Three Percent Podcast

This week, Chad W. Post and Kaija Straumanis talk with Philip Graham--a co-founder and current nonfiction editor of Ninth Letter, author of several books, including The Moon, Come to Earth: Dispatches from Lisbon about Portuguese culture and literature, specifically the works of Gonçalo Tavares, whose book The Neighborhood is coming out this month with Philip's introduction. (Which will appear here on Three Percent in the near future.)   There's a lot of references included in the podcast this week, the main ones being to Sintra, an amazing town just outside of Lisbon that was once the playground of the aristocracy. It's LOADED with castles and palaces and other intriguing estates. 

This week's podcast features special guest Kaija Straumanis to help preview the upcoming American Literary Translators Conference. Every fall, approx. 350 translators get together for three days of panels, discussions, readings, movies, and drinking. (Oh, and mechanical bull riding. Unless your name is Scott Esposito.) 

This week's podcast features freelance book critic Jacob Silverman, who stirred up a lot of discussion last month when Slate published his piece, "Against Enthusiasm" about "the epidemic of niceness in online book culture." Basically, Jacob argued that online book culture has lead away from legit discussion to a series of endorsements and "+1s." Shortly after he wrote this, William Giraldi trashed Alex Ohlin's recent publications, setting off another Twitter firestorm. And of course, the day we recorded this, Giraldi published a long piece in The Daily Beast explaining his beliefs about book criticism. Anyway, this week we talk about all of that . . . 

This week's podcast--the last before Tom goes off to visit the good people of Carolina--is a bit of a surprise. Tom told me he had a topic, but wanted to spring it on me and get my unprepared reaction. So, to share in the spirit of surprises, I'm not going to say anything about what we talked about, except to mention that it wasn't about baseball or Arsenal's post-RVP lack of firepower. It does involve Canadians, though. And the New York Times Book Review. Enjoy!

I'm just back from family vacation, so this week we decided to take things easy and talk about The Dark Knight Rises (which we sort of spoil for anyone who either hasn't seen it, or thinks it's great), the Olympics, books we've read recently, and J. K. Rowling and her misguided attempt to prevent piracy of her new book.

This week, Will Evans joins us to talk about contemporary Russian literature (READ THIS BOOK) and the Read Russia initiative at this year's BEA. (Sidenote: click on that link just to see the section at the bottom left corner where you can share the page via "Socialist Media." Seriously.) We talk about Zakhar Prilepin, Mikhail Shishkin, Dmitry Danilov (who looks a bit like Ignatius J. Reilly, see below), and Oleg Kashin. We also talk a bit about Will's plan to start a new publishing company in Dallas that's focused on literature in translation . . .

This week's podcast (which was actually recorded weeks ago) features Ryan Chapman of The Penguin Press, who came on with us to discuss the fun marketing campaign Penguin put on to celebrate the release of the ebook versions of all of Thomas Pynchon's books. As usual the conversation swerves from that to discussing American literature in general, the Euro Cup (SPAIN!) and sundry odds and ends, such as making up blurbs for catalogs . . .

In this week's podcast, Tom and I talk about BookExpo America and its parties, in particular the rocking one that took place at the New Directions offices. I also rant (a bit) about why I didn't get to go to Cape Town to present my speech, "The Long Term Is the Only Race Worth Winning." There's also a bit of baseball talk related to a bet that the two of us made, and we throw out ideas for a few future podcasts.

In this week's podcast, Tom and I talk about two related subjects: a New Yorker article about the translation of the first line of Camus' The Stranger, and the PEN World Voices panel about "Reviewing Translations." There are also some digressions, mostly involving me apologizing for all sorts of things (offending people, swearing, being silly, etc.), and baseball. Naturally.

This week's podcast is a special Eurovision edition featuring resident Eurovision expert, Kaija Straumanis. We go through a bunch of the videos/songs participating in this year's competition and make fun of almost everything while also trying to come to understand why Eurovision is so compelling in its bizarreness. To follow along with our comments, I highly recommend watching the videos below as you listen to the podcast--it will greatly enhance your listening experience. 

Tom and I were on fire during this week's podcast, talking about the PEN World Voices Festival and some interesting questions we were asked in an interview for the Picador Book Room Tumblr. While talking about PEN WV, what is learned about a location from reading a book set there, what's lost and/or gained in translation, we (meaning mostly me) tear into a number of things. 

(My initial plan was to create a title for this podcast that was actually an acrostic spelling out "Oulipo." The best I came up with was "Our Unique Lab Instigating Poetic Opportunities," which is decent, self-referential, and strange, but not perfect. Unfortunately, drinking didn't help me improve upon that, so . . .)    This week's podcast features a special discussion with Daniel Levin Becker, author of Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Liteature, a history of of the Oulipo, past, present, and future. For the uninitiated, the Oulipo is a 50-year-old group of writers and mathematicians and others interested in the idea of "potential" literature. At times highly technical and esoteric in their thinking about literature, the group also has a sort of prankster streak, which comes out in the liveliness of many of their writings. Some of the most famous works produced by Oulipian writers include Georges Perec's Life A User's Manual, Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler . . ., and Harry Ma

This week we completely avoid talking about Amazon and the Department of Justice to focus on genre books in translation. Tom's a big noir/thriller fan, so we talk about a number of those, but we also discuss some works of science-fiction, including XYZ.

This week Tom and I welcomed Jeff Waxman of University of Chicago Press and 57th Street Books to the podcast to talk about different approaches to marketing different "types" of translations, such as contemporary translations vs. classic works vs. new translations vs. reprints vs. . . . It's an interesting conversation (isn't it always?) with the conversation ranging from the influence of reviews, to best practices for publishers to engage with booksellers. And it ends with a stunning rendition of the "Bookselling" section of The Way it Wasn't by New Directions founder James Laughlin. (It's worth listening to the podcast just to get to this.) 

In this week's podcast, we talk about the future of book reviewing, focusing on a few central questions: who reads book reviews? (A: definitely not my students), what is the function of the book review in today's world?, is there a website/app that would be the ideal book review platform? We also digress into sports talk (as we do), with Tom explaining how he just found out about the new MLB playoff setup while I predict the winners of the Champions League quarterfinals. (A: Chelsea, Bayern Munchen, Barcelona, and Real Madrid.) 

With the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament getting underway this afternoon (I refuse to acknowledge the "First Four" games), Tom and I thought this would be a good time to talk about the fact that we both picked the exact same Final Four (Kentucky, Missouri, UNC, and Ohio State) and that The Morning News's Tournament of Books is made up of a lot of mediocre books.    We also talk about the idea of a "Tournament of World Literature" featuring the best translated works of the 20th and 21st centuries. It's kind of fun coming up with what books would be included in such a mythical tournament--Sartre's Nausea, Cortazar's Hopscotch, Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark, Lispector's The Hour of the Star, Perec's Life, a User's Manual, so on and forth--and trying to figure out how to seed these. I am pretty serious about trying to bracket this out, so if you have any suggestions of books that just have to be included, send me an email.

To celebrate tonight's announcements of the National Book Critic Circle Award winners, Tom and I decided to go through all six categories (fiction, nonfiction, autobiography, biography, criticism, and poetry) and pick out who we thought would win. Seeing that neither of us has read many of the finalists, this makes for some pretty fun times and some great digressions, like about how we're both over WWII novels, and how "revolution" is the theme of this year's awards.    To honor the totally -insane- rad video the U of R admissions office released today, we decided to use a bit of it as our intro/outro music. But really, you should just watch the whole video on the Three Percent blog post. "For those of you who want to know what we're all about . . . MELIORA."

In this week's podcast, Chad and Tom welcome Ed Nawotka, editor of Publishing Perspectives, to unpack the Best Translated Book Award fiction longlist that was announced this week. (Also, Harry Potter, the Oscars, and other fun miscellany all make random appearances.)