The Best Books of 2021: Literature in Translation!
/This year’s list of best translations includes new voices in contemporary fiction from around the world, as well as established classics re-rendered for today’s readers.
Read MoreThis year’s list of best translations includes new voices in contemporary fiction from around the world, as well as established classics re-rendered for today’s readers.
Read MoreWilliam Carter, in the first volume of his epic ongoing Proust edition for Yale University Press, characterizes Proust’s seven-volume series À la recherche du temps perdu as “considered by many to be the greatest novel of the 20th century and perhaps of all time.”
Read MoreThe authors work a kind of magic in the book that’s evident even in translation; the combination of reporting and novel-writing going on here shouldn’t work as well as it does. The Father (the book is Part 1 – Quercus will bring out The Sons next year) is incredibly gripping reading, every bit as good – in fact, often quite a bit better – than the faddish Swedish crime fiction that’s been dominating the fiction bestseller lists for over a decade. We get prickly insights into Ivan, the violent paterfamilias of this crime family, into his sons Leo, Vincent, and Felix, and, intriguingly, into the mind frame of the mother, Britt-Marie. And the tension hardly ever lets up – the writing team does a very effective job of constantly working the narrative’s tempo:
Read MoreSome Penguin Classics, as I’ve noted before here at Stevereads, feel like they’re a long time in the making, and the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi more than most and in two different ways. Not only has this sprawling tenth century Persian epic waited a long time for an attractive, affordable paperback edition in English, but this particular text, a prose translation by Dick Davis that Viking brought out ten years ago, has waited a long time to become a Penguin Classic.
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