I hope to upload spreadsheets compiling all the data from time to time, but for now, is where you can get the most up-to-date data about which titles are being published in translation for the first time ever in the U.S.  (That link has a full explanation of the various criteria.)

Also, you can now add/correct information in the by entering the information in . It will not be corrected/added immediately, but I do work my way through all of these requests on a weekly basis.

Additionally, we’ve expanded our scope to include non-fiction and children’s books, so feel free to add any and all of those as well.

Finally, if you want to see the in action, be sure to read my weekly articles, which frequently combine data from the with commentary on one (or more) recently translated titles.

But again: If you’re researching translations in the U.S., y0u need to go .

Tentatively entitled 100 Best Translations of the Century (So Far), the book will be a sort of guide to the most interesting books that have come out (in their original language) in the past fifteen years and are also available in English translations. We plan on including representatives from as many countries as possible, highlighting titles that appeal to us for one reason or another—this could be because of the book’s structure, it’s political import, or because it has a special connection to our lives.

As you can see in the article, we want this to be fun and personal; a book that’s smart but not elitist or drily academic. I personally want people to argue with our choices of what we decided to include. I also think that readers already immersed in the world of translated literature will discover new things in this—threads connecting works from disparate cultures, ideas from one book that are reflected in another, idiosyncratic juxtapositions that open up various titles.

In addition to these hundred entries, there will be longer framing essays about different topics in international literature: international poetry, crime fiction, women in translation, books from “smaller” languages, etc.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy this article/sampler, which does unveil ten of the hundred books we will be including . . . .

The week leading to Mother’s Day was a good one for print books in general and adult fiction in particular. Unit sales of fiction titles at the outlets tracked by Nielsen BookScan rose 20% in the week driven by sales of that new favorite Mother’s Day gift—one of the titles from E.L. James’ Fifty Shades trilogy.

According to BookScan, sales of Fifty Shades of Grey jumped 40% in the week before Mother’s Day compared to the earlier week, selling almost 443,000 copies, pushing total sales to about 1.5 million at outlets tracked by BookScan.

For both of you who are reading this and have somehow avoided encountering this phenomenon, E.L. James’s Fifty Shades trilogy is basically smutty fan-fic that has become a massive thing among suburban moms. (It’s generally referred to as “mommy porn,” not because it’s about moms and porn, but because it’s the porn that mommies are willing to read. Apparently.)

But this whole thing raises a lot of issues for me. We’re such a creepy moralistic culture that people wig out with M.I.A. flips off the camera during the Super Bowl (and why not? ‘Eff you viewer and corporate America and self-indulgent, obnoxious, irritating NFL), but we’re totally cool with buying soft core porn for the women who reared us? Very strange.

I have no moral issues with any of this though. I’m glad that women in the suburbs are finding some pleasure in reading. My issue is with the smut that’s got them all on fire . . . Here’s a couple choice moments from the

“Does this mean you’re going to make love to me tonight, Christian?” Holy shit. Did I just say that? His mouth drops open slightly, but he recovers quickly.

“No, Anastasia it doesn’t. Firstly, I don’t make love. I fuck . . . hard. Secondly, there’s a lot more paperwork to do, and thirdly, you don’t yet know what you’re in for. You could still run for the hills. Come, I want to show you my playroom.”
My mouth drops open. Fuck hard! Holy shit, that sounds so… hot. But why are we looking at a playroom? I am mystified.

“You want to play on your Xbox?” I ask. He laughs, loudly.

“No, Anastasia, no Xbox, no Playstation. Come.” . . . Producing a key from his pocket, he unlocks yet another door and takes a deep breath.

Xbox? GROAN. But wait, there’s more:

“Why don’t you like to be touched” Ana whispered, staring up into soft grey eyes.

“Because I’m fifty shades of fucked-up, Anastasia”

Really?! The “fifty shades” thing runs throughout this book? THAT’S SO ORIGINAL.

““I am going to have coffee with Christian Grey . . . and I hate coffee.”

Is this what the good people of the suburbs refer to as “character development”?

“Holy shit. What does that mean? Does he white-slave small children to some God-forsaken part of the planet?”

OK, total props for making “white-slave” a verb. That’s the first thing in this book I can get behind. (Did you see what I did there? “Get behind.”)

“I’d like to bite that lip.”

Holy Jesus this is just TERRIBLE. There are a million variations on that construction that are hotter and more interesting: “I’d like to ace your deuce on the tennis court,” or “I’d like to conjugate your verbs,” or “I’d like to entangle my neutrons with your protons.” Whatever. But “I’d like to bit that lip”???? DO YOU EVEN HAVE AN IMAGINATION E.L. JAMES?

This post has no real place here on Three Percent, except to point out that American mainstream tastes tend to suck. We make fun of Eurovision songs and then read stuff like this? Who are we to judge? And really, is suburban life that boring? I’m sorry, American moms—your plight is not getting the attention it deserves.

From

the main goal of Bookish is to make recommendations about books that will appeal to a reader’s particular taste. He compared the site to things like IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes that mix information about movies with reviews and news. Editorial will include breaking news, author interviews, excerpts, reviews and other marketing materials that publishers feel will help readers pick a book, Lemgruber said. Although backed by Penguin, S&S and Hachette, Lemgruber stressed that Bookish will be editorially independent, covering books from all publishers (excluding vanity presses).

Penguin Group USA CEO David Shanks compared Bookish to Pandora and said unlike other sites that are driven by purchases, Bookish will make recommendations based on the information provided by consumers. “The more information readers provide the more customized the recommendations can be,” Shanks said, noting that Bookish is aimed at helping readers identify books they may like from the tens of thousands published annually. He said the three publishers came together after it became clear that their individual sites would never drive enough traffic to reach a critical mass of book buyers. As print media devotes less space to book coverage, the publishers felt they needed a way to raise the profile of their content, Shanks said.

As with the still not doing shit the proof is in the pudding, so to speak. And without being able to check out whether it recommends Harry Potter or The Pale King, based on my muted post horn tattoo it’s hard to say whether this algorithm is worth its weight in silicon. So we’ll see.

I’m all about the idea of recommending software/websites/apps/etc, mainly because I feel that the real challenge for book people in our Age of Abundance (everyone’s a writer! everyone’s a publisher! a million books is year is nothing!) is going to be hooking up the right reader with the right book at the right time. Maybe this is a step in the right direction . . .

Also curious to see how book reviewers respond to something like this. In a sense, a site that automates recommendations takes away a bit from their importance. Rather than puzzle out from a 1,000 word review if I should or shouldn’t read a book, I could just ask Bookish how well it “fits my criteria.”

It will also be interesting to find out how dispersed the recommendations are. I know there’s a better, more accurate statistical term for this that I can’t think of, but basically, will this site end up recommending pretty much the same books you see on tables at Barnes & Noble, or will it end up pushing readers down the “long tail” toward niche publications and books that are outside of the mainstream. There’s a fine balance to be struck here, one that Pandora is only so-so at (in my opinion).

All very curious that the tide has shifted in the direction we (people like myself and Richard Nash) have been talking about for some time now . . . Kind of cool to see a prediction start to come true . . .

Publishers Weekly‘s list for the fall came out yesterday, featuring twenty titles from independent presses that may be slightly less hyped than Franzen’s Freedom, but have a real shot at “breaking out,” capturing the imagination and interest of the reading public, and selling thousands of copies thanks to great indie stores, solid reviews, word-of-mouth, etc.

These lists are always fascinating, especially when they include one of our titles (the only translation included on the list . . . at least the one in the magazine. There are 20 additional titles featured online, including Laurence Cossé‘s A Novel Bookstore, translated from the French by Alison Anderson and published by Europa Editions):

Zone by Mathias Énard, trans. from the French by Charlotte Mandell (Open Letter)

This 517-page novel, winner of the Prix du Livre Inter and the Prix Decembre, has an unusual conceit; it’s told in a single sentence. Francis Servain Mirkovic, a French-born Croat, travels by train from Milan to Rome with a briefcase, whose contents he’s selling to a representative from the Vatican. It contains information about the violent history of the Zone—lands of the Mediterranean basin: Spain, Algeria, Lebanon, Italy. Over the course of a single night Mirkovic visits the sites of the tragedies of these lands in his memory and recalls how his own participation in that violence has wrecked his life. Author and translator Christophe Claro acclaims it as “the novel of the decade, if not the century.”

Not to jinx anything, but there is a lot of momentum for this book, so, fingers crossed . . . (I actually have a dream that one day I’ll see someone on the subway reading one of our titles, and I have some hope that it’ll be Zone.)

On a less self-promotional note, here are some other interesting titles from the list:

The Instructions by Adam Levin (McSweeney’s)

This massive 1,026-page debut novel covers four days in the life of 10-year-old Gurion Maccabee, a potential Messiah and accused terrorist, possibly both, who was ejected from three Jewish day schools. “This is wonderful in a quirky way,” says Sheryl Cotleur, at Book Passage, who is considering it for her Buyers Bookmark Club. “I see a great future for this author and really hope this book catches on. I’ll do my part!”

The Report by Jessica Francis Kane (Graywolf)

During WWII, tube stations across London have been converted into bomb shelters; immigrants and East Enders alike sleep on the tracks and wait. But on March 3, 1943, as the crowd hurries down the staircase, something goes wrong, and 173 people lose their lives. When the neighborhood demands an inquiry, the job falls to a young magistrate, who is forced to revisit his decision decades later. “The Report is a stealthy, quiet page-turner that understands there is as much tension in reckoning a disaster as there is in the disaster itself,” says Elizabeth McCracken.

Extraordinary Renditions by Andrew Ervin (Coffee House Press)

“Through the eyes of three outsiders, Extraordinary Renditions takes the reader deep into the heart of Budapest, both its past and present,” says Stewart O’Nan. “The whole city is here, the banks of the Danube brimming with history, intrigue, art, food, drink, and most important of all, music. His characters may be lost—even the one native is a foreigner—but Andrew Ervin is a sharp-eyed, sure-handed guide.”

Richard Yates by Tao Lin (Melville House)

This could be Lin’s breakout book. Although the title of this novel comes from the real-life writer Richard Yates, it has little to do with him. Instead, it tracks the relationship between a young writer in his 20s and his 16-year-old lover. Clancy Martin calls Lin “a Kafka for the iPhone generation. . . . [He] may well be the most important writer under 30 working today.”

A hilarious blend of absurdist, futurist and surrealist sensibilities, this new (and only complete) translation of Ilf and Petrov’s novel . . . is a highly animated tale of a con artist’s journey through the cities and hinterlands of Soviet Russia. . . . It’s an invigorating journey through innumerable paradoxes, dreams and burlesque routines, and though it’s intensely chaotic (at times to dizzying effect), this is a finely translated edition of a triumphant literary experiment.

Check out the (about halfway down the page), and, as always, you can the book now . . .

There’s nothing particularly new in Rushkoff’s depiction of what’s happened to the book industry, but it’s always good to be reminded of how the corporate structure has screwed with culture in such an insidious way (Andre Schiffrin’s also offers a great look at how the corporate consolidation went down):

Publishing is a sustainable industry—and a great one at that. The book business, however, was never a good fit for today’s corporate behemoths. The corporations that went on spending sprees in the 1980s and ’90s were not truly interested in the art of publishing. These conglomerates, from Time Warner to Vivendi, are really just holding companies. They service their shareholders by servicing debt more rapidly than they accrue it. Their businesses are really just the stories they use to garner more investment capital. In order to continue leveraging debt, they need to demonstrate growth. The problem is that media, especially books, can’t offer enough organic growth—people can only read so many books from so many authors.

So begins consolidation. In order to achieve the growth shareholders demand but the businesses can’t supply, corporations embark upon mergers and acquisitions, even though, in the long run, nearly 80% of all mergers and acquisitions fail to create value for either party. [. . .]

The same thinking led the conglomerates to hone in on publishing. Top-heavy, centralized bureaucracies know how to work with a B&N better than with a Cody’s or a Spring Street Books. And they applied their generic corporate management to a ragtag crew of book nerds, most of whom wouldn’t—and shouldn’t—know a balance sheet if their lives depended on it. Finally, unable to grow as fast as their debt structures demanded, these corporations have resorted to slashing expenses.

This we already know. (Some of my friends know this more personally and directly than others.) But what I like about Rushkoff’s piece is his optimism about the future:

The good news is that much of this talent—book editors, publicists and sellers—is ready to rebuild what Wall Street has seen fit to destroy. Book enthusiasts are not giving up. I get e-mails constantly from editors asking if I’m interested in writing books for their new, independent publishing houses. Many offer smaller advances but higher royalties and more attention to details—like the quality of my writing. I also get correspondence from people opening independent bookstores in the shadows of vacant outlets, stores that would be happy with a hundredth of the sales volume that made their larger counterparts unsustainable.

Behind the bad news, there is much to look forward to. Our industry has for too long favored those skilled at negotiating the corporate ladder and punished those who simply publish great books. Now that publishing has revealed itself to be a bad growth industry, it is free to rebuild itself as the vibrant, scaled and sustainable business the reading public can support.

Right on! Book lovers of the world, unite!

But seriously, I think there really is something to this. Look at all the great new presses and bookstores—mostly started by relatively young people with a lot of passion and energy. For any number of reasons—struggles of corporate publishing, e-books, implosion of chain retail stores, etc.—the next few years should be very interesting. (Although I can already see the comment below about how none of this matters since everyone spends all their time online instead of reading and kids hate books and etc., etc.)

I especially enjoyed the article’s title: “The International Literature Evangelist.” Not only does Chad spread the good news (of sorts), but it seems like only yesterday that we were philistines.

The diversity of initiatives is dizzying: Marvel Comics, Boom! Studios and Viz Media have made select back issues available in digital form; DC Comics and Top Shelf Productions now curate Web sites of comics developed specifically for the internet; Korean manhwa house Netcomics offers comics online for a small fee; and Tokyopop, Devil’s Due Productions, Papercutz and Virgin Comics have joined with mobile digital publishing services like uclick and GoComics, to distribute their content on mobile phones—not to mention e-books, animated comics on iTunes, or the smart phone-based reader from ClickWheel, which also offers a format for reading comics on the iPhone.

And in terms of the age-old (well, decades-old maybe) question about the impact on sales of giving something away for free online:

And while no print publisher is yet prepared to give away all its content online, some are beginning to conduct experiments to gauge the potential impact of free Web distribution on print sales. This January, Boom! Comics broke ground by releasing a new periodical comic, North Wind #1, in comic shops and on the Web simultaneously. Despite the objections of some comics shop retailers who saw the day-and-date release as a potential threat to their in-store sales, the first issue sold out within a week and went to a second printing.

“Usually on the fourth issue, you’re seeing a 10%–20% sales decrease, but we saw a 20%–30% increase,” says Mosher. “By the end, there wasn’t as much opposition as there was in the beginning.”

After closing its 15-year-old Penn Quarter store in Washington, D.C., on Friday to make room for a Wagamama noodle shop, (Ed. Note: At least it’s not a fucking Cold Stone Creamery.) Olsson’s Books & Records, which is headquartered in Silver Spring, Md., is continuing to be squeezed by publishers. On June 19, three of the largest—Hachette Book Group, Random House and Penguin Group—filed a petition in U.S. Bankruptcy Court to place Olsson Enterprises, dba Olsson’s Books & Records, into involuntary Chapter 7 bankruptcy.