{"id":299746,"date":"2014-10-21T08:46:49","date_gmt":"2014-10-21T08:46:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2014\/10\/21\/new-btba-judge-james-crossley-highlights-his-picks-for-bestsellers\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T14:39:24","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T14:39:24","slug":"new-btba-judge-james-crossley-highlights-his-picks-for-bestsellers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2014\/10\/21\/new-btba-judge-james-crossley-highlights-his-picks-for-bestsellers\/","title":{"rendered":"New BTBA Judge James Crossley Highlights His Picks for Bestsellers"},"content":{"rendered":"

James Crossley is a bookseller at Island Books<\/a>. He writes regularly for the store’s Message in a Bottle<\/a> blog and for the website of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association<\/a>. <\/i><\/p>\n

By this point several judges have had an opportunity to share their thoughts about participating in the BTBA<\/span><\/a> process, and it’s hard to come up with anything especially original that I can contribute. But that’s rarely stopped me from blogging in the past, so why would it now?<\/p>\n

More than one judge, most recently fellow Northwest bookslinger Jeremy Garber<\/a>, has written about the honor it is to be involved with the Best Translated Book Award. Ditto that. It’s ego-inflating whenever someone seems to care about my opinions, all the more so when it’s the people at a high-class outfit like the BTBA<\/span> who do. And it’s a true privilege to think that I can play a small role in bringing attention to the huddled masses of international literature yearning to breathe freely on American shores. I’m like a lamp beside a golden door<\/a>!<\/p>\n

Disgusting paternalism aside, it really is a treat to read all this great writing from around the world. I’m a fan of literature in translation who keeps up with the work of dozens of authors and publishers, but barely a day has gone by without my finding in my mailbox a remarkable book that I’ve never heard of before. Even months away from the final voting, it would be easy for me to compile a very credible shortlist, and I have to remind myself that many more remarkable books are on their way.<\/p>\n

What may be most exciting is that by the end of the process I’ll have as complete a picture as possible of an entire segment of the industry. We in the US see relatively little of the world’s production of fiction, which is bad, but it’s still possible (just) for me to familiarize myself with every single piece of fiction newly translated into English during this calendar year, which is fascinating to consider.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

One thing I’ve observed is that there’s a broader range of work available than I’ve been finding on my own. I gravitate toward books that don’t come across like mainstream American fiction, books that through their language or form remind me they come from somewhere else, but there’s plenty of reading pleasure to be obtained from fiction that’s not focused on estrangement. Judge M.A. Orthofer<\/a> has already covered some of the mystery\/thriller\/suspense titles that have come from abroad in 2014, and there are a number of others that could have strong popular appeal. Jonas Jonasson, for example, had a bestseller a couple of years ago with The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared<\/i><\/a>, and he has a BTBA<\/span> entry this year called The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden<\/i><\/a> that’s equally entertaining.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Want proof that not all French novels are thinly-veiled memoirs weighed down by existential angst? That rumor is dispelled by Armand Chauvel’s The Green and the Red<\/i><\/a> : “When L\u00e9a and Mathieu first cross paths, it is under false pretenses\u2014Mathieu is posing as a vegetarian, infiltrating the local animal rights community for information that will force L\u00e9a\u2019s restaurant toward a swifter demise. And while L\u00e9a suspects that Mathieu isn\u2019t all that he appears to be, she has no idea how deep his culinary deception goes. Neither of them can deny the attraction they feel for each other, and it seems as though they might be setting a table for two \u2026 until L\u00e9a learns the truth.” Swoonworthy for the right reader, n’est-ce pas?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Bulgaria provides a companion volume for foodies via Nine Rabbits<\/i><\/a> by Virginia Zaharieva. It’s a good bit grittier than Chauvel’s romance, telling of a young woman growing up under Communist rule who finds solace in the domestic arts passed down by her grandmother—the dozens of recipes that are critical to the heroine’s identity are right there in the text. As a person whose most-used kitchen utensil is a corkscrew, I wouldn’t have chosen to read Zaharieva’s story without the BTBA<\/span>, and I wouldn’t have known anything about the satisfactions that it offers.<\/p>\n

As these and other books have rolled in, I’ve realized how much I’ve missed in earlier years, and I’ve been tempted to start digging into previous longlists and back catalogs. I can’t, of course, given that I still have so much of this year’s crop to harvest. The pile of paperbacks next to my desk is inspiring, but as it continues to climb past the height of an average fourth-grader, there are also moments when I feel like sloping off in search of bad science fiction novels that can be consumed like potato chips. Until the pile actually buries me, though, I’ll persist. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

James Crossley is a bookseller at Island Books. He writes regularly for the store’s Message in a Bottle blog and for the website of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association. By this point several judges have had an opportunity to share their thoughts about participating in the BTBA process, and it’s hard to come up with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":186,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67476],"tags":[58436,58256,56746,58416,58446,58406,58426,58456],"class_list":["post-299746","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-translated-book-awards","tag-armand-chauvel","tag-btba2015","tag-james-crossley","tag-jonas-jonasson","tag-nine-rabbits","tag-the-girl-who-saved-the-king-of-sweden","tag-the-green-and-the-red","tag-virgina-zaharieva"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299746","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/186"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=299746"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299746\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":333726,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299746\/revisions\/333726"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=299746"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=299746"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=299746"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}