Translated Literature

Katie Lee Hull | March 2009

Of the nearly 200,000 books published in the United States each year, about 3% are translated. When you consider the category of literary fiction and poetry, that number shrinks to about 0.7%. That sliver of a pie graph was firmly placed in the back of Chad Post’s mind when he joined the University of Rochester [...]

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Audiobooks Go Global, Competition Rises In Germany, Yoshi Mixes Tunes in Japan As PT continues its foray into the audio delivery of the word, we leave behind the car-loving Americans who drive twice the distance at a third of the cost, for the land of the TGV, the U-Bahn and the AVE. A land where [...]

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Book-Banning Scare in Iran, Expats Unite in Turkey Despite having completed all of the normal and rigorous procedures required to get permission from the government, Arash Hejaz, the Iranian publisher of Paulo Coelho‘s latest international sensation, THE ZAHIR, was threatened and terrified last month by the authorities. The novel was the first foreign title to [...]

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Goodness, Gracious Do-Gooders in Denmark, Laughing Last in France, and Oz Goes Feral in Israel A wave of irrational exuberance crashes over Denmark this month as the nation just can’t stop reading a novel in which the citizens of a small Danish town become pathologically obsessed with doing good deeds for their neighbors. Hitting the [...]

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Beat the Devil Coelho Back in Brazil, Mortier in the Netherlands, And Pleijel Shakes Up Sweden Brazilian high priest of letters Paulo Coelho has conjured up The Devil and Miss Prym after two years of soul searching, and the result is a half-million-copy catechism that’s been deemed a “parable in which the characters show all [...]

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Spiritus Mundiw Chimoni’s French Miracle, Lama Love in Germany, and Italy’s Sci-Fi Satire Anyone out there remember Mr. God This Is Anna, a UK bestseller for Holt in 1975 that’s been in print at Ballantine since 1976? Well, it’s back to the future in France, where a similar title has just been published: Annaëlle Chimoni’s [...]

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