and those who placed and showed in the categories where that pays out) and most of the projects, in SHATIU 2018 winners honoured.
       The winners were selected from 203 submissions from 31 countries.

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       Wilhelm Genazino (1943-2018)

       German author Wilhelm Genazino -- winner of many literary awards, including the biggest German author prize, the Georg-Büchner-Preis (in 2004) -- has passed away; see, for example, the (German) reports in the NZZ (by Roman Bucheli) and FAZ (by Edo Reents).
       None of his work is under review at the complete review, and, somewhat surprisingly, only The Shoe Tester of Frankfurt has been translated into English; see the New Directions publicity page, or get your copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.

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       The Embalmer review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Anne-Renée Caillé's The Embalmer -- just out in French last year, and now available in English, from Coach House Books.

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       Rentrée de l'hiver

       The publishing calendar in France has long revolved around the 'rentrée', the traditional new-title-dump in late August, but in recent years the winter rentrée has grown from out-of-season mini-dump to outright competitor. So also this year (well, more 2019 than 2018, but this season, anyway), when the rentrée de l'hiver will see 493 novels -- 336 French, and 157 in translation -- introduced to the market; see also the Livres Hebdo report.
       492 of the titles are, however, overshadowed by a single one -- Michel Houellebecq's new novel, coming out on 4 January, with an announced print run of 320,000. The title -- Sérotonine -- was only revealed this week -- and at Amazon.fr it is still listed simply as: 'title to come', but it's clearly by far the most anticipated book of the rentrée and, indeed, the year, so far.
       No word yet when the English translation will appear -- though there's no question it will -- but Submission-(etc.-)author Houellebecq has just made a prominent appearance in the US media, offering: 'One foreigner's perspective' in the January issue of Harper's, in Donald Trump Is a Good President. That should attract ... some sort of attention; maybe Fox News will have him on .....

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       Decals review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of the Complete Early Poems by Oliverio Girondo, Decals, just out from Open Letter.

       Girondo was the husband of Norah Lange -- whose People in the Room came out (and I reviewed) earlier this year. (They're not the only couple I reviewed his-and-her books by this year -- I also got to several Ross Macdonalds and a Margaret Millar.)

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

       Highest-paid authors

       At Forbes Hayley C. Cuccinello reports on who were the World's Highest Paid Authors Of 2018: Michael Wolff Joins List Thanks To 'Fire And Fury'.
       For a 'world's' list the methodology -- "Earnings estimates are based on data from NPD BookScan and Box Office Mojo, as well as interviews with industry insiders, including some of the authors themselves" -- is very US-industry-centric; they don't seem to have looked at, for example, the successful Chinese online-specializing writers: Zhang Wei, known as Tangjiasanshao, reportedly took in US$16.8 million in 2015 and $18 million in 2016, which would put him well in the top ten, for example.
       As far as the Forbes list goes: James Patterson took the top place for the tenth time -- earning more than the second (J.K.Rowling) and third (Stephen King) authors combined.
       The only one of these authors with any titles under review at the complete review is Stephen King.

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       Reading in ... Canada

       There's a new report out, More Canada: Increasing Canadians' awareness and reading of Canadian books (warning ! dreaded pdf format !); in the The Globe and Mail Simon Houpt summarizes the findings in Canadians reading fewer domestic books, report shows -- including:

More Canada, a report from an ad-hoc think tank of industry veterans that included publishers, librarians, broadcasters and booksellers, says the English-language share of sales of books by Canadian authors in this country fell more than 50 per cent in a little more than a decade: to only 13 per cent last year from 27 per cent in 2005.

       Fascinating also that:

In 2017, first-year sales of Canadian-authored books published by multinational-owned companies averaged 2,241 copies for a retail value of $55,414 a title; books published by Canadian-owned companies averaged a mere 343 copies, for a retail value of $8,110 a title. That same year, multinationals released 851 new titles and Canadian-owned companies published 2,551 titles, for a total of 3,604 new titles by Canadian authors. (That represented only 4.6 per cent of the total number of new titles published in Canada, with books by foreign authors totaling 77,721.)

       Canadian-owned French-language publishers have also suffered a decline, but not nearly as much English-language ones.

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       Worst of the year ?

       There seems to be an endless making of best-of-the-year-lists around this time of the year, but far too few people/outlets call out the worst, as well.
       At Entertainment Weekly Seija Rankin and David Canfield at least offer a few examples of the awful in their overview of The year in books: Everything you need to know 2018's biggest titles -- and at the Open Letters Review Steve Donoghue can at least be depended on to give his run-down of The Worst Books of 2018: Fiction ! and The Worst Books of 2018: Nonfiction !

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

       PEN America Literary Awards longlists

       They've announced the longlists for the 2019 PEN America Literary Awards, in categories from debut short fiction collections to biography, essays, 'general nonfiction', science writing, and sports writing.
       Among the categories are also the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation -- and the PEN Translation Prize, for fiction; the semifinalists (as the longlisted titles are being referred to -- I must have missed the quarterfinals ...) for that are:

• Aetherial Worlds, by Tatyana Tolstaya, tr. Anya Migdal
  
  
• CoDex 1962, by Sjón, tr. Victoria Cribb
  
  
• Disoriental, by Négar Djavadi, tr. Tina Kover
  
  
• The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter, by Matei Calinescu, tr. Adriana Calinescu
  
  
• Love, by Hanne Ørstavik, tr. Martin Aitken
  
  
• Moon Brow, by Shahriar Mandanipour, tr. Sara Khalili
  
  
• Mourning, by Eduardo Halfon, tr. Lisa Dillman and Daniel Hahn
  
  
• Nevada Days, by Bernardo Atxaga, tr. Margaret Jull Costa
  
  
• The Stone Building, by Aslı Erdoğan, tr. Sevinç Türkkan
  
  
• Trick, by Domenico Starnone, tr. Jhumpa Lahiri

       There's quite a bit of overlap -- four titles -- with the longlisted titles for this year's National Book Awards (with another NBA longlisted title longlisted in a different PEN category -- The Beekeeper, in the more remunerative general nonfiction category). It'll be interesting to see whether the Best Translated Book Award will also follow suit, or go in entirely different directions when they announce their 25-title strong longlist next spring .....
       I have to say, I find the list fairly middling -- the Calinescu (which wasn't NBA-eligible -- dead author) is a good get, but I think most of 2018's standouts were elsewhere .....
       (The one title I am really surprised hasn't popped up anywhere -- and has barely gotten any review attention -- is Carlos Rojas' The Valley of the Fallen (translated by no one less than Edith Grossman), one of the most impressive books I've read this year; maybe the Best Translated Book Award will see fit to longlist it .....)
       The finalists will be announced in January.

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

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       WLT's 75 Notable Translations of 2018

       World Literature Today has announced its '75 Notable Translations of 2018'.
       They note that it is an: "admittedly incomplete curation"; among titles I'd suggest are major omissions are ... Carlos Rojas' The Valley of the Fallen (see also above), the two Dag Solstads, T Singer and Armand V, and Willem Frederik Hermans' An Untouched House.

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       Man Booker judging panel

       They've announced the judges for next year's Man Booker Prize for Fiction: Peter Florence (chair), Liz Calder, Xiaolu Guo, Afua Hirsch, and Joanna MacGregor.
       The longlist will be announced in July.

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

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       Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature

       They've announced that مسرى الغرانيق في مدن العقيق, by Saudi author Omaima Al-Khamis has won this year's Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature; see also the Dar Al Saqi publicity page; as part of the prize an English translation will be forthcoming from American University in Cairo Press.

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       The Tale of Cho Ung review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of A Classic of Vengeance, Loyalty, and Romance, the Chosŏn Korean classic, The Tale of Cho Ung, just out in a nice edition from Columbia University Press.

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

       Banipal Prize shortlist

       They've announced the four-title shortlist for this year's Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for translations from the Arabic.
       The four titles are:

• Concerto al-Quds by Adonis, tr. Khaled Mattawa
• Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi, tr. Jonathan Wright
• The President's Gardens by Muhsin Al-Ramli, tr. Luke Leafgren
• Using Life by Ahmed Naji, tr. Ben Koerber

       The winning title will be announced in late January

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       JQ Wingate Prize longlist

       They've announced the thirteen-title longlist for the 2019 JQ Wingate Literary Prize -- "awarded to the best book, fiction or non-fiction, to translate the idea of Jewishness to the general reader".
       Quite a variety, with seven works of fiction, and six of non, and with three of the works in translation. None, however, are under review at the complete review.
       The shortlist will be announced mid-January.

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       Boyd Tonkin's global best for 2018

       At the Art Desk Boyd Tonkin selects: "a baker's dozen of translated novels to widen literary horizons", in Global fiction: the pick of 2018.

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       Bullseye ! review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of a collection of twenty of Tsutsui Yasutaka's stories, Bullseye ! -- the sixth Tsutsui-title under review here.

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