3%'s Top 10...
So Three Percent, the latest addition to blogs of international literature, is having us punters vote on the Best Translations of 2007. We do have one in there ourselves, and I'd never suggest you stuff the ballot box...
So Three Percent, the latest addition to blogs of international literature, is having us punters vote on the Best Translations of 2007. We do have one in there ourselves, and I'd never suggest you stuff the ballot box...
"young-authors-from-luchterhand-read-paul-fattaruso" is how it was described to me, when they emailed me for permission. Paul Fattaruso's Travel in the Mouth of the Wolf was acquired by, of all places, Random House Deutschland for publication in German. And, easy as it is to make fun of the Germans, a lovely crew of editors there took a chance on a beautiful fairy tale that was decidedly under-recognized here.
And one of the things they did, a la Julian Rubenstein's audiobook version of The Ballad of the Whiskey-Robber, is gather a whole bunch of their favorite young writers to read excerpts from the book.
Here's the site. [They called it, in German, Isabella's Love of the Flugelhorn.]
But it's all in German, you protest.
Not all: they also had me and Paul read sections ourselves, in English.
From the Australian newspaper the Herald Sun on the subject of This Day in History (it's already November 2nd in Australia...)
2003 – The Rev Canon V Gene Robinson is consecrated as the first openly gay bishop of the US Episcopal Church, a move that threatened to tear apart the worldwide Anglican community.2004 – A filmmaker who was the great-grandnephew of Vincent van Gogh is slain in a daylight attack, and police arrest a Dutch-Moroccan man after wounding him in a shootout. Theo van Gogh made a movie criticizing the treatment of Muslim women.
I came to this information via the poor man's clipping service Google News Alerts, because of the reference to Gene Robinson, and I'm keeping up-to-date with him because we're publishing a book about him next June, entitled Going to Heaven written by Elizabeth Adams, herself possessed of a lovely blog.
I then notice, as did you, immediately beneath, that November 2nd is also the day (the following year) on which Theo van Gogh was assassinated in the Netherlands. And we're in discussions about doing a book about that also (a translation of a Dutch book, publishing today...). Shoudl we end up doing it, I'll devote a post to it, as it touches on several things of concern to Soft Skull and publishing (and the Frankfurt Book Fair).
So this coincidence—Gene Robinson and Theo van Gogh—compells me to note, earlier than I might otherwise have planned to, that Soft Skull is embarking on a plan to start publishing a good deal about religion and how it plays into politics and society. And it's not all anti-clerical, either, though I can assure you that it is also not going to involve books about how the Dems can win in 2008 by being more religious. What it is about is recognizing that the U.S. is by far the most religious country in the West, and if we're to tussle with understanding this country, we have to engage with religion, and we're going to have to get our hands dirty with it. And, notwithstanding the relative secularity of the rest of the West, and notwithstanding my massive antipathy towards utterly ahistorical Huntingtonesque theories about clashes of civilizations, to also seek to understand the role religion (theological religion, let's say) plays when cultures (Algeria and the Netherland, Somalia and Italy, Morocco and Spain, etc etc...) interpenetrate.
Interestingly enough, almost everyone writing for us on this subject is in blog land. Michael Standaert is writing on Tim LaHaye and the Left Behind series in Skipping Toward Armageddon: The Politics and Propaganda of the Left Behind Novels and the LaHaye Empire; Laurel Snyder is editing Half/Life a collection of original essays on growing up half Jewish; and David Griffith has written what is probably the finest title for a book we'll publish this year: A Good War Is Hard to Find which we're describing as a Catholic Regarding the Pain of Others or as Joan Didion meets Flannery O'Connor...the first chapter of the book is online here.
So we're hitching a couple more horses to the Soft Skull non-fiction chariot: intellectual property as readers of my Google post will have noted, and religion, as I'm saying here. Making ever stranger bedfellows with queer studies, music, foreign policy, electoral politics, and so on...
Do we know what we're doing, putting all this together? No. But we're doing it so we can find out why we're doing it.
Yes, that's 23 hours asleep out of the 145 hours I spent at Frankfurt Book Fair which, even for this decidedly non-narcoleptic publisher, meant the best-laid plans of neophyte bloggers got lost in a sea of meetings, dinners, and midnight to 4 or 5am chats with French sub-agents, American scouts, Dutch editors, Spanish publishers, and a great Italian editor with a John Waters moustache who introduced Avant-Pop to Italy.
However, over the course of the coming days and weeks, I will give a few accounts as I do have all my notes and such. It will not be particularly newsworthy (the big news, covered elsewhere already by GalleyCat on the business side and the Complete Review on the literary one: Buffet went for $7 million but the Europeans were unimpressed; the Courtney Love memoir is hot the world over; and a novel about Pablo Cassals, once the Spanish bought it, started getting mega-offers left, right, and center) but I do hope it will give a sense of the different publishing cultures around the world—how the Italians seem to know more about contemporary American fiction than we do, how the Tiawanese have no interest in American non-fiction right now because they've their own political situation to worry about, and how the UK publishers are so much more fucked by chain retailing than we are.
So sorry to any of you who were hoping for the daily dispatch with breaking news and such—my eyes were bigger than my stomach.
As I mentioned in the introductory post, I realize that the Frankfurt Book Fair is probably somewhat of a mystery to many and that I might be doing folks a service to report on what goes on there so here's dispatch #1.
In fact, Frankfurt, though it officially runs Oct 18-24th, started for us all back in early July, when the world's publishers started frantically e-mailing one another to make apppointment at each others' booths and tables—most appointments for this October rendezvous have been made by the end of July and you won't get a meeting with anyone worth meeting if you wait til the Eurorepans have disappeared for August.
Why such organization? Part of it could be that it's Frankfurt and therefore the Germans are involved—for the other major international fair, in London, you're fine making your appointments 6 weeks in advance. The other factor, of course, is that Frankfurt is the Big Kahuna. It's Cannes and Sundance combined (minus the glamor). It's largely about pimping tranlation rights to one another in a fashion that's somewhat like speed-dating. You race to the table, greet each other in pidgin English, exchange cards and Rights Guides—xeroxed stapled descriptions of your books—ideally playing down anything that's overly culture-specific (Paul Berman's Power and the Idealists will play abroad, but America's Mayor won't, especially after all the Europeans lost money hand over fist doing Giuliani's Leadership), playing up blurbs from folks who have sold well internationally (Paul Auster blurb sells translation rights in France, Sam Lipsyte in Italy, Colum McCann and Colm Toibin sell them everywhere...). You give your two sentence description, guage the reaction from the eyes lighting up/dulling over, and immediately move onto the next one/launch into a deeper blow-by-blow.
And you basically do that from 9am to 6:30pm (or 900 to 1830, as is the tradition of he Frankfurt appointment-making process.)
And then, the day's appointments done, you start hustling invites to cocktail parties, dinners, parties and such, where, assuming you're successful, you simulataneously realize that this is one of the best aspects of your job, talking about books and writers with your peers from all over the world, and one of the most stressful, because you're desparately hoping they'll buy translation rights to one of your authors cause that's your best shot at ever being able to buy dinner at Frankfurt without mooching it off Random House Deutschland, or Einaudi, or Gallimard.
Then you go back to your room, in the European equaivalent of a Comfort Inn (the Hotel Ibis chain) in what's technically another city altogether, at around about 2-3AM, and report on the day's events to you, Dear Reader, courtesy of T-Mobil wi-fi.
FYI, as I'm sure you understand, but I'll make explicit right now nevertheless: this will be a snail's eye view of Frankfurt Book Fair. I'll do my best to find out the high-octane stuff like who's the next Melissa P. and was Padma there and will the titled publisher of a certain British independent house be doing his best Kate Moss impression...But largely I'm a grunt, so it'll be the trenches you'll be hearing about, and maybe Ron Hogan or Sarah Weinman will be able to persuade Laurel Touby to spring for one of them to go to Frankfurt next year for a more elevated perspective...