Germany loves us!

By Lauren

I was heartened to read this recent piece on Deutsche Welle (via Publishers Lunch Automat) about Germany’s love affair with American fiction. It’s been my experience as rights director that Germany is the one market we can really count on to buy the books we have rights to in a wide variety of categories—the one market where we don’t tend to hear, “Well, we know it’s big everywhere, but here we just don’t buy American (fill in the blank).” It helps of course that it’s among the largest book markets in the world. It’s a nice counterpoint to a discussion we had here a while back about how American literary fiction is often too insular for everyone else to get excited about. Those interested in the ways in which books cross borders should give it a read!

Contest: World champion!

by Lauren

Well, the USA may have bowed out to Ghana back in June, but thanks to Harper Lee's classic To Kill a Mockingbird, we are the victors in this contest.  Let's take a moment to pause for chants of "USA! USA!" and maybe a round or two of "We are the Champions." 

OK, so now that that's done, here's the results:

1) USA: Harper Lee's TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD: 36.59%
2) England: George Orwell's 1984: 26.83%
3 - tie) Chile: Isabel Allende's THE HOUSE OF THE SPIRITS: 9.76% and Spain: Carlos Ruiz Zafon's THE SHADOW OF THE WIND: 9.76%
4)  Netherlands: Anne Frank's DIARY OF A YOUNG GIRL: 7.32%
5) Argentina: Jorge Luis Borges's LABYRINTHS: 4.88%
6 - tie) South Korea: Hwang Sok-yong's THE GUEST: 2.44% and Paraguay:  Augusto Roa Bastos's I, THE SUPREME:  2.44%

So, our winner is...Anonymous.  Email me at labramo@dystel.com to claim your prize, which you'll recall is a copy of one of the fine books in the contest. 

And while I did promise to read the winner and report back, I've actually read both #1 and #2 on this list.  I love them both (and still fear being in close quarters with rats as a result of the latter), so I certainly support their victory.  But since the goal was to get me reading more foreign lit, I'll skip on down to the tie for #3.  I have long meant to read both, so they're both moving up to the "to read soon" pile.  Tell me which to start with below!

Thanks to everyone who participated, and I hope we all at least got some good book recommendations out of it!

Contest: Into the finals

by Lauren

You know about our contest, right? If not, read here and here.

So first, let me start by apologizing for the technical difficulties.  The polling site I used to generate the polls seems to have gone down and the polls won't load now.  Anyone who tried to load that blog post (or even our home page) in the last couple days before we noticed would probably have found it very slow going.  Sorry for that! 

It also proves a slight problem because I'm not 100% sure about all the books now and of course hadn't written them down.  I think I've gotten this right, but please let me know below if I haven't.

I did write down the countries that won the last round before the site went belly up, fortunately.  In the interest of not dragging this out, let's skip ahead to the final match, shall we!  New poll pitting the last 8 against one another, below.  (I'm using a different polling site and sacrificing a USB drive to the technology gods for good measure.) 

Let's get ourselves a winner, shall we?  Polls open till Thursday 8/5, and the winner will be handed glory the next day.

Final Free-for-All » make online polls
Tags : literature

Contest: Be your own psychic octopus

by Lauren

You know about our contest, right?  If not, read here.

I think we could all learn a little something about the courage of our convictions from the world's most awesome psychic, Paul the Octopus, so let us all embrace that spirit and go forth and declare winners!  I lack the technical know-how to set up something awesome and bracket-like for you here, but polls are open until Monday the 26th, so root for your favorites below, and let's see who makes it to the quarterfinals!



[Sorry, technical difficulties!! See the next round post!]



Thanks, everyone, for the nominees!  A bunch of these have been on my to-read list for ages.

*Selected from a list of Korean novels on Library Thing!
**Technically, this isn't from Slovakia, but it was the closest suggestion I got, since it was published in Czechoslovakia before the split.
***Vicki pointed out that while Allende is Chilean, this was published in Spain. I'm sure she's right, but I'll include it here because we did get another Spain entry and no other Chile ones!

Kick Back and Read: A Contest

by Lauren

 

Folks, if you’ve spoken to me in the last month, you’ll know that I have a serious case of World Cup fever. As a child, I was a devoted soccer player and a fairly good goalie, if I say so myself. While I’m something of a fair-weather soccer fan now, every four years I get really, really into it again. I’ve spent the last few weeks on a rollercoaster of excitement (Impressive goals! Beautiful men with even more beautiful accents! Delightful tonsorial choices!) and disappointment (my top three choice teams going out in a blaze of something other than glory). While I gear up to see my (fourth) favorite in the final, inexplicably not doomed by my supporting them, I’m also starting to feel withdrawal.

Now I’m the one who sells foreign rights around here, but I’m not particularly widely read on books in translation. In the spirit of improving that and keeping the World Cup buzz part of my life a bit longer, let’s have some fun here:

Below is a list of the “teams” in the tournament. I’m going to start this off at the round of 16, even if that means excluding Italy (sob). Here’s where you come in: in the comments below, give a shout out to your favorite book from a country listed. The first book named from each is getting selected for the national team! Next week, before I head out on vacation, I’ll set you up with the head-to-head battles. Then while I’m away, you guys can vote for your favorite book in each match. We’ll take this on through to it’s logical conclusion: the World Champion, which I’ll promise to read and report back on—and I’ll send the person who nominated said book a copy of something from the list they’d like to check out.

 

Fine print: books must have been translated into English, because I don’t know any other language well enough to read in it. (Way back when, my trusty French-English dictionary and I trudged through a few, but let’s just say that neither of us enjoyed it.) Let’s see if we can’t get books in for the US and England that were published in those countries but not originally in English. And if we can’t come up with something for a country that doesn’t export a whole lot to the US, the best argument for including a book for that country gets called up, much like those athletes who play for the team grandma was from instead of the one they’ve lived in their entire lives.

Don't have any favorites for countries that haven't already been taken?  Get in the game by suggesting a new name for this contest, because mine is terrible.

• Uruguay
• South Korea
• USA
• Ghana
• Netherlands
• Slovakia
• Brazil
• Chile
• Argentina
• Mexico
• Germany
• England
• Paraguay
• Japan
• Spain
• Portugal

Literary Elite vs. Literary Underclass

by Rachel

Robert McCrum’s article in the Guardian is probably one of the most interesting reads I’ve had in a while concerning literature with the ranking of class.  McCrum gives us a rundown of who he believes sits at the top and who’s at the bottom of the heap in literary society.

At the top of the British ladder, McCrum – with the help of a recent Ian Rankin interview, places the poets. “To be a poet,” he says, “is to be a member of an elite.”  Next come the playwrights. Third down the line are the literary novelists, which McCrum points out are “rather middle-class types who spring from bourgeois society in all its complexity.” Crime authors, thriller writers and spy novelists are then all grouped together, followed by – clumsily put – the literary underclass: the writers of celebrity biographies. The writers of children’s books are given a slight mention at the end – some are on the “right side of the tracks”, and others are too rich and famous to care.

Do you think authors of different genres earn more praise or respect than others because of their “class”? And, while the article gave insight on literary class in Britain, do you think there’s a cultural difference when it comes to literary rankings?

The Leader Orders an Arrest

by Jessica

A week or two ago Rachel posted on censorship, which is always a hot-button issue, even among citizens of a country who generally agree that freedom of speech is a good thing, and are pleased to exercise it, in tones both civil and hysterical, as often as we can. Yet despite how absorbing questions relating to censorship and the first amendment can be, it can be eye-opening to look beyond our own borders, where limits on civil society (or even shrieking, rabid, partisan society) are far more onerous. And dangerous.

Earlier this month at the Cairo International Book fair, Egyptian security officials confiscated a novel entitled The Leader Cuts His Hair, and arrested its publisher on the grounds that the books insults Libyan leader Muammar Qadhafi. The novel, written by the Egyptian novelist Idris Ali, looks at social conditions in Libya in the late seventies, a period during which Ali was living in Libya. Egypt has long outlawed books that cast aspersions at its own President, Hosni Mubarak, now in his 28th year in office, but I’m surprised that Qadhafi is afforded the same treatment. The Egyptian Writers Union protested the incident, calling it an embarrassment and a stain on the nation. Indeed, this is hardly the sort of behavior that will win the Cairo Book Fair—now the largest in the Arab world—the kind of international status that it quite deservedly seeks. Which is too bad, since the fair, which throws open its doors to thousands of publishing professionals and millions of Cairenes, is an experience to behold. Whole families make a day trip of the fair, and when not browsing the miles of bookstalls in search of bargains (take note, Strand Bookstore, home of “18 miles of books”), they picnic on the grounds. Between the ice-cream vendors and balloon sellers and the impromptu soccer matches are people of all stripes, laden with books. It’s a far cry from the trade oriented fairs at Frankfurt or London, but it’s a clear demonstration that the culture of the book is thriving—despite, as recent events again demonstrate, some very serious obstacles.

Books in translation

by Jessica

This week’s New Yorker has a wonderful article on Arabic Literature: "Found in Translation" by Claudia Roth Pierpont. Since my time in Cairo was spent working on contemporary Arab fiction—I sold translation rights to books to American and international publishers, including many by authors cited in this piece—this is a subject close to my heart. Not long before this, A Public Space ran Bryan T. Edward's very smart piece on Cairo's young literati. Clearly, as I remarked to a colleague who acquires international fiction (one of a handful in the publishing industry), these articles presage a new commercial trend, one in which works in translation rocket right to the top of the bestseller lists, elbowing aside assorted tales of the undead.

Stranger things have happened.