BAR#2 features new fiction by (Bolivia) and (France), as well as poetry by PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award-winning (Jamaica). Reviews and essays by and and a walk through the Bibliothèque nationale de France with

The piece from this that jumped out at me is Samuel Rutter’s which is about Open Letter author Carlos Labbe’s latest novel, Piezas secretas contra el mundo.

A recent interview in El País identified Carlos Labbé (Santiago de Chile, 1977) as a writer at the forefront of a generation returning to the complex relationship between avant-garde literature and political engagement. In keeping with this characterization, Labbé’s latest novel, Piezas secretas contra el mundo, published in March by Editorial Periférica is an ambitious declaration of principles for a new understanding of the novel in the twenty-first century.

Those familiar with Labbé’s growing and challenging body of work, beginning with the hypertext novel Pentagonal, will recognise in this latest novel some of the tropes the author continues to address. There is a particularly textual nature to the worlds Labbé creates, where the acts of reading and writing form an essential part of the fabric of reality in which his protagonists exist. The increasingly political edge to the author’s prose manifests itself in this novel through its ecological themes, which have come to include the status of indigenous cultures in Chile. Labbé’s prose, full of surprisingly juxtaposed registers and genres, matches its form to its content and embroils the reader in the fusion of these competing elements in order to construct a meaningful, overarching narrative.

Presented in the form of a “choose your own adventure” novel, it is the reader and not the author who actively constructs the narrative of Piezas secretas. There are obvious affinities here with Cortázar’s Rayuela, which celebrates its fiftieth anniversary this year, but while Cortázar gave the reader a roadmap and left the ludic structure of his novel outside the narrative, Labbé’s work begins with a gnomic prologue that immediately involves the reader and layers the metafictional instructions inside the story, often providing the reader with several options for movement within its pages. As such, the experience of reading Piezas secretas is disruptive and alluring at the same time – as the reader constantly moves back and forth through the pages, it is impossible to know exactly how deep into the narrative one is at any given point. Considering the mechanics of Labbé’s prose is like pulling the case off a desktop computer and watching it tick—there is a constant hum of activity, with bulbs blinking in the darkness and a mass of plugs and wires leading in all directions, and just like the virtual memory of a computer, Labbé manages to give his narrative more scope than appears possible in a conventional 220 page novel.

Yes. Yes and more yes.

For those who can’t read Spanish, you should check out Labbe’s And we’ll be bringing out another of his novels, Loquela, next fall.

This first quarterly issue of the Buenos Aires Review boasts new literary works from a variety of tongues—French, Galician, German, Portuguese, Russian, and a touch of Hungarian accompany the Spanish and English of always—and locales ranging from Rio de Janeiro, México, London, Paris, A Coruña, and São Paulo, to Moscow, Los Angeles, Costa Rica, Mar del Plata and New York.

Fiction. We unravel the mystery of Bola Negra, the shapeshifting piece by that led to a film and an opera, tap the spirit(s) of Mad Men with and winter with on the Argentine coast, while gets tangled up with hitmen and supermodels in Colombia and — France’s latest enfant terrible — takes on literary glam & doom.

Poetry. We cut a path through sensual urban pastorals and lyric maps to wrangle paleocreatures and rappel from the precipices of eyes.

Time Regained. We revisit the sublime and fantastic world of (1863-1915) through the translations of Mariana Dimópulos and Joel Morris.

Conversations: on Conceptualisms. We listen in as Latin America’s first and foremost conceptual artist sits down with Reinaldo Laddaga, Ubuweb founder and Uncreative Writer binds past and present with Michael Romano, and American poet David Shook talks poetry drones with Pola Oloixarac.

Art. We join in the factory that became Costa Rica’s best museum.

Bookstores we . We visit indie bookstores in and with Marfa Nekrasova and Julián Fuks.

Translator’s Note. Fulbright scholar takes a heady swig of Hungarian and Yiddish.

Besos!
The editors

Definitely worth checking out.

We’re going to have a ton of interns again this summer, which should free up a bit of time to let loose on this blog, which I plan to do in grand style . . . But before getting into those fun and games, I thought it would be best to ease back into the Three Percent world by highlighting some exciting new ventures, starting with brought to you by one of Open Letter’s favorite translators, Heather Cleary.¹

The BAR launched last week to great acclaim (including mentions by Bookforum, Granta, New Directions, and the like), and for good reason. This bilingual internet magazine “presents the best and latest work by emerging and established writers from the Americas, in both Spanish and English. We value translation and conversation. We publish poetry, fiction, essays, criticism, visual art, and interviews.”

And the inaugural issue is, to slang it up a bit, pretty baller.

There’s a

Javier Calvo: The other day I saw a book by Alejandro Zambra on a list of the most anticipated books of 2013 in the United States, and I wanted to ask you this: what do you think of this phenomenon, which to me is one of the most important things that have happened in American publishing in a long time? I’m talking about the attention Spanish-language fiction has been getting since Bolaño. How have you experienced this change as a translator, reader, scout, etc?

Mara Faye Lethem: Do you see it as so distinct from the Boom? Because I don’t.

Javier Calvo: I do see significant differences from the Boom. To begin with, I think the boom was much more a strategy, and as such it had a center. And when I say strategy, I say it almost in the sense of the British Invasion: we’re going to take over North America. Here, I don’t see too much strategy, and as a matter of fact I don’t see how an editor could hope to get rich on the books of Aira or Zambra. Secondly, the Boom in America was a much more asymmetrical phenomenon, the rich neighbor’s consumption of a series of consumer elements related to exoticism and magic.

Look, for example, at the resounding failure as strategies of all the “commercial brands” of exportation of Latin American literature: McOndo, the Crack Movement . . .

In the current case it’s true that Bolaño has been sanctioned by the American world of culture as the “Chosen One” to replace GGM [Gabriel García Márquez] as the Great Novelist in Spanish, but I also see differences: it seems to me that the acceptance of the new literature in Spanish already lacks that aspect of consumption of the poor, the exotic, and the distinct. I believe that now, strangely, it already has a certain aspect of normalcy, acceptance of the two-directional cultural tides that exist between Spanish and English. Although this may perhaps be overly optimistic.

Mara Faye Lethem: Well, when they talk about Aira as the new Bolaño, yes, that implies a certain strategy of marketing. I think that the case of Bolaño has been an astounding example of the unpredictability of the editorial world, and the strategy of buying books in other people’s styles is ridiculous, but shows no signs of waning. I suppose people’s lack of vision, as well as their fear, just get bigger and bigger than their risk-taking . . .

There’s an featuring the intriguing pull-quote, “We exist in a constant state of translation. We just don’t like it.”

There’s

The pointless memories are the most beautiful ones. I must have been, what, eight years old when this guy with a bird’s name, Piri, came to my grandparents’ house. He’d come to help my grandmother with the little sausage and bakery business she’d set up in her third courtyard. It sounds unbelievable, I know, but the house really did have three courtyards and in the third, as I said, my grandmother had set up a real life steam-powered manufacturing line for chorizo and bread. If you showed up very early in the morning, you could imagine the smoke belched out by the grinders, ovens, crushers, fillers and pots being, logically, the smog that rose in a frenzy from the First World’s last generation of machines.

There’s that opens by name-checking JLo and “Jenny from the Block.”

And

Overall, this is a solid opening issue, and one I’m sure we’ll be featuring time and again. (Oh, and while I’m plugging things that make me happy, Heather’s translation of Sergio Chejfec’s The Dark is at the printer now. So all your Chejfec/Cleary fans have something fantastic to look forward to reading this fall.

¹ Actually, we love Jennifer Croft, Pola Oloixarac, and Maxine Swann all deserve special shout-outs as well.