“Our reading habit has been stolen and changed” said Guo. “For example I think Asian literature is much less narrative . . . but our reading habit is more Anglo-Saxon, more American . . . Nowadays all this narrative [literature is] very similar, it’s so realism, so story-telling driven . . . so all the poetry, all the alternative things, have been pushed away by mainstream society.”

“I love your work, Jonathan,” she told Franzen,² “but in a way you are smeared by English American literature . . . I think certain American literature is overrated, massively overrated, and I really hate to read them,” she said.

Two cheers for Xiaolu Guo! I read a lot of books—written in English and from abroad—and find overrated shit from all over the globe. But percentage-wise—and this is a trick of reading in translation, since most of the really awful stuff stays in its own language—American books probably have the highest ratio of dreck to gold. There’s this whole “stylelessness” writing that’s invaded American prose, thanks to MFA programs? to the commercialization of publishing? to J-Franz? to lazy readers? to the competition of Breaking Bad and Archer? and it’s a bit of a bummer.

But that’s not my rant. I do agree with Guo in a lot of ways, and abhor the way mainstream culture hypes the shallowest of art works for reasons that are uninteresting to me personally. But we have a choice not to read/engage with this.³

The Pulitzer-winning Indian/American Jhumpa Lahiri also laid into America’s literary culture, saying that it was “shameful the lack of translation, the lack of energy put into translation in the American market”. “It is embarrassing, to me, and I think just getting out of America for a little while makes you much more conscious of that,” said Lahiri, who currently lives in Italy and has not read anything in English for the last two years.

OK, here is the seed of my rant. Lahiri’s totally right on one hand—especially with her statement about how the Italian paper listed 7 American books in their “Best of 2013” list, and how that’s something that will never happen in the U.S.—but “lack of energy put into translation” strikes a little close to home.

I’ve been on about the number of books published in translation in America since the inception of this blog, and I do feel like the number could and should be higher. There are only so many books you get to read in your lifetime—and even fewer that have a life-changing impact on you—and for those books to remain locked off from readers . . . Also, this was the promise of the Internet—everything available from everywhere at any time—and the backbone of the long tail theory.

But let’s put that aside. As of now, I’ve identified 484 works of previously untranslated works of fiction and poetry that came out in 2013, and although this is a very modest number—how many of these have Lahiri or Franzen read? And shit, I know a lot of people who have put in a LOT of time and energy and whatever into translating, publishing, and promoting these 484 works. And I’ll bet like 5 of them were invited to Jaipur, and, and this is speculation, that these panelists know next to no details about the vibrancy of the translation scene in America. They know one thing—the number of translated books per year is paltry—and then use this to categorize the entirety of translation publishing in the U.S.

I don’t know any of these panelists personally—except for J-Franz, who I met at an event for the NEA where he publicly made fun of Dalkey Archive and the work I was doing there—but my suspicion is that, like with the generalization behind the “American fiction is massively overrated” comment, they’re all thinking and talking about mainstream publishing. The Big Five, Four, Two, whatever it is. Of those 484 books I mentioned above, Random House published 14 titles and Penguin 16. The largest publishing company in the world—responsible for 25% of the English books produced yearly throughout the world—accounted for just over 6% of all the translations published in America last year.

That’s pretty shitty for

So here’s my overall point: If you’re lamenting the lack of translations in America, you should start looking for them. There could always be more, but ENERGETIC people like myself are brining attention to hundreds a year, and you could easily familiarize yourself with what’s available—and maybe find a great book in the process—and with who’s doing what and what it is their doing with a simple Google search.

I’m all for popular authors sounding off on issues like this, but I’m kind of sick of them using the platform to lament something they’re only tangentially involved with. Use the Jaipur festival to sing the praises of Archipelago Books or Melville House or Restless Books. Talk about the recent increases in quality fiction from Russia and Brazil. Speak in specifics—this is the Age of Information and all that you need to know to make an intelligent comment on the translation situation is at your fingertips.⁴

¹ I think this statement needs a lot of qualifiers. A sentiment that sort of ties into the rest of my rant. There are a ton, absolute TON, of lazy, bad, realist, mainstream, boring, shitty, Franzen-esque writers writing in English. And some others—a much smaller percentage to be sure, if only for the reason that qualifying something as “great” means that it’s in the top XX%—are writing really interesting, strange books. (A mere 340 pages into Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries, I’d put her in that second camp.) But we all know the process and situation that Guo is talking about.

² I hope she guffawed internally when she said this.

³ Sort of. There are commercial forces at work that draw in young, talented writers with promises of unlimited Petrón cocktails and trips to exotic literary conferences like in, well, Jaipur. In today’s publishing landscape, you can choose to write whatever you want and find a way to get it out to the public—via self-publishing, ebook only deals, any thousand micropresses out there—but the money still tends to flow down from the coffers of the Penguin Random Amazon Times.

⁴ Somehow I managed not to attack all my usual suspects in this rant. So, for good measure: Just saying something like “the only translation I’ve heard of recently is Bolaño’s 2666, so obviously there’s a problem” is like relying on Flavorwire to give you all the info you need on contemporary writing. BOOM. POST OUT.

Why translators should give Dr Alaa Al Aswany and Knopf Doubleday a wide berth

For the sake of fellow translators who might find themselves caught up in similar circumstances and because I do not think that abuses should go unnoticed, I would like to lay out the facts surrounding the project to produce an English version of The Automobile Club of Egypt, the latest novel by well-known Egyptian writer Alaa el-Aswany. Firstly, I should say that I am not of an argumentative or litigious nature and have never before had any dispute with any of the authors or publishers of the eight of so books I have translated over the last few years. On the contrary, my experience of life is that, if you have a strong case and are willing to press it, your opponent usually gives way. That’s because, to paraphrase Descartes, a sense of justice is the most fairly distributed thing in the world, since no one ever desired more of it than they already have.

So when Aswany unilaterally and whimsically withdrew from an agreement arranged between me and his publishers, I assumed he would offer his apologies, honor his obligations and make speedy and generous compensation for the time and effort I had expended on his behalf. The more so since Dr Aswany and I are hardly strangers. I have met him many times, interviewed him on two occasions for television and he and his wife have visited me for lunches and dinners at home in Cairo and at my country house in Fayoum on two or three occasions. We had worked together since 2009 on his political writings, specifically the weekly columns he wrote for Egyptian newspapers, the English version of which I prepared for international syndication. He was always pleased with my work and I had great respect for the brave position he took against police brutality in the last years of the Mubarak regime, against plans to install Mubarak’s son Gamal as his successor and then against the military rulers who ruled Egypt up to June 2012. I remember meeting him in Tahrir Square in February 2011 as he shouted in outrage that police snipers were shooting at the crowd from somewhere near the Interior Ministry. After the revolution, I worked on a volume of his articles, The State of Egypt, which won good reviews and sold well in the English-speaking world. When the literary elite belittled Aswany’s novels, I always stood up for him, arguing that Egypt and the Arab world in general needed good story-tellers who put plot and character ahead of literary ostentation and obsessive self-analysis. I said there was room for everyone, and that Aswany filled a gaping hole.

I can no longer feel the same way about Dr Aswany, especially in his private capacity as an individual with social obligations towards those around him. The least I can say is that he is not an honorable man. But let others be the judge, as I explain the origins of our dispute:

In August 2012, I was approached by the American University in Cairo (AUC) Press, with whom I have an amicable working relationship dating back some years, to see if I would be interested in handling the English version of Aswany’s novel, The Automobile Club of Egypt, which he was then planning to finish by the end of November. I said I would be pleased to take it on.

I communicated with Dr Aswany about the book on and off between September 2012 and February 2013, mainly to get a clearer idea of when it would be ready. This was against the background of AUC Press telling me that they intended to recommend me as the translator, with Dr Aswany’s knowledge and approval.

On February 15, I sent Dr Aswany an email, saying, “Do let me know how you are progressing with The Automobile Club. I’m looking forward to seeing a copy and starting work on it.” He replied, “I finished already the novel I will send the Arabic version next week to my agent Andrew Wylie. He asked me to have the text first and then he will send it to the publishers. I think you will have the text through Wylie very soon.”

On February 20, AUC Press sent me the complete Arabic text of the novel and asked me to prepare a 15 to 20-page sample for submission to the New York-based publishers Knopf Doubleday, saying they would need to approve the sample before we went ahead with the project.

On February 27, I submitted an 8,600-word sample to AUC Press.

On March 14, AUC Press sent me an email, saying that Knopf has studied the sample and had agreed to go ahead with the translation. It then laid out the basics of what would become our contract—payment, deadlines etc.

On March 27, George Andreou, an editor at Knopf, sent me an email, saying, “I am writing to introduce myself as Dr Alaa’s editor at Knopf and to say how pleased I am that you have accepted the commission to translate his new book. I look forward to working with you on the editing of the English version. In the meanwhile, if I can answer any questions, please don’t hesitate to be in touch.” I said he could help by expediting the contract process.

On April 11, I reminded Mr Andreou of the contract and he replied, “It has been ordered. Sorry for the delay. We’ll be back in touch shortly as to when you might expect it.” The same day Jahua Kim of Knopf emailed me, saying, “There is a backlog in the contracts department at the moment, but we should have your contract ready in about a week. Please feel free to reach me if you have further questions.”

On April 25, Dr Aswany sent me a message, saying he thanked me for my “efforts translating The Automobile Club” and asked if I had any questions. I replied that I was making good progress but I would prefer to ask my questions all at once at a later stage. His assistant replied, “Dr. Alaa is glad you are working on it currently . . . and he will be very willing to help anytime.”

On May 1, William Shannon of Knopf finally sent me a contract (for text, ), with a cover note saying, “If the agreement looks in order please print out and sign three copies and return signed copies to Juhea Kim in George Andreou’s office.” I returned the copies as requested, both as signed and scanned JPEGs by email and as hard copy by mail.

On May 11, I received an email from Dr Aswany’s agent, Andrew Wylie, saying, “On further reflection . . . and in consultation with Dr Alaa and with Knopf, we are obliged to withdraw the request for you to translate the novel.” The message gave no substantial explanation. I replied that I had already signed a contract and done a large several months of work on the project. I said Dr Aswany was free to choose another translator but Knopf and/or Dr Aswany had an obligation to pay me for the work I had done and for the time I would have wasted.

On May 12, Dr Aswany sent me an email, his only message ever on this matter, despite he long acquaintance and amicable relations. He said he wanted Mr X (his identity is irrelevant) to work on The Automobile Club. The explanation he offered for his decision was “I think you could understand that I feel comfortable to work with him.” He blamed AUC Press for what he called a misunderstanding and said he wasn’t aware I was working on it (although we had in fact discussed it openly several times). At this stage Aswany had not seen the sample submitted to Knopf in February. But he now asked for a sample translation and, strangely, also proposed giving Mr X a role editing my translation. I sent him the 8,600-word sample that Knopf had approved.

The next day, on May 13, Charles Buchan of the Wylie Agency sent me a message dictated by Andrew Wylie, saying, “Alaa Al Aswany has reviewed the opening pages of your translation of The Automobile Club, and he has found the translation unsatisfactory . . . The book will be translated by Mr X. I have notified AUC and Knopf accordingly.” Dr Aswany and his assistant had spent several hours overnight poring over the sample text, trying to identify aspects that they thought they might plausibly present as ‘mistakes’, apparently to justify retroactively their decision to withdraw from the contract. They were a little overenthusiastic and their efforts are risible. If anyone is interested in the details, the whole document is available ] The relevant Arabic text and the relevant part of the English version are available and

The document, which was circulated to several people, contains remarks that would be defamatory under British law. One of the most outrageous is Aswany’s objection to the spelling Fatiha for the first chapter of the Quran. Fatiha is of course the standard transliteration favoured by most academics and publishers. He writes: “Mr.Wright wrote ‘Fatiha’ instead of ‘Fatha’. The ‘Fatha’ is the most famous Muslim prayer and the only explanation of this mistake is that Mr. Wright is not able to read this very famous word correctly in Arabic.” The document continues in similar vein. I particularly admired Aswany’s ingenuity when he objected to ‘I felt lonely’ for the Arabic ‘aHsastu bil-wiHsha’. He would prefer ‘I felt solitude’. He insists on placing chalets rather than beach houses on the Mediterranean coast. No big deal, but it might give readers the impression they are in the Swiss Alps. The list goes on. But the bigger picture is that Aswany and his assistant appear to think that a translation must match the original word by word, with nouns replacing nouns and so on. Or perhaps they don’t really think that: maybe they just thought it would be a good wheeze to avoid their financial obligations under an inconvenient agreement. If Hell exists, I assume it has a special corner for those who bear false witness against their colleagues for the sake of financial gain.

To continue the story: on May 21, Mr Andreou, in a rare moment of honesty from Knopf in the course of various exchanges, wrote to me saying, “As you know, I was content with your sample. It is simply not feasible, however, for us, as Dr Aswany’s publisher, to proceed with an arrangement that displeases him: author’s (sic) have their prerogatives.” In other words, his justification for withdrawing from the agreement was based on the decision of the author, which itself appears to have been based on a whim. He offered me a small amount in compensation, and I said his offer was inadequate.

After a series of exchanges over the proportion of the work completed, Knopf has ignored my proposal, now about one month old, that we choose an independent arbiter to make an assessment—an idea that strikes me as eminently reasonable.²

Knopf has argued that we never had an agreement because I do not have a contract signed by them (they never sent me a signed copy), and that therefore their offer is ex gratia. My legal advice is that this argument is baseless and that all the elements of an agreement exist. The contract makes no provision for unilateral withdrawal and the only quality provision refers to a final text to be submitted in September 2013, which will never be completed. On October 15, Knopf tried a new approach, alleging that it never even approved the sample translation submitted in February. This is what in plain English we call a lie and, as I noted above, Mr Andreou said the opposite on May 21.

I did have one further exchange with Dr Aswany, when I informed him on May 22 that until our dispute was resolved I could no longer translate his political articles. His response illustrates his attitude to those he deals with. His only concern that my ‘unprofessional’ decision, which he didn’t appear to expect, had disrupted the worldwide distribution of one short article. Under ordinary circumstances, he said, he would have withheld the money I was owed for previous articles—a total of about $600. “Despite all this, I will arrange to give you your money, because I believe I should behave well to the end,” he added.

Thank you, Dr Aswany, you are very gracious, but you have not behaved well. In fact, your behavior has been despicable.

Aswany can be contacted at dralaa57@yahoo.com

The editor-in-chief at Knopf is Sonny Mehta, contactable at smehta@randomhouse.com

I can be contacted at jnthnwrght@gmail.com or in London on +447586244484

Jonathan Wright
Oct 23, 2013

¹ Holy shitsnacks is all of this document insane. It’s the worst sort of authorial interference in a translator’s work, and is both rude and pretty lame.

One example: From the column entitled, “Mr. Wright’s wrong translation” (wow. WOW.), “My wife realized I needed some time alone.”

In the “The Correct accurate meaning of the word” column: “My wife understood my need for the solitude.”

The fuck? Seriously? Not only is the “Wright’s wrong” a terrible pun and really over-the-top, but “Correct accurate meaning” is redundant and sounds like someone who doesn’t understand English. That and “my need for the solitude.” Oh boy, oh boy.

And it goes on and on and on. “Like a bewitched city” to be replaced by “as if.” “I had a good look” versus “I had a look.” This reads like a hack job done by someone who wanted to create cause to get rid of Jonathan Wright as the translator.

² This is a clause included in every single Open Letter contract. If we think a translation is awful, there is a system for sending it to three outside judges who evaluate it. No matter what, the translator gets 2/3 of the agreed to payment.

Of course, I am a heartless bastard with unrelenting standards when it comes to literature, and next to no patience for things like Twitter or Flavorwire or click-garnering listicles. So take the beginning part of this post with a grain of angry salt.

BuzzFeed’s suckiness isn’t even the point; the shady way they’re going about spreading their lists to the world is.

From the

Jonah Peretti, the founder of BuzzFeed, disclosed in a recent letter to investors¹ that its traffic tripled over the past year, hitting 85 million visitors in August. [. . .]

Until recently, though, BuzzFeed’s towering traffic ambitions were held in check by a simple fact of global demographics. Everything BuzzFeed publishes is in English—and at the rate it’s growing, BuzzFeed may be running out of new English speakers to colonize. [. . .]

The site this month will launch versions in French, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese. These international sites will be populated with BuzzFeed posts that originally appeared in English, but BuzzFeed won’t be using professional translators to create them. Instead, BuzzFeed’s posts will be translated by crowds of foreign-language speakers who are learning English using an app called Duolingo. In theory, as part of their coursework, these hordes will translate a BuzzFeed post in a matter of hours—at a quality that rivals that of professional translators, but at the speed, scale and price that you’d get from a machine.

Let’s break this down: BuzzFeed, which receives more than 85 million visitors a month, and makes more than is going to use unpaid (and generally inexperienced) student translators to generate even more wealth for themselves. Great. Sounds like a certain ad for unpaid interns that we all probably remember . . .

On the surface, the concept of sounds kind of interesting:

Duolingo is something like a videogame version of Rosetta Stone, and it’s been found to be quite effective at teaching people new tongues. According to a study commissioned by the company, in about 34 hours with Duolingo, a person with no knowledge of Spanish will become as proficient as someone who’s taken a first-semester college Spanish course. As of last month, the app, which is free to use, had garnered about 10 million users.

When you first begin using it, Duolingo teaches you the most basic concepts of a new language. As you become more adept, you’re asked to translate texts as a test of what you’ve learned.

Great, great. I may even sign up to “gamify” my way to learning Portuguese, but in terms of Duolingo and BuzzFeed, capitalist impulses turn it all shitty:

But why should people waste their energies translating dummy texts? Shouldn’t their work amount to something?

Yes, it should. But what it SHOULDN’T amount to is translating stupid lists for free so that BuzzFeed (and Duolingo) can make money.

If BuzzFeed had any integrity (SPOILER ALERT: It doesn’t), it would pass along some of its foreign language earnings to the people who produced the translations. I know it won’t, because BuzzFeed and capitalism and GROSS . . . But man, does this plan ever devalue translation. Way to go, BuzzFeed! Good thing that by 2015 everyone will have moved on . . .

¹ Holy SHIT. You really should it’s every bit of annoying that you’d expect and more.

But how bad could an interview be, really? It’s just an interview. It provides a context. Information about JGV’s work. Right?

Jonathan Franzen: I’m struck by how different in feel The Informers and The Sound of Things Falling are from the Latin American “boom” novels of a generation ago. I’m thinking of both their cosmopolitanism (European story elements in the first book, an American main character in the new one) and their situation in a modern urban Bogotá. To me it feels as if there’s been a kind of awakening in Latin American fiction, a clearing of the magical mists, and I’m wondering to what extent you see your work as a reaction to that of Márquez and his peers. Did you come to fiction writing with a conscious program?

To be honest, this is all I’ve read of this interview, because it’s just so stupid that I can’t go on. I may well burn this promo material as soon as I finish writing this post.

First off, where the hell has Franzen been? Not only were there a lot of Latin American writers working in non-“boom” type aesthetics at the same time that Márquez was writing, but there have been hundreds of interesting authors since that time who ripped open the “magical mists” of Latin American fiction. And seriously, “magical mists”? That is some shit.

This is the kind of bullshit question that no one would ever ask an American author. Just imagine:

I’m struck by how different in feel The Corrections and Freedom are from the American “modernist” novels of a generation ago. I’m thinking of both their disinterest in language and representations of the inner workings of the human experience (the straightforward neo-realistic prose that dominates both of them) and the obsession with the suburbs. To me it feels as if there’s been a kind of awakening in American fiction, a clearing of the obfuscating mists, and I’m working to what extent you see your work as a reaction to that of Faulkner and his peers. Did you come to fiction writing with a conscious program?

Sorry. I’m just sick of this sort of approach to reading international literature—especially Latin American literature. Implicit in Franzen’s question is the idea that there was—or is—a certain “type” of Latin American writing and that anything different than that is some sort of political statement or bold move, as if Latin American writers can’t write about Europe or America or anything modern and universal. Get back to the banana plantations and bring us some talking butterflies! Beyond being insulting to Latin American writers, it really makes the person asking the question—Franzen in this case—seem like an ignoramus. So all y’all Mexicans actually know about Europe? Holeey shit!

/end rant

Once again, Open Letter will be attending (both Kaija and I will be there), and once again, we have a table at the end of the end of the world. So if you’re lost up on the second floor of the exhibition center, come see us at Z24, which is probably next to the Dianetics stand, that weirdo puppet guy, and some grad student who makes bongs and bookmarks out of beer cans.²

If you do make it to our stand, we will greet you with a free Thousand Morons T-shirt, and will sell you any of our books—from The Canvas to Maidenhair to Death in Spring to Zone to The Private Lives of Trees to Ergo—for $10 each.

So come see us! And if you can’t find our booth, just check all the parties. We’re gonna rip this scene up and teach you flannel children how publishers party.

¹ Oh, and desperation and skinny jeans. Lots and lots of desperation. The vast majority of attendees are young hipsters writers looking to break into print. So yeah. It’s like a casting couch for lyric poets!

² Seriously, AWP Adminstrators. Why the shit are we relegated to this part of the exhibition hall? Who do I have to sleep with to get Open Letter—one of the more prestigious independent presses in the country—into a space near our comprable presses? It’s really irritating to be floors away from NYRB and New Directions and Graywolf and all the areas where people actually buy books . . . Seriously. There are start-up presses publishing single poems on the back of napkins that have better placement than we do. These presses won’t even be around next year, after their bearded directors blow all their sales money (“Oh, I just love the concreteness of your publishing enterprise. Napkin poems make me feel so alive.”) on fake mushrooms and more skinny jeans. Then again, writers generally don’t, and creative writing programs definitely don’t have any sense of perspective, so I guess it only makes sense that your exhibition hall layout is so jacked. Congratulations!

That said, and before I get more fully into the Bookish conundrum, a few of the things I posted last night remain true:

• about “Rock Fame and Fandom” completely blows. Not only is Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity #1 on the list (PREDICTABLE, SO UTTERLY PREDICTABLE AND LAME), but the edition referenced is the “Movie Tie-In Version.” (PUKE.) Also, of the four other books on this list, one is by Bob Dylan, another by J-Franz. (I promise that part of my reaction to the lameness of this list will make more sense below.)

• The fact that there’s an ad for on Bookish, pretty much eliminates about 85% of its credibility. Sure, it’s there because TFM is published by one of the publishers putting up the money for this site—an issue I’m going to get into below. Putting that aside, it’s not very reassuring that a site billing itself as the “next great book discovery site” believes that writing like this is worth sharing with the general public:

When I was growing up my dad always told me, “Townes, college will be the best four years of your life.” He was rarely wrong about anything, so I couldn’t have been more excited to head off to school. High school was the minor leagues, and I was ready for the big show. Ready to walk onto the field under the lights, throw up on home plate, kick the catcher in the balls, and charge the mound.

• I’ve been sending Bookish copies of all Open Letter books for years (at their request, mind you), and only some of them are indexed on the site. Last night, I happened to choose the ones that weren’t there, and just wanted to take a second to say that yes, has a Bookish page, as does (Please note that the translators are not listed on these pages. That’ll come up in a minute as well.)

By this point in time, a good number of you are wondering, Just what the hell is Bookish, and why is Chad being such a douche?

Basically, Bookish is supposed to be the “Next Big Thing” allowing readers—especially those who don’t go to bookstores or talk to people—to find out what books they should buy and read. And basically, after years of waiting for Bookish to come out, I’m extremely disappointed. And I’ve yet to learn how to express my disappointment in mature ways.

But let’s start at the beginning . . . Or rather, let’s start with about Bookish’s launch:

After three CEOs and a number of delays, Bookish launched at 9 p.m. Monday with approximately 2 million ISBNs from 19 publishers and a search recommendation function that its founders hope will make it easier for consumers to discover books. To help draw traffic to the Web site, Bookish will feature exclusive content about books and authors and will work with USA Today to integrate Bookish into the newspaper’s book page site.

That’s quite an opening paragraph—one that opens up a ton of things to pick apart. Let’s start with that “three CEOs and a number of delays” statement.

I’m trying to remember when I first heard about Bookish. I’m guessing it was around the time that the New York Times ran about a new “One Stop” Book Site—May 6, 2011. From the article:

Publishers have spent a lot of time and money building their own company Web sites with fresh information on their books and authors. The trouble is, very few book buyers visit them.

In search of an alternative, three major publishers said on Friday that they would create a new venture, called Bookish.com, which is expected to make its debut late this summer. The site intends to provide information for all things literary: suggestions on what books to buy, reviews of books, excerpts from books and news about authors. Visitors will also be able to buy books directly from the site or from other retailers and write recommendations and reviews for other readers.

The publishers — Simon & Schuster, Penguin Group USA and Hachette Book Group — hope the site will become a catch-all destination for readers in the way that music lovers visit Pitchfork.com for reviews and information. [. . .]

“There’s a frustration with book consumers that there’s no one-stop shopping when it comes to information about books and authors,” said Carolyn Reidy, the president and chief executive of Simon & Schuster. “We need to try to recreate the discovery of new books that currently happens in the physical environment, but which we don’t believe is currently happening online.”

First off, who is this ridiculous reader who can’t find the “one-stop shopping” website named Amazon.com where they can find information about books and authors? Has Carolyn Reidy ever talked to this “book consumer”? I’m going to guess this is another instance of a publisher “knowing” what its readers want. (SPOILER! They rarely ever do.)

Instead of making fun of the fact that, as Reidy describes it, this site is 100% redundant and unnecessary, I want to riff on the part that I think is interesting: “The publishers hope the site will become a catch-all destination for readers in the way that music lovers visit Pitchfork.com.”

Once again, not to make fun of corporate CEOs and shills, but Jesus fuck is it clear that the people behind Bookish have never visited Pitchfork.com. And that’s the real tragedy that’s driving my piss-offedness.

For better or worse—better because it has an editorial voice, worse because 75% of the music criticism is poorly written—Pitchfork is an incredibly influential site for people interested in “contemporary music” (loosely defined). It is a place that a lot of music connoisseurs visit on a regular basis.

Why? Well, there is the news section, which, due to Pitchfork’s popularity and influence, has become one of the best outlets for bands to release information. But it’s my belief that most everyone comes there to read (and internally argue with) the daily reviews.

Every day of the week (more of less), Pitchfork reviews 5 albums, ranging in musical style from death metal to dubstep to indie rock to dancetronica. (Or whatever.) The point is that taken as a whole, these 25 reviews a week are a decent starting point for finding out what albums have just come out and whether or not they’re worth checking out.

A key feature of these reviews is the 10-point grading system. It can be useful, illuminating, and infuriating, but it does provide a snapshot of what a particular review/editorial source thinks of a certain album. For instance, so far this week, Thao & The Get Down Stay Down received a 7.5 for “We the Common,” Lightning Swords of Death received a 7.8 for “Baphometic Chaosium,” and The History of Apple Pie received a semi-dismissive 6.7 for “Out of View.”

Obviously, these numbers are subjective, and readers will often disagree (seriously, the Thao album is much better than that, and the 8.4 for Foxygen’s new album is ridiculous—the first is way better, and neither is all that interesting), but it’s a representative of a particular “taste-making voice.” Read it long enough and you’ll know what makes a Pitchfork album and what doesn’t. Of course they love Local Natives and find Buke & Gase a bit confusing. The point is, a huge group of music listeners go there to find out what albums are coming out and how this website assesses them.

What people don’t go to pitchfork for: to buy albums, add them to their “listened to!” shelves, or rate them. And that’s fine. This is a more traditional “discovery” site in that it represents a particular point of view, and offers guidance by evaluating products.

When I first heard about Bookish, the word on the street was that it would be a “Pitchfork for Books.” (See this that echos this belief.) I believed/hoped that this would be a site in which 3-5 books from a dozen different categories (fiction, business books, sci-fi, health, etc.) would be reviewed on a daily basis. That it would serve that critical “discovery” function in which readers (especially those not reading best-sellers) could find out what’s coming out and if they should seek it out.

THAT would be extremely valuable to readers, and would have the potential to become a “taste-making” book site that is respected by a wide range of readers. A site that could take over for the loss of newspaper reviews and position itself as more reputable than most blogs. Also, by actually focusing on books instead of publishing news or gossip, it would be pretty damn unique. Something for readers, not just insiders.

But that sort of book discovery isn’t sexy anymore. The Age of Screens is also the Age of Big Data. An editorial vision has been replaced by an algorithm. Why hire 20 editors to curate reviews and cultivate a reading community when you can get readers to piss away spend their time entering in gobs of information about which books they’ve read, bought, and liked, and then crunch that data and recommend that the next book they read is Hunger Games?

(My luddite tendencies are at full-force today.)

Looking at Bookish, it’s clear that it’s definitely NOT the Pitchfork for books. Before getting into what it is, I need to explain a bit more about why it WOULD NEVER be the Pitchfork for books. And why it’s kind of evil.

First off, this site (and it’s rather corporate, lame name) is funded by Simon & Schuster, Penguin, and Hachette—three of the largest publishers in the country. (Especially if you consider Penguin being Penguin + Random House.) Can corporate publishers really ever be the “taste-makers” in the sense that Pitchfork is? Absolutely not. In fact, no publisher can/should. An independent group of smart readers evaluating all the books coming out and highlighting ones from commercial, indie, and university presses can have an editorial vision that gets passed along to readers. And even if Bookish has a separate staff, its editorial objectivity has already been compromised.

(Note that on the opening page of you’ll find the tagline “We Know Books” above images of Tina Fey’s Bossypants and J.K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy. “We Know Certain Books” is a much more accurate statement.)

Secondly, a site that is aiming to sell books and feature advertising (mostly from it’s partent publishing companies), isn’t exactly in it to help readers . . . Or at least that’s not their only motive. Go back to Reidy’s seeming ignorance of that small start-up Amazon.com. Is that maybe intentional? It seems possible that these three publishers are thinking they could create their own Amazon, thus bringing them more profits and giving them more control over the way the books are presented and promoted.

Or MAYBE this is a way for the big presses to help out struggling independent bookstores? That would be pretty cool, since kind of sucks, as do most indie store websites. From PW:

Any title bought directly from Bookish will be fulfilled by Baker & Taylor, which is also setting the price for the titles.

GodDAMN IT. Never mind. I should’ve known better than to think that a) this would be useful and cool and b) that it would be about more than just creating leverage for dealing with Amazon.

So what exactly is Bookish? Well, first and foremost, it’s a database of authors and titles that you can look at. PW again:

There are about 400,000 author profile pages as well as title pages for all books on the site and Bookish allows consumers to search for books in 18 major categories. Reviews from PW are also featured and customers can add reviews and rate titles as well. [. . .] In addition to titles from the founding partners—Penguin Group USA, Hachette Book Group, and Simon & Schuster—Bookish includes titles from 16 other publishers, a list that comprises the three other big six houses plus companies that range from Abrams to Workman as well as Perseus and all its distribution clients and the clients of IPG.

If you’re thinking but with fewer books and options, you’d be right.

In which case, why did it take so damn long to launch? Initially this was supposed to be live in September 2011. It is now 2013. The moment for this site happened so long ago. At one point in time, I heard that the delay was due to one of the three CEOs wanting to create their own database of titles and metadata rather than pull it from some other source. Which, great, congratu-fucking-lations. You’ve just reinvented the wheel!

The core of Bookish is going to be its recommendation algorithm. And as much as I’d like these corporate publishers to put money into creating a review website featuring real readers, I do find the principles behind algorithmic recommendation tools really fascinating. So far, this one seems fine. My Two Worlds led to recommendations of Merce Rodoreda, Cesar Aira, and Isabel Allende. (OK, so it’s not fine, but passable?)

Other features on the website include the following:

Bookish’s home page will have new content each day and the site launched with an interview between Michael Connelly and Michael Kortya, an essay from Elizabeth Gilbert, and a look at the first chapter of Harlan Coben’s upcoming thriller Six Years. Excerpts, trailers and updated news will also be featured assembled by a team of seven editors overseen by Rebecca Wright, who is executive editor.

All of which feels pretty damn blah and corporate and void of personality. Why, come to think of it, it sounds pretty much like a website version of USA Today.

Bookish is counting on lots of pre-launch SEO work to help drive traffic as well as its collaboration with USA Today, a deal that replaces Bookish’s original media partner the AOL Huffington Post Media Group. USA Today readers who click on book information on the site will be linked to Bookish and the paper will syndicate Bookish content through its site.

Oh. Yeah. That. Congrats, S&S, Hachette, and Penguin! You accomplished your goal and disenfranchised interesting, intellectual readers once again.

Finally, in summary, this site is what it is. It’s no where near the Bookish I wanted and thought I was getting, but if there’s one thing we all know, it’s that corporate media dollars don’t often go to interesting things. But it’s GoodReads for other people. And a place that corporate publishing folks can buy their books without feeling like they’re betraying their employers. Again, all I can say is congrats.

But will it succeed? God, I can’t imagine that it will. There’s a huge First Mover problem going on with this site. One reason I thought it well could have been a Pitchfork with books is because that would make it something other than Amazon or GoodReads. Instead, publishers do what publishers do—copy what’s successful and dress it up a bit. Real innovation is hard to find at this level.

The point is, why would I stop buying from Amazon (if I don’t have huge moral issues), to go to Bookish? Why would I stop updating the GoodReads account I’ve been using for years to try and recreate it on Bookish?

Remember Riffle? Remember Google+? They both faced similar issues, and neither really overcame it. What I don’t understand is why these companies don’t get that. Create something actually new and you’ll get what you want. Improve slightly on what people are already sort of, pretty much satisfied with, and they’ll ignore you.

[In reference to all the other book awards out there—Man Booker, Costa, IMPAC, Women’s Prize for Fiction, etc.] Enough to be going on with? Well, no. Not just because there can never be too many literary prizes (it’s a profession with precious few bonuses), but because the brief of all existing prizes is to seek out “the best” or “most promising”, rather than to highlight what’s innovative, ground-breaking, iconoclastic – fiction at its most novel. This is why Goldsmiths College, where I work part-time as a creative writing tutor, has just launched a new £10,000 prize, in association with the New Statesman.

The new fiction prize will go to a book that celebrates the spirit of invention and characterises the genre at its most surprising. Drawing up a description was tricky, not least because we wanted to avoid the word “experimental”, which no one seems to like any more. It’s easier to list the sort of writers who might have won the prize had it been around in recent years: David Mitchell, Ali Smith, Nicola Barker, Geoff Dyer and Tom McCarthy come to mind.

Further back, in 1922, James Joyce’s Ulysses would have been battling it out with Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room – whereas in 1962, Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange might have edged out Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. And Julian Barnes might have got it for Flaubert’s Parrot in 1984, a quarter of a century before he won the Booker.

For anyone even halfway excited by this, you should go read the The reference to Tristram Shandy is sure to give you a thrill, as is the bit about not excluding “hybrid” books:

[T]he prize won’t want to ignore is the number of texts that mix fiction with non-fiction. Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty is a good example. And then there’s WG Sebald, whose books blur the distinction between fiction, memoir and history, and who once compared his method to that of a dog running through a field – there might be nothing systematic or plottable, but he got where he needed to by following his nose.

Yes. Fuck and YES.

The one thing that breaks my heart about this prize is that it’s for “UK and Ireland residents only.” Why can’t America—home to any number of “innovative” writers, from David Markson to David Foster Wallace to Shelley Jackson to Lydia Millet—sponsor such an award? I have my (anti-capitalist) suspicions as to why something like this is pretty unlikely, but before laying out my biases and disgust, let’s take a look at the new format of the National Book Awards.

On January 15th, the National Book Foundation announced a few changes to the NBA’s, one of the three most important book awards in the U.S. (along with the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Awards):

One change in the process will increase the number of honored books by selecting a “Long-List” of ten titles in each of the four genres, to be announced five weeks before the Finalists Announcement. In 2013, the Long-Lists will be announced on September 12th (forty titles), the Finalists on October 15th (twenty titles) and the National Book Award Winners on November 20th (four titles.) [. . .]

In addition, judges comprising the four panels—Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, and Young People’s Literature—will no longer be limited to writers, but now may also include other experts in the field including literary critics, librarians, and booksellers. The number of judges in each panel will remain at five.

These are both pretty fantastic changes that I whole-heartedly approve of . . . at least on the surface. I love “longlists” (see our own Best Translated Book Awards) since they provide readers with a slightly wider range of titles to check out, adds an extra round of excitement to the awards process.

Ditto for the expansion to include critics, librarians, and booksellers. Authors (who have been the only group to comprise the judging panels for years now) are great, but in my experience, there are tons of critics, librarians, and booksellers who are much better readers, and more well-read, than a standard author. This isn’t to slight authors (at least not most of them), but they’re spending time working on creating, whereas these other groups are readers first . . . Point being, I think this should be great for the award as well. (And maybe, just maybe, someday I could make it onto one of these judging panels, which would be probably the Greatest Thing Ever.)

But wait! All’s not perfect in book paradise—there are cracks in the press surrounding these NBA changes that make me sick and hateful. Just check these bits from the

[Grove/Atlantic CEO Morgan] Entrekin said that some of the recent National Book Award fiction lists, which usually get the most attention, had been “very eccentric” and that allowing critics and booksellers as judges could open up the process. The results, he thinks, will be a “little more mainstream,” and less likely to include “a collection of stories by a university press.”

“I think there are plenty of awards that recognize those kinds of books,” Entrekin said. “If one of those books is truly the best book of the year, that’s no problem. But it seemed like the judges had been recognizing lesser-known authors for the sake of choosing lesser-known authors.” [. . .]

“We’re asking people to read a lot of books, but some of these librarians and booksellers we hope to bring in are reading a lot of books anyway,” Entrekin said.

Oh no, you didn’t. Please tell me you didn’t just say that. “Very eccentric”? “Little more mainstream”? And what do you think “mainstream” means exactly? There are really only two interrelated definitions: 1) more people read this, hence more popular or “mainstream,” and 2) more people know about it because it made lots of money. And those things have to do with something being the “best” book how exactly?

Way-too-obvious-to-waste-time-on-side-rant: America is The Worst for trying to equate popularity with quality. We do it over and over and over again and it drives basically everyone with taste nuts. And we lament it and gripe, but can’t really seem to do much of anything, since the system—those producing, promoting, and determining our tastes subtly and not-so—has all them money and power and influence.

OK, here’s another interesting quote:

“Our mission is to celebrate literature and expand its audience and we chose the path most consistent with our mission,” said David Steinberger, chairman of the foundation’s board and CEO of the Perseus Books Group.

I totally agree with the National Book Foundation’s mission to expand the audience for literature in all sorts of ways. Beyond the awards, the NBF—run by the brilliant and perceptive Harold Augenbraum, who I respect as much as any other person working at a literary organization anywhere in the world—runs a slew of really amazing programs, such as the Innovations in Reading awards, 5 Under 35, and all of which are aimed at preserving and expanding our book culture.

But the awards are the main thing everyone knows about, and the balance that has to be kept between rewarding great literature and expanding readership may be getting a little bit tainted . . . (Here comes my paranoid of the military-industrial-complex bit.)

Did you notice anything about the two National Book Foundation members quoted above? One is the CEO of a very well-respected, and relatively large, international publishing house (Grove/Atlantic). The other is CEO of another large(ish) book publishing group (Perseus Book Group) that happens to own the distribution company (Perseus Distribution) responsible for selling Grove’s books.

I don’t necessarily care about that connection—this is publishing after all, a pretty incestuous and well-knotted industry—but about the fact that it’s these for-profit, pro-sales organization heads who are determining the shape of this very respectable award.

Just look at which companies are represented on the Perseus Books Group, Grove/Atlantic, John Wiley & Sons, Google, Simon & Schuster, Barnes & Noble, Penguin Group USA, W.W. Norton & Co., Random House, and Janklow & Nesbit. This is quite a heavy hitting board—as it should be—made up of some very influential and brilliant people. People who have a lot invested in creating an award that would benefit their bottom line.

See! Paranoid. But read in context of what I just wrote above:

Board members had come to feel that the awards needed a model more like that of the Man Booker Prize, Britain’s top literary honor, which is more integrated into popular literary culture.

“When a book is shortlisted for the Man Booker prize, it sells another 50,000 copies,” Morgan Entrekin, president of Grove/Atlantic Press and vice chairman of the National Book Foundation’s board, told The New York Times last November. “It can transform the fate of a book.”

So what exactly is the mission of the National Book Award? To honor the best works of the past year by American writers, or create a system by which you can sell more copies of more “mainstream” works? If it’s the latter, then fuck it, this award is dead to me, and I’d cut it if I could.

But maybe these quotes are somehow taken out of context? Let’s look at the past few recipients of the NBA for Fiction:

2012: Louise Erdrich, The Round House (Harper, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers)
2011: Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones (Bloomsbury USA)
2010: Jaimy Gordon, Lord of Misrule (McPherson & Co.)
2009: Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin (Random House)
2008: Peter Matthiessen, Shadow Country (Modern Library)
2007: Denis Johnson , Tree of Smoke (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
2006: Richard Powers, The Echo Maker (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
2005: William T. Vollmann Europe Central (Viking)
2004: Lily Tuck, The News from Paraguay (Harper)
2003: Shirley Hazzard, The Great Fire (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

So, over the past ten years, with the exception of McPherson & Co., and to a lessor extent, Bloomsbury USA, the winning book has been awarded to one of the Major Corporate Publishers. What exactly did Entrekin mean by stating that the selections have been “very eccentric” and that it was less likely with these changes that a collection of short stories from a university press would be on the list?

OK, not to draw this out too much, but to build up to my final condemning point, we first have to look at the complete list of “small” or “independent” or “university” presses with books on the finalists list for fiction over the past five years: McSweeney’s Books, Bellevue Literary Press, Lookout Books (which is part of the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, and the book in question—Edith Pearlman’s Binocular Vision—_is_ a collection of short stories), McPherson & Co., Coffee House Press, Wayne State University Press (on there for Bonnie Jo Campbell’s American Salvage, which, yes, is a collection of short stories), and Graywolf Press.

In the greater scheme or things, that’s not terrible for the non-corporate presses of the world . . . Our of 25 finalists from the past five years, 7 were from this “second-tier” of publishers.

One last thing worth noting: The Lookout Books book that was a finalists—Edith Pearlman’s Binocular Vision—actually won the NBCC for fiction that year. How “eccentric” of a choice for an award honoring the “best” of American writing is that, really? Fucking crazy that authors and critics would both reward a book that certain publishers didn’t publish because they didn’t think it would be commercial successful. (And didn’t think it would win any major award.)

OK. Point being that if you tie all of Entrekin’s quotes together along with a cursory look at recent finalists, it’s clear (to me) that what he wants is a longlist of 10 titles that may include some of these “eccentric” small press books. But that these would be weeded out before announcing the finalists, which would then go on to sell 50,000 copies a piece—sales figures that commercial presses clearly deserve, since this is sort of their award . . . And that the winner would be even more mainstream that Louis Erdich, Richard Powers, Colum McCann?

(That’s one thing that totally scares me. These are all fine writers with sold literary credentials—McCann and Powers more than Erdich, but still—what would a “more mainstream” list of winners look like? Clearly J-Franz would be on there. Do we need an award that focuses on writers less literary/more mainstream than these? No. Absolutely not.)

As much as Entrekin retracts these statements (and don’t get me wrong, Morgan is brilliant and an awesome publisher and person who has done more for literature—especially literature in translation—than most anyone else), I think the tracks have been laid and that the NBA is going to move from an award honoring “writer’s writers” that deserve respect and readers and money, to an award helping generate revenue for commercial publishers. And that makes me puke in my mouth.

In other words, GO UNITED KINGDOM! Until they totally cock it up, this Goldsmiths Award is The Greatest. (Well, that and the NBCCs which, once again, have a really great group of finalists for )

U R Ananthamurthy (India)
Aharon Appelfeld (Israel)
Lydia Davis (USA)
Intizar Husain (Pakistan)
Yan Lianke (China)
Marie NDiaye (France)
Josip Novakovich (Canada)
Marilynne Robinson (USA)
Vladimir Sorokin (Russia)
Peter Stamm (Switzerland)

What’s really fricking strange though, is this first couple paragraphs of the press release:

Anyone who could have guessed even five of the 10 novelists who have just been revealed as the finalists for the fifth Man Booker International Prize deserves a mass cap-doffing from the wider reading public. The previous incarnations of the prize have included a large cluster of well-known and indeed expected names, from Doris Lessing and Milan Kundera to Amos Oz and Joyce Carol Oates. There is, however, nothing familiar or expected about the list unveiled today by the chair of judges Sir Christopher Ricks at the DSC Jaipur Literary Festival.

It is a list that will, for many readers, open up a wealth of possibilities since perhaps only two of the writers can be said to have a wide international profile, Marilynne Robinson and Aharon Appelfeld. Robinson, an Orange Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award winner is the only one of the 10 who has been nominated for this prize before.

“Nothing familiar or expected”?Only two with a “wide international profile”? What the shit, Man Booker?

Ok, so I’m not familiar with Ananthamurthy or Husain, but all the others are, if not household names, definitely familiar to readers of Three Percent or anyone interested in international literature.

In fact, we’ve reviewed books by all of the foreign authors on here (with the exception of Marie NDiaye, but we have two reviews of her books in the works), and everyone knows of Lydia Davis for either her writing or her translations of Proust and Flaubert. Have some self-respect Man Booker International Prize Press Release Writer—you don’t have to apologize for not including Philip Roth or Haruki Murakami on this list. (Besides, why would you?)

Not to kick a sleeping horse, but here’s another strange bit from this oddly written press release:

The list of finalists reveals other things too [Fiammetta Rocco] thinks. This is a young though very experienced judging panel (although not as young as Marie NDiaye who, at 45, is the most youthful Man Booker International finalist to date) and its choices show a taste for Modernism rather than conventional narrative: “the judges were interested in novelists who push the form”, says Rocco. Many of the novelists – NDiaye, Novakovich and Sorokin among them – are fascinated by cultural migrants which produces in turn a very rich literature. Nevertheless, as Christopher Ricks stresses, these are novelists whose work is different rather than similar.

One of the benefits of such a high profile prize is that it brings with it its own sense of momentum. It is a prerequisite of the prize that the finalists’ work should be available in English and since the MBI imprimatur is a guarantee of quality their nomination will hopefully lead to more of their work being translated in more countries. The winner of the £60,000 prize can also choose a translator of their work to receive a £15,000 award of their own.

The announcement of this year’s prize recipient will be made at a dinner at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London on 22nd May and with this list the judges have already made sure the name will be a surprise.

In case you didn’t catch that, this will be a “surprise” because NO ONE KNOWS WHO THESE CRAZY MODERNIST AUTHORS ARE!

Sorry, but fuck off, Man Booker. I like this list of authors a lot, but your public relations spin is annoying and condescending both to readers and to the authors on your list.

I used to tell my students in translation courses that in preparing to translate a writer they could never know enough about the writer’s culture. But looking at the writing coming out of Europe now, I’m not so sure. Now I ask myself: What other culture? Or, what other culture? A creeping homogenization is developing in prose fiction, a kind of generic international content and style that transcends national borders. A broad horizontal culture seems to be replacing vertical national cultures. [. . .]

American scholars and students who discuss French or German philosophers or continental European theory frequently see no need to consult foreign sources in the original language, or to take into account what circumstances and cultural traditions in the original language might lie behind them: a colleague of mine once described contemporary English departments as “the monolingual in pursuit of the multicultural.”

In an interview in Austria Kultur, the cultural magazine published by the Austrian government, the writer Jakob Lind describes himself as “a Viennese-born Dutchman turned Israeli with an Austrian passport, Eastern European parents.” Lind lives in England, writes in German. If I translate him, what culture am I translating?

I’m not sure what direction this took in the panel discussion, but what’s always interested me (mostly because of the publishing angle), is the way that authors around the world ape current trends in Anglo-American fiction in hopes of getting their work translated into English. That sounds a bit dismissive and damning, but I remember talking with editors in Germany a dozen years ago and having someone remark, “[Germans] used to write those experimental novels, now we write like Americans!” Which totally bummed me out. The retaining of something unique about a country’s “book culture” is something I think is extremely important. And in some ways, it’s the responsibility of (certain) publishers to help preserve this by publishing and promoting works that are “uniquely French” (if there is such a thing), or at least not “from France, but just like Freedom!” Otherwise, what’s the point?

This is the second time I’ve been to Paris—the first time was in 2009, which, to say the least, was an intense period in my life. But that trip . . . Wow. So many good people, so many good conversations, so much Three Percent material.

That was at a time when I still tried to write coherent “this is the state of publishing, yo!” type essays. Which I still love to do, but being back here where the buildings are more complicatedly beautiful than anything in NY, and where the people drip the sexy and the books reek of intellectual charm, I don’t think I can synthesize anything. So instead, I give you a few facts and a ton of opinons and jokes. Enjoy!

FACT: I have slept eight hours of the past 72. My mind is slipping.

FACT: The Irish bar across the street is having an “Apocalypse Party” on Thursday. Which brought home the point that I fly out on 12/21/12, right about practically maybe when the aliens invade the Mayan temples and rape the global warming. Or so I understand.

FACT: The French can’t dance.

QED: This post is probably offensive.

1) I arrived yesterday (Monday) morning at 8 am, and got a chauffeur cab to my hotel, where I arrived just a minute before 10, leaving me plenty (!) of time to shower and get my ass to my first meeting. Which, naturally, was with a woman who spoke next to no English. I have never received so many books at a meeting in my life. It was like compulsive giving. “BLAH BLAH DURR BALSH OPEN LETTER.” “Book, you like?” “SCHMEER TRANSLATION SLEEP HYPER BAD MOVIES BLAH.” “Other book? Is short erotic fiction?”

2) This same publisher publishes three Lutz Bassmann (aka Antoine Volodine) books, including his latest (Danse avec Nathan Golshem) and Haïkus de prison, which I assume are the haikus “Bassmann” “wrote” while in “prison.”

FACT: There is no one at work at a project as ambitious—and strange—as Antoine Volodine.

3) Everyone and their brother has tons of questions about a that we all know I know about, and that we all know I can’t know about on Three Percent without knowing that a certain someone (who knows I know!) will get upset and knowingly call people and complain that I’m hurting their ability to succeed and therefore—PUNISHMENT! There’s no joke here, but shit, do I hate having to explain another’s actions at almost every single meeting. Keep the crazy in your own court! I have nothing to do with this!

4) Holy and fuck does Paul Fournel rock. First off, knowing next to little about it, I totally want to publish Chamboula. But for you Oulipian lovers out there—feast your sexy dreams on this: Paul took me into the room adjacent to his majestic apartment that houses a makeshift library of Oulipian works. Cool, no? Well, just wait . . . One of those works was a book by Perec and his mistress’s daughter (?) that’s in an oversized purple case lined with velvet and contains about 30 pages of text and photographs. Again—cool, no? Well it’s one of maybe 10 copies that exist in the world.

FACT: Duke would DESTROY Michigan’s overrated basketball team. This is old ACC >>> B1G 10 love. Nice try, but your coach will always be Elite Eight and out. PROVE ME DIFFERENT, WOLVERINES.

5) Dan Gunn and his partner Kristina Kovacheva treated me to the best meal I’ve ever had at someone’s Parisian apartment.

5a) When I told my daughter I was going to Paris: “Can I go with you?” “I wish! What do you know about France, Chloë?” “They have fancy cheeses! And I want to wear a pink beret!”

5a1) I bought her a pink beret today.

5b) I ate all the fancy cheeses at Dan and Kristina’s place. (Sorry, Chloë!)

6) Dan and Kristina and Daniel Medin should all be invited to the next May. That should maybe be a “FACT.”

7) When I was in the office of Editions Verdier receiving all the Bassmann books, I saw Damian Tabarovsky’s card—an author that Emily Davis translated while here at the U of Rochester and that Open Letter wants to publish. Apparently he was here recently, meeting with Verdier about rights to another of their authors.

FACT: French people move in a way that is automatically sexy. This woman working in the hotel restaurant got—and drank—a glass of water, standing in front of me in a way that can only be described as “illegal.” Every guy&girl here walks in a way that slithers with a certain something that makes it automatically beautiful. It’s indescribable, yet so there. My belief is that the angle between their hips and shoulders is like the golden fucking mean of sexy. Fact!

8) The ebook situation here in France is about the same as it was in 2009—less than 3% of sales are of the e-variety. One quote today: over a million print copies of a Gray book were sold, and like 30,000 e-versions. In other words, the French are basically like, “Suck a pixel, iPad/Kindle! And e-ink my ass!” Which is going way too far, and not recognizing the potential value of the Amazon/e-phenomenon—not to go all small scale on you, but I wouldn’t be teaching Mo Yan’s POW! in my class if the kids couldn’t get it for cheap—but is also so damn awesome. Bookstores exist here in France, and not because people like DLJ of the House of Moby wish they would, but because of the fixed book price, government intervention and support (suck an Obamacare stick, Ayn Randians!), and a schooling/cultural system that promotes reading not as entertainment, but as something valuable in and of its own right (suck a Survivor Mark Zuckerberg!). I love this country for that. And for the way people walk. And the absinthe.

9) is like Richard Nash’s Cursor + Kaija Straumanis’s Plüb – booze. (Well, officially.)

FACT: French people CAN NOT DANCE. I was at the Irish pub across the street and it was all 80s movie flailing and a dude wearing Mickey Mouse gloves groping ass. NO ONE WANTS TO SEE THAT, MICKEY. There was also a cougar (which, in France, they refer to as “a woman”) who was not-so subtly rejecting a dude with sunglasses pushed up on the top of his head. Really? Your style points just got rammed, France. That shit doesn’t even happen in Sixteen Candles.

9a) TLHub is a virtual space where translators can post a text they’re working on along with their translation and share it with other translators/members for edits/comments. It’s sort of brilliant in a very understated, yet essential way.

FACT: An American publisher asked the French government for a grant to cover the translation costs of doing a book PLUS $15,000 for marketing. In other words, $20-25,000 for a book. Great. So my FACT: There’s no way you, as a smart, savvy, educated independent publisher can spend $15,000 on marketing in a legitimate way that would actually result in an increased readership for that book, short of giving away 15,000 copies. You have a different idea? Email it to me. I’m curious to know how anyone would spend this sort of money in a non-pissing-it-all-away fashion. Ads? NOPE. Conferences? NO IMPACT. Reading tours? HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Review copies? 15,000.

QUESTION: I just got a text about the aforementioned and the fact that this publisher has been “swamped” with job applications. Does anyone believe this? Really? Do you know who has actually applied? Yeah, me neither.

9b) In addition to TLHub, the people at the Sociéte européenne des auteurs also run the news part of and containing a ton of books deserving international recognition recommended by a group of stellar authors from around the world. Both of these are also worth checking out.

FACT: I am ONE DAY away from being the FourSquare Mayor of the Eiffel Tower. FACT FACT FACT.

10) Buildings in France are something else. The entrance ways, the courtyards, the understated yet magnificent opulence. I am smitten with the architecture here. And the publishers, books, way people walk, and wine. Their beer blows, as does their dancing, attempt to make pizza, and book design (for the most part), but I totally love it and wish that I could have a semester sabbatical (HA! HA HA! HAHAHAHAHHAHA!) to live here, study the publishing scene, find books to get into English, love the shit out the Oulipo, etc. Instead, Rochester. Summer interns to tend to when all the academics are away. Women’s soccer (yay!).

FACT: The other night I had a dream in which the “greatest” of insults was to call someone a “donkey diddler.” This came from a dirty book everyone read, but no one admitted to reading. And I promised myself—as I woke up—that I would work it into a post. So, yeah. Donkey diddler.