Features

From the Editors: On Lessons Learned and Not Learned From the Nobel

It is hardly necessary that we remind our American readers that for the free world’s great, lone, staggering superpower these are dark times. For those fortunate enough to sit unscathed above what we are now provisionally terming the “Great Recession,” there is much else to cause distress: an obstructionist, rump Republican party that daily marches [...][more]

By The Editors of The Quarterly Conversation

Translate This Book!

We’ve talked to some of the top translators into English working today; we’ve talked to publishers big and small; we’ve talked to agents, journalists, and foreign-language authors. We’ve asked them all for the best books that still aren’t in English. And have they responded. They’ve told us TRANSLATE THIS BOOK!, and now we pass that on to you.[more]

By Scott Esposito and Annie Janusch

Tracing Mahmoud Darwish’s Map

Mahmoud Darwish was a poet essential to Palestinian concepts of identity an nationhood. Here, George Fragopoulos looks at four recently published book by the prolific writer, tracing an outline of the map Darwish left for his readers to follow.[more]

By George Fragopoulos

Now Playing at Pynchon Cinemas: What’s Going on in Pynchon’s Three California Novels

Why does Pynchon keep coming back to California? His latest novel, Inherent Vice, is his third novel set in the state. Here, Donald Brown ponders what Pynchon has found in California . . . and what it has to do with film.[more]

By Donald Brown

Intentional Schizophrenia: J.M. Coetzee’s Autobiographical Trilogy and the Falling Authority of the Author

Throughout his career, Coetzee has relentlessly highlighted the instability of words and stories, perhaps never so much as in his novels after the Nobel prize. Here, Matt Cheney shows how his three autobiographical works belie an attempt to pin down who “JM Coetzee” is.[more]

By Matthew Cheney

Blogging to Gorbachev: Stanislaw Borokowski’s Letters to a Latter Day Cold War Hero

Blog, farce, open letters, or all? Austrian-Polish author Stanislaw Borokowski has been writing a blog to the Soviet Union’s final General Secretary, touching on everything from glasnost to the former world leader’s romantic songs.[more]

By Chris Michalski

Let Me Make a Snowman: John Gardner, William Gass, and “The Pedersen Kid”

“The Pedersen Kid” is the genesis of William H. Gass’s canon. In it Nick Ripatrazone finds the roots of a battle between Gass and John Gardner for the future of fiction.[more]

By Nick Ripatrazone

False Truths: How Fact Is Fiction in Machado de Assis

Widely considered Brazil’s greatest writer, Machado de Assis was a unique writer. Like a Laurence Stern across the Atlantic, this freed slave wrote postmodern literature long before the 20th century.[more]

By Michael Moreci

Only Poems Can Translate Poems: On the Impossibility and Necessity of Translation

Robert Frost famously said, “Poetry is what gets lost in translation.” But what if it’s really not so black and white?[more]

By Ellen Welcker

From The Mezzanine by Nikos Kachtitsis

Read this chapter from The Mezzanine by Nikos Kachtitsis, the first time it’s ever been published in English.[more]

By George Fragopoulos and Lyssi Athanasiou Krikeli

Nikos Kachtitsis’s Dark Night of the Soul and The Mezzanine

George Fragopoulos explains why he wanted to translate The Mezzanine, a book that brings to mind Kafka, Conrad, Dostoevsky, Joyce, and even Proust.[more]

By George Fragopoulos

From Jerzy Pilch’s A Thousand Peaceful Cities

An excerpt from Polish author Jerzy Pilch’s next novel, available next year.[more]

By Jerzy Pilch (translated by David Frick)

Notes on Jerzy Pilch’s A Thousand Peaceful Cities

Matt Jakubowski introduced Jerzy Pilch’s latest novel, available next year.[more]

By Matt Jakubowski

From An Unfinished Score by Elise Blackwell

An excerpt from Elise Blackwell’s newest novel, available next year.[more]

By Elise Blackwell

Reviews

The Ask by Sam Lipsyte

Review by Barrett Hathcock

The Tanners by Robert Walser

Review by Scott Esposito

I Am Not Sidney Poitier by Percival Everett

Review by John Lingan

The Wall in My Head: Words and Images from the Fall of the Iron Curtain

Review by Karen Vanuska

The Salt Smugglers by Gerard de Nerval

Review by Ahmad Saidullah

The Witness by Juan Jose Saer

Review by Andrew Seal

Sunset Oasis by Bahaa Taher

Review by M. Lynx Qualey

Nog by Rudolph Wurlitzer

Review by Jeremy Hatch

The Cave Man by Xiaoda Xiao

Review by Gregory McCormick

Brecht at Night by Mati Unt

Review by Karen Vanuska

Season of Ash by Jorge Volpi

Review by Paul Doyle

Dick of the Dead by Rachel Loden

Review by Levi Stahl

The Sri Lankan Loxodrome by Will Alexander

Review by Andrew Wessels

Rising by Farrah Field

Review by Ron Slate

They Carry a Promise by Janusz Szuber

Review by Patrick Kurp

Tracer by Richard Greenfield

Review by Andy Frazee

Versed by Rae Armantrout and The Winter Sun by Fanny Howe

Review by John Herbert Cunningham