Archive for October, 2010

It’s a privilege to help usher in Nelson Mandela’s Conversations with Myself, an international publishing event. We’ve selected President Barack Obama’s foreword to the book as our monthly exclusive for Work in Progress readers. A preview is excerpted below.

-Ryan Chapman

“Like many people around the world, I came to know of Nelson Mandela from a distance, when he was imprisoned on Robben Island. To so many of us, he was more than just a man – he was a symbol of the struggle for justice, equality, and dignity in South Africa and around the globe. His sacrifice was so great that it called upon people everywhere to do what they could on behalf of human progress.

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When the 2010 Nobel Prize for Literature announcement went out last week, we were thrilled they named our author Mario Varga Llosa. I reached out to two of his translators for their thoughts.

Edith Grossman is an award-winning translator of Gabriel García Márquez, Julián Rios, and Álvaro Mutis, among others. Her 2003 translation of Cervantes’ Don Quixote is widely acclaimed as one of the best translations from the Spanish in recent years.

Natasha Wimmer is best known for her translation of Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives and 2666. She has also translated Pedro Juan Gutiérrez’s Dirty Havana Trilogy.

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Chapman: How did you first discover Mario Vargas Llosa’s work?

Edith Grossman: I first discovered his work in graduate school, when I was reading works of the Latin American Boom—Vargas Llosa, Fuentes, García Márquez, Rulfo, Cortázar, and so forth.

Chapman: How did you come to translate his books in the United States?

Grossman: I was approached by FSG to translate Death in the Andes, the first book of his I worked on. I had met him a few times before that in New York, at talks and readings.
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I met with Richard Howard on a bright October morning in his apartment near Washington Square Park. He welcomed me as he always does, standing on the threshold, one foot in, one foot out, watching me walk down the corridor with a smile on his face. We kissed hello à la française. On that Saturday morning, he wore a striped shirt of subtle shades of blue and elegant black trousers. His round glasses, of which he owns an astonishing collection (same model, in a Pantone-like array of colors) were deep blue, matching the darkest of his shirt’s stripes. His socks, light blue, matched the other shade. The walls in Richard Howard’s home are lined with books, from floor to ceiling, dimming the place with an opaque silence. Behind me, as I sat on the sofa, battered editions of Cioran, Gide, Baudelaire in the original—authors whose works Richard Howard translated or taught. Roland Barthes was one of them, as well as a longtime friend.

-Marion Duvert, Editor and Associate Director of Foreign Rights

Duvert: Samuel Beckett once wrote that there was no need of a story. Roland Barthes would have probably agreed with that, and yet I think I would like to hear it—the story of you and Barthes. How did you come to meet him? Did you meet the man first, and then the work? Or the work first, and then the man? (more…)

Would you sacrifice one life to save five? Is it okay to steal a drug your child needs to survive?

These are the questions Professor Michael J. Sandel poses in his legendary course and New York Times-bestseller Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?

Sandel’s class on moral philosophy is consistently the most popular at Harvard, with over 1,000 students at a time. On November 7th, we’re taking his accessible approach directly to readers with a national, live, interactive format called teleforum. It’s a new form of the traditional author reading, one where readers can join in from anywhere in the country.

All you need to participate is a telephone. Broadnet‘s teleforum enables readers to interact with an author directly, answering his questions and responding with your own. Simply sign up in advance and we call you as the event begins. It’s completely free.

Sandel debating “The Moral Side of Murder”:

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It may seem foolish to start a literary journal at a time when fewer people are reading books, and doomsayers fill column inches with “death of literature” jeremiads. But Andy Hunter and Scott Lindenbaum have developed a new approach that seems to work: find great short fiction and get it to the people wherever they are. They’re also producing a number of more experimental approaches to narrative and technology that… well, we’ll let Andy tell you himself.

-Ryan Chapman

Chapman: Give us a brief overview of Electric Literature and how you distribute the work to readers.

Andy Hunter: Electric Literature was created as an optimistic response to the fear many were feeling in the face of a changing medium: what the obsolescence of the printed word meant, specifically, for literary writing.
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