Tag: books

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Elsa on the Longlist for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation! And what an extraordinary list of amazing books in translation it is! Let’s read them all!

Lies and Sorcery by Elsa Morante Translated by Jenny McPhee #NameTheTranslator Longlist 2025 The 14 longlisted titles are: Johanna Ekström and Sigrid Rausing, And the Walls Became the World All Around, translated from Swedish (Sweden) by Sigrid Rausing (Granta) Evelyne Trouillot, Désirée Congo, translated from French (Haiti) by M.A. Salvodon (University of Virginia Press) Fatma Aydemir, Djinns, translated …

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A Shortlist Nomination! We love Prizes! Especially when they showcase literature in translation!

The American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) is delighted to announce the 2024 shortlists for the Italian Prose in Translation Award (IPTA), Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize, the Spain-USA Foundation Translation Award (SUFTA), and ALTA First Translation Prize! The winners of these awards will be announced at ALTA’s annual awards ceremony, which will take place on …

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My Take On Sally Rooney’s Latest @ Air Mail

“The hardest disappointment is in feeling that I’ve failed to do justice to my characters.” Intermezzo by Sally Rooney Reviewed by Jenny McPhee Reading this novel,” Sally Rooney wrote in her introduction to Natalia Ginzburg’s All Our Yesterdays, “we get to know its characters as if they were our own friends, or even ourselves. Many of them are …

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My Translation of Natalia Ginzburg’s “The Jews” in The Massachusetts Review

The Jews BY NATALIA GINZBURG Translated from Italian by Jenny McPhee The day after the events in Munich, the Catholic Press Association called me to say it was conducting an inquiry regarding the massacre and asked if I would express my opinion. I refused to respond. I told them that I never respond to inquiries.[*] …

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THE (IMAGINED) WOMAN READER AND MALE ANXIETY: My September Column at Bookslut

Recently, in The New York Review of Books, Elaine Blair wrote, "Our American male novelists, I suspect, are worried about being unloved as writers -- specifically by the female reader. This is the larger humiliation looming behind the many smaller fictional humiliations of their heroes, and we can see it in the way the characters' …

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THE SULTANA OF SUBVERSION: THREE HARD-BOILED NOVELS BY DOROTHY B. HUGHES: My July Column at Bookslut

The serial killer Dix Steele in Dorothy B. Hughes's 1947 noir classic In a Lonely Place professes to his friend Brub Nicolai, an LAPD detective assigned to the "strangler" case, to be writing a detective novel. Brub responds: "Who you stealing from, Chandler or Hammett or Gardner?" Hughes herself stole brilliantly from her fellow pulp …

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“Arm Yourself Against My Dawn”: Revisiting Jean Strouse’s groundbreaking biography of Alice James

In a colorful, chatty, and ironically self-aggrandizing letter to her Aunt Kate, Alice James concludes with a quip: "Forgive me all this egotism but I have to be my own Boswell." Alice James had to wait nearly a century, but she eventually found her Boswell in Jean Strouse. First published in 1980, Strouse's dazzling, bold, …

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