So, on Friday night, when I got to in DC for a “Rep Night” organized by Jeff Waxman of Other Press, and noticed that Kramerbooks didn’t stock a single Open Letter title, I was basically ready to just give up. Slinging books that no one in the world seems to care about is as thankless and pathetic as it can get.

(Although I want to make a critical, annoying point right here: No one is outraged that this store didn’t bring in even a single Open Letter title, even though I spent $500 and my weekend flying down, bringing them books, buying them pizza and beer. That’s insulting. And bad business. Yet, according to most everyone, that’s the bookstore’s choice. They don’t have to stock our books. But when Amazon doesn’t stock Hachette? That’s an attack on authors and book culture. It’s an understandable, yet weird double-standard. I wish Amazon didn’t carry Hachette or any of the Big Five. More space for Open Letter titles. Same thing goes for other bookstores. Get rid of the weeds so the good literature can grow!)

Despite all my misanthropic inclinations to skip the rep night and sit in my room drinking myself blind, I powered on, gave a half-entertaining presentation, and had a great time hanging out with a lot of DC booksellers and librarians. (I also found out why our books weren’t in Kramer’s, and I really hope our DC-area sales rep shows up to his next meeting with the store.)

Offsetting my gloom and pessimism—not just at this event, but basically all the time—is Jeff Waxman of Other Press. Jeff used to work at Seminary Co-op and has special ties to booksellers around the country. A major part of his job at Other Press is to serve as a bookstore liaison and get booksellers excited about his books, displaying them, reading them, recommending them, etc. And these “rep nights” are one of the ways that he’s able to mobilize a lot of booksellers (and publishers) to get the word out in a fun, engaging, special way.

I’m not sure how many of these Jeff has done, but I was able to participate in one in Chicago last January that was astronomically effective in getting Open Letter titles into Chicago stores. We already had a lot of fans there—at Unabridged, Seminary, Book Cellar, etc.—but being able to meet with these booksellers face-to-face makes a huge difference.

That’s a cliche of the highest order, but when you live in the sticks of Rochester, NY (the only city more removed from book culture in the U.S. is probably Toronto) and rely almost exclusively on communication through email and social media, talking to a bookseller personally is hugely important.

And for booksellers, this must be thrilling. In addition to beer and pizza, you get individual presentations from New York Review Books, Soho Press, Other Press, Melville House, Grove, Open Letter, and New Directions and copies of their forthcoming books. Even if the usual suspects will still outsell all Open Letter books at these various bookstores, at least now there’s a chance that our books will be stocked, that faces won’t be blank when our rep shows up and talks about this “small indie press specializing in international literature.”

So, thanks to Jeff Waxman for doing these, for helping engage booksellers around the country and for allowing my grumpy ass to participate in a couple of these. I hope that Other Press will continue to set these up throughout the country, and that Open Letter will be invited to participate in at least a few. As retro as it seems, this is the future of publisher-bookseller relations, and getting booksellers excited about a title is definitely worth the price of a few six-packs and a pizza.

And even though it’s not even noon, I highly recommend using this as a drinking game . . . Every time Judge Jeff looks directly into the camera, do a shot. And do a double if he looks in there and smiles.

Next Tuesday, April 10th, fiction panelists Jeff Waxman will be here in Rochester for a special Reading the World Conversation Series event, during which he’ll reveal the BTBA finalists in poetry and fiction.

Before he unveils the shortlists (which will also be posted here as soon as he reads them off), we’ll talk about the evolution of the award, the role of the BTBA in general book culture landscape, how the panel came to make its decisions, and so on. Seeing that Jeff works at the University of Chicago Press and 57th St. Books, he has a unique perspective on literary awards and promoting international literature.

Following our talk and the unveiling of the finalists, we’ll read a few pages from a few of my favorite titles on the list. (We don’t have enough time to read from all of them—anyone want to camp out in the Welles-Brown room?—but we want to at least highlight a few of the books in a special way.)

(NOTE: Cover images on this were chosen randomly by Nate for design purposes only. Read nothing into this. And having the list in front of me, I can only reiterate—read nothing into this poster.)

Also, this means that over the three weeks building up to the celebration of the two winners—which will take place on Friday, May 4th at 6pm at during the PEN World Voices Festival—we will be highlighting all of the poetry finalists and running short excerpts from the ten fiction finalists. Which means you have almost one more month of BTBA stuff to look forward to . . .

On a related BTBA note, here’s the display that Jeff Waxman set up at 57th Street Bookstore in Chicago:

If you’ve never been to the (57th, Newberry Library, and Seminary Co-op are all part of the same co-op), you’re missing out on one of the absolute best indie stores in the country. Really is the prototypical university/literary bookshop. Absolutely packed with great books that you’ll probably never see in another store (there is no fluff here), and has that indescribable bookstore allure. (Helps that it’s in a cave-like space within the seminary. So very cool.)

If you’re ever in Chicago, it’s definitely worth swinging by.

• An excerpt from which was translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston and recently published by Archipelago books. (Actually using this in the “Translation & World Literature” class I’m teaching this spring.) Since there’s nothing about issue 14 on the “Absinthe website” quite yet, below is a description of the novel from Archipelago. And click here to hear the Reading the World Podcast episode featuring Bill Johnston.

Myśliwski’s grand epic in the rural tradition—a profound and irreverent stream of memory cutting through the rich and varied terrain of one man’s connection to the land, to his family and community, to women, to tradition, to God, to death, and to what it means to be alive. Wise and impetuous, plain-spoken and compassionate Szymek, recalls his youth in their village, his time as a guerrilla soldier, as a wedding official, barber, policeman, lover, drinker, and caretaker for his invalid brother. Filled with interwoven stories and voices, by turns hilarious and moving, Szymek’s narrative exudes the profound wisdom of one who has suffered, yet who loves life to the very core.

• An excerpt from Agnomia by Robert Gal, translated from the Slovakian by Michaela Freeman and Jim Freeman, and opening interestingly enough:

They select some man, sufficiently experiment with him and only then identify him as the object of the experiment. They slip him hidden meanings of his multisense expressions which, for them, are univocal. They let him deal with it for years. What they tie in a knot through definition in a moment, he is forced to spend years untying through conscientious interpretation. In the meantime, their definitions are petrified solid. His interpretations appear, as if they were made of butter and deliberately throw them on his head, so that they could laugh at these babbles.

• A bit about Mateiu Caragiale’s The Rakes of the Old Court, which was published in 1929 and was recently voted “the Romanian novel of the twentieth century.” This bit from the intro by Paul Cernat makes it sound pretty interesting:

For those who wish to gain a closer knowledge of the peculiarities of the Balkan mindset, a reading of this text, which has the value of an emblem of national identity, is, I might say, obligatory. Of course, we are dealing with a “Balkanism” that has been filtered through the work of Huysmans and Edgar Allen Poe, captured in a hypnotic narrative whose density of meanings has led literary theorist Matei Calinescu to compare it with Borges’ El Aleph. It is an unusual narrative, whose effects are those of an addictive literary drug.

There’s also a piece by Thomas E. Kennedy called “A Visit to Hunger 120 Years Later,” and book reviews of The Other City by Mchal Ajvaz (reviewed by Jeff Waxman) and When a Poet Sees a Chestnut Tree by Jean-Pierre Rosnay (reviewed by John Taylor).

As mentioned above, the Absinthe site for issue 14 is still coming together, but you can

Anyway, the symposium took place a few weeks back and was absolutely amazing. Great panels, wonderful to see Ross Benjamin receive the award, very nice tribute to Breon Mitchell re: his new translation of The Tin Drum. (I maybe shouldn’t admit this, but I’ve never read this, although every time I see Breon I swear that it’ll be the next book I pick up . . . And it will be! Soon. Soon . . .)

I was planning on writing up some notes and thoughts and whatever from the day of panels, but well, it’s been a busy time and besides, WBEZ was there to record the whole symposium. And although I can’t imagine many people listening to all of these podcasts, they’re a much better record of what was discussed than anything I could babble on about . . .

If you do decide to listen, you might want to do so in order—at least when it comes to the “Increased Interest in Foreign Fiction?” and “Cultivating Audiences” panels, otherwise my random 15-minute speech at the beginning of the latter panel will make next to no sense . . .

So:

First off is the that included an interview with NY Times journalist David Streitfeld.

(There was another panel with Peter Constantine, Drenka Willen, Susan Bernofsky, Krishna Winston, Ross Benjamin, and Breon Mitchell, but I can’t find the podcast . . . Which sucks! This was a great conversation . . . Maybe I’m just missing something? If anyone knows where this is, please e-mail me.)

Then the panel with Dennis Loy Johnson of Melville House, Daniel Slager of Milkweek, Jeremy Davies of Dalkey Archive Press on

And then the panel that started with my rant and ended with all of us (Susan Harris of Words Without Borders, Susan Bernofsky, and Annie Janusch) talking about technology and reaching readers . . . while my phone buzzed with the dozen or so text messages I received during that panel . . .

Finally, we wrapped up with a contentious argument about Amazon.com discussion about Dennis Loy Johnson of Melville House, Henry Carrigan of Northwestern University Press, and Jeff Waxman of Seminary Co-op were on this panel, which was a great way to end the day, having moved from a grand appreciation of Breon and the craft of translation to the dirty details of the book business and how all the various segments always feel like their getting screwed. Speaking of screwing, this panel also had one of the funniest exchanges of the day:

Jeff: “Being a bookseller, it’s kind of an unrequited love affair with books where you know that you’re going to get screwed.”

Chad: “That’s not really an unrequited . . . It’s actually just a love affair.”

This then led to a series of sexually charged double entendres . . . Man, those end of the day panels—brilliant!

I’m really glad Jeff brought this book to my attention . . . It was one that I had missed in entering info into the Translation Database, but more importantly, it sounds really interesting.

For anyone who doesn’t know, Jeff is a bookseller at Seminary Co-op and runs He’s also a frequent contributor here and is on the Best Translated Book Award fiction committee.

And here’s the beginning of his review:

Big publishing houses have a lot going for them. They’ve got money and media access and the power to bring a book to the forefront of a very noisy culture, if only for a moment. And, like the small presses, they have some outstanding people working for them—publishers, editors, and publicists trying their damnedest to make something like art. What they don’t have very often is a coherent and cohesive vision, even for their individual imprints, and I hope it’s not too unkind to say that they don’t often have very interesting books. Instead, they seem to expend a lot of their energy—and money—in getting excited about the unexciting.

All of this is why I was so delighted to see Harper Perennial come out with Assaf Gavron’s Almost Dead. Harper Perennial is one of the best corners of that house, and a translation isn’t unheard of there, but a political satire that is artfully and ingeniously constructed is a hugely welcome surprise. Translated by the author with James Lever, Almost Dead is everything I always wanted and never expected from a big publisher.

Set in present-day Israel, these are intertwined stories of Croc—a secular, ambivalent Israeli—and Fahmi—a comatose and conflicted Palestinian suicide bomber. Around them, there’s a society in turmoil, a morass of Western-influenced post-industrial business people overlaying a subjugated population seething with enmity and regret.

Click here to read the full review.

All of this is why I was so delighted to see Harper Perennial come out with Assaf Gavron’s Almost Dead. Harper Perennial is one of the best corners of that house, and a translation isn’t unheard of there, but a political satire that is artfully and ingeniously constructed is a hugely welcome surprise. Translated by the author with James Lever, Almost Dead is everything I always wanted and never expected from a big publisher.

Set in present-day Israel, these are intertwined stories of Croc—a secular, ambivalent Israeli—and Fahmi—a comatose and conflicted Palestinian suicide bomber. Around them, there’s a society in turmoil, a morass of Western-influenced post-industrial business people overlaying a subjugated population seething with enmity and regret.

The book opens with a bang as Croc’s usual bus to work explodes a few blocks after his stop. Before and for a short time after that near-miss, Croc’s life is dominated by his workplace and merely complicated by his girlfriend, Duchi. Life in an embattled and foreign country rendered familiar to most English-language readers through the wondrous universality of fuck:

My first thought was: fuck, how will I get to work from now on? Those fuckers hit every possible means of transportation. Am I going to have to take cabs now? Buy another car? Too expensive . . .

But when that first bombing is followed by a rifle attack that kills the hitchhiker in his car, and he survives a café bombing soon after, Croc becomes a minor celebrity and the target of one last, very personal, attack. This is satire and this is life; separating the two in any society is difficult, but separating them in a tragically hysterical culture in the persistent throes of PTSD is nearly impossible. Croc’s appearances on Israeli television are nightmarishly comic and serve only to alienate him further from his experiences.

But now I was also. . . CrocAttack! Magnet of attention, symbol of resistance, vessel for other people’s ideas. New forces were taking control of my life. . . every day I was approached by people I’d never talked to who knew what I needed, or who needed to know what I thought. . . It didn’t matter to them that, in most cases, I had no opinion.

If trauma can be drawn-out and painfully constant, Fahmi suffers more. Dispossessed of their homes, but not their heritage, Fahmi and his brother Bilahl are mired in the stories of their grandfather’s heroic struggle against the Israelis of two generations ago. Estranged from their families by their politics, the two brothers pursue their own violent agenda that leads them closer and closer to the events in Croc’s half of this book.

But what isn’t in Fahmi’s memory of the past is his tortured present; he spends this novel in a hospital bed, unresponsive but painfully aware, comatose and confused and lost in fractured memory:

“Good movement of the eyes . . . Dr. Hartom will be happy to hear . . .”

My brain must be stuck.

“And now it’s time for your wash . . . “

A never ending dream, and always the same.

Through alternating chapters of Croc’s mounting anxiety and Fahmi’s fever dreams and memories, the reader gains access to the strange duality of life in a country that lies at the margins of another state, a place where everything has two names and two histories. In a sense, this is as much a book of class and race as, say, To Kill a Mockingbird, and the geography is almost incidental to that story. Almost.

Instead, we have a wonderfully vivid book that builds something beautiful on the strange trajectories that bring two lives into such mortal proximity. And at the same time, we have a book that is very much of its time and of its place, a book without easy answers or any clear idea of morality. Gavron’s empathy, voice, and outstanding construction are appealing, and this book is really an exciting contribution to the literature and to the Levantine conversation.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to my anxiety. I am, you see, an independent bookseller, one of the many anxious denizens of the book world. And when reading Shelf Awareness and other trade news has become like reading obituaries, why shouldn’t I be anxious? Dutton’s, Lambda Rising, Olsson’s, Schwartz’s, Shaman Drum, Cody’s. This list will only get longer.

I tell myself sometimes that one day, I will have to tell my grandchildren what it was like when there were still bookshops. With windows, some of them, and a door to walk through. I will tell them about the people inside who knew you by name, or by sight, or by literary tastes, and how those fine people might recommend a book to you, and how they would know all about it. I’ll tell my grandchildren that there used to be lots of stores on the street, not just dry cleaners and chain restaurants, and that people used to make things, buy things, and sell things. And books, well, they used to be made of paper.

I am quite a young man now, but if my grandchildren are anything like my contemporaries, they will laugh and they will kick me down the stairs to die with my memories in the basement bookstore where I will hopefully still work.

Because we booksellers have let our livelihood become irrelevant to many, many people. Hapless, we flail and scramble to survive between the impending incorporeal reality of the internet and the tangible, comforting tradition of our past. Worst of all, bookselling is exactly where the two met. For Amazon. Sixteen years ago.

The American Booksellers Association has been dragging indies, painfully, into the present since the present overtook us sometime in the past. For more than ten years, they’ve been moving us, kicking and screaming, toward e-commerce; you might have noticed our websites, those painfully amateurish and poorly-designed rocks that we’ve hurled at Jeff Bezos to no effect.

Today, we are struggling to sell books online according to a fifteen-year-old model. And we’re not, respectively or together, even a pale shade of the polished and soulless retail machine that’s destroying us. But mimicking Amazon is too much like loving the beast that’s chewing our entrails, and what we do best, we still do in our stores. What we do online is a poor imitation. Amazon has done nothing wrong. and we have done nothing.

Recently, in a bid to bring us up to the Amazon standard, the ABA enabled Google Preview on our e-commerce sites. Are you aware of the degree to which Google previews these books? Something to the tune of 20% of the book is viewable at a time. Some books are long and some are short, but the effect is that Google is making one fifth of these books freely available. And to a bookstore like mine, one that relies heavily on rapidly falling textbook sales, this means that students will have free access, through our site, to more of their textbooks than they were planning on reading to begin with. Our new business plan includes facilitating a cost-free alternative to shopping at our stores. We are hastening our demise by underscoring our irrelevance to the few customers that still have the inclination to visit our website in the first place.

The isn’t just a battle for dollars. This is a losing war for the hearts and minds of our customers, for the folks that we know by sight, and that Amazon knows better by algorithm. Most booksellers aren’t out to make a killing or a dime. We’re trying to make a living, sure—but by putting the best of what we know in your hands. The best of our friends and customers ask often how business is, and the majority of us can only shrug. There is a time when the bookseller needs to stop his and her panicked breeziness about the state of affairs and tell our customers, point blank, the truth. Business isn’t good, and let me tell you: spending money is a political act, a ballot cast for the kind of world you want to live in. There is no right or wrong answer, but if you don’t shop locally, in the real world, there won’t be one left when you step outside.

– Jeff Waxman