I like the fact that the BTBA has a strong track record for picking not only the massive, monumental doorstoppers that tend to garner the lion’s share of award attention but also the slim, sleek books that are often much richer and better-constructed. The best possible example is our first award, in which we gave the svelte Tranquility by Attila Bartis the nod over the imposing 2666 from, of course, Roberto Bolaño. 2011 saw us pick the slender The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson (beating out sizable finalists Hocus Bogus by Romain Gary, Agaat by Marlene Van Niekerk, and Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer by Ernst Weiss). But we’ve also gone for the bulky books: in 2013 we gave it to the sizable Satantango by Laszlo Krasznahorkai, and in 2012 is was Wiesław Myśliwski’s epic Stone Upon Stone.

So, in that spirit, here’s my discussion of some of the more sizable books that I both think are strong contenders for the award, and that I think should be left out.

Contenders

by Mircea Cartarescu.

This is, quite simply, one of the most amazing books I’ve read this year. Cartarescu is one of the few authors I’ve read that could legitimately claim the legacy of Thomas Pynchon (now that Pynchon is writing parodies of himself). I’ll have lots more to say about it in an upcoming review at The Kenyon Review, but for now, here are links to a and at The Quarterly Conversation. Read it.

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

I have a feeling that when it’s all said and done, this will be many people’s favorite volume of the My Struggle sextet. It’s subtitled “A Man In Love,” and that’s just what it is: the story of Knausgaard falling in love with the woman who is now his wife. There are so many passionate, ecstatic moments in here that anyone who has ever been in love will recognize, wrought extraordinarily well by Knausgaard. Plus, the book also has: his on and off feud with his crazy neighbor, who might be a prostitute; why he hates interviews; and the story of the incident in which he turned his face into a bloody mess with a razor blade.

by Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq

This is billed as the Arabic world’s answer to Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne. Apparently it begins with a lengthy list of synonyms for various parts of the male and female genitalia.

by Laszlo Krasznahorkai

If the Nobel committee would ever give their award to a writer like Krasznahorkai, this would be the book they would give it to him for. An inquiry into what humanity needs spirituality that is unlike anything I have ever read. Grand in scope, accomplishment, virtuosity. Grand, grand, grand. Read my review in Wednesday’s

Intrigued

by Jean-Marie Blas de Robles

Reviews have made this book sound extremely diverse and remarkably achieved. Could either be incredible or too big for its own good.

by Wiesław Myśliwski

Okay, the title of this book is not awesome. But it is by the author of Stone Upon Stone, a book that seemingly everybody loves (I did enjoy it). And it is reputed to be even more of a masterpiece than that one.

by Christa Wolf

An autobiographical look at ‘90s Los Angeles interspersed with memories of the Eastern Bloc where she re-discovers that she was actually a Stasi agent? Might just be crazy enough to work.

Maybe Not

by Antonio Munoz Molina

Billed as the War and Peace of the Spanish Civil War. Muñoz Molina is certainly one of Spain’s pre-eminent authors, but I’ve already read War and Peace.

by Wu Ming

I’m tossing this on because “Wu Ming” is an awesome name and it’s a pseudonym for a collective of Italian writers. How cool is that? Apparently not cool enough to make something more than middlebrow Dan Brown. The collective’s previous book, Q, was a massive hit: I hope this book makes Verso boatloads of money so they can keep publishing Badiou and Ranciere.

One of the books that I’m most looking forward to reading this year is Scott Esposito and Lauren Elkin’s The End of the Oulipo?, which just came out this week. As a huge fan of the Oulipo—and a huge fan of Scott and Lauren—this has the potential to be really interesting.

The jacket copy isn’t that spectacular or illuminating, but for those who are interested, here it is:

The Oulipo, founded in 1960s, is a group of writers and mathematicians which seeks to create literature using constrained experimental writing techniques such as palindromes, lipograms and snowballs. A lipogram is writing that excludes one or more letters. A snowball is a poem in which each line is a single word, and each successive word is one letter longer.

The Oulipo group celebrated its fiftieth birthday in 2010, and as it enters its sixth decade, its members, fans and critics are all wondering: where can it go from here? In two long essays Scott Esposito and Lauren Elkin consider Oulipo’s strengths, weaknesses, and impact on today’s experimental literature.

To give you a slightly more appealing entryway to the book (which you should here’s a bit from the introduction:

In the movement’s first “manifesto” co-founder François Le Lionnais implies that it isn’t possible to pin down a definition of the Oulipo: there is an “annoying lacuna,” he says, in the dictionary under the term “potential literature.” Whatever the Oulipo is, and the Oulipo has the potential (of course) to be many things, it will always endeavor “systematically and scientifically” to find new forms for literature. Some Oulipians will make their constraints explicit (Georges Perec and Italo Calvino believed this was crucial), while others will leave them implicit, leaving readers, as Harry Mathews put it, “straining to find out” what constraints are at play (if any). Mathews himself has said
that he only occasionally produces Oulipian literature, while, according to Hervé Le Tellier, any work created by a member of the group is Oulipian to some extent.

The skeptical reader would be forgiven for wondering whether such games aren’t, after all, a little juvenile. Why write a novel, as Georges Perec did, without the letter e? But the Oulipo’s game-playing fits into a long French tradition: the avant-garde just loves a game, with its rules of engagement and its unknown outcome. It was only a matter of time before a group made games its entire raison d’être. (The Oulipo weren’t the first to do so, joining the Situationists and the Lettrists and the ’Pataphysicists in the game mentality of the postwar period.) [. . .]

Exhaustion is the necessary corollary to the Oulipian concept of potential. The constraint acts as a rubber band, expanding around the contours of the work as it pursues exhaustion, stretching to its limits; then it’s snapped, and the work’s potential sails out into the world. The constraint creates an environment in which creation can be helped along. Rather than facing down the blank page, the Oulipian writer can begin with a project.

There is no doubt that the Oulipo remains a productive and much-admired literary force on both sides of the Atlantic, but today, as the group enters its sixth decade of existence, its relevance and its future are in question. None of the Oulipian works that have made their way into English in the past decade (with the possible exception of Jacques Roubaud’s “great fire of London” project) can rival the best work published during the group’s staggeringly successful run through the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, in many instances the writing produced now is strikingly derivative of prior Oulipian works. Increasingly, the strongest work in the Oulipian spirit is occurring outside of the group, being done by authors working both consciously and unconsciously within its shadow. Perhaps this was inevitable: embedded in the Oulipo’s “open source” ethos is the idea of discovering forms and methods that anyone can use, regardless of membership in the group (though they can always be coopted sooner or later). It is possible that the group has become too inbred: it is now as concerned with archiving its history, carrying on its traditions, as it is in making new literature. Perhaps it is now the case that writers who wish to make their mark by following the creative spirit of the legendary cadres of Oulipians must do so beyond the group’s margins. These questions cut to the core of artistic movements in general, commenting profoundly on where true experimentalism comes from and how it is sustained. Can potential literature outlive its potential? Is the inevitable progression of an avant-garde group from fringe to mainstream? Which aspects of Oulipo have thrived, and which have become co-opted and defused? Where
is the Oulipo vulnerable to caricature?

It’s great to see this resurgence (at least among the younger American literati) of interest in the Oulipo. In fact, this seems like a really nice complement to Daniel Levin Becker’s book, Many Subtle Channels, which you should also read.

Anyway, I’ll write a more descriptive piece after I’ve had a chance to read this, but for now, I just wanted to share my excitement about this . . .

Sometimes marketing copy is all the copy you need . . . I’ll just let this description speak for itself:

Daniel Medin and Scott Esposito return to the second season of That Other Word energized by the translators’ duels at the Edinburgh International Book Festival and the great work being done at the UK-based press And Other Stories. They look forward to new works in translation this fall, including Antonio Tabucci’s The Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico, Basque author and Edinburgh guest Bernardo Atxaga’s Seven Hours in France, and the latest from César Aira, The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira. Daniel Medin hopes that several novels generating interest in Germany and France — Jenny Erpenbeck’s Aller Tage Abend, Clemens J. Setz’s Indigo, and Jean Echenoz’s 14 — will soon be translated as well.

Afterward, Scott Esposito sits down with Margaret Jull Costa, a distinguished translator from Spanish and Portuguese who has brought Javier Marías, José Saramago, and Eça de Queiroz into English. She is the winner of numerous literary awards for translation, including the IMPAC Dublin award for her version of Marías’ A Heart So White. She speaks about her twenty-five year career, her pragmatic approach to translation, her favorite authors and her love of the nineteenth century, as well her thoughts on the evolution of Javier Marías’ style and his latest novel, which she has translated as The Infatuations.

DEFINITELY worth checking out. And you can also

This particular episode features a discussion between Daniel Medin and Scott Esposito about W.G. Sebald’s Across the Land and the Water: Selected Poems 1964-2001 and Robert Walser’s The Walk, and includes a special interview with Three Percent hero Benjamin Moser.

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On a related note, Ed Nawotka of Publishing Perspectives was praising the on the Twitter or the Facebook the other day for it’s excellent series on visiting bookstores around the world. This particular episode features reports on stores in Tunis, Buenos Aires, and Barcelona . . .

So while you’re waiting for me and Kaija to break down this year’s Eurovision Song Contest (subject of the new Three Percent podcast, which will be available Friday), you can listen to both of these. Probably not as profane/filled with hysteria and crazy Euro “songs,” but interesting nevertheless . . .

Here are short highlights of some of the pieces I found most interesting:

• by Aashish Kaul

“Winfried Georg Maximilian Sebald was already in his fiftieth year and his third decade of residence in East Anglia, when he began to write of the walk he had taken two years before in the Suffolk country to dispel, he tells us, the strange emptiness which had come to fill him suddenly. Ironically enough, however, the walk soon became distressing as he took in, with ever-growing uneasiness, the traces of destruction reaching far back into the past that locked his gaze wherever he turned. Such was his horror upon return, he would have us believe, that, in due course, he had to be rushed to a hospital in a state of near paralysis. But once there, what the body had lost, the mind gained, and before long it was soaring higher and higher with each tilt of the wings to view from above that Suffolk expanse, which, like the Borgesian Aleph, had now shrunk to a single spot, rightly so, devoid of all sensation.”

• by Jan Steyn

“For those of us following Vladislavić’s work, 2011 was a good year. It saw the release of three new works. The first is a collection of lost, abandoned, incomplete and incomplete-able stories, together with reflections on their failure to come into print, sandwiched around a central story that gives the collection its title—The Loss Library. The second is a fable, or a riddle, written from the phenomenological perspective of a character who is a word (but which word?) in a dictionary, published alongside 19 spectacular color illustrations in Sylph Editions’ Cahier series under the title, A Labour of Moles. And, of course, the third is Double Negative, a novel. Since the last novel with a continuous story by Vladislavić was his second—the 2001 masterpiece, The Restless Supermarket, the story of a retired proofreader setting about to “correct” the bewildering and rapidly changing world of post-Apartheid Johannesburg, written in a form that contains its own telling ‘errors‘—readers were especially excited about Double Negative. It was worth the wait.”

[The Loss Library is high on my list of books to read. I love Portrait with Keys.]

• by Heather Cleary

“Cited by The Independent as ‘the most important writer after Borges,’ he has also been described by his contemporary Ricardo Piglia as ‘one of the best writers today in any language.’ In his native Argentina he is counted among the pantheon of ‘writer’s writers’ who have left an indelible mark on the cultural landscape. English-language readers were introduced to Saer’s fiction by Margaret Jull Costa, who translated The Witness (originally El entenado) in 1990. The years that followed would see three more of Saer’s novels brought into English by Helen Lane: Nobody Nothing Never (1993), The Event (1995, originally La ocasión), and The Investigation (1999), all published by Serpent’s Tail. More recently, Open Letter Books released two more of Saer’s novels in Steve Dolph’s translation: The Sixty-Five Years of Washington (2010) and Scars (2011); a third title in the series is on the way. This recent crop is a tremendous addition, not only because it represents some of Saer’s most acclaimed work, but also because it broadens our perspective on his oeuvre, which is less a series of individual novels than an extended engagement with the different possibilities of a single, continuous narrative.

[Everyone in the world should read Saer—it may not make you a better person, but it will make you a better reader. And will cause you to start referring to everything awesome as being “madman.” For example, “Her body is madman.” Also, read Heather Cleary’s translation of Sergio Chejfec’s The Planets. That’s a good example of an insanely talented translator working on an insanely talented writer’s book.]

• by Paul Kerschen

“The Autonomous Republic of Catalonia now holds up Mercè Rodoreda as a national treasure. Barcelona offers commemorative sculptures, libraries, gardens in her name; government-supported institutes sponsor conferences and translations; a yearlong festival marked her 2008 centennial. Her international champions include Gabriel García Márquez. Apart from two recent, welcome titles from Open Letter, her English catalog has drifted in and out of print. There is no question that Rodoreda is a uniquely difficult writer—not in her sentences, which are as clean as any in the century, but in the starkness of her emotional climate. Her subject, both in the earlier domestic books and the later irrealist ones, is the destructiveness of desire, the brutishness of power, the primacy of hunger and death. Her particular power and challenge lies in the style that she created to address them: a fearsomely pure deployment of words, empty of rhetoric, in which the bea uty of the world shines so clearly as to seem a kind of cruelty.”

[One of the best authors we’ve ever published. Hands down.]

• by Paul Doyle

“Authors of what’s called the New Spanish Short Story have had a great burst of creativity that began in the early 1980s and flowered during the 1990s and 2000s (the few stories that have been translated have been relegated to obscure editions unavailable in the United States). From the stories of the fantastic by Cristina Fernádez Cubas to the structural inventions of Hipólito G. Navarro and the surrealism of Ángel Zapata, Spanish short story writers have created an exciting and diverse body of work marked by its openness and dedication to pushing the boundaries of the form.”

• by Colm Tóibín

“The idea of Clarice Lispector as fleeting, oddly unreliable, complicated, someone who could vanish is essential to her work and her reputation. In October, 1977, shortly before her death, she published the novella The Hour of the Star in which all her talents and eccentricities merged and folded in a densely self-conscious narrative dealing with the difficulty and odd pleasures of storytelling and then proceeding, when it could, to tell the story of Macabéa, a woman who, Lispector told an interviewer, ‘was so poor that all she ate were hot dogs.’ But she made clear that this was ‘not the story, though. The story is about a crushed innocence, about an anonymous misery.’”

• Interview by Scott Esposito

“Barbara Epler: The whole Lispector re-launching began innocently enough: our plan had been to bring out a new edition of The Hour of the Star in the old Pontiero translation with an ardent Colm Tóibín preface. (With a backlist of our size—about 1,100 titles from 75 years of publishing—we are always trying to repackage classic backlist to reach more readers.) That was all we had planned, but then I met Ben. I’d very much admired his biography, so I have a drink with Ben when he’s in town, and he is amazingly persuasive, and I get on board the big project of four new translations with Penguin UK, for which he would serve as series editor. And suddenly, in a phone conversation a few months later about those four books, I mentioned I was going to press with our new edition of the old translation of The Hour of the Star with the Tóibín preface, and Ben came out of the bag at me.”

[All the Lispector! As a semi-recent convert to her work, this is like crack to me. Thanks, Scott Esposito for all the crack. Really.]

In addition, there’s an with Edmundo Paz Soldan and five of his

In terms of reviews, in this issue you can find pieces on by Robert Walser; by Geoff Dyer; by Kjersti Skomsvold; by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky; by Siddhartha Deb; by Abdourahman Waberi; by Jorge Carrera Andrade; by Heinrich Böll; by Sjón; and by Edouard Levé.

Whew. Seriously, this is almost too much goodness all in one issue . . . Enjoy!