Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

The latest news from Brazil, Egypt, and Spain!

This week, we take off on tour just south of the equator, where Editor-at-Large for Brazil, Maíra Mendes Galvão, gives us the scoop on Indie Book Day and some big-time literary awards. Then it’s east to Egypt, where we’ll catch up with Editor-at-Large Omar El-Adl about some exciting recent and upcoming events. Finally in Spain, Editor-at-Large Carmen Morawski highlights new releases and a chance to win poetry collections!

Maíra Mendes Galvão, Editor-at-Large for Brazil, has the latest from the lit scene:

The National Library Foundation of Brazil has issued an open call for publishers from all over the world interested in translating and publishing works by Brazilian authors to send in their proposals. Selected works will be eligible for a grant. Publishers have until May 2 to apply.

Raduan Nassar, veteran Brazilian writer with a short but acclaimed bibliography, has made headlines after giving a politically-charged speech on February 17 when he accepted the Camões Prize, issued by the Ministry of Culture of Brazil in partnership with Portugal. Mr. Nassar has called out the present government’s controversial claim to power, calling it anti-democratic and pointing out specific instances of misconduct by the administration, the president’s cabinet, and the Supreme Court nominees.

The popular Plana Fair, catalyst of a movement to popularize self-publishing and small publishing houses in Brazil, is holding its fifth edition under the name Plana – Art Book Fair at the São Paulo Biennial building, taking over the ground floor and the mezzanine of the iconic Pavilion Ciccillo Matarazzo from March 17 to 19. Plana will feature around 150 national and international exhibitors and a parallel program of talks, screenings, performances, and workshops.

Brazil is taking part on this year’s Indie Book Day on March 18, an initiative to promote and popularize independent publishing. It is a concerted action with a simple proposition: to go to a bookstore, any bookstore, on this particular day, buy an independently published book and post a picture of it on social networks with the hashtag #indiebookday.

Casa Guilherme de Almeida, the São Paulo State museum dedicated to Modernist journalist, poet, and translator Guilherme de Almeida, is holding a two-day conference dedicated to the translation of classics—the 3rd Translation of Classics in Brazil Conference—with the theme Re-translations in Conversation. Speakers will focus on comparative efforts of the differences between the premises, procedures, and results of translations of the same classical works.

Editor-at-Large Omar El-Adl reports from Egypt:

Last month, six novels were shortlisted for the International Prize in Arabic Fiction. They include Children of the Ghetto—My Name is Adam by Elias Khoury, Al-Sabiliat by Ismail Fahd Ismail, A Small Death by Mohamed Hassan Alwan, In the Spider Room by Mohamed Abdelnaby, The Slaves’ Pens by Najwa Binshatwan, and The Bookseller’s Murder by Saad Mohammed Rahim. Youssef Rakha’s Paolo was long-listed, and you can read an excerpt on Asymptote.

Today at 7 pm Cairo time, Wekalet Behna will be hosting a launch party for the third issue of Tara El-Bahr. Tara El-Bahr is a non-periodic publication concerned with the artistic and cultural practices of Alexandria. It includes original writing and translations.

Sociologist Mohamed Hakem’s book about life under Mohamed Ali will be discussed in the Greater Cairo Library on March 7. The book focuses on the relationship between the urban and rural in the first half of the 19th century and offers a reading of Ali’s time that focuses on the primacy of the city in the socioeconomic make-up of the era as well as the lives of “the people, not the pacha’s.”

Another lecture titled “The Cultural Scene and Publishing Now” will be held on March 13 at AUC’s Al Waleed Hall in New Cairo. The lecture will be given by Fatma El Boudy who runs and owns Elain publishing house. Also at AUC’s New Cairo campus, a lecture by Marilyn Plumlee titled Egypt’s Linguistic Landscape: Tokens of its History and Trajectory will be held in on March 6. It is part of a series of interdisciplinary lectures by AUC’s Center for Translation Studies.

The Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival’s 2017 edition will merge its film and literature programs into one. The new program will screen films based on literary texts, including Monsieur Lazar and Incendies and feature a public reading of Bashir Lazhar, a masterclass on playwriting, and a talk on adapting plays into films.

Carmen Morawski, Editor-at-Large, has publishing news from Spain:

Following up on two book releases promised in my last dispatch from Spain, Javier Cercas’s highly anticipated novel, El monarca de las sombras, was released by Random House on February 16. In his El Pais review, Jose-Carlos Mainer quotes Cercas, calling this novel “the true end” to his previous book, Soldados de Salamina about the Spanish Civil War. Translated into English by Anne McLean as Soldiers of Salamis, it won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2004. For readers interested in learning more about McLean’s translation process, this interview from New Spanish Books may prove interesting.

Also released this month is Enrique Vila-Matas’s latest novel, Mac y su contratiempo by Seix Barral. Like several other Vila-Matas works, the novel deals with a meta-fictional exploration of narrative genesis. Here, Mac, the protagonist and narrator who’s an avid reader, takes on the task of rewriting a less-than-perfect novel, and with this plot, according to Ana Rodrigues Fischer’s review, Vila-Matas shows “how literature advances from variations of a first oral account.” Although Mac y su contratiempo is not yet available in English, Anglophone readers not yet acquainted with Vila-Matas’s work may want to reference New Directions’s author website or his 2011 Paris Review interview while they wait.

For Asymptote readers wishing to better understand the complicated history of the 20th Century Basque experience in Spain, Fernando Aramburu’s recent novel, Patria, may be a good place to start. Awarded on Feb. 8 with the Francisco Umbral prize, this Basque novelist’s most recent work explores the experiences of two families affected by the ETA, living in a village in the Basque province of Gipuzkoa, and was recognized with a first-time unanimous vote by the judges because “it constitutes a solid literary testimony that will endure as a chronicle of great historic value to understand the 20th Century of Spain and Euskadi.”

While Care Santos’s 2017 Premio Nadal award-winning novel, Media vida, isn’t yet available in English, Anglophone readers can still get a taste of this Catalan writer’s work by dipping into Julie Wark’s translation, Desire for Chocolate—Santos’s first book in English.

Finally, if poetry is your passion, it’s not too late to try your hand at the Caballero Bonald Foundation’s Pistas Dudosas contest, in which, between now and April 23, one lucky person will be awarded a book of poetry every two weeks.

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