Monthly Archives: August 2014

Interviewing “Los bárbaros”: Ulises Gonzáles, Spanish literature in New York

A conversation with the editor of "Los bárbaros," a Spanish-language journal based in the Big Apple

Peruvian writer Ulises Gonzáles founded the thrice-yearly journal Los bárbaros in 2014. Gathering work from Spanish-language writers about New York, Gonzáles talks about the important role of New York City for contemporary writers in Spanish and his hopes for the journal’s future.

Eric Becker: How did the journal come to be?

Ulises Gonzáles: It’s a great story, actually.

Some of us were in a class at the CUNY Graduate Center and someone mentioned something about the poem “Waiting for the Barbarians” (by the Greek poet C.P. Cavafy). But that person connected it to the idea that now the barbarians are major figures in language and literature departments (throughout the world) and were creating their own literary theories and not leaving it just to the French anymore—because of people like Borges.

And today, for example, people in English departments are reading Borges and it was all about this idea that now the barbarians are in charge. The reach of English is still, of course, broad. But one thing that I like about these Latin American writers is that every one of them is going to tell you that among their favorite writers are maybe Faulkner, maybe Hemingway, maybe Wilde. There’s a big connection: it’s like “I got all this from English literature, I’m going to recycle it and I’m going to tell you about my world through what I learned and at the same time I’m going to teach you something about my world.” READ MORE…

Weekly News Roundup, 8th August 2014: Slang-xplaining, Winning Prizes and Judging Them

This week's literary highlights from across the world

Prescriptive grammarians may enjoy this, even if it destabilizes their strict sense of right and wrong: Slate has detailed the 250-year-long grammatical quibble over the correct use of “hopefully,” that ever-present eye twitch of incorrect adverbial usage. Also related: the same website explains why certain adjectives just sound right in one way, and not the other. If your eyes aren’t tearing up with that twitch yet, take a look at io9′s ambitious compilation of the most disastrous typos in Western history.

Meanwhile, in the same spirit of chronological grammar-mapping, The Atlantic has compiled a web app history of the New York Times’ stiff slang explanations (example: “Diss, or a perceived act of disrespect”). And the game-side disputes can finally end: Scrabble has added over five thousand new terms to its updated player dictionary, including such witticisms as “sudoku” (shouldn’t that be a proper noun?), “buzzkill,” and “vlog.”

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July Issue Spotlight: Sergio Chejfec’s “The Witness”

A close look at Sergio Chejfec's masterful not-quite fiction, non-quite essay, "The Witness"

Patty: The phrase “of-the-moment” is so annoyingly trite, but for lack of a better expression, Sergio Chejfec is perhaps one of today’s most of-the-moment writers, and the short fiction/systematic essay-musing “The Witness”—translated by Steve Dolph and published in Asymptote’s July issue as part of our Latin American feature—proves beyond a shadow of a doubt just why that is.

They say, more or less, that anyone who’s made the mistake of leaving can’t make the mistake of returning. READ MORE…

Crime on the Island: Interviewing Cheryl Tan of “Singapore Noir”

An interview with Cheryl Tan, editor of the first Singaporean crime fiction anthology published in the United States

Singapore has one of the world’s lowest homicide rates, but much like its partner in (low) crime, Iceland, it’s fertile ground for noir stories. Launched this month, ten years after the release of Brooklyn Noir, is Brooklyn-based Akashic Books’ newest title in its bestselling series of Noir anthologies, Singapore Noir, edited by the Singaporean writer Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan, a former staff writer at the Wall Street Journal and author of A Tiger in the Kitchen: A Memoir of Food and Family.

Nicole Idar: Singapore is the fourth Asian city to boast an Akashic Books Noir anthology, after Delhi, Manila, and Mumbai (Seoul is forthcoming). Can you tell us how Singapore Noir came about?

Cheryl Tan: I’d long admired New York publisher Akashic Books’ award-winning Noir seriesa series of anthologies, and there are dozens by now, each one set in a country or a city. Brooklyn Noir was a personal favorite but you also have everything from Baltimore Noir to Paris Noir. Some really big names have edited these collections of dark stories set in these locales—Joyce Carol Oates edited New Jersey Noir, for example, and Dennis Lehane edited Boston Noir.

In November 2011, I was at the Miami Book Fair, speaking about A Tiger in the Kitchen, my first book. At the authors’ party, mystery writer extraordinaire S.J. Rozan introduced me to Johnny Temple, Akashic’s publisher. I told Johnny how much I loved his noir series but asked why there hadn’t been a Singapore Noir. He said it was because he didn’t know any Singaporean writers. And S.J. said, “Well now you do.”  

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Translation Tuesday: “Obituario (El estudiante)”

"His last words—how to explain without telling her the rest?—had not come out of his mouth."

When it was all over, the mother knocked on the door to my office. She sat down in the only chair that faced mine from the other side of the desk, in the same place where the student had been a few minutes before he fell to the floor. To mask my discomfort, I offered her a box of tissues and she wiped her eyes. I had been the last person to see him the way she would have wanted to remember him. Now it would be impossible after the legal process, the photos, the morgue, and the many stories in the newspapers. She told me about his last few months, avoiding all uncomfortable commentary. Suddenly she paused. She wanted to know what his last words had been. I inhaled deeply: his last words—how to explain without telling her the rest—had not come out of his mouth.

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On the Dearth of South Asian Translations in the U.S. (Part I)

“It’s a serious problem when so few titles and literature from so few languages find their way to American readers.”

Read all posts in Mahmud Rahman’s investigation here.

Until about ten years ago, whenever I visited Bangladesh, a journey “home” every three to five years, I would make my way to a small bookshop in Dhaka’s New Market. Zeenat Book Supply was one of the few places that carried English titles from India. There were better shops for books in Bangla, and subcontinental writing in English I could find in the U.S. What I sought at Zeenat was books in translation. These would sometimes be wrapped in plastic, other times coated with dust, the edges dirt-brown. Here I would find fiction that had originally been written in languages I didn’t know: Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam.

When I had the good fortune to visit Calcutta, I would discover more.

What discoveries I returned with! Raag Darbari, Shrilal Shukla’s biting small-town satire. Karukku, Bama’s brave memoir as a Dalit Christian. Desert Shadows by Anand that took me into the corrupt world of an Indian prison.

Unless a used copy lands somewhere by chance, such books are not found in U.S. bookstores. Unless you were teaching Indian literature or someone who keeps up on South Asian writing outside English, you would probably not know about these titles.

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Weekly News Roundup, 1st August 2014: Cringey #longreads, Awards out to SEA

This week's literary highlights from across the world

We’ve all got our cringe moments. This past week, the blog highlighted some of our favorite translated pieces from The New Yorker’s archive, but don’t be fooled into thinking the venerable magazine’s back stock is chock-full of equally dazzling gems. Gawker has highlighted ten of the worst offenders in the storied tradition of essayistic self-absorption.

Regardless of the quality of the #longreads, the fact that it’s available through a virtually unlimited online portal is pretty cool, and this computerization leads to some pretty impressive data collection—as in the New York Times’ digi-feature of the moment, an interactive app called “Chronicle,” graphing word occurrence since the paper’s inception. Elsewhere, the Times still tackles the (not so) tough technological beat: here’s a brief overview of the current poetry apps, and a quiz to determine your emoji fluency. While the New York-based publications appear to have the edge in tech-aptitude, British standby the Guardian attempts to broaden its base by crowdsourcing translation in a World-War-I-related multimedia endeavor.

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