Mario Bellatin introduces his biography Shiki Nagaoka: A Nose for Fiction in this trailer for the accompanying short film.
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No Longer Secondary Characters: CP Heiser in Conversation with Alejandro Zambra
CP Heiser talks to Alejandro Zambra about the Great Conspiracies of the family, who tells Chile’s story, and the rhythm of his novels.
Turkish Delights
At Chora, I purchased the inaugural issue of The Istanbul Review, edited by Hande Zapsu Watt, now available at many government-owned tourism sites in greater Istanbul. The 200+ page glossy includes brief interviews with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Gerhard Schröder, Elif Shafak, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Banana Yoshimoto, and an annoying Paolo Coelho. Highlights of the issue include [...]
Three in Spanish
Elisa Rizo’s Caminos y Veredas: Narrativas de Guinea Ecuatorial (Textos de Difusión Cultural UNAM) provides a much-needed update to the selection of Equatorial Guinean fiction available outside the country. The book features one to three short stories each by Donato Ndongo, Justo Bolekia Boleka, José Fernando Siale Djangany, Juan Tomas Ávila Laurel, and Recaredo Silebo [...]
New Walser
This November sees the release in paperback of Robert Walser’s Selected Stories (FSG Classics, $15), with a peculiarly pleasing semi-plasticized cover-stock. It includes well over thirty of Walser’s often very short stories and essays, including pieces about aviators, pimps, and poets, the last of which recounts his knowledge of “a poet, the author of most captivating verses, [...]
The Black Olive Tree and Other Memories
Translator Clare Sullivan recounts her experiences with indigenous women poets in Oaxaca, Mexico. “The women I met are custodians of culture and of memory. In their poetry, as in their stories, they combine nurturing and insight with fierceness and fire.”
Offerings to the God of Attention: Recent Literary Events in Bali and Australia
Australian poet John Mateer contemplates recent literary events in Bali and Perth, Australia, celebrating a wide range of world writers and detailing his own offerings to the Gods of Attention.
World Prose Portfolio #4: Cristina Rascón Castro
Mexican writer Cristina Rascón Castro converses with The Word, rants at the fragmented reflection of her own face, and recounts a young woman’s murder of an attacker. Sudeep Sen presents three stories co-translated by the author with Amal Chaterjee.
Kwanini?’s Tiny Coups
The Kwani? Trust is Kenya’s premiere literary institution, anchored by their flagship publication, the omnibus journal Kwani?, roughly translatable from the Swahili as “What’s up?” Their reduplicative Kwanini? series features diminutive, perfect-bound fiction and creative nonfiction at chapbook length.
Allen Ginsberg’s Recycled Erotic Manuscript
Allen Ginsberg’s letter about Buddhism was handwritten on the back of a discarded erotic manuscript, complete with tattoos, dog-like leg-humping, licking, and Ginsberg’s notation “recycled.”
Fork Over the Gold: Yuri Rytkheu’s Chukchi Bible
Boris Dralyuk catalogues false interpretations—backed unfortunately by Winchesters—and contextualizes the Chukchi people within the Soviet sociopolitical mindset in his appreciative review of Yuri Rytkheu’s The Chukchi Bible.
Ben Lerner in Conversation with Cyrus Console
Console asks about “the historical Ben Lerner,” who both is and isn’t similar to his novel’s protagonist Adam Gordon.