Jenny Erpenbeck’s The End of Days, translated by Susan Bernofsky, has variously been described as brutal, haunting, and dreamlike, unvarnished and the work of a miniaturist. It’s all that and more. And it’s a very fitting first German winner of…
Jenny Erpenbeck’s The End of Days, translated by Susan Bernofsky, has variously been described as brutal, haunting, and dreamlike, unvarnished and the work of a miniaturist. It’s all that and more. And it’s a very fitting first German winner of…
St George is England’s patron saint – and Catalonia’s. April 23, his day is traditionally when Catalans celebrate all kinds of love, by giving red roses, as St George is supposed to have given one to the princess he saved from the…
25 years ago, the Berlin Wall came down. 9 November might seem like a good date to celebrate German reunification, but because the same day in 1938 saw the burning of synagogues and destruction of Jewish property across Germany, they…
A new translation of 2014 Nobel Laureate Patrick Modiano’s stories, Suspended Sentences, comes out next month. The translator, Mark Polizotti, also happens to be publisher in chief of MoMa. These novellas are needed: Modiano in English and in print is very hard to…
Former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has a new book of poems out this month, first presented at the Edinburgh Book Festival, where I got my hands on a copy. The Other Mountain, published by Carcanet, includes a couple of…
In preparation for my next Finnish exam, I’ve been devouring teen literature; the action is usually breathless enough to compensate for my slower reading pace. But when I went to take Ilkka Auer’s Ice-Witch ones back and get As Red…
Reading stories in translation opens up the world to places you could never go to. For some people however, the place they can never go to is back home. More and more children are migrating into the US from Latin…
Love football or hate it, you can’t ignore the World Cup. But if you’d rather read a good book, three percent is pitching readable works published this millennium from each World Cup qualifying country against each other. On the day…
Just three percent of books published in the US are in translation, and less than one percent are literary fiction and poetry. The University of Rochester is trying to change that, with its three per cent website and Best Translated…
World Book Day today, and there’s a £1 book for everyone under 18 in the British Isles (discussion of the politics of that short-hand term another time, please). There’s an app, there are trailers for the books, you can win a…