Celebrate Women in Translation Month with 40% Off All Open Letter Books Written by Women OR Translated by Women

Women in Translation Month is always an exciting time to discover, read, discuss, and celebrate books by women from around the world. It was created by Meytal Radzinski back in 2014, and has since spawned numerous articles, events, and even the . (Check out the website for a ton of good information. Which, incidentally, is where I grabbed the image above to remind all you Tweeters out there to use #WITMonth to promote your favorite titles, or to learn about new voices.)

I’ve done a lot of number crunching over the years related to the paucity of women writers being published in English translation (see this post, this one, or this, or, most recently, this one), and if you want to dig into the data, I highly encourage spending some time on , where you can run any number of queries for books written by women, or translated by them.

Since none of these books in translation would exist in English without a great translator, and since there is no Women Translators Month, we decided to offer a 40% discount on all Open Letter print titles written by women, along with any book translated by a woman. As a result, almost two-thirds of our books are currently on sale . . .

We’re excluding ebooks and our anthologies, with the exception of , which was translated in its entirety by Janet Hendrickson, and which features Samanta Schweblin’s English-language debut—”On the Steppe.”

All you have to do to take advantage of this offer is use the code WIT2018 at checkout. Offer expires at midnight on August 31st, so get your books now!

We will be posting about a number of these books on Three Percent over the course of August, and will be highlighting ALL of the Open Letter #WITMonth titles on our account.

Ma Bo’le’s Second Life Now Available

You may have seen this in our , but by Xiao Hong, translated, edited, and completed by Howard Goldblatt is now officially available online and at better bookstores everywhere.
One of the most interesting female novelists you probably haven’t heard of, Xiao Hong lived an incredible, difficult life, yet managed to produce a half-dozen incredibly influential works by the time she was 30. Her rediscovery—in China and here in the States—is exactly what makes Women in Translation Month so important.

Recently, Michael Orthofer :

Xiao’s novel—the parts she wrote—is an enjoyable if somewhat rough and tumble story centered around Ma Bo’le, born into a fairly well-to-do family in Qingdao, in northern China. His father, who used to be: “the quintessential Chinese Mandarin” embraced Westernization and converted to Christianity, with the credo that: “Western things are better than Chinese things.” [. . .] Ma Bo’le’s Second Life is certainly worthwhile for its unusual take on life in China under increasing Japanese threat—not exactly carefree, and certainly not sugar-coating the hardships, but facing them with an entertainingly idiosyncratic fatalism.

The novel is definitely worth reading in its own right, but it’s also fascinating for opening up a larger conversation about how active the role of the translator can—and maybe should—be in working on a translation. This is a frequent topic of interest among people in the translation world, and this novel is a great example for discussing all the various viewpoints. You can read an excerpt .

Plus, it’s a fun book that’s currently 40% off! (Remember: WIT2018.)

Other Women in Translation from Open Letter

In case you’re looking for some #WITMonth books to start with, below you’ll find a list of ten of my personal favorite Open Letter titles to check out. (Subject to change every time I reopen the catalog. Also: I’ll post some recommendations for books by women from other presses over at Three Percent later this month.)

by Dubravka Ugresic (tr. Ellen Elias-Bursać & David Williams)

Check out the ongoing about this book, and also see , including , which comes out in September.

by Inga Ābele (tr. Kaija Straumanis)

Award-winning translation from Open Letter’s senior editor.

by Mercè Rodoreda (tr. Martha Tennent)

Another book, and the best-selling title by a woman in our catalog, which was recently featured in the !

by Can Xue (tr. Karen Gernant & Chen Zeping)

Stunning, surreal work from one of China’s greatest writers, and former winner of the Best Translated Book Award.

by Bae Suah (tr. Deborah Smith)

Booker-prize winning translator and founder of Titled Axis working on one of Korea’s most innovative writers? Sign me up!

by Marguerite Duras (tr. Kazim Ali & Libby Murphy)

The follow-up to Duras’s The Ravishing of Lol Stein!

by Iben Mondrup (tr. Kerri Pierce)

Risque sex, art school, and a murder. ‘Nuff said.

by Amanda Michalopoulou (tr. Karen Emmerich)

For all fans of Elena Ferrante.

by Josefine Klougart (tr. Martin Aitken)

One of the dreamiest, most emotionally raw books we’ve ever published. From the two-time finalist for the Nordic Council Literature Prize.

by Kristín Ómarsdóttir (tr. Lytton Smith)

The best book about war that doesn’t actually feature a war.

And if you missed the one that went out earlier this week, you can see the prettified version or just read it all below.

In almost every issue of Publishers Weekly—the trade magazine for booksellers, publishers, agents, and authors—the editors select one title to promote as the “Pick of the Week.” It’s usually something predictably large and respectable (like the new David Mitchell book, for example), but in the July 14th issue it was Open Letter’s by Icelandic author Sölvi Björn Sirgdsson!

The “starred” subtitled “Goodbye to All That,” had this to say:

The setup: Hermann’s girlfriend of seven years leaves him for a French dentist, then his native Iceland’s banking system goes belly-up, and finally his 63-year-old mother, Eva, is diagnosed with a rare and terminal cancer. The punch line: a bitterly laugh-out-loud novel of Nordic misery. [. . .] Sigurdsson’s novel successfully straddles the line between impious gallows humor and a heartfelt depiction of a son’s love for his mother.

Because we switched distributors this summer to Consortium (sorry, bit of inside baseball, but this is a really good thing for Open Letter), we ended up releasing this a couple months early, so your local indie bookseller should have copies, as does your favorite online retailer. Or, you can always order it either as a single book, or as part of a . . .

With the official publication date of The Last Days of My Mother coming up in August—and to celebrate the high praise it’s already receiving—if you we’ll throw in two extra books for free. So: Over about the next 14 months, you’ll receive a big 12 Open Letter titles for the same low price of $100—and that even includes free shipping within the U.S..

This is the cheapest and best way to keep up with what’s going on in international literature. By signing up now, you’ll not only get The Last Days of My Mother, but also great titles like A Thousand Forests in One Acorn: An Anthology of Spanish-Language Fiction (probably the prettiest and most impressive book we’ve ever published), a thrilling new book from Mathias Énard (the author of our first book to sell-out in just over a month), and The Man Between, a unique, intelligent, moving collection of pieces honoring the life and activism of one of the greatest translators of all time, Michael Henry Heim.

Again: and you’ll get 12 books, instead of the usual 10, for $100 even.

The In case you missed it, this past month Three Percent hosted the first ever World Cup of Literature, which pitted a recent book from each of the 32 countries that qualified for this year’s Real World Cup in a head-to-head knockout tournament.

Each match was written up by a reader or reviewer or translator or bookseller explaining why one of the two titles beat the other—and by what score. The pieces are incredibly fun to read and can help guide you to interesting books from all of the various World Cup counties.

In the end it came down to four literary powerhouses: Chile (represented by Roberto Bolaño’s By Night in Chile), Germany (W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz), Mexico (Valeria Luiselli’s Faces in the Crowd), and the United States (David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King).

If you want to find out who won, you’ll have to click here.

(We have to keep up the suspense somehow!)

Included is information about 18% Gray, next Monday’s Tirza launch party at 192 Books & The Half King, and a bit about the 2013 Preview Podcast.

If you’d like to sign up for the newsletter (and really, why wouldn’t you?), just and enter in all your info.

Anyway, before we send this out, you should Just click enter your email address and name, and you’ll start receiving biweekly communiques from the Open Letter Headquarters.

We’ll be including giveaways, insider editorial info, and goofy photos in the newsletter, so don’t miss out!

And BTW, if you want to receive our monthly newsletter (which will be pretty monthly from now on, I swear), you can sign up on the of our recently (as in 10 hours ago) website.

�ᾱ—

There was such a great response to last week’s giveaway of Jerzy Pilch’s The Mighty Angel that we’re definitely going to do this on a regular basis . . . Copies of the book (and congratulatory e-mails) went out to the winners yesterday—for everyone else, copies are available at better bookstores everywhere, or via . (And yes, the book is even prettier in real life . . .)

This week, we’d like to do two things:

First off, I’d also like to officially kick off our first $10 fundraising campaign. As a nonprofit press (that does a lot of non-revenue generating activity like the Best Translated Book Award, , and, well, publishing translations), we have to rely on grants and individual donations to keep doing what we’re doing—making great works of world literature available to readers like you (and me).

Obviously, the more money raised via this campaign, the more we’ll be able to offer, but seeing as this is our first ever online fundraising effort, the real goal is to demonstrate a broad base of support for Open Letter and Three Percent. So, although we’re more than happy to accept gifts of any level, we’re only asking for $10. It’s an affordable amount that adds up to a very significant total, and any show of support for what we do can’t be overestimated.

To contribute—and I really hope you will—simply take two minutes to fill out the .

Second, our new fall/winter 2009 catalog is now available ) with lots of interesting books that I’ll be featuring on Three Percent in the near future and giving away through this newsletter.

Thanks in advance, and next week we’ll be back to our regularly scheduled newsletter. (Unless no one contributes. Kidding, kidding.)

Best,

Chad

As an update: the Vilnius Poker giveaway is now closed. We received a lot of submissions and will be sending out e-mails to the three winners (and all other entries) this afternoon.

Another book featured in the newsletter is Fonseca’s The Taker and Other Stories, which was recently reviewed on where Gwen Dawson had this to say:

The Taker and Other Stories, by Brazilian author Rubem Fonseca, is a collection of short stories examining death in all its forms: murder, suicide, road kill (animal and human), medical emergencies, sickness, and old age. One protagonist laments, “Man is a solitary animal, an unhappy animal, and only death can fix us.” This thought echoes throughout this collection.

It was also reviewed by

Although Fonseca steadfastly refuses to discuss the meaning of his stories, he once said of himself, “Perhaps I am ‘The Taker.’ ” He also says, “A writer should have the courage to show what most people are afraid to say.” Fonseca’s bitterly grim stories, mostly in the first person, show the skull beneath the skin in Rio’s violent world. Tough to read, they analyze Rio’s gratuitous criminality as a symptom of universal hatred among people of every class.

As mentioned in the for the rest of the month The Taker is available through our website for only