
“People in a hotel” would be a literal translation of Vicki Baum’s groundbreaking novel. It’s nearly a century old now, but when she wrote it, she invented a whole new genre. What sort of people are staying in the hotel?…
“People in a hotel” would be a literal translation of Vicki Baum’s groundbreaking novel. It’s nearly a century old now, but when she wrote it, she invented a whole new genre. What sort of people are staying in the hotel?…
Reading about a pandemic while living through it is not everyone’s idea of staying safe and well (as we’ve wished for each other so often this year). There was a patch in the summer, however, where things were looking up…
This is the subtitle to Judith Schalansky’s Atlas of Remote Islands. I discovered it eleven years late, because this year Marko Niemi translated it into Finnish. I ordered the German original straight away and despite the pandemic it arrived promptly…
I read When Death Takes Something from You Give It Back on the train to the city where Naja Marie Aidt was raised, Copenhagen. She wrote it a long journey away from there, back in Brooklyn, where she now lives.…
They took the roses apart themselves, ripping them from their stems and casting the petals on the waters. Silently, purposefully. It was tragic, gardens shaped by decades of love and care destroyed in a moment, yet the people showed little…
I have post-its over the camera on my laptop and my tablet – but not on my phone. Which seems silly as that’s the one that goes everywhere. Now I’m in more and more video meetings, the post-its fall off…
When you lose someone, you try to hold onto them. You might wear their old clothes (and they might be rather too big). You might read things they’ve written (even if it’s just underlining or marginal notes in books they’ve…
The year is not that far into the future, near enough that it could almost be now, but far away enough that it really couldn’t, at least one hopes not. A bit like Black Mirror, perhaps. But the location of…
The second novel by Omani author Jokhar Alharthi, Sayyidat al-Qamar, is translated into English by Marilyn Booth as Celestial Bodies. Which are what? The men around whom the world revolves? That would be the answer one might expect from an…
New year, fresh snow. Fresh snow, old words. I first came across Gwerful Mechain this time last year through her most famous poem of all, translated as ‘Ode to My Cunt’ by Zoë Brigley Thompson for Modern Poetry in Translation.…