Ìęby Zhang Ling, translated from the Chinese by Shelly Bryant (AmazonCrossing)

Forthcoming on October 1st from AmazonCrossing,ÌęA Single SwallowÌęby Zhang Ling, the award-winning author of nine novels along with several short story collections. Here’s the jacket copy:

On the day of the historic 1945 Jewel Voice Broadcast—in which Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s surrender to the Allied forces, bringing an end to World War II—three men, flush with jubilation, made a pact. After their deaths, each year on the anniversary of the broadcast, their souls would return to the Chinese village of their younger days. It’s where they had fought—and survived—a war that shook the world and changed their own lives in unimaginable ways. Now, seventy years later, the pledge is being fulfilled by American missionary Pastor Billy, brash gunner’s mate Ian Ferguson, and local soldier Liu Zhaohu.

All that’s missing is Ah Yan—also known as Swallow—the girl each man loved, each in his own profound way.

As they unravel their personal stories of the war, and of the woman who touched them so deeply during that unforgiving time, the story of Ah Yan’s life begins to take shape, woven into view by their memories. A woman who had suffered unspeakable atrocities, and yet found the grace and dignity to survive, she’d been the one to bring them together. And it is her spark of humanity, still burning brightly, that gives these ghosts of the past the courage to look back on everything they endured and remember the woman they lost.

To celebrate the release of this book—and Women in Translation Month—here’s a conversation that Lucy Silag conducted with Zhang Ling:

Lucy Silag: Tell us about Ah Yan, the main character of A Single Swallow. What makes her extraordinary?

Zhang Ling: Ah Yan, “Swallow” in Chinese, is a girl whose initiation into womanhood is marked with unspeakable atrocity, a woman who bears, with dignity and courage, the suffering and shame inflicted upon her by people she abhors as well as people she adores, and a woman who, through her action, redefines the meaning of hope and salvation.

A character pivotal to the development of the story line, Ah Yan outlives all three men who have once loved her, each in a different way. What war has snatched away from her, peace does not give her back. Bullied, downtrodden, but never defeated, she has drawn her strength from attending to the needs of others. It is her spark of humanity, burning brightly throughout her life, that brings people together and gives them hope in their darkest moments. While both of her American lovers have left her, by death and by different course of life, she provides a home and fortress to which the weary Zhaohu, her puppy love, and Ah May, her interracial daughter, turn for shelter and protection. Her extraordinary ability to endure and forgive makes her a truly remarkable woman of her time, and in fact, of all time.

LS: What inspired you to write about Ah Yan’s village during World War II?

ZL: The acts of atrocity committed by the Japanese military and the great sufferings of the Chinese people during the War of Resistance (1939-1945) have not received, in my opinion, sufficient literary attention worldwide. As an enthusiastic reader of wartime memoirs, I’ve for years brooded over the idea of a Chinese war story.

A small, secretive American military group specializing in spy and guerrilla warfare, with an acronym of SACO (Sino-American Special Technical Cooperative Organization),operated in China during WWII. SACO established thirteen camps during 1943-1945 along the Chinese coastline with the dual purpose of gathering meteorological data for a possible air raid on Tokyo and training local Chinese guerrilla forces using the latest technology.

Through my reading I discovered, with great excitement, that the 8th SACO Camp was located in a place called Yuhu (or Yuehu in the novel), which was under the jurisdiction of my hometown Wenzhou, a city 800 km south of Shanghai. The American presence more than 70 years ago in a then very poor and isolated village immediately roused my curiosity. I instantly decided to write a war novel set in my hometown.

LS: The historic detail in A Single Swallow is so vivid. How did you research the novel?

ZL: I was able to arrange field trips, with the help of a local volunteer group, to visit the site of the 8th SACO camp, which has miraculously survived not only the Cultural Revolution but also recent economic development. I met with three surviving Chinese SACO trainees, an old man who worked when he was a youngster as a kitchen helper for the Americans, and some local residents with childhood memories of their interactions with the American soldiers in the village, etc. Vivid details emerged from my meetings with those people.

While my reading has helped me to gain a historic perspective of the war, the field trips helped me understand the poverty and sufferings of China as a war-torn country, the local people’s initial resentment and distrust of the American presence forced upon them, the displacement and alienation the American soldiers felt when trapped in an isolated village thousands of miles away from home, and the bond that eventually established between these two groups of people.

LS: The three narrators of the story—Pastor Billy, U.S. gunner’s mate Ian Ferguson, and local Chinese soldier Liu Zhaohu—each bring a new perspective to the story and to Ah Yan as a character. What makes each of their voices distinct?

ZL: By age and line of work, Pastor Billy is naturally the more mature and nurturing type. His mind is constantly occupied with thoughts about Ah Yan’s future when the war ends—her education, her medical career, and her financial independence, etc. His plan seems to proceed well except for one problem: he realizes, along the way, that he wants to be a part of her future, too. Sadly, he never gets a chance to find out whether his feelings for her are reciprocated.

A well-educated youth by local standard, Liu Zhaohu (“Tiger” in Chinese) gets his ideas about changing the world from his more sophisticated teachers in school, but the war shatters everything around him, including his chance to build a life with Ah Yan. Unable to overcome the shame and humiliation associated with Ah Yan’s lost virginity as a result of gang rape by the Japanese, he abandons his duty to Ah Yan and his own family, hoping in vain to die an eager and heroic death in battlefield. Forever haunted by his guilt-laden conscience, he lives his post-war years destitute of passion and enthusiasm.

Out of the three, Ian is the only one not aware of, nor bothered by, Ah Yan’s painful past. Ian’s youthful energy and free spirit breathe fresh air into Ah Yan’s care-laden life, but their flame of passion is doomed evanescent. Peace separates them as suddenly as the war has once joined them, leaving her pregnant with his child. This child, a girl named Ah May, becomes the talk of the town for many years to come, as Ah Yan never reveals the true identity of the father.

These three men each plays a different role in Ah Yan’s life. While Pastor Billy is a fatherly figure, forever living in a future tense, Liu Zhaohu seems to dwell on the past, unable to cross the gulf of shame. Ian’s youthful passion for life in its present tense seems to strike a right chord with Ah Yan. Pastor Billy embodies knowledge, wisdom and common sense whereas Ian represents youth and passion dangerously bordering on recklessness. A terribly torn man unable to put the broken pieces of life together, Liu Zhaohu, on the other hand, procrastinates whenever called upon to make a decision. Those are the elements I was conscious of while creating their individual voices.

LS: A Single Swallow was released in China in 2017 to wide acclaim. What is the most common thing that readers say about it when they reach out to you?

ZL; Readers were quite intrigued by the existence of SACO camps throughout China during WWII, as this part of history is new to most of them. While outraged by the atrocity of war and saddened by the suffering of Ah Yan, they admire her incredible resilience, her innate ability to forgive and love, and her power to neutralize the most trying crises in life. Many of my readers, old and young alike, feel that there is a sense of modernity in Ah Yan, as she struggles to maintain her “five hundred pounds and a room of her own” even in the direst situations.

LS:What was the most emotional section of this novel to write?

ZL: Two sections seem to linger in my mind long after I’ve finished the novel. The first one is the farewell scene when Ian leaves the village at the armistice and his houseboy, Buffalo, runs barefoot after him, with the boots Ian gives him as a parting gift slung around his neck, to say his long goodbyes, until he reaches the port and can go no further. Fully aware this might be their last sight of each other, they wave and wave until the boat carrying Ian and his comrades fades into the deep sea.

The second section is when Ah Yan, narrowly escaping a rape attempt by a Chinese trainee who regards her as a piece of left-over by the Japanese, finally decides to lay bare the story of her past in front of a strange and initially unsympathetic crowd, just to stop, once and for all, the gossip that has haunted her wherever she goes. It breaks my heart to write about the agonizing pain inflicted upon her not only by the enemy, but also by her own people.

LS: Tell us what you are working on now.Ìę

ZL: During the pandemic outbreak in China, I was trapped in my hometown Wenzhou, the second most affected area in China outside Hubei Province (where Wuhan lies), for three weeks. Cut off from my family and social ties in a lockdown city, I succumbed to fear, both real and imagined, of my daily supply chain being interrupted. Upon returning to Toronto, I’ve started to write about my experience there. This will be my first work of non-fiction.

The Great Passage by Shion Miura
translated from the Japanese byÌęJuliet Winters Carpenter
222 pgs. | pb |9781477823071 |Ìę$14.95Ìę

Reviewed by Talia Franks

Ìę

Shion Miura’s The Great Passage chronicles the construction of a dictionary also called The Great Passage, which is a comprehensive catalog of the Japanese language, the completion of which is a defining moment both professionally and personally for all involved. Yet, more than any other narrative thread, this book is centered around how words affect the human experience.

Written in third person limited, the character upon which the narration is focused changes throughout the text. This makes each character more individually accessible since the reader is allowed into the minds of multiple people and thus sees the story through the many perspectives that shape the work into a cohesive whole despite the shifting focus. Where one character might misinterpret the actions of another, and readers can see both perspectives of the exchange, which allows for a fuller narrative. This falls in line with a major theme of the book: that words enable mutual understanding of complex ideas and emotions. For example, multiple characters reflect on how the protagonist, Majime, has trouble expressing himself, as can be seen when reading Majime’s own perspective.

The split narration provides an advantage in many places throughout the book, as there are places where time skips. This switch in perspective to each new character’s internal reflections indicates this passage of time to the reader, and enables them to contextualize themselves in regard to how the narrative takes shape.

The book actually starts not with Majime, but with Kohei Araki, who wants to find someone as passionate as he is about dictionaries to replace him when he retires from the Dictionary Editorial Department. Not only does he want to leave the department in good hands, but Araki seeks someone who will continue to work on The Great Passage, which is a massive undertaking.

Aside from Araki, the characters who are most alive in the text are Nishioka and Midori Kishibe. Nishioka, an employee at the office who seems to simply do the bare minimum, is at first portrayed as careless and a bit of a womanizer before the reader is allowed into his perspective, and slowly, a hidden depth is revealed as Nishioka matures and the reader spends more time within his mind. In contrast to Nishioka, who is developed through viewing snippets of his consciousness from near the beginning of the text, readers are introduced to the character of Midori Kishibe late in the book and spend an entire chapter (out of five total) inside of Kishibe’s mind. Kishibe’s observations are meant to supplement Majime’s narrative, but in the process, readers are taken in to her world, and at the end I found myself much more invested in her story than that of Majime.

The plot of the book is mostly concerned with the making of the dictionary, with the aforementioned dips into the personal lives of the characters—primarily the development of Majime’s relationship with Kaguya, who works as a chef at a frequently visited restaurant and is the granddaughter of TakĂ©, Majime’s landlady. That said, the romantic relationships are, while important to the plot of the text, not nearly as engaging as the friendships and bonds created through the construction of The Great Passage, and the commentary that the book itself makes on the power of words.

As a non-speaker of Japanese, I would have been hopelessly lost when reading a text about the making of Japanese dictionaries were it not for the thoughtful explanations that I can only assume are the work of the translator, Juliet Winters Carpenter. Each time the use of a particular word had a special significance that would inform a character’s actions or intentions, there was a short expansion of the utterance that explained the use of the word and the implications of its use. These expansions fit so well into the English text that it was only because I was paying particular attention to these parts of the story that I even noticed them, they so little affected the narrative flow.

More than any other book I’ve read, The Great Passage has made me consider the cause and effect that words have on a person through every waking and dreaming moment, and its focus on the effect of dictionaries as keepers of a culture, able to either build bridges or build walls between the past, present, and future of a language and therefore community, took my breath away when reading. The Great Passage is interwoven with romantic love stories, but ultimately it is the passion of the characters, their friendship and their devotion to their task that direct and complete the narrative and turn it from simply a good book to a great one.

AmazonCrossing, the literary translation imprint of Amazon Publishing, today announced a commitment to publish exceptional works of literature from Indonesian authors translated into English beginning in early 2016. The announcement coincides with Indonesia’s participation as Guest of Honor at the Frankfurt Book Fair this week. [. . .]

Indonesian titles planned for publication include:

Nirzona, a love story by Abidah El Khalieqy, set against the backdrop of the Aceh tsunami, a rare moment in recent history when the world’s eyes turned to Indonesia

English-language originals The Oddfits and The More Known World, the first two titles in the Oddfits series from Indonesia-born Tiffany Tsao, a translator and past Indonesia editor at large for Asymptote Journal

Paper Boats, a new adult love story written in glittering, quotable prose from popular novelist, actress, and singer Dee Lestari

A new edition of Laksmi Pamuntjak’s acclaimed A Question of Red and her latest, Aruna and Her Palate, which follows a food writer’s travels through Indonesia

Hummingbird, a stunning work of magical realism from Nukila Amal [. . .]

The Indonesia spotlight program follows similar AmazonCrossing programs in past years featuring literature from Finland, Iceland and Brazil. The Finnish spotlight program included Katri Lipson’s European Union Prize for Literature-winning literary thriller The Ice Cream Man, as well as books by Leena Lehtolainen, Jari JĂ€rvelĂ€, Marko Hautala, and Risto IsomĂ€ki. The Brazilian spotlight program launched in 2013 and has included the release of a dozen books of full-length fiction and short stories from Brazilian authors including Luiz Ruffato, CristovĂŁo Tezza, Josy Stoque, and Eliane Brum. In 2012, the Iceland spotlight program included ten Icelandic books, three of which—The Hitman’s Guide to Housecleaning by Hallgrimur Helgason, The Flatey Enigma by Viktor Arnar Ingolfsson, and House of Evidence by Viktor Arnar Ingolfsson—became Kindle Top Ten best sellers.

Taken in combination with the relative success of the recent releases by Eka Kurniawan (Beauty Is a Wound, Man Tiger) and Leila Chudori (Home), this is a great time for Indonesian lit. (Just to put it in perspective: From 2008 until this year, only nine works of Indonesian fiction were published in the U.S.)

My favorite line from this is “a new adult love story written in glittering, quotable prose.” I shudder to think of “quotable prose” being used as a positive adjective. A lot of readers post lines from her work on GoodReads!

Also, the only food writers I read are

There’s not a lot of specifics in their press release, but there is some information about a new site they set up:

To support this growing commitment to books in translation, AmazonCrossing editors today opened a new website for authors, agents and publishers to suggest titles for translation at translation.amazon.com/submissions. AmazonCrossing is now accepting submissions in mystery, thriller, women’s fiction, historical fiction, literary fiction, memoir, science fiction and fantasy categories. In addition to this new streamlined process for submissions, AmazonCrossing editors will accept submissions for translation consideration in person at the Frankfurt Book Fair on October 14th from 11:00 am-1:00 pm in Hall 3.0, K31.

It’ll be interesting to see how this develops over the next few years. They published 35 books so far this year, and 47 last year, and with a $2 million investment, they could easily up that to 60 or 70. What I think we’re all hoping is that a good chunk of this money goes directly to the translators. AmazonCrossing really is in a position to help the field as a whole, essentially creating more jobs for translators, which is really important given the growing number of young people getting into this field.

As Sarah Jane Gunter mentions in the press release, AmazonCrossing is one of the largest publishers of translated literature in the United States. And they publish a much wider range of books than, say, Open Letter or Dalkey Archive. This is the thing that I most respect about them as a publisher. They’re making books available to English readers that a lot of translation-centric presses don’t even consider.

Over the past five years, AmazonCrossing has published significant works such as German author Oliver Pötzsch’s million copy best-selling Hangman’s Daughter series, Korean author Bae Suah’s acclaimed novella Nowhere to Be Found and Turkish author Ayse Kulin’s Kindle best seller Last Train to Istanbul. The 2016 list will continue a commitment to translating books by exceptional foreign-language authors including award-winning and best-selling Mexican author of Like Water for Chocolate, Laura Esquivel. Her novel Pierced by the Sun, a gripping tale of murder and redemption translated from Spanish by Jordi Castells, will be published in June 2016. In July 2016, AmazonCrossing will publish award-winning Polish crime writer Zygmunt Miloszewski’s Rage, translated from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, winner of the 2014 Paszport Polityka prize for literature.

I highly recommend that Bae Suah book, and I’m looking forward to reading the Laura Restrepo book that they’re doing as well.

I’ll bet the AmazonCrossing folks are going to be in high demand at this year!

The disturbing premise is certainly absorbing, and the book is by no means a standard thriller or detective story. However, despite the low page count (it’s just over 100 pages), the book seemed to drag on. Glavinic appears to be equally interested in the ability of his characters to continue on with their ordinary activities and concerns in spite of the horror that edges in. A pretty standard passage reads as follows:

Heinrich and I put up the net. We marked out the court with discarded articles of clothing and broken twigs stuck in the ground (those of the previous day that had been dislodged by the wind or the nocturnal rainstorm). We also flattened the grass at the edge of the court by treading it down.

The wicker basket was unpacked by my partner and Eva. My partner extolled the fact that our short walk there had refreshed her and said we should at once devote the time that remained before the storm broke to playing doubles. We duly did so. Team Heinrich/self beat Team Eva/my partner 15:6. Heinrich pronounced this pointless; the difference in level of ability was too glaring. So we changed partners. My partner and I were narrowly defeated (11:15) by the Stubenrauchs.

The book follows events like this, with a focus on minute and mundane details, until an arrest is made. The Camera Killer relies perhaps more on what is not said than on what the narrator describes, but the tone doesn’t entirely work. These detailed descriptions, the flat and stilted tone, and the disappointing dĂ©nouement detract from the author’s intriguing and Kafka-esque approach. The narrator comes off as cold and robotic, and I imagine that is a deliberate choice to create contrast between the low-key prose and the intensity of the situation rather than a failure on the part of the writer or translator, but the narrator makes a rather dull robot. Rather than being chilling in its banality, it’s just bland.

The narrator is not the only one without much of a personality; the women—or “womenfolk” as they are often referred to—do little more than prepare food, think about food, act scared, and nag the men. Heinrich is the only one with any defining characteristics and that’s basically that he’s an irritating, inconsiderate jerk. The most intriguing character was probably the “fancy-dress cat” that occasionally appears around the house.

It is possible that part of the problem is the translation, although I do not have the knowledge of German to determine if that is the case. Both Glavinic and Brownjohn have received critical acclaim in the past, and this is the third time Brownjohn has published a translation of Glavinic’s work. In fact, Brownjohn has translated over 200 books and has received multiple awards, including the Schlegel-Tieck Prize and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize. Glavinic has achieved both critical and commercial success; his book Das bin doch ich (“That’s Me”), was short-listed for the German Book Prize, How to Live (Wie man lebel soll) reached the top of the Austrian best-seller list, and the original version of The Camera Killer, Der Kameramörde, was awarded the Friedrich-Glauser Prize for crime fiction. Nonetheless, there were moments that sounded a bit strange in English, for example: “Masticating, she said it was a glorious day and it mustn’t be spoiled by talk of murder and so on; Eva should bring influence to bear on Heinrich in that regard,” “We betook ourselves to the CafĂ© Wurm, surveyed the tables in the garden without sighting our womenfolk, and went inside,” or when the cameraman threatens to “pay the family a visit on October 31st and Halloween them all to death.” The frequent use of “my partner” and “womenfolk” was somewhat irritating, although I suspect that is more likely true to the original.

Perhaps some of my disappointment was due to the fact that the jacket copy described it as “gripping,” which it is not. The twist at the end of the book is very important, and unfortunately I anticipated this surprise quite early on in the book. I’m not convinced that everyone will, and I think my dissatisfaction upon reaching the final lines is absolutely influenced by the fact that I expected them. Overall, I didn’t feel that I wasted the small amount of time it took to get through this short thriller, as it was unique and at times very-well written. However, monotonous narration and occasionally awkward phrasing led me to wish that Glavinic had considered writing The Camera Killer as a short story instead.

Lisa Boscov-Ellen is another MA student here at the URochester, and translates from Spanish. She was also in my class last semester (and this one!), where she wrote this fairly negative review . . .

The Camera Killer by Austrian writer Thomas Glavinic, translated by John Brownjohn, is a psychological thriller that was first published in 2003 as Der Kameramörde. The unnamed narrator travels to the region of West Styria over Easter weekend with his “partner” Sonja to stay with their friends, Eva and Heinrich Stubenrauch. Shortly after they arrive, the two couples hear about an appalling crime committed nearby, which they and the rest of the public are compelled to follow in the news over the weekend, each with differing reactions. The original report is that a man forced “two children of seven and eight to kill themselves by jumping from tall trees and filmed those crimes with a video camera. A third boy, the deceased children’s nine-year-old brother, managed to escape.” More information is gradually released, such as the fact that the surviving boy is in an induced coma and the mother has been institutionalized, and the video of the crime is even broadcast to the public on the news. The novel (really on the border of being a novella) focuses on the reactions of the four individuals as they follow the manhunt and the media sensationalism of the event.

The disturbing premise is certainly absorbing, and the book is by no means a standard thriller or detective story. However, despite the low page count (it’s just over 100 pages), the book seemed to drag on. Glavinic appears to be equally interested in the ability of his characters to continue on with their ordinary activities and concerns in spite of the horror that edges in. A pretty standard passage reads as follows:

“Heinrich and I put up the net. We marked out the court with discarded articles of clothing and broken twigs stuck in the ground (those of the previous day that had been dislodged by the wind or the nocturnal rainstorm). We also flattened the grass at the edge of the court by treading it down.”

“The wicker basket was unpacked by my partner and Eva. My partner extolled the fact that our short walk there had refreshed her and said we should at once devote the time that remained before the storm broke to playing doubles. We duly did so. Team Heinrich/self beat Team Eva/my partner 15:6. Heinrich pronounced this pointless; the difference in level of ability was too glaring. So we changed partners. My partner and I were narrowly defeated (11:15) by the Stubenrauchs.”

The book follows events like this, with a focus on minute and mundane details, until an arrest is made.

Click here to read the full review.

At once wryly observant and sweetly comic, The Greenhouse is a meditation on such sweeping themes as sex, death, becoming a parent, manhood, and finding a place for oneself in the world which doesn’t once fall prey to cloying generalizations or cliche. Rather, through the eyes of twenty-two year old ArnljĂłtur ThĂłrir—or Lobbi, as his elderly father affectionately calls him—author Audur Ava Olafsdottir breathes a freshness and sincerity into her subject matter which is as charming as it is insightful.

The novel opens with a birth and a death. Having lost his mother in a car accident just a year earlier, Lobbi is also adjusting to his unexpected new role as father. His first child, Flóra Sól, is the product of the unlikely indiscretion of “one quarter of a night, not even, a fifth, more like it.” His mother’s death and the birth of his daughter both take place on the same day, which also happens to be his mother’s birthday. Lobbi’s father ascribes this confluence to “some intricate system,” while his son dismisses the coincidences as meaningless chance. “In my experience,” he sagely remarks, “as soon as you think you’ve got one thing figured out, something completely different happens.”

This statement ends up being wiser than Lobbi could imagine, as all of his best laid plans and worldviews are systematically upended throughout the novel. Feeling himself to be somewhat superfluous in the life of his daughter, and at loose ends with his father and autistic twin brother at home, Lobbi decides that rather than go to college, he will travel to a remote (unnamed) village monastery abroad to work as an gardener. Although he is generally indecisive and frequently unsure of himself, the decision is not a difficult one. Lobbi was “more or less brought up in a greenhouse” by his mother, who shared with her son a knack for cultivating tomatoes, flowers, and roses where once had only been “a flat stretch of barren land with rocks surrounded by wind-scattered pebbles.”

Lobbi is not even out of Reykjavík when his plans begin to go awry. He falls ill on the plane and must be hospitalized upon landing. Once recovered, he rents a car and begins his long journey, only to find himself lost in a deep forest and unexpectedly transporting an inn-keeper’s daughter to her drama class, 350 kilometers out of his way. Finally arriving at his destination, he finds solace in the monastery garden and a mentor in a monk with a love of dessert liqueurs and art house cinema. But he has not been working at the garden long when he is contacted by the mother of his child, an aspiring geneticist who would like Lobbi to “bear [his] part of the responsibility” and help her look after Flóra Sól while she completes her thesis. Thus, in very short order, Lobbi finds himself living with a woman, raising a daughter, learning to cook, and hopefully, figuring out what he wants to do with his life.

The Greenhouse is a meandering novel and although there are quite a few happenings throughout the narrative, not much actually “happens” per se, and nor does it need to. Lobbi’s daily negotiations of quotidian responsibilities are so sweetly related that something as simple as making dinner can become a rich, humorous, and illustrative moment. From Brian FitzGibbon’s seamless translation, it is clear that Audur Ava is a beautiful prose stylist who uses simple and straightforward language and imagery to convey complex emotions and observations. Interspersing scenes from Lobbi’s daily life with reflective moments from his past—the last conversation he had with his mother, sitting up and watching his daughter sleep the night that she was born—Audur Ava creates a fully realized portrait of a young man coming into himself without even really being aware of his own transformation.

The Greenhouse is a novel about finding beauty in the everyday, in simple moments and acts—in making dinner, and planting roses, and helping a child learn to walk. It is a story of creating meaning in one’s own life, especially in the face of chance and coincidence.

As Larissa—one of our excellent contributing reviewers, who loves the Scandinavian and is starting to learn Icelandic—points out at the beginning of her review, this is the first of ten (yes, ten) Icelandic works that AmazonCrossing will be bringing out over the next year. A (a little place called Amazon.com that you may have heard of), and of the forthcoming titles, the one I’ve heard is most amazing is by Hallgrimur Helgason (who is an incredible writer).

This is great news for the Icelandic literary scene, and will surely bring a lot more attention to the non-crime fiction writers one can find there. (Such as Bragi Olafsson and Kristin Omarsdottir, two Open Letter authors you should all read.)

Here’s the opening of Larissa’s very positive review:

2011 has been a banner year for Icelandic literature on the international stage. “Fabulous Iceland” was this year’s guest of honor at the Frankfurt Book Fair, and in August, UNESCO named the ReykjavĂ­k as one of its five Cities of Literature—the only such city where English is not the native language. Perhaps even more notable for American readers, however, was the recent announcement that Amazon’s new publishing imprint, AmazonCrossing, will release an astounding ten Icelandic titles in new English translations over the next year. Judging by the press’ first Icelandic selection, The Greenhouse by Audur Ava Olafsdottir, English-readers can look forward to a catalog of remarkable Icelandic titles in the coming months.

At once wryly observant and sweetly comic, The Greenhouse is a meditation on such sweeping themes as sex, death, becoming a parent, manhood, and finding a place for oneself in the world which doesn’t once fall prey to cloying generalizations or cliche. Rather, through the eyes of twenty-two year old ArnljĂłtur ThĂłrir—or Lobbi, as his elderly father affectionately calls him—author Audur Ava Olafsdottir breathes a freshness and sincerity into her subject matter which is as charming as it is insightful.

The novel opens with a birth and a death. Having lost his mother in a car accident just a year earlier, Lobbi is also adjusting to his unexpected new role as father. His first child, Flóra Sól, is the product of the unlikely indiscretion of “one quarter of a night, not even, a fifth, more like it.” His mother’s death and the birth of his daughter both take place on the same day, which also happens to be his mother’s birthday. Lobbi’s father ascribes this confluence to “some intricate system,” while his son dismisses the coincidences as meaningless chance. “In my experience,” he sagely remarks, “as soon as you think you’ve got one thing figured out, something completely different happens.”

To read the whole piece, simply click here.

Here’s the

“The Icelandic series from AmazonCrossing will ensure that the guest country will still be present on the international book market once the Book Fair has come and gone,” said HalldĂłr GuĂ°mundsson, director of Fabulous Iceland, at a press conference given to announce that AmazonCrossing, a new imprint of Amazon Publishing dedicated to foreign works in translation, had resolved to publish ten Icelandic titles in the near future.

The series will kick off with The Greenhouse by AuĂ°ur Ava ÓlafsdĂłttir and HallgrĂ­mur Helgason’s The Hitman’s Guide to Iceland. Both authors appeared at the conference. Also slated for publication are works by Viktor Arnar IngĂłlfsson, Árni Þórarinsson, Vilborg DavĂ­Ă°sdĂłttir and Steinunn SigurĂ°ardĂłttir, with more to be announced in early 2012.

Translated books comprise less than three percent of titles published in the United States and United Kingdom. “This figure is too small, by a long shot,” Jon Fine of AmazonCrossing said, adding that the imprint’s aim was to improve the ratio of foreign translation on the English-speaking market. “There are wonderful stories in Iceland and around the world that are not accessible to English speakers. We want to translate these extraordinary international literary works and authors and introduce them to new audiences worldwide.”

In the world of translation publishing, one of the more interesting developments of the past year was the launching of AmazonCrossing, a new initiative of Amazon.com Books. The imprint’s first book—The King of Kahel by Tierno Monenembo—goes on sale November 2nd, and a second batch of six titles was announced late last month.

According to Amazon.com Books Vice President Jeff Belle, the seed of AmazonCrossing was planted a couple years back when he read a report by translator extraordinaire Esther Allen about the “three percent problem”—the fact that, of all the books published in the US, only three percent are works in translation. As Belle stated, this dismal statistic “is really at odds with Amazon’s vision of making every book in every language available to our customers.” Allen educated Amazon about the translation market, leading Amazon to start funding translations through the “Author & Publisher Giving Program,” and to launch AmazonCrossing to “discover great voices of the world that have not been translated into English and introduce them to [Amazon’s] English-speaking customers.”

Amazon.com has been moving in the direction of publishing for some time now, first with a couple of self-publishing options—CreateSpace (formerly BookSurge) is a print option, and any author/publisher can sell their eBooks through Amazon’s Kindle program. In a somewhat more traditional publishing vein, there’s also AmazonEncore, through which Amazon uses information such as customer reviews to identify “exceptional, overlooked books and authors” that deserve to have their works reintroduced to readers. These titles are available both in print and Kindle formats.

In some ways, AmazonCrossing is an extension of the Encore program, with Amazon acquiring rights and responsible for the marketing of these books. What’s interesting is that they’ve chosen to pursue international works—a category that many of commercial publishers shy away from. As Jeff Belle puts it, this “dearth of foreign translations into English” is one area of publishing that’s not well served.

As mentioned above, the first title in the AmazonCrossing program is Tierno Monenembo’s The King of Kahel, which first came to Amazon’s attention when it won the 2008 Prix Renaudot in France and just starting to plan this initiative. More than a year later, the English rights were still available, which further convinced Belle and the rest of the Amazon team that there are a lot of great books that never make their way into English.

Similar to the Encore program, customer reviews (in this case on Amazon.fr—the company’s French site) helped convince Amazon to go ahead with this book, which points to Amazon’s ability to leverage customer research. Although comments are obviously public, traditional publishers don’t tend to examine this sort of feedback when deciding whether or not to publish a translation of a particular book. This
customer-centric approach is unique, almost the diametrical opposite to the traditional “I know what readers want” mantra of most editors. “Our choices are really dictated by what our customers tell us about the books they love,” says Belle. “We’re looking for exceptional books that are effectively nominated by our customers and deserving of a wider, global audience.”

Amazon won’t specify how many translated titles they plan on publishing in any given season, but they recently announced their next six , which include a thriller (The Hangman’s Daughter by Oliver Pötzsch), a non-fiction book on Argentina’s economic troubles (No Reserve: The Limit of Absolute Power by MartĂ­n Redrado), a YA-novel (Pizzicato: The Abduction of the Magic Violin by Rusalka Reh), a 19th-century Spanish novel (Pepita Jimenez by Juan Valera), and a controversial work of literary fiction (Field Work in Ukrainian Sex by Oksana Zabuzhko).

Members of the AmazonCrossing team will be at the Fair, meeting with agents, publishers, and translators to spread the word about this new program. More information about AmazonCrossing and its titles can be found online.