2 and 2

If you’ve got a copy of the January 25th Publishers Weekly: Touch by Adania Shibli is featured as one of ten “first fiction” titles to be excited about this spring.  We agree!

January’s issue of ForeWord Magazine includes a fantastic review of Rien ne va plus:

Rien Ne Va Plus tricks its reader by a rapid mid-point shift from realism to metafiction—but only after the reader has fallen in love with Karapanou’s writing, and her inimitable main character…

Read more!

The January issue of the exciting new review venue Critical Flame brings George Fragopoulos’s fascinating essay on Margarita Karapanou, considering Kassandra and the Wolf, Rien ne va plus, and (forthcoming next fall from Clockroot!) The Sleepwalker.

Karapanou’s work then gives the impression of being constantly in motion, an active critique, perhaps, of Nietzsche’s claim that we need to read slower. When reading Karapanou one cannot read quickly enough. There is a velocity to her texts, both in the obvious sense of their structure and pacing as well as a visceral sense akin to vertigo. They seem always to be spinning wildly and recklessly towards unknown destinations (often that destination is death) or, rather, they seem to emphatically evade any firm lodging or easy comfort. Rien ne va Plus is a prime example, a novel that asks us, after a certain point, to return to its beginning and to question everything we have just read. Karapanou knew, as Deleuze did, that flight was by no means a passive activity, but rather the complete antithesis of passivity; that, in the wake of escaping, art could follow.

Read the full here—

A wonderful review of Landscape with Dog and Other Stories by George Fragopoulos at the Quarterly Conversation.

I think this is the best part of being a publisher: reading these responses, magically getting to see works one had thought one knew inside out anew.

Reading Ersi Sotiropoulos’s collection of short stories, Landscape With Dog, brings to mind the Surrealist masterpiece by Giorgio de Chirico, “Melancholy and Mystery of a Street.” Much like Chirico’s painting, most of Sotiropoulos’s stories are textual cul-de-sacs, seemingly expansive but surprisingly claustrophobic, tinged with dark corners, a series of streets that lead nowhere, leaving readers to puzzle over wonderfully unrealized moments and conclusions. There are no easily recognizable beginnings, middles, or ends in these stories.

Read in full here.

O (otherwise known as the Oprah magazine), following their excellent review, has just posted a great list of reading group questions for Uzma Aslam Khan’s novel.

—Pam

This week the folks at Three Percent announced their top 25 translated books of the year. We’re so pleased that our most recent book, Ersi Sotiropoulos’s Landscape with Dog, translated by Karen Emmerich, is among the books chosen. You can get it here, or get it from your favorite bookstore. I hope that’s not too old-fashioned to say. Three Percent is directing people to the wonderful Idlewild bookstore in New York, for any of the honored books.

Speaking of Landscape, stories from the collection are out recently in The Literary Review, an international journal of contemporary writing, and in the new issue of Two Lines, Wherever I Lie Is Your Bed, from the Center for the Art of Translation, both of which are making for great bedtime reading in our house. (By which I mean nothing other than reading. Ah, to be a student, or a ten-year-old, and read all day long.)

—Pam

Applications for NEA translation fellowships are due tomorrow! For more information, go to the website or email flaniganm@arts.gov.

Grants of $12,500 to $25,000 are awarded annually to translators of poetry and prose who are working on specific translations of published works from any language into English. Applicants must have published at least 20 pages of translation in literary publications or in book form between January 1, 1995, and January 7, 2010. Using the online submission system, submit 10 to 15 pages of translation and the original work, a project description, a resumé or biography, and the resumé of the writer of the original work with proof of eligibility by January 7, 2010. There is no entry fee. Visit the website for the required entry form and complete guidelines.

National Endowment for the Arts, Translation Fellowships, 1100 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, D.C. 20506. (202) 682-5772. Maryrose Flanigan, Literature Division Specialist.

And, there’s just a little more time (another week—due January 14, 2010) to apply for the PEN Translation Fund Grants: Grants of $3,000 are given annually to support the translation of book-length works of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction that have not previously appeared in English or have appeared only in an “egregiously flawed” translation. Submit eight copies of 10 to 12 pages of translation and the original passage, a short biography, a curriculum vitae, and statement outlining the work by January 14, 2010. There is no entry fee. Visit the website for the required entry form and complete guidelines.