"Moonstone" by Sj贸n [BTBA 2017]
This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is by Mark Haber of Brazos Bookstore. For more information on the BTBA, “like” our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter. And check back here each week for a new post by one of the judges. Small in size and epic in scale, Moonstone is Sj贸n鈥檚 fourth ...
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World Literature and Translation (Spring 2017)
I know I’ve mentioned this on the blog (and podcast) a million times, but every spring I teach a class on “World Literature and Translation” that features somewhere between eight and ten recently published translations. Although the individual arrangement of ideas and books shifts every year, the overall ...
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"The Whispering Muse" by Sj贸n [Why This Book Should Win]
We’re down to the last three longlisted titles, so we’re going to have to cram these in before Tuesday morning’s announcement of the fiction and poetry finalists. I’ll be writing the first two, Bromance Will will bring it home tomorrow evening. The Whispering Muse by Sj贸n, translated from the ...
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Latest Review: "The Whispering Muse" by Sj贸n
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is by Vincent Francone on The Whispering Muse by Sj贸n, from Farrar Straus and Giroux. The first time I saw The Whispering Muse was in a bookstore in Riga, Latvia, misplaced somewhere on the D-F shelf. Taking this as a sign of meant-to-be, I bought it, and promptly placed it on my ...
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The Whispering Muse
The Whispering Muse, one of three books by Icelandic writer Sj贸n just published in North America, is nothing if not inventive. Stories within stories, shifting narration, leaps in time, and characters who transform from men to birds and back again鈥攜ou鈥檝e seen this sort of thing before in Ovid, Bulgakov, Kafka, and ...
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Latest Review: "From the Mouth of the Whale" by Sj贸n
The latest review to our Reviews Section is a piece by Brian Libgober on Sj贸n’s From the Mouth of the Whale, which Victoria Cribb translated from the Icelandic and is available from Telegram Books. Sj贸n was born in Reykjavik in 1962. He won the Nordic Council鈥檚 Literature Prize (the equivalent of the Man Booker ...
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From the Mouth of the Whale
Sj贸n鈥檚 From the Mouth of the Whale has been well received by readers and critics. Junot D铆az has called the book 鈥渁chingly brilliant 鈥 an epic made mad, made extraordinary.鈥 A.S. Byatt gave it a hearty endorsement in The Guardian. Such praise for the book is well deserved. The book鈥檚 prose is lovely and its ...
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