Three Percent - Article

Open Letter at Book Expo America 2013

Kaija Straumanis — Thu, 23 May 2013 21:00:00 GMT

As the week comes to a close, we at Open Letter Books are getting ready to join the masses of publishers, agents, authors, translators, and book people in general in for Book Expo America 2013.

In addition to getting ramped up to see familiar faces and meet new ones, we’ll be toting around a copies of a few of our forthcoming titles and plenty of shiny new catalogs to wave in your faces. And since we won’t be at a booth this year, we will instead be everywhere. In the book lines, at publishers’ booths, at snack-and-wine gatherings in the aisles, not ~~not~~ crashing evening parties/events/galas, in the whispers of the wind, in the rustling of exhibit floor curtains. In your free book totes and dreams.

Creepiness aside, we’ll basically be around all week and would love to see and talk to you! If you plan on being at BEA and want to catch us, shoot us an email, or check in with us on Twitter to see what we’re up to. (We may even have a few free A Thousand Morons shirts to hand out!) You can also use the same means of contact to avoid us. As an added bonus, Chad will be speaking on panels Wednesday at the Alternative and Independent Presses panel at 10:40 a.m., and Friday at the The Translator & Editor panel at 3:30 p.m.

Hope to see many of you there!

Latest Review: "El arte de la resurrección" ("The Art of Resurrection")

Kaija Straumanis — Thu, 23 May 2013 14:00:00 GMT

The latest piece in our Reviews Section comes to us from Jeremy Osner, and is on Hernán Rivera Letelier’s El arte de la resurrección (The Art of Resurrection) from Alfaguara.

Jeremy Osner blogs about reading and translation at READIN. He is currently working on a translation of El arte de la resurrecctión (and the translated excerpts in his review are his), a novel that is looking for an English-language publisher. Here’s a bit from his review:

“The small stone plaza was floating in the midday heat. The Christ of Elqui, kneeling on the ground, his gaze thrown back on high, the part in his hair dark under the Atacaman sun—he felt himself falling into an ecstasy. It was no less than this: he had brought it to pass. Had restored to life a dead man.”

We meet Domingo Zárate Vega, “better known to all as the Christ of Elqui,” in the opening lines of Hernán Rivera Letelier’s The Art of Resurrection (Alfaguara, 2010), at the moment of realization of his greatest dream—of having mastered “the sublime art of resurrection.”

The novel follows Zárate Vega in his travels through a key week in the midpoint of his 20-year mission of penance. It is the last week of December, 1942; the randy Christ of Elqui journeys to the mining camp of Providencia in search of the woman he believes will play the role of Mary Magdalene to his messiah. His story of finding her and losing her again is an exuberantly comic, darkly sarcastic, heartfelt, and sentimental meditation on faith and loss, played out against labor unrest among the striking workers of Providencia.

Life in the mining camp is threaded together with currents in Chile’s history in a way that is characteristic of (and perhaps unique to) Rivera Letelier’s narrative voice. He has spent the past 20 years telling the stories of people who worked in the nitrate industry, an industry that formed a vital part of the story of Chile and, by extension, that of the industrialized world. (No nitrate, no industrialized agriculture!) The degree of precision and fluency in his descriptions of scene and character bring that past alive.

For the rest of the review, go here.

Latest Review: "There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories" by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

Kaija Straumanis — Tue, 21 May 2013 14:00:00 GMT

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is by Brendan Riley on There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, from Penguin.

Brendan has written reviews for Three Percent in the past, and has worked for many years as a teacher, translator, editor, and writer. Brendan’s translations include works by Juan Velasco, Álvaro Enrigue, Juan Filloy, and Carlos Fuentes.

Petrushevskaya’s previous collection published in English, There Once Lived A Woman Who Tried To Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby (Penguin Books), came out in 2009 and was on NPR’s/Jessa Crispin’s 2009 best books list. Here’s a bit of Brendan’s review:

This slender, uncanny volume—the second, best-selling collection of stories by Russian author Ludmilla Petrushevskaya to appear in the U.S.—has already received considerable, well-deserved praise from many critics and high profile publications. Its seventeen short tales, averaging ten pages each, are grouped into four sections: “A Murky Fate”; “Hallelujah, Family!”; “My Little One”; and “A Happy Ending.” But there is little in them that readers might associate with true love or happy endings. Instead, Petrushevskaya delivers a smoking, cast-iron skillet upside the head: promiscuity, serial mendacity, domestic violence, dangerous liaisons, ineptitude, ignorance, geriatric romance, and cringing fear. Love stories? Seamy debacles. Hookup sagas set in a grim Moscow and environs. Coupling stories fraught with meanness, misery, and egregious misunderstanding. Workaday women sharing sour, collective apartments and tawdry, loveless lives. Young women who flower, suffer abuse, and wither. Collision stories: hapless women, old before their time, thwarted by brutal men. Though the men hardly fare better.

In “A Murky Fate,” an unmarried thirty-something living with her mother engineers a drab tryst with a man who services her with perfunctory courtesy and patronizing affection. But in her sterile office-life world, this confers a blissful memory: “There was nothing but pain in store for her, yet she cried with happiness and couldn’t stop.”

“The Fall” offers a dry comedy of manners at a state-run seaside resort where vacationers escaping the rainy north come together only to multiply one another’s misery. A gaudy temptress attracts a mooning pack of suitors before efficiently selecting her tall, confident “Number One.” They find the sex lovelorn travelers yearn for, only to fall prisoner to their coveted exclusion and inevitable teary separation: “Our golden couple has departed. The delicate Carmen and her faithful husband, Number One, are jetting through the frozen air away from each other, back to their children and spouses, back to the cold, and to hard, grim work.”

For the rest of the review, go here.

"The Black Spider" by Jeremias Gotthelf [Books I'm Excited About]

Chad W. Post — Thu, 16 May 2013 14:00:00 GMT

I think it was two summers ago that I was last in Chicago for the annual Goethe Institut Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize Extravaganza. (I love these gatherings. The award ceremony, the people involved with German literature, the panels, etc. It always seems to be a beautiful couple days weather-wise as well, which makes the whole series of events even cooler. Hopefully I can get invited back sometime . . .)

Anyway, at that last Extravaganza, Susan Bernofsky was telling me that she was translating the creepiest book that she’d ever worked on—something called The Black Spider. I suspect that most everyone reading this (not including Michael Orthofer, because Michael knows about everything) is unfamiliar with this classic of world literature, about which Thomas Mann claimed, “there is scarcely a work in world literature that I admire more.” That won’t be the case this fall.

Here’s the description from NYRB:

It is a sunny summer Sunday in a remote Swiss village, and a christening is being celebrated at a lovely old farmhouse. One of the guests notes an anomaly in the fabric of the venerable edifice: a blackened post that has been carefully built into a trim new window frame. Thereby hangs a tale, one that, as the wise old grandfather who has lived all his life in the house proceeds to tell it, takes one chilling turn after another, while his audience listens in appalled silence. Featuring a cruelly overbearing lord of the manor and the oppressed villagers who must render him service, an irreverent young woman who will stop at nothing, a mysterious stranger with a red beard and a green hat, and, last but not least, the black spider, the tale is as riveting and appalling today as when Jeremias Gotthelf set it down more than a hundred years ago. The Black Spider can be seen as a parable of evil in the heart or of evil at large in society (Thomas Mann saw it as foretelling the advent of Nazism), or as a vision, anticipating H. P. Lovecraft, of cosmic horror. There’s no question, in any case, that it is unforgettably creepy.

And although this has been translated into English in the past, it’s never been translated by Susan Bernofsky. So even if you are familiar with it, I’d still recommend checking out this version, since, Susan Bernofsky.

Japanese Literature in English [New Cool Things, Part III]

Chad W. Post — Wed, 15 May 2013 18:00:00 GMT

Another favorite translator—Allison Powell—has just launched Japanese Literature in English, a website that plays to all of my databasing and list making impulses.

japanese literature in english is a searchable database that compiles all literary works translated from japanese to english and available in the united states (with some exceptions). entries are still being added, and suggestions for inclusion are welcome.

You can search by author, title, translator, subject, publication date, and publisher, and can click on various tags, such as “japanese americans, fiction” or “jesus christ, biography” (which leads to exactly one title, Endo’s A Life of Jesus).

Very helpful for those interested in finding out what’s out there, and a nice way to make sure I don’t miss too many Japanese books in the Translation Database. (Which, yes, I’m updating right now. This is a good week for mindless tasks like entering ISBNs, author names, titles, and whatnot. So expect an update soon.)