Interviews Veronica Esposito Photo by Camila Valdés Megan McDowell has translated many contemporary authors from Latin America and Spain, including Alejandro Zambra, Samanta Schweblin, and Lina Meruane. Shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, her translations have been published in the New Yorker, Tin House, the Paris Review, Harper’s, and McSweeney’s, among others. Veronica Esposito: As a translator, you’ve primarily worked with writers from Chile and Argentina, a region with a very rich literary history, and you are the primary translator for two of the standout authors to recently emerge from the Southern Cone—Alejandro Zambra and Samanta Schweblin. What is special about this region and its literatures? Megan McDowell: I’m not an academic or a critic, so I’m very reluctant to try to draw connecting lines through the literary histories of countries I live in but that aren’t mine. Every time I make a generalization, all the exceptions spring to mind. But, my assumptions or predispositions go something like this: Chilean writers tend to look inward, to play with autofiction, to write the domestic and the personal. Argentine writers tend toward the surreal, toward madness and fantasy and the uncanny. Both, I think, can get pretty experimental with form. Both have histories of dictatorship and state violence, which can rear its head in fictions in various ways. If you look at the writers I’ve translated, these... Continue reading at 'World Literature Today'
[ World Literature Today | 2020-06-22 15:20:00 UTC ]
Over seven years ago, two books written by retired lieutenant-colonel Douglas Bland offered some sobering warnings about the future of the Crown-Indigenous relationship — warnings that seem eerily prescient after the events of the past two... Continue reading at CBC
[ CBC | 2020-02-20 09:00:00 UTC ]
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The New York Public Library is marking its 125th birthday this year—in part with this list of their favorite books written for adults from the past 125 years, which they hope will “inspire a lifelong love of reading.” The list is full of classics, of course, but it’s also got a few refreshing... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2020-02-14 14:59:09 UTC ]
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Cultural Cross Sections Alice-Catherine Carls Pachamama / Pichincha / Photo by Scipio Rocío Durán-Barba / Photo by Stephen Carls Rocío Durán-Barba is one of the most important voices of Latin American literature today. The author of more than fifty... Continue reading at World Literature Today
[ World Literature Today | 2020-02-13 15:00:14 UTC ]
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Walk into a contemporary bookstore and self-help manuals are likely to be among the first books you’ll see. In my local Barnes & Noble, a “self-improvement” section is featured in the vestibule, luring customers before they even open the store’s main doors. Inside the store, the boundary... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2020-01-29 09:49:07 UTC ]
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Jerry Craft’s story exploring ‘friendship, race, class and bullying in a fresh manner’ is the first graphic novel to win the long-running American children’s awardFor the first time, a graphic novel has won the Newbery Medal, the oldest and most prestigious children’s book award in the US. The... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2020-01-28 16:03:46 UTC ]
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These days, it seems like every book that gets even the barest amount of hype gets snapped up by a production company in the first month of its publication, but that doesn’t necessarily mean those are the books whose adaptations get made. 2020 starts out with a whole host of movies adapted from... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2020-01-16 09:50:47 UTC ]
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Get a fresh take on literary fiction with Book Riot's new podcast, Novel Gazing, your destination for lit fic news, book recommendations, and more. Continue reading at Book Riot
[ Book Riot | 2020-01-14 11:34:19 UTC ]
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Kendra Winchester: Hello, I’m Kendra Winchester. And this is Reading Women, a podcast inviting you to reclaim half the bookshelf by discussing books written by or about women. Today, I’m talking to Sarah Moss about her book Ghost Wall, which is out now in paperback from Picador. Welcome to 2020,... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2020-01-08 09:45:19 UTC ]
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When the news becomes too difficult to watch, these books about refugees will having you questioning the blurred line between fiction and reality. Continue reading at Book Riot
[ Book Riot | 2020-01-07 11:38:59 UTC ]
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The Street is a groundbreaking work of American literature that is as relevant today as when it was published in 1946. When it won Ann Petry the Houghton Mifflin Prize for Debut Writers, the literary world was put on notice. Everyone agreed that the novel was brilliant, but, as is the case with... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2020-01-06 09:47:44 UTC ]
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The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom. Men are freest when they are unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was. — D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature ¤ I. THE ROAD BLINKS IN ahead of Eric Ashby. He’s nodding out, but he recognizes... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books
[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2019-12-11 13:30:31 UTC ]
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In this episode, taped live at the Miami Book Fair, writer Jeff VanderMeer and editor Ann VanderMeer talk to Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast co-hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell about editing The Big Book of Classic Fantasy anthology, historical understandings of fantasy, editing beyond... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2019-12-05 09:48:07 UTC ]
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Comic book creators search for ways to combat the rise of illegal digital sharing of their work. Continue reading at BBC World
[ BBC World | 2019-11-29 13:41:32 UTC ]
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Cultural Cross Sections Shohreh Laici Photo of Tehran by Xiquinho Silva / Flickr A writer in Tehran incapable of entering the US under the Muslim travel ban encounters Michelle Obama’s Becoming in a beauty salon. Reading the Farsi translation, she... Continue reading at World Literature Today
[ World Literature Today | 2019-11-26 14:55:39 UTC ]
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The list includes a mix of books written originally in Spanish and in translation. Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2019-11-26 10:00:03 UTC ]
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The new Elena Ferrante is just one of the exciting novels in translation coming next year. Lara Feigel talks to the UK editors who are rediscovering classics and finding new audiencesThere are voices that speak to us across oceans and centuries with more intimacy than the people who surround us... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2019-11-23 08:00:49 UTC ]
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These inclusive children's books by women of color highlight awesome yet underrepresented communities like Sikh, indigenous, and Dominican. Continue reading at Book Riot
[ Book Riot | 2019-11-21 11:35:59 UTC ]
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Writers of literary fiction are supposed to disdain celebrity memoirs. They’re sucking up all the big advances and lowering the bar of what’s supposed to be Literature, right? But I’ve got a dirty reading secret. I love celebrity memoirs, particularly by standup comedians (and not just because... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2019-11-20 12:00:00 UTC ]
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That winter, the year Boogie turned 14, we got it in our heads that we could run away, leave Miami Beach and never come back. For months, I’d spent every night lost in a book, read whatever the librarian put in my hands, which usually meant books written by white men, about white people, for […] Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2019-11-20 09:47:43 UTC ]
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Shortly after the stunning US presidential election in 2016, a French journalist with a lifelong love for American literature seized the political moment to give American authors a platform to express themselves in what would become a 200-page magazine called America—in French. Fifteen days... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2019-11-15 09:48:32 UTC ]
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