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The Literary Saloon Archive

11 - 20 November 2020

11 November: Francis Bacon-themed imprint | Murakami in ... German | M. John Harrison Q & A | Toni Morrison's library
12 November: Warwick Prize for Women in Translation shortlist | Goldsmiths Prize | Dayton Literary Peace Prizes | Best-of-the-year lists | Death in a Bookstore review
13 November: Boekenbon Literatuurprijs | New Swedish Book Review | Académie française 2020 palmarès
14 November: Book sales in ... the UK | New Hyperion
15 November: Michael Emmerich profile | Giovanni Gioviano Pontano reviews
16 November: Premio Rómulo Gallegos | Premio Nacional de las Letras Españolas | Lockdown reading in ... the Czech Republic
17 November: New Latin American Literature Today | Translations from ... the Dutch
18 November: Sacred Defense Book of the Year awards | Behind The New York Times' book desk scenes | A Snake Lies Waiting review
19 November: (American) National Book Awards | Best Translated Book Award 2021 and 2022 | The Age of Skin review
20 November: Booker Prize | Bayerischer Buchpreis | Kawakami Mieko profile

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       Booker Prize

       They've announced the winner of this year's Booker Prize for Fiction, and it is Shuggie Bain, by Douglas Stuart.

       I haven't seen this one yet, but see the publicity pages from Picador and Grove Press, or get your copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.

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       Bayerischer Buchpreis

       They've announced the winners of this year's Bavarian Book Prize.

       The fiction prize went to Ulrike Draesner's Schwitters -- which, yes, is about Kurt Schwitters; see also the Penguin foreign rights page.
       The non-fiction prize went to Jens Malte Fischer's biography of Kark Kraus which I've been hoping to see (but haven't yet); see also the Zsolnay foreign rights page.

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       Kawakami Mieko profile

       At nippon.com Richard Medhurst profiles Kawakami Mieko: Amplifying the Voices of Japanese Women Through Fiction, mainly about her Breasts and Eggs.
       Interesting also to hear:

As a major project for her forties, Kawakami set out the goal of authoring a novel on religion. “I’d like to write about what kami [native gods] mean here in Japan or about society after Aum Shinrikyō,” she said, referring to the cult that launched gas attacks on the Tokyo subway in 1995. This time, she imagines a story centering on the youngest character from Breasts and Eggs, and she remarked that Midoriko’s voice is in the back of her head, talking to her.

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

       (American) National Book Awards

       The (American) National Book Foundation has announced this year's winners of its National Book Awards.
       Interior Chinatown, by Charles Yu, won the fiction prize; see the publicity pages from Vintage and Europa Editions, or get your copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.
       Tokyo Ueno Station, by Yu Miri, in Morgan Giles' translation, won the prize for translated literature; see the publicity pages from Riverhead and Tilted Axis Press, or get your copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.

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       Best Translated Book Award 2021 and 2022

       As Chad Post reports at Three Percent, the Best Translated Book Award is shaking things -- well, itself -- up, going on a hiatus of sorts for 2021: no translation-of-the-year prize, but rather a sort of retrospective celebration of the twenty-five previous winners, culminating in a public vote for a "BTBA Champion of Champions".
       Meanwhile, a 2022 prize is planned -- and: "ALL books from 2020 and 2021 will be eligible". Which should be interesting too .....

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       The Age of Skin review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Dubravka Ugrešić's latest collection, The Age of Skin, just out from Open Letter.

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       Sacred Defense Book of the Year awards

       As the Tehran Times reports, in Iran the Winners of Sacred Defense Book of the Year awards honored -- the eighteenth edition of these prizes presented by the Foundation for the Preservation and Publication of Sacred Defense Works and Values.
       Yes, they continue to take memorializing the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s very seriously.
       We don't see much Iranian literature in translation in any case -- see what little is under review at the complete review -- but I suspect this will always remain a very local genre.

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       Behind The New York Times' book desk scenes

       At The New York Times Insider Sarah Bahr has a Q & A with books-editors Pamela Paul and Andrew LaVallee, as this is apparently An Epic Week for the Books Desk, with coverage of the National Book Awards (which are being announced tonight), Booker Prize (tomorrow), as well as the announcement of the NYTBR's '100 Notable Books of 2020' on Friday (with the top ten to be announced on 23 November).

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       A Snake Lies Waiting review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of the third of the four volumes of Jin Yong's Legends of the Condor Heroes, A Snake Lies Waiting.

       Apparently we still have to wait a couple of months until the concluding volume -- A Heart Divided; see the publicity pages from St. Martin's Griffin and Quercus -- is out in English; I'll certainly get to it as soon I get my hands on a copy.

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       New Latin American Literature Today

       The November 2020 issue of Latin American Literature Today is now available online -- lots of material here, including the always useful collection of book reviews.

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       Translations from ... the Dutch

       The Dutch Foundation for Literature has published its latest batch of Translation Grants for Foreign Publishers -- 51 grants for the translation of Dutch fiction, children's books, non-fiction, and poetry.
       Always interesting to see what it is being translated into what languages -- though disappointing to see, yet again, that almost none of the subsidized translations are into English .....
       (That doesn't mean some of these titles won't be (or haven't been) published in the US/UK, but still .....)

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

       Premio Rómulo Gallegos

       They've announced the winner of this year's Premio Internacional de Novela Rómulo Gallegos, a leading Latin American book prize awarded every couple of years that has previously been awarded to Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Carlos Fuentes' Terra Nostra, and Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives (and, more recently, Eduardo Lalo's Simone), among others, and this year's winner is El país del diablo, by Perla Suez, selected from 214 entries; see, for example the report at Página|12.
       Impressively, this is already available in English, as The Devil's Country; see the White Pine Press publicity page, or get your copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.

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       Premio Nacional de las Letras Españolas

       They've announced the winner of this year's Premio Nacional de las Letras Españolas, a leading Spanish (government) author award; previous winners include Rosa Chacel (1987), Miguel Delibes (1991), Manuel Vázquez Montalbán (1995), Juan and Luis Goytisolo (2008 and 2013), and, last year, Bernardo Atxaga; this year's winner is the prolific Luis Mateo Díez.
       None of his work appears to be available in English.

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       Lockdown reading in ... the Czech Republic

       At Radio Prague International Ruth Fraňková reports that Czechs borrow record-high number of books from libraries, as readers stocked up for the latest lockdown a few weeks ago.
       Municipal Library in Prague spokesperson Lenka Hanzlíková reports:

People used the last day we were open, which was October 21, to the full. Many of them borrowed up to 60 books, the maximum that can be borrowed at once, to make sure they have enough for the during of the closure. Traditionally the biggest demand was for fiction.

       Sixty books ! That's a lot to lug home.

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

       Michael Emmerich profile

       In The Japan Times Kris Kosaka profiles Michael Emmerich: Wisely navigating the levels of translation.
       Among his responses:

Hardest word to translate: “It’s difficult to pinpoint one word. It’s almost more important to talk about how to translate the space between words. One thing I’ve wanted to do is to find a way to translate the tategaki [横書き] (vertical writing) aspect of Japanese. I’d love to someday have a translation in English that’s done in tategaki.”

       I hope he figures it out.

       Quite a few of Emmerich's translations are under review at the complete review, but I would also recommend his The Tale of Genji: Translation, Canonization, and World Literature.

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       Giovanni Gioviano Pontano reviews

       The most recent additions to the complete review are my reviews of the two dialogues by Giovanni Gioviano Pontano in the Harvard University Press I Tatti Renaissance Library edition of his Dialogues I, Charon and Antonius.

       I finally got around to this (it came out in 2012) because volumes II and III have just been published -- see the Harvard University Press publicity pages here and here -- and my copies arrived just as I was preparing these reviews.
       'Asinus', in the third volume, sounds particularly promising, described as: "less a dialogue than a fantastical autobiographical comedy in which Pontano himself is represented as having gone mad and fallen in love with an ass".

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

       Book sales in ... the UK

       In The Bookseller Mark Chandler reports that in the UK Total book sales fell 11% in first-half, PA stats show.
       The PA press release puts a different spin on it: Fiction makes a comeback in 2020, but the numbers add up the same: yes, fiction sales are up -- 13 per cent, "driven largely by digital formats" -- and audiobooks boomed, but the academic and export markets tanked; even children's book sales were down.
       Not really encouraging news .....

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

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       New Hyperion

       The November 2020 issue (warning ! dreaded pdf format !) of Hyperion is out.
       147 pages of excerpts, interviews, and essays -- more than enough to keep you covered for the weekend !

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

       Boekenbon Literatuurprijs

       They've announced the winner of this year's Boekenbon Literatuurprijs, one of the leading Dutch book prizes, and it is Zwarte schuur, by Oek de Jong -- which had already been shortlisted for this year's Libris Literatuur Prijs, the other leading Dutch novel prize.
       See also the Atlas Contact publicity page, or the (English) information page at the Dutch Foundation for Literature.

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

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       New Swedish Book Review

       The Swedish Book Review has a new URL, new look -- and a new issue is up (even if in the new design doesn't look as obviously issue-y (and, yes, obviously I preferred the old look)). Fortunately, the content seems to be the usual -- translations, articles, and, above all else, reviews of new (not yet translated) Swedish titles -- all well worth your time.

       The Swedish Book Review was recently profiled in the Times Literary Supplement by Paul Binding, in Evergreen darkness, where he describes it:

It features interviews with writers, publishers and translators (these last an important point of focus) as well as appraisals of literary achievements; generous extracts from significant recent works (usually novels); and, forming each issue’s end section, reviews of new Swedish books, both fiction and non-fiction. These reviews are exemplary, never resembling publishers’ blurbs but objectively analytic of content, style and context. Taken together they constitute paradigms of what’s going on in the Swedish book world.

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

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       Académie française 2020 palmarès

       The Académie française has announced (warning ! dreaded pdf format !) its 2020 palmarès -- 62 (!) literary distinctions.
       Among the bigger prizes: the Grande Médaille de la Francophonie goes to Lise Gauvin, the Grand Prix de la poésie to Michel Orcel, and the Grand prix de la philosophie to Claude Romano, all for their life-work.

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

       Warwick Prize for Women in Translation shortlist

       They've announced the seven-title shortlist for this year's Warwick Prize for Women in Translation.
       Only two of the titles are under review at the complete review:

• Abigail, by Szabó Magda, translated by Len Rix
• The Eighth Life, by Nino Haratischvili, translated by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin

       The winner will be announced 26 November.

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

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       Goldsmiths Prize

       They've announced the winner of this year's Goldsmiths Prize, and it is The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again by M. John Harrison; see, for example, Frances Wilson on Why M John Harrison's The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again won the Goldsmiths Prize.

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       Dayton Literary Peace Prizes

       They've announced the winners of this year's Dayton Literary Peace Prizes, awarded for works showing: "the power of literature to foster peace, social justice, and global understanding".
       The World That We Knew, by Alice Hoffman, took the fiction prize, and Know My Name, by Chanel Miller, took the non-fiction prize.
       The awards ceremony -- at which Margaret Atwood will also pick up her previously announced Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award, will take place 27 June 2021.

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

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       Best-of-the-year lists

       Quite a few best-of lists out by now, including:

        - "Sixty-five writers make their selections from around the world" in the Times Literary Supplement's Books of the Year 2020.
       (I'm fully on board with Michael Hofmann's selection: Roberto Bazlen's Notes Without a Text.)

        - Time offers their list of The 100 Must-Read Books of 2020.
       (I've seen, much less read, very few of these: Kawakami Mieko's Breasts and Eggs, Murata Sayaka's Earthlings, Scarlett Thomas' Oligarchy, and Susanna Clarke's Piranesi. (Yes, oddly enough, all fiction by women -- even though writing by women remains grossly under-represented at the complete review.)

        - They have: "The best reading of 2020, according to New Statesman friends and contributors", another extensive Books of the Year list.

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       Death in a Bookstore review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of An Inspector De Vincenzi Mystery by Augusto De Angelis, Death in a Bookstore.

       This 1936 novel, recently translated and out from Kazabo Publishing, is the fourth Inspector De Vincenzi mystery under review at the complete review.

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

       Francis Bacon-themed imprint

       Profile Books has announced the launch of Cheerio: "an eclectic new imprint and media company", in partnership with The Estate of Francis Bacon:

CHEERIO's name is a nod to Bacon’s favourite drinking toast. It will commission unexpected and provocative essay collections, books and films from contributors across a broad range of artistic disciplines. Much of its content is inspired by or linked to Francis Bacon’s life and work, although that is not a prerequisite. Its eclectic mix of fiction and non-fiction, drama and factual, will appeal to enquiring minds with an artistic bent.

       Their first books include an account of a 1988 exhibit, Bacon in Moscow, as well as a title by ... oh, dear ... DBC Pierre.
       Not the worst idea for an imprint; I'm curious as to how it develops.

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

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       Murakami in ... German

       Murakami Haruki's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was published in German as Mister Aufziehvogel in 1998 -- outrageously in a translation not from the original Japanese but rather Jay Rubin's English translation. And, as Murakami fans know and lament, on top of that, Rubin's translation is an edited version, with big chunks of the Japanese original missing. But now Ursula Gräfe has translated the whole thing directly from the Japanese -- as Die Chroniken des Aufziehvogels; see also the DuMont publicity page. (Page comparison: Mister Aufziehvogel is listed at 684 (hardcover) or 768 paperback, while Die Chroniken des Aufziehvogels clocks in at 1005 (hardcover).)
       At Deutsche Welle they take the occasion for Melissa Sou-Jie Van Brunnersum to write about Haruki Murakami and the popularity of Japanese literature.

       (For more about the early Murkami translations into English, see also David Karashima's essential Who We're Reading When We're Reading Murakami.)

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       M. John Harrison Q & A

       In the New Statesman Leo Robson has a Q & A with M John Harrison: “A number of novels don't sit well in their genre of origin”.
       His The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again is up for the Goldsmiths Prize, which will be announced today; see also the Gollancz publicity page.
       I haven't seen this one yet, but I hope to; two of his earlier books are under review at the complete review -- Light and Signs of Life.

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

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       Toni Morrison's library

       Via I'm pointed Michelle Sinclair Colman's piece in Galerie reporting that Toni Morrison's Personal Library Is Now Available to Purchase.
       Yes, her fancy Tribeca condo is up for sale -- asking price: $4,750,000 -- but her: "entire 1,200-plus collection of books is available for purchase in a separate deal, and the family is willing to negotiate on price".
       The piece includes quite a few odds and ends about the collection, such as that: "She owned multiple Stephen King novels but not the most popular ones", and that: "She had a few never-returned library books".
       I hope they make and publish a catalogue .....

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

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