Non-US

From The Guardian:

Translators are like ninjas. If you notice them, they’re no good.” This quote, attributed to Israeli author Etgar Keret, proliferates in memes, and who doesn’t love a pithy quote involving ninjas? Yet this idea – that a literary translator might make, at any moment, a surprise attack, and that at every moment we are deceiving the reader as part of an elaborate mercenary plot – is among the most toxic in world literature.

The reality of the international circulation of texts is that in their new contexts, it is up to their translators to choose every word they will contain. When you read Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights in English, the words are all mine. Translators aren’t like ninjas, but words are human, which means that they’re unique and have no direct equivalents. You can see this in English: “cool” is not identical to “chilly”, although it’s similar. “Frosty” has other connotations, other usages; so does “frigid”. Selecting one of these options on its own doesn’t make sense; it must be weighed in the balance of the sentence, the paragraph, the whole, and it is the translator who is responsible, from start to finish, for building a flourishing lexical community that is both self-contained and in profound relation with its model.

Since I began an MFA in literary translation at the University of Iowa exactly 20 years ago, there have been numerous positive changes in the way translators are paid and perceived. Take the International Booker prize, which since 2016 has split the generous sum of £50,000 between author and translator, thereby genuinely recognising the work as a fundamentally collaborative entity that, like a child, needs two progenitors in order to exist.

Despite this type of extraordinary progress, there is ample room for improvement still. Often enough, translators receive no royalties – I don’t in the US for Flights – and a surprising number of publishers do not credit translators on the covers of their books. This is where the author’s name always goes; this is where you’ll find the title, too. People tend to be surprised when I mention this, but take another look at the International Booker, and you’ll see what I mean.

Since the 2016 launch of the redesigned prize, not one of the six winning works of fiction has displayed the translator’s name on the front. Granta didn’t name Deborah Smith there; Jonathan Cape didn’t name Jessica Cohen; Fitzcarraldo didn’t name me; Sandstone Press didn’t name Marilyn Booth; Faber & Faber didn’t name Michele Hutchison. At Night All Blood is Black by David Diop, 2021’s winner from Pushkin Press, doesn’t name Anna Moschovakis on its cover, although its cover does display quotes from three named sources. Four names, in other words, on the cover of a book Moschovakis wrote every word of. But her name would have been too much.

The underlying assumption on the part of many publishers seems to be that readers don’t trust translators and won’t buy a book if they realise it’s a translation. Yet is it not precisely this type of ruse that breeds distrust, and not translation itself? What tends to encourage a reader to pick up an unfamiliar book is the thrilling feeling that they are about to embark upon an interesting journey with a qualified guide. In the case of translations, they get two guides for the price of one, an astonishing – an “astounding”, a “wonderful”, a “fantastic”, a “fabulous” – bargain.

Link to the rest at The Guardian

From The Guardian:

So now we know what Pointless creator Richard Osman has been up to behind that laptop: drawing on his passion for classic English crime fiction for his own attempt at the genre. When word got out it sparked a 10-way publishing auction, and the novel has become the fastest selling adult crime debut since records began.

That’s quite an achievement for what turns out to be an amiable if undemanding cosy caper. What marks it out is the originality of the setting, inspired by a visit Osman paid to an affluent retirement village boasting a full range of recreational and medical facilities including a “contemporary upscale restaurant”.

In the novel this becomes Cooper’s Chase, an exclusive development secreted on the Kentish weald: “You can’t move here until you’re over sixty-five and the Waitrose delivery vans clink with wine and repeat prescriptions every time they pass over the cattle grid”. Every Thursday the amateur sleuths of Cooper’s Chase gather in the jigsaw room, “between Art History and Conversational French”, to investigate unsolved murder cases that the Kent police force have been too incompetent to prosecute themselves.

Cooper’s Chase sits on the site of a former convent: now the developer, a brash vulgarian who owns a red grand piano, is exploiting a contractual loophole to turn the chapel and graveyard into eight new flats. Clearly he is not long for this world, and when somebody slips him a lethal injection in a scuffle, the Thursday Murder Club have a real life homicide on their hands.

Link to the rest at The Guardian

From Publishing Perspectives:

hose summer reading lists. Just when you start to see the arrival of some new books on China’s bestselling fiction charts as we did in June, the curriculum-driven course recommendations take over and we’re looking once more at classics of the classroom.

You’ll find they include Luo Guangbin and Yang Yiyan’s Red Crag from China Youth Press (moving up 13 spots to No. 1); To Live by Yu Hua from Beijing October Art & Literature Publishing House (at No. 2); and The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin from Chongqing Publishing House (at No. 3).

Additional familiar titles from the reading list include Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin (People’s Literature Publishing House), which was powered 10 spots up the list to No. 7 by the syllabi provided by the school system. And here’s Water Margin by Shi Nai’an and Luo Guanzhong (People’s Literature Publishing House); Journey to the West by Wu Cheng’en (another from the People’s Literature Publishing House); and Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder in a new edition ( The Writers’ Publishing House).

Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives

From Publishing Perspectives:

Despite what’s described as lingering difficulties in “large-scale distribution,” the Association of Italian Publishers (Associazione Italiana Editori, AIE) today (July 13) is reporting strong book-sale growth in the first six months of this year, both in units and in revenue.

According to analyses conducted by AIE’s research department based on NielsenIQ data, between January 4 and June 20, some 15 million more copies of printed books were sold, a 44-percent jump over the same time period’s sales in 2020. This encompasses all trade book channels, including bookstores, both online and physical, and large-scale distribution, with the exception of schoolbooks.

Even more significant, media messaging from AIE in Milan points out, is the growth compared to 2019, prior to the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic’s arrival. By comparison to the first half of 2019, 11 million more copies of books were sold January to June this year, an increase of 31 percent.

Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives

From The Spectator:

I happen to have, by chance, a small library of books about books, including a collection of guides to book collecting. They tend to advise the collector to choose a particular subject — a period, movement, theme, an author — early on in a collecting career, something I have singularly failed to do. They also advise collectors to attend book auctions, to inspect booksellers’ catalogues and only to buy the best — I don’t do that either. Like most normal people, my main source and supply of books (including books about books) has always been among the dross and dreck to be found in secondhand bookshops in unfashionable provincial towns — which is probably what makes the novelist Nicholas Royle’s White Spines seem both so thrillingly familiar and so utterly refreshing.

It’s not a book about the world of grand auction houses and expensive signed editions. It’s an account of how, at some point — around the mid-1990s — Royle decided to start collecting ‘every single B-format Picador paperback published between 1972 and 2000, when the publisher abandoned its commitment to the white spine with black lettering in a more or less uniform style’. He currently has 959 Picadors in his ‘main collection’, including reissues and rejacketed titles, most of them picked up for a couple of quid in unprepossessing bookshops up and down the country.

It’s not exactly a history of Picador, though we certainly learn a lot about the imprint, launched by Pan Books in 1972 by Sonny Mehta. Nor is it exactly a memoir, though there are plenty of details about Royle’s time as a student and his work for Time Out, his teaching and his running of his own small press, Nightjar. There’s mention of a divorce, a new relationship and children — all subtly tipped in, or interleaved, in chapters about various Picador-related matters, including descriptions of book covers.If you think authors are really only interested in writing, Gekoski will quickly disavow you of the notion

What keeps this assortment of reflections and reminiscences hanging together is Royle’s delightful accounts of his trips to charity and secondhand bookshops across the UK: Goldmark Books in Uppingham; George Kelsall Booksellers in Littleborough; Southend; Coventry; Wigtown in Scotland. Over the years, Royle has been everywhere. White Spines is a sort of Bill Bryson for book lovers, wry, cosy and full of amusing asides and lovely cameos.

But the question remains, why? Well, Royle is clearly temperamentally a collector, on a limited budget, which makes £3 charity shop paperbacks the perfect buy. And he collects poetry magazines — also things no one else really wants — and bread labels: ‘You know those little plastic adhesive ties you get around the end of the plastic bag your supermarket loaf comes in? With the best before date on?’ (He sticks them inside his cupboards.) He’s just that sort of bloke. But there’s something else:“If I could just acquire a few more Picadors … I’d have a bookcase, a white bookcase no less, full of white-spined Picadors. It would be a thing of beauty. It would be a small masterpiece, and it would be easier to achieve than the masterpieces I was trying to create at my desk in the attic.

Collecting books as a distraction — a displacement, an alternative — from actually writing books. Sounds familiar.

‘I wonder if I might not be the Ronnie Corbett of Contemporary Letters,’ Royle asks himself. (He’s pictured on the dust-jacket wearing large Corbettesque glasses.) ‘And if that’s the case, who is my Ronnie Barker?’ Anyone of a certain age with mild literary proclivities will fondly remember many of the Picador titles he discusses — Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America, Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines, Angela Carter’s Heroes and Villains. Which makes us all Barkers to his Corbett.

The great, renowned rare-book dealer Rick Gekoski is another sort of character entirely. He’s like something out of a Raymond Chandler. In Guarded by Dragons he relates the story of one particularly fraught book-related negotiation: ‘The call ended there. I put the phone down, and lit a cigar. “Son of a bitch!” I said in a very loud voice, as I put my feet up on my desk, and said it again.’ He is not a man to be messed with: ‘They might suppose me clever, self-satisfied and disputatious, rich and aggressive, as the clichés demand, but to these putative qualities I would add “relentless”.’

. . . .

Guarded by Dragons is indeed relentless — and clever and self-satisfied and disputatious — which makes it an absorbing read, like listening to your favourite uncle regale you with tales of life and work back in the day when men were men and book dealers were cigar-chomping buccaneers, ready to go to battle at the slightest hint of a rare first edition. The book’s title relates to Gekoski’s sense of having spent a lifetime on a great adventure: ‘There’s something enticing and valuable out there, the intrepid hunter-dealer seeks it out, but it is guarded by a jealous owner-dragon, and other hunters are circling.’

Gekoski’s tales from 50 years on the front line of rare-book dealing — his encounters with writers, institutions and fellow dealers — make the whole business sound like such fun that one is tempted to take it up oneself, not least because the barrier to entry seems so low ‘There are only two things a rare-book dealer must know: at what price is a book buyable and at what higher price one might sell it.’ Alas, it’s not quite as simple as that. In order to succeed you’ve got to be a bit like Rick.

He tells how he gave up a secure academic teaching position to pursue book dealing, starting out with a few D.H. Lawrence first editions, until eventually he ended up handling entire archives, jetting around, smoking cigars, fine-dining, drinking and generally wheeling and dealing across continents at the highest level. You’ve got some original documents relating to the Balfour Declaration? You need to quickly offload some Ulysses first editions? Or you’re Rachel Cusk, looking to sell your archive? Rick’s your man.

Link to the rest at The Spectator

From The Guardian:

The byline at the top of this piece reads MA Sieghart, not Mary Ann. Why? Because I really want men to read it too. Female authors through the centuries, from the Brontë sisters to George Eliot to JK Rowling, have felt obliged to disguise their gender to persuade boys and men to read their books. But now? Is it really still necessary? The sad answer is yes.

For my book The Authority Gap, which looks at why women are still taken less seriously than men, I commissioned Nielsen Book Research to find out exactly who was reading what. I wanted to know whether female authors were not just deemed less authoritative than men, but whether they were being read by men in the first place. And the results confirmed my suspicion that men were disproportionately unlikely even to open a book by a woman.

For the top 10 bestselling female authors (who include Jane Austen and Margaret Atwood, as well as Danielle Steel and Jojo Moyes), only 19% of their readers are men and 81%, women. But for the top 10 bestselling male authors (who include Charles Dickens and JRR Tolkien, as well as Lee Child and Stephen King), the split is much more even: 55% men and 45% women.

In other words, women are prepared to read books by men, but many fewer men are prepared to read books by women. And the female author in the top 10 who had the biggest male readership – the thriller writer LJ Ross – uses her initials, so it’s possible the guys thought she was one of them. What does this tell us about how reluctant men are to accord equal authority – intellectual, artistic, cultural – to women and men?

Margaret Atwood, a writer who should be on the bookshelves of anyone who cares about literary fiction, has a readership that is only 21% male. Male fellow Booker prize winners Julian Barnes and Yann Martel have nearly twice as many (39% and 40%). It’s not as if women are less good at writing literary fiction. All five of the top five bestselling literary novels in 2017 were by women, and nine of the top 10. And it’s not as if men don’t enjoy reading books by women when they do open them; in fact, they marginally prefer them. The average rating men give to books by women on Goodreads is 3.9 out of 5; for books by men, it’s 3.8.

Turning to nonfiction, which is read by slightly more men than women, the pattern is similar, though not quite so striking. Men still read male authors much more than female ones, but the discrepancy isn’t so large because women tend to do the same in favour of female authors. But there is still quite a difference. Women are 65% more likely to read a nonfiction book by the opposite sex than men are. All this suggests that men, consciously or unconsciously, don’t accord female authors as much authority as male ones. Or they make the lazy assumption that women’s books aren’t for them without trying them out to see whether this is true.

Why does this matter? For a start, it narrows men’s experiences of the world. “I’ve known this for a very long time, that men just aren’t interested in reading our literature,” the Booker prize-winning novelist Bernardine Evaristo told me in an interview for The Authority Gap. “Our literature is one of the ways in which we explore narrative, we explore our ideas, we develop our intellect, our imagination. If we’re writing women’s stories, we’re talking about the experiences of women. We also talk about male experiences from a female perspective. And so if they’re not interested in that, I think that it’s very damning and it’s extremely worrying.”

If men don’t read books by and about women, they will fail to understand our psyches and our lived experience. They will continue to see the world through an almost entirely male lens, with the male experience as the default. And this narrow focus will affect our relationships with them, as colleagues, as friends and as partners. But it also impoverishes female writers, whose work is seen as niche rather than mainstream if it is consumed mainly by other women. They will earn less respect, less status and less money.

Link to the rest at The Guardian

As PG examines his own reading habits, he believes that he doesn’t care whether a book is written by a woman or a man. In many cases when he hears something about a book that makes it sound like he is likely to enjoy it, he may not even pay attention to the author’s name.

(PG understands that many people, especially authors, will feel that PG’s lack of attention to the author’s name is exceedingly disagreeable and even worse than it would normally be since he has and does represent a number of authors, but it’s an old habit that long predated him marrying an author or representing any. If he’s going to point to the source of this habit, he’ll mention a childhood lived largely in book deserts a long way from any libraries in a family which owned a few books, but couldn’t afford to buy any new ones very often. Under those circumstances, PG read any book he could get his hands on that was not vastly above his reading abilities. Rereading books he liked several times was something he always did as well. He read the poem, The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes so many times that he still remembers most of it from memory.)

As an adult, when PG finds an author of any gender he likes, he tends to read every book the author wrote. Dorothy Sayers comes to mind as an example as does Vera Brittain on the prose side and poets Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Emily Dickinson.

Plus almost everything J.K. Rowling has written and close to everything that Barbara Tuchman published, including The Guns of August, The Zimmerman Telegram, Stilwell and the American Experience in China: 1911-1945, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century and The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World before the War, 1890–1914. (Listing Ms. Tuchman’s books has made PG realizes that he wants to reread all of them again.

From Publishing Perspectives:

Russian book publishers have reported a significant increase in production costs this year, describing a substantial level of pressure on their business. Book-price increases and production cuts appear to be likely, as a result.

The key challenge is in a shortage of offset-print paper in the domestic market and a sharp rise in paper prices.

The cost of paper is reported to have risen by some 10 percent to 80,000 rubles per unit (US$1,100).

Russia was acknowledged in November in an article by Oliver Yorke for the non-profit Earth.org to hold 23 percent of the world’s forested land. At some 814 million hectares (2.1 billion acres), rapid deforestation has alarmed environmentalists who cite longtime trends in illegal logging and confused classification of land tracts (as forested or agricultural).

Despite the wealth of forest resources, Russia’s book market traditionally has imported 80 percent of its paper from abroad. Prior to the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic, most paper products were supplied to Russia by China and member-states of the European Union.

Reports indicate, however, that for the last year—since mid-2020—the volume of such supplies getting into Russia has declined amid border closures and other elements of contagion spread-mitigation measures and regulations.

That reduction of paper imports has had a negative effect on the Russian book market, executives say, and has led to shutdowns among some localized publishing companies.

. . . .

Konstantin Lun, production director of the Moscow-based business-book publisher Alpina, says to Publishing Perspectives that the current situation in the market is complex.

“Our fears are confirmed,” he says, “as a shortage of offset paper and a significant increase of prices for it has already led to a rise in the cost of books. Of course, that jump in price is a very serious problem for the industry, but in the end, it will be passed on to the customer.

“In any case, it creates an increased risk level for a publisher.”

Tatiana Doroshina, director of the Molodaya Gvardiya (“Young Guard”) publishing house—a specialist in fiction and popular science—echoes the urgency Lun refers to.

“In addition to the increase in prices for printing services and materials which primarily took place at the end of 2020,” Doroshina says, “our colleagues at the printing houses at the end of March this year sent us letters warning of a sharp, unpredictable increase in prices for materials and especially for paper and cardboard.

“So far, the cost of producing books in domestic printing houses has increased by 20 to 22 percent.”

. . . .

An interesting take on the paper shortage issue surfaces in talking with publishers who point to an overall drop in demand for i in the international marketplace, something that could reflect the widely observed “digital acceleration” of consumers’ adoption of electronic-reading formats during the 2020 pandemic year.

In Russia, pulp and paper mills are have seen dwindling profits, triggering higher prices for what does get sold, say publishers.

According to publishers, Russian book prices may see a hike of as much as 10 percent.

Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives

From The Guardian:

In September 2017, David Simon, creator of The Wire, tweeted a photograph of golfers calmly lining up their putts on an Oregon course as wildfires raged in the background. “In the pantheon of visual metaphors for America today, this is the money shot,” he wrote of the picture, which was taken by an amateur photographer who spotted the photo-op as she was about to skydive out of a plane. Everything about this story – the image, the circumstances – seems stranger than fiction.

A year before Simon’s tweet, in a landmark polemic, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh had questioned why so few writers – himself included – were tackling the world’s most pressing issue in their fiction. But now, as extreme weather swirls around the globe, melting glaciers, burning forests, flooding districts and annihilating species, the climate emergency has brought the unimaginable into our daily lives and literature. A survivor in Jessie Greengrass’s haunting new novel The High House sums it up: “The whole complicated system of modernity which had held us up, away from the earth, was crumbling … and we were becoming again what we had used to be: cold, and frightened of the weather, and frightened of the dark. Somehow while we had all been busy, while we had been doing those small things which added up to living, the future had slipped into the present.”

. . . .

Greengrass is among a growing number of novelists who are confronting this unfolding catastrophe through the young genre of climate fiction – or “cli-fi”. Among the new arrivals are the Irish writer Niall Bourke, whose novel Line conjures the Boschian image of refugees queueing for generations in an arid land; and Bethany Clift, whose Last One at the Party is the diary of an unnamed thirtysomething who decides to revel her way to the end, as the sole survivor of a pandemic. In August, Alexandra Kleeman’s Something New Under the Sun will take us to a climate-ravaged near-future California. And in September, Anthony Doerr will follow his Pulitzer-winning novel All the Light We Cannot See with Cloud Cuckoo Land, set between 15th-century Constantinople, Idaho in 2020 and space some time in the future. Doerr has said of the book: “The world we’re handing our kids brims with challenges: climate instability, pandemics, disinformation. I wanted this novel to reflect those anxieties, but also offer meaningful hope.”

So what has changed since Ghosh published The Great Derangement? “I think that the world has changed us, and the inflection point was 2018,” he says now. “It was partly because there were so many extreme climate events that year – the California wildfires, flooding in India, a succession of brutal hurricanes – but partly also because of the publication of Richard Powers’s The Overstory.”

This is a big claim to make for a novel. His point, says Ghosh, is not just about the book itself, but the welcome it received (including being shortlisted for the Booker prize). “It wasn’t hived off into the usual silos of climate change or speculative fiction, but was treated as a mainstream novel. I do think that was a very major thing. Since then, there’s been an outpouring of work in this area. In my own personal inbox, I get two or three manuscripts a day.”

Link to the rest at The Guardian

From Woman Writers, Women’s Books

Inspiration as an author can come in many forms. It can be an event that once happened or a person you know or have read about, it can even be an experience you yourself have had that manifests itself into a scene for your next book. All it takes is a grain of sand caught in the folds of your brain to work itself into a gleaming pearl.

I had many inspirations when writing my recently released New York Times bestselling historical fiction, The Last Bookshop in London. But then, it’s so easy to draw ideas from history with its powerful impact and incredible stories. 

The event which really began to spin the idea for my story was the bombing of Paternoster Row. This particular area of London is known for its history in the book trade that dates back to the 17th century when the area was wiped out by the Great Fire of London. The book publishing industry rose from the ashes like a literary phoenix and publishers and booksellers continued to flock to Paternoster Row.

During WWII, however, when the Nazis bombed London for seven months straight during the Blitz, Paternoster Row received a direct hit. Countless bombs and incendiaries rained down on the publishing district and reduced it to rubble and ash with a fire that took days to fully extinguish.

This attack resulted in the destruction of over 5 million books. It was a heartbreaking loss made all the more devastating in light of the paper ration which prevented more books from being printed to replace the ones that were lost. As a book lover, this struck me in the heart. But through incredible loss can come the greatest hope and that inspired the bookshop where I had Grace work for Mr. Evans. 

As far as characters go, I received most of my inspiration from the Mass Observation. This was an initiative funded by the men who came up with the concept where hundreds of people were paid to record their daily life in journals and diaries before, during and after the war. It was a truly unique opportunity to have an inside look into the lifestyle of the time as well as how the daily bombings affected the overall mindset.

But in reading those detailed accounts, characters began to take shape in my mind. The naysayer who always had an opinion (like Mr. Pritchard), the woman who unexpectedly finds purpose in her war efforts (like Viv) and then there is Colin’s character who is an especially dear one to me. 

He came to me after one entry I read where a mother lamented over her son who was being conscripted into the military and was scheduled to depart the following day. She observed his gentleness with the family dog (one he had saved, cared for and kept as a boy) and went on to bemoan how tender-souled men are not meant for war. It was a heartbreaking observation and one I wanted to push forefront in my story. I wanted to highlight those men forced into war when their spirits were never meant for battle. 

Link to the rest at Woman Writers, Women’s Books

From The Guardian:

I read an article the other day about a computer program that writes fiction. You feed it a few lines, tell it the genre – science fiction, horror – and it produces the rest. And it’s not bad at it. It writes in full grammatical sentences; comes up with metaphors and analogies; emulates a writer’s particular style and so on. The author of the article, who seemed a little too thrilled about the existence of this diabolical toy from the depths of Silicon Valley says, at some point, that this “tool” was going to be the “salvation” for writers who dislike writing, which, according to him, is nearly all writers. I want to say to this writer: you are wrong. And to this robot that writes fiction I want to say … well I don’t want to say anything to it because, you know, robots are robots.

Fiction is one of the most pleasurable of human activities. It’s one of the most difficult, yes; but when it is driven by a deep desire, it is one of the most pleasurable. Fiction is also something quite like a bodily intuition, or an embodied knowledge, something we feel when our minds are able to pierce through the mesh of the present, and imagine someplace/something other. At times, when we try to peer into that other place what we see is too painful, shocking or simply abysmal. But we have to look at it anyway, and make something of it, make something with it. The word fiction, in fact, comes from the Latin fingere, which means “to shape, to form”, and originally, “to mould something out of clay”. Fingere implies the action of making, or rather, giving form. It is not inventing something that is not true, but giving shape to something that was already there. Fiction requires a combination of insight, hindsight and foresight. In other words, it requires experience.

Lost Children Archive is a novel about childhood solitude and children’s boundless imagination, the fragile intensity of familial ties, about tensions between history and fiction, and the complex intersections of political circumstances and personal lives. But more than anything, it is a novel about the process of making stories, of threading voices and ideas together in an attempt to better understand the world around us. It is a novel about fiction. It begins with two parents telling stories – their children physically but also metaphorically riding in the backseat of the family car – but then shifts to the children’s narrative, to them becoming the voices that tell us the story of the fucked-up but sometimes blindingly stunning world that we are always fictioning, as in, always shaping and reshaping.

In this past year of isolation and doubt, and so much fear, my daughter, my niece and I have been reading out loud to each other, for company, for a better sense of togetherness, maybe, beyond cooking and eating meals and cleaning the house. We read to each other the way one seeks company around a fireplace – to be alone, together. Often, we play a game: we sit in front of the bookshelves, and one of us choses a book with our eyes closed, and then we read out loud from it, sometimes just a few lines, sometimes entire chapters.

We’ve been reading Audre Lorde, Marguerite Duras, James Joyce, and even a vampire series the title of which I will never confess. In any case, I can say, without a hint of doubt, that without books – without sharing in the company of other writers’s human experiences – we would not have made it through these months. If our spirits have found renewal, if we have found strength to carry on, if we have maintained a sense of enthusiasm for life, it is thanks to the worlds that books have given us. Each time, we found solace in the companions that live in our bookshelves.

Recently, for a project I’m working on, I interviewed some women in my family about what they feared most. What are you afraid of? I asked. My mother said: “Perder claridad” – to lose clarity. My daughter said: “I’m afraid of being left alone.” My younger niece said: “Expectations.” My older niece said: “I’m afraid of my relationship failing, losing love.”

“And what are you afraid of, Mamma?” my daughter then asked me.

What am I afraid of? I am afraid, like any adult, of many things. Of loss, of not being able to provide for those who depend on me, of political violence, of climate change and Silicon Valley. But I am particularly afraid of our spirits becoming stagnant, of not having a narrative to believe in, of not having a common space in which to listen to each other and understand each other deeply. I am afraid, in other words, of a world without fiction. A world in which we do not share a collective space of imagination.

Link to the rest at The Guardian

From Publishing Perspectives:

• In 2020, ebook and audiobook sales in the Spanish-language markets’ publishers responding to Bookwire and Dosdoce saw increases of 112 percent for ebooks and 137 percent for audiobooks
• Downloaded ebook sales generated a 97-percent increase in turnover for publishers in 2020 over 2019
• In all seven years of this report series’ life, gains have been recorded, but in 2020 that aggregate gain among the 840+ publishers was 113 percent
• Ebook subscription platform revenues for publishers in 2020 in Spanish-language content increased 112 percent

. . . .

• Digital exports have accounted for 50 percent of digital revenue for Spanish publishers
• Mexico generates 16 percent of ebook sales by Spanish publishers “across the Atlantic”
• During the most severe lockdown months in the relevant territories “digital consumption multiplied four times”

By the end of this year, the report’s authors are estimating that there will have been 14,300 Spanish-language audiobook titles available. “Judging by the trends in international markets,” the report’s text reads, “everything points to a 25- to 30-percent increase in audiobook sales in 2021, thus reaching €13 million in Spanish-language markets (US$15.9 million).

The average price in 2020 of a Spanish ebook was €6.06 (US$7.41), and the average price of a Spanish audiobook was €13.49 (US$16.49).

And with all deference to the old sayings about content’s importance, when it comes to audiobook sales channels, the report says, the subscription is king, accounting for 86 percent of sales. The platforms driving those sales, as might be expected, were Storytel, Audible, Scribd, Kobo, and Podimo. In podcasting, streaming platforms of course hold the lead (Spotify, Amazon Music, Audible, iVoox, Podimo).

As for the markets themselves, Spain is anticipated to be seen as the leading Spanish-language market for audiobooks this year, with Mexico as the second driver, and the United States as the No. 3 market for Spanish audio–the rest of Latin America following.

Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives

From the BBC:

A novel written about the persecution of Jews in Germany in 1938 but which was then forgotten about for 80 years has made it onto a UK bestsellers list.

Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz’s The Passenger is about a Jewish man who – like the author – attempts to escape the rise of the Nazi regime.

It was rediscovered in 2018 after the author’s niece told an editor about it.

The book has had stellar reviews and has now entered The Sunday Times list of top 10 hardback fiction bestsellers.

The UK edition sold almost 1,800 copies last week to put it at number 10 on the list.

It was written in the weeks after Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass, also known as the November Pogrom), the outbreak of mass violence against Jews in Germany and Austria in November 1938.

It tells the story of a Jewish businessman called Otto van Silbermann, who hears a knock at his door from Nazi Storm Troopers and quickly realises he must flee.

He and his wife stuff all their money into a suitcase and end up boarding train after train across Germany as they try to make their escape.

Boschwitz himself had left Germany three years earlier after anti-Semitic laws were enacted.

His book was published in the US and UK in 1939 and 40 respectively, but made little impact and soon went out of print. The author died in 1942 at the age of 27 when a boat he was travelling on was torpedoed by the Germans.

. . . .

Boschwitz’s niece contacted German editor Peter Graf after reading an interview with him about another novel he had rediscovered.

She told him about her uncle and the book, the original typescript of which was in the archive of the National Library in Frankfurt.

Graf went there and told the BBC that as soon as he read it, he “knew that this was an important novel”.

He decided to edit and revise the book and it was published in Germany. It has now been released in 20 other languages so far this year.

He believes the novel, written more than 80 years ago, has a powerful message for modern society.

“If you look at the refugee problem today, you see that the willingness to help people in need is low. And the more refugees there are, the less people are willing to help. This terrible and simple pattern runs through history,” he said.

“After the November pogroms in Germany, almost no country accepted Jews. They were trapped. And people who are assumed to leave their country only for economic reasons are even worse off in this respect than those who are persecuted.”

Graf added that the novel was essentially about “the disenfranchisement of a hitherto respected and well-off citizen”. He added: “Anyone who reads the fate of Otto Silbermann will understand a lot about human values and how terrorism and the lack of courage of the masses make terror against individual groups possible.”

Link to the rest at the BBC

From The Paris Review:

The most common food in the medieval historical romance Kristin Lavransdatter, written by the Norwegian author Sigrid Undset (1882–1949), is oatmeal porridge, a dish I made elaborate perfection of during my children’s early years. The porridges in Undset’s book are good and nourishing but plain (though in one scene, a young Kristin eats hers with “thick cream” off her father’s spoon). Mine, on the other hand, were ridiculous. I blitzed half the oats in the baby-food blender before cooking. I tried different combinations of milk and water. I made fruit puree swirls. I had a two-year-old daughter, an infant son, and an office job, to which I fled every day in great relief to get a moment to myself and then struggled not to leak breast milk on my work clothes. My husband was unhelpful with the children. Childless people found my travails boring and embarrassing. I’d never thought being a woman mattered much, but suddenly it seemed to. I was miserable, and perfecting the oatmeal made me feel better.

Kristin Lavransdatter, which unfolds over the course of three volumes—The Wreath, The Wife, and The Cross—is a woman’s story. It’s also a gripping read and an impressive feat of historical re-creation, which helped Undset win the 1928 Nobel Prize in Literature. The epic’s structural and textual allusions are so numerous that, as the professor Sherrill Harbison dryly remarks in her introduction to The Cross, they “show no signs of being exhausted by scholars.” (She also—correctly, I feel—thinks the book is overlooked.) When writing Kristin Lavransdatter, Undset drew from sagas, ballads, Scandinavian oral tradition, and medieval texts of all types, notably the allegory Le roman de la rose, to tell the tale of a woman in the early fourteenth century, a time when society was changing for women, who takes her newish right to consent to her own marriage a step further and demands her own choice of husband. Not accidentally, Undset was writing in the 1920s, another time of rapid social change.

. . . .

The story follows Kristin, daughter of Lavrans, from childhood to death. Lavrans is a salt-of-the-earth Norwegian, “a strong and courageous man, but a peaceful soul, honest and calm, humble in conduct but courtly in bearing, a remarkably capable farmer and a great hunter.” As the treasured offspring of this strong and good man, Kristin is herself strong and good, and destined to carry on her family’s legacy of virtue. But in the book’s first section, Lavrans takes her up to the mountain pastures with a handful of children and servants to see to some land-management tasks. The group eats lunch outdoors amid the dazzling mountain views—“soft bread and thin lefse, butter and cheese, pork and wind-dried reindeer meat, lard, boiled beef brisket, two large kegs of German ale, and a small jug of mead.” Lavrans gives Kristin “all the ale she could drink, along with frequent sips of mead” and says: “God’s gifts will do you good, not harm, all you who are still growing. The ale will give you sweet red blood and make you sleep well.” The whole party falls asleep in the midday sunshine. Kristin, unaccustomed to drinking, wakes up with a headache and a dry mouth and accidentally wanders off down the wooded slope, where she is first captivated by her reflection in a stream and then sees an apparition, a woman with “a pale face,” “flowing, flaxen hair,” and “full breasts,” which are “covered with brooches and gleaming necklaces.” Kristin flees in terror, but the damage has been done.

The woman is an elf maiden. In Norwegian folklore, Harbison writes, the elf maiden represents “abduction and erotic abandon; her mischief is to lure young girls into the mountain for orgies with the mountain king.” Later, it will be Kristin’s fate to defy the counsel of her wise and good father, the values of her community, and the expectations of her religion, and reject an eminently appropriate betrothed, Simon Darre, for a different man, Erlend Nikulausson, with whom she falls in wild, besotted, sexual love. The reflection in the water is a reference to the myth of Narcissus, an inspiration for Le roman de la rose, which is about a dreamer who falls in love with a beautiful rose at the bottom of a pool but is eventually persuaded to make the more “responsible” choice: to marry a woman and reproduce. Throughout the entirety of Kristin Lavransdatter, the title character struggles with her decision to choose Erlend, herself, and her passion over her community’s values—which are also, with anguish, her own values. The motifs of Narcissus, the elf maiden, and the mountain king continue to appear.

. . . .

Familiarity with the source material invaluably deepens one’s appreciation of the book’s themes, making Harbison’s introduction to The Cross required reading. She explains that even the idea of romantic love the way Kristin experiences it was relatively new in the fourteenth century. Romantic, or courtly, love was “invented by poets in France in the twelfth century” and represented an advance in the status of women, because suddenly they were deemed worthy of inspiring heights of passion. (Prior to this, sex with women was considered a troublesome and low occupation that kept men from their real work.) Courtly love, though, wasn’t quite the same as how we view romance today—it claimed the highest status for doomed, forbidden, secret passions, usually between people who were married, but not to each other. The beautiful, unattainable rose at the bottom of the pool in Le roman de la rose is evocative of this kind of love. In an echo of its symbolism, Kristin and Erlend’s first outing together is in a rose garden.

. . . .

Everywhere there was food in medieval Norway, there was drink, and often many kinds on the same table—wines and meads, ales strong and weak. The ensuing drunkenness is another aspect of the books’ harsh realism and another example of the dual nature of God’s gifts. My spirits consultant, Hank Zona, found me not just meads but a mead trend, which serendipitously reflects both Kristin Lavransdatter’s pagan Catholic spirituality and some of our more modern struggles to live virtuously and situate ourselves in our wider human community. First, I spoke to a home mead maker named Eileen Coles, whom I met through the Norwegian immigrant community in Brooklyn. Coles brews mead as a sacred beverage in the Heathen tradition. (Heathen is a designation for the pre-Christian Scandinavian and Northern European religion.) Coles noted that mead is found worldwide, “wherever one would find beehives, in places as far-flung as India, Ethiopia, and China,” but that it and beer are more prevalent in Northern Europe because of the climate. Since grapes don’t grow well in the cold, “people made do with what was available—grains, herbs, and honey.”

Link to the rest at The Paris Review

From Publishing Perspectives:

A report from the Russian Book Chamber and its statistics division has indicated that in the pandemic year 2020, the publishing market fell by 20 percent.
In units, this represents a decline of 83.7 million titles in Russia. The overall turnover of published books and associated content fell by 19 percent last year, the report says, from some 435.1 million copies in 2019 to 351.4 million copies.

Hardest hit was the religious book sector, which reported a 34.5-percent downturn, to 4.7 million copies. Scientific literature slipped 11 percent, to 6.7 million copies.

Counter to patterns in some markets–in which children’s book sales made a robust showing–books for children and youth declined in Russia by a substantive 18 percent, to 78.1 million copies.

. . . .

Irina Bogat, director of the independent Zakharov publishing house, has a particularly bleak take on the situation and the outlook for what’s to come. She tells Publishing Perspectives, “Fewer and fewer people are buying books in Russia. This is the mayor reason for the current situation in the market, which was significantly hit by the pandemic.

“So in 2020, the market declined and the publishers–those not already bankrupt–were faced with 20-percent drops in their sales.

“Many people have lost their jobs because of the pandemic and they don’t have money to buy books.

“The price of paper and other materials has increased more than 30 percent in just the last three months, which is a record. And at the same time, the exchange rate between the ruble and the euro has been getting worse.

“As a result of this, books have become a luxury item in Russia. We do not expect any restoration or growth this year.”

. . . .

Alexander Nemirov, head of marketing at the Moscow-based Algoritm publishing house, says that while the pandemic has severely affected book publishing in Russia, the trend in the market was headed downward ahead of the outbreaks of the novel coronavirus.

“Book production began to lose momentum long before the pandemic,” Nemirov says.

“Books are no longer a source of information, but just an intelligent habit or a beautiful gift. Therefore, many publishers prefer to reduce their production, personalizing books for certain niche groups.

“That in turn leads to higher costs for printing, while bookstores increase their margins. All these factors lead to fierce competition.

“For example, we recently came across the fact that some publishers abuse online stores,” with bogus negative reviews of their competitors’ titles.

According to Nemirov, while sales of ebooks continue to grow, their growth is insignificant amid falling print sales. Nemirov says he believes there are no reasons to anticipate growth or development of the book publishing sector in the second half of 2021 or in early 2022.

Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives

From The Guardian:

It’s 1996 in a perfectly ordinary suburb just north of Heathrow airport. A teenage boy and his sister are on their way to the optician. Walking under a railway bridge, they pass a man who slows down and gives the boy a stare “as startling as scalding water”. He can’t stop thinking about it all through the appointment, and when they emerge – though surely the man won’t still be there? – they walk a different way back to the bus stop, just in case. When the bus arrives, they climb to the top deck, and as it turns the corner, the boy peers out. The man is still there, and smiles as he catches sight of them, before opening his coat wide to reveal a colourful patchwork of swastikas sewn into the lining: red, white, black, purple.

The boy is Musa Okwonga, and he goes to school at Eton College, just the other side of the M25. Over there racism may not announce itself with swastikas, but it’s a constant background hum, with something of the same menace as the man in the coat: just when you think you’ve evaded it, surprise! Here’s a moment to chill you to the bone, like when a fellow pupil boasts about the fact that his ancestor was a slaver.

Nevertheless, Okwonga thrives at the school, which he set his heart on after being dazzled by a documentary he saw as a child. He wins a scholarship and aged 13 becomes a boarder, putting on the school’s distinctive morning suit every day: “The greatest proof of my status is my uniform. It consists of a black tailcoat, a black waistcoat under which I wear a white shirt with a starched collar and thin white cotton tie, a pair of black pinstriped trousers and black shoes.”

. . . .

He becomes a model student, almost to a fault. But he’s carrying around a double burden of responsibility: first to his father, who was killed amid political violence in Uganda when he was four, and his widowed mother, who works hard as a doctor to pay his fees. Then there’s the second, crushing weight imposed by society’s expectations of young black men and the mostly white environment of the school. “I think it is unlikely that many of my contemporaries,” Okwonga writes, “have had a close black friend, and so I don’t want to conform to any of the stereotypes they might have about black people. I resolve never to get drunk around any of them, never to get stoned in their company. I don’t even risk getting a haircut that I might enjoy.” Much of his time, then, is spent conducting himself with “a military level of self-restraint”, although he admits “it is unclear whether my classmates either notice or care”.

Okwonga tries to make sense of the pressures, absurdities and rewards of his schooldays in his latest book, One of Them: An Eton College Memoir. He talks to me over Zoom from his flat in Berlin, where he has lived for the past six years. As well as being a poet and writer, he presents a successful football podcast, and a big red professional microphone juts into shot. His conversation is more laidback than his prose, which can have the disconcerting quality of feeling both buttoned-up and incredibly raw. I ask why he wanted to write about Eton now, more than two decades after he left.

. . . .

Okwonga describes the gallery of busts in the 17th-century building known as “Upper School” on the sprawling campus outside Windsor (he writes: “No one here ever tells us out loud that we Etonians are natural leaders: that is what the architecture is for”). Prime ministers from Walpole to Earl Grey to Gladstone are immortalised in marble. The prospect of Cameron and Johnson joining them one day makes him queasy. The school smooths the path to power, but seems to evade responsibility for how it is wielded.

. . . .

He thinks there are serious questions to be asked about the charitable status of private schools on the basis of public benefit, given their role in the reproduction of a conservative establishment that tends to strip the public realm of resources. But mostly he wants to start a series of conversations that have largely been avoided. In the book he writes, “I keep reflecting on what Eton doesn’t talk about”, from the part it played in the creation and maintenance of empire, to the function it serves today. He tells me: “The school explicitly prides itself on leadership, right? But if you’re not creating the kind of leaders that are moving the world forward – that’s the most pressing conversation to have, I think.” Of private schooling in general, he asks: “As a structure, as a system, is it serving our society best? I don’t believe it is. And I say that as someone that’s benefited hugely from that world.”

. . . .

Okwonga started thinking about school again when he was invited to his 20-year reunion. It was the prompt for a fairly unforgiving bout of introspection. He was embarrassed at how his penurious life as a single writer nudging 40 compared with his fellow alumni, by then wealthy executives with houses and families. In his autobiographical novella, In the End It Was All About Love, published earlier this year, the protagonist says: “There is not a week when you do not look in the hallway mirror and think, my God, what have I done.” But unlike in the Talking Heads song, there is no beautiful house or large automobile in sight.

When I ask him what psychological marks Eton left on him, Okwonga says: “You’re taught to compete all the time. And once you leave a world where you can readily compete against others, you kind of turn that competition inward. So you’re pushing yourself constantly, you’re just brutal with yourself. And sometimes things don’t feel satisfying unless they’re difficult.”

Link to the rest at The Guardian

PG is not competent to comment on the benefits and detriments of expensive British public schools.

However, he has to admit that the Guardian review makes him think this may be a book whose conclusions were foreordained before the author even thought of writing it.

Though this is from the Guardian, PG could imagine the same type of review of the same type of book about the same US subject from The New York Time.

From The Guardian:

Cecilia Knapp

“I came to poetry by accident, through a workshop at Camden’s Roundhouse. I was 18 at the time, had no money, and was living alone in London. Poetry had not been in my life before. I was awful when I started. But I was so thirsty to get better.

I’m working on my first collection now. I lost my mum at a young age, so a lot of the collection looks at how that might impact a young woman. And I lost my older brother to suicide in 2012. He had a long battle with addiction, and also his sexuality, and I was a carer for him for a really long time. A lot of the poems in the book that I’m working on are looking at his life. I’ve always used writing as a way to figure things out: not necessarily to find answers, more to ask questions about them.

When young people see a poem or film on YouTube or social media, it gets rid of that preconception that poetry has to be this isolated, solitary act of opening a book and reading something old fashioned. I love reading poetry myself, and I believe that young people can, too, but they can also love spoken word or performance poetry, poetry on film or poetry with music.

I’ve worked with young people for almost a decade now, and I’ve experienced first-hand the impact poetry can have on them – something happens when you let yourself be free and creative, it is magic. It’s really empowering for young people to be told that what they have to say is important and valid. We need young voices contributing to the canon, because they usually reflect what’s really going on in the world a lot of the time.

Someone who I use as a springboard for young people is Danez Smith, a non-binary African American poet who talks a lot about race, class, sexuality and gender in their collections Don’t Call Us Dead and Homie.

Roger Robinson’s book A Portable Paradise responded so amazingly to the injustice of Grenfell, as did Jay Bernard’s book Surge. There are so many amazing writers at the moment.”

Link to the rest at The Guardian

From Publishing Perspectives:

As we continue to receive assessments from various international markets of coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic impact in 2020, Tiia Strandén at the Finnish Literature Exchange, FILI,  has provided Publishing Perspectives with a report from the Finnish book market.

. . . .

“While sales of printed books increased by just 2 percent” in Finland, the report tells us, “demand for audiobooks and ebooks was far greater, leading to an overall increase in trade book sales of 12 percent over 2019 figures.”

Audiobooks did particularly well, even over what’s described as strong growth for several years prior to the pathogen’s outbreaks.

In 2020, audiobook sales in Finland “more than doubled,” the report says. “While many Finns commuted less than before as they switched to working from home, they also focused on exercise and spending time outdoors, which provided more opportunities to listen to audiobooks,” per the report’s text. This brought audio up to “nearly a fifth of trade book sales” last year.

What the FILI information says was “most surprising of all in 2020” was a “whopping 84-percent increase in ebook sales. “Ebooks made up only a small share of the total market,” the report clarifies, and a smaller share than audiobooks, “but that growth far outstripped their previous year-over-year increase of 32 percent.”

One dynamic behind the advances in ebooks in Finland is thought to have been an expansion of subscription book and audio services. And the entry point—not surprisingly in the audio-friendly Nordic markets—was on the audio side. “While people usually sign up for these services in order to access audiobooks,” the report points out, “ebook libraries are included for the same fee. The ease of swapping between audiobooks and ebooks helps to diversify usage across formats.”

All of this added up to something of a leveling effect between fiction and nonfiction. “Among printed books,” the report says, “nonfiction represents a larger segment than fiction. In audio and ebook formats, however, fiction is bigger, and the gap grew even further in 2020, as sales of fiction ebooks and audiobooks increased more than sales of nonfiction in the same formats.

“Sales of printed fiction titles increased by 11 percent last year, while sales of printed nonfiction decreased by 6 percent.”

Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives

From The Los Angeles Review of Books:

ON FEBRUARY 9, 2013, the works of writer Akram Aylisli were publicly burned in Azerbaijan because his writing upset the Azerbaijani government. Aylisli watched his books burn via the internet, an experience he describes in a 2018 essay excerpted in this very magazine. Azerbaijan’s president Ilham Aliyev stripped Aylisli of the title of “People’s Writer” and his presidential pension; his wife and son were fired from their jobs, and he received death threats. In 2014, Aylisli was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by supporters from several countries. In March 2016, he was invited to address a literary festival in Venice, Incroci di civiltà; however, the 79-year-old writer was detained at the Baku airport, and trumped-up legal charges were filed against him. Those charges are still pending.

. . . .

MARK LIPOVETSKY: In March 2016, you were slated to deliver a speech at a literary festival in Venice, but could not attend because you were denied permission to leave Azerbaijan. You later published the remarks you’d planned to give. At the start of the speech, you write, “Now we are all defenseless before these inconceivably cruel times. There are periods in history when nothing can fill the emptiness of the human heart: not religion, not science, not literature.” Do you feel the same way now, and what does it mean to be a writer in such times?

AKRAM AYLISLI: I’d like to first of all clarify the circumstances of my situation that not everyone understands completely. They made me sign an agreement not to travel, so I don’t have the right to leave the confines of Baku. What’s more, the prosecutor’s office confiscated my proof of identity. Without that proof, a person has no actual rights — can’t take part in elections or anything. The prosecutor’s office was supposed to investigate my case within a year, according to Azerbaijani law. But to this day, the case that was opened in March 2016 hasn’t been reviewed. They simply aren’t processing it. This all weighs very, very heavily on me psychologically, and all of it puts pressure on me. But I think some people are starting to overcome the anxiety they felt about the fact that part of Azerbaijan’s land was, let us say, under the control of Armenia. They’ve calmed down a bit, and I think [laughs] that calm will in some way make a difference in my life. They’ll calm down and finally say: “So what about this guy? How much can we really cut him off from society? This kind of thing isn’t good for him.” I think this will all pass. I’m sure of it.

In terms of how I live in this difficult time, it seems to me that no matter what the circumstances, no matter what situation a writer lives in, he lives in his own world. For example, I didn’t feel the loss of what was taken from me very deeply, and I wasn’t depressed because I never remembered myself being free. I never felt that: not in school, not at university, not at work. I felt myself to be a little bit free only at my work table, my writing desk. They couldn’t take that away from me. It can’t be taken away from any writer. I live now through literature. It’s possible to live through literature — there’s a lot of air there. More, maybe, than there is even in the street, especially during a pandemic.

From your trilogy Farewell, Aylis, which of these novels — Yemen, Stone Dreams, and A Fantastical Traffic Jam — is the most important for you?

If I think about it, Stone Dreams. I wrote Stone Dreams for Azerbaijanis, not Armenians. I wrote it out of the desire that not all of the bridges between our peoples would be burned. So that there would not be this deep alienation, particularly in terms of culture. We are, after all, a Turkic people, but in point of fact we are people of the Caucasus. Our mentality is of the Caucasus — not Turkish, not Central Asian, specifically of the Caucasus. I wrote Stone Dreams out of the desire to bring people closer, so that people wouldn’t think that we have to revile one another, that we have to kill one another.

Who has supported you? Are there writers, cultural figures, who supported you in Russia and Azerbaijan?

In general, the Russian intelligentsia defended me a great deal — Andrei Bitov, Viktor Yerofeyev. That level of writer — important writers — really defended me. A few Russian journalists, also. In Azerbaijan, my support mainly came from young writers. Among them, many people understood things as I understand them, and in the way people will someday understand.

How can we, readers living all over the world, help you?

You’re already helping me. We’re sitting here, today I’m looking at you, at such good-hearted people. That joy is enough for me, if only for a few days. Sometimes you suddenly remember such good moments, and that helps you live. I don’t know how exactly readers can help. Many organizations wanted to help me. In Norway, they even proposed an excellent situation so that I could move there. I didn’t go, because someday these people will understand that I love Azerbaijan more than they do. I think there are individuals among the Azerbaijani people who know that I love Azerbaijan more than the authorities do. It’s dangerous to say so [laughs], but it’s necessary.

Link to the rest at The Los Angeles Review of Books

PG thinks its a good idea for him and others who live in liberal Western democracies to reflect on those who do not from time to time. Such an exercise helps to avoid feelings of entitlement and nurture feelings of gratitude, at least for PG.

From Words without Borders:

The condition of the patient just delivered to the trauma department of one of the major Baku hospitals was very serious.

They took the patient, who was lying unconscious on the gurney, along the very middle of the half-lit hospital corridor that stretched the length of the whole floor to the operating room, which was located in the other wing of the building. There were two women in white lab coats and two men, also in lab coats. The surgeon himself walked beside the gurney, a spare, silver-haired man of middling height, distinguished from his colleagues by his reserve, the compelling sternness of his face, and the particular cleanliness of his lab coat.

If there was anything unusual or seemingly incongruous in this ordinary scene of hospital life, it was the tragic humor in the appearance and behavior of the person who’d brought the patient to the clinic. That small, fidgety man of fifty-five to sixty whose small face was not at all in harmony with his enormous, round belly ran around the doctor constantly repeating the same thing over and over.

“Doctor, my dear Doctor, they killed him! Such a man, in broad daylight, they beat him, destroyed him. It’s those yerazy, Doctor, yerazy. Five or six of those yerazy-boys who fled from Armenia! Those sons of bitches, those refugees simply don’t respect people, Doctor, my dear Doctor. They don’t recognize artists or poets or writers. Just call someone an Armenian—and that’s it! Then they slam him to the ground and trample him like wild animals. They tear him to pieces, and no one dares get involved. I told them: ‘Don’t beat him,’ I said, ‘That man’s not Armenian, he’s one of us, a son of our people, the pride and conscience of the nation.’ But who listens? They didn’t even let me tell them my name. They kicked me so hard in the side that I almost died there, too. Right here, Doctor, in the right side. It still hurts badly now.”

The doctor didn’t really understand what the man who’d brought the patient was saying. Maybe he didn’t want to understand. Maybe he wasn’t even listening to what that fussy, funny man who’d knotted a yellow tie over a brown checked shirt was babbling without pause. However, an observant person might have noticed that the doctor from time to time smiled into his moustache. And not because every word, every gesture of the man who’d brought the patient rose to comedy. But, rather, because the light-haired man lying on the gurney was slender and remarkably tall. And it’s possible that the contrast in appearance between these two reminded the doctor of the very saddest pages of the story of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.

When they reached the doors of the operating room, one of the men wearing a white lab coat blocked the path of the funny man in the yellow tie.

“Let him in,” said the doctor. “It seems he has something to say. Let him have his say.”

Although the operating room was considerably smaller than the corridor, all the same it turned out to be a spacious room with a high ceiling and gigantic windows. The operating table standing directly in the center resembled the linen-covered gurney on which they conveyed the patient. The two men in white lab coats delivering the gurney that bore the patient lifted him, laid him on the table, glanced at the doctor for permission, and silently left the operating room.

“Peroxide!” said the surgeon loudly to the nurses, rolling up the sleeves of his lab coat. “Bring it here, wipe off his face.” Looking at the patient covered in blood, he muttered an oath, and turning to the man’s companion, he asked, “Who did this to him?”

“I already told you, Doctor: yerazy. Those bastard refugees arriving from Armenia. It wasn’t enough to smash his face. They also knocked him to the ground like wild animals and began beating him in the stomach. It’s a good thing, Doctor, that I arrived in time. I went out this morning to get some air in the city. I’m coming down from that cursed place they call the Parapet when I see five or six mustachioed scoundrels beating up a man at the edge of the fountain. And people just standing by and watching in silence . . .” Then he suddenly hesitated. His lips continued to move, but the words, it seems, died in his throat.

“There’s no more peroxide, Doctor,” said one of the nurses in an apologetic voice, as quietly as possible. (One of them was elderly, the other quite young.)

“There should be some alcohol,” said the surgeon without hope.

“No, Doctor. Everything we had was used up yesterday.”

“Fine, clean him with water. Don’t use too much manganese.” The doctor washed his hands with soap at the sink standing in the corner of the room and then went up and stood in front of the operating table. “Take everything off of him. Leave only his underwear.”

The patient—his face, nose, chin, the collar of his orange wool shirt, the lapels of his bluish jacket covered in scarlet blood—was lying so calmly on the operating table that it was as if his most evil enemy rather than he himself had been beaten up in the aforementioned Parapet Square. He was sleeping deeply, although frequent, harsh moans escaped from his chest. Not only did he sleep but, apparently, also dreamed, and it seemed that his dreams gave him great satisfaction.

While the women washed the dried blood off the patient’s face, the doctor checked his pulse. When the nurses had stripped the patient, he began to examine him attentively, as if compiling a report for himself or dictating to someone.

“Put two stitches in his lower lip. No fractures noted in the area of the jaw. Two dislocations in the left hand at the elbow and wrist. Two fingers dislocated on the right hand: the thumb and middle finger. Severe muscle trauma in the left leg. A fractured kneecap in the right leg. No serious anomalies noted in the back, rib cage, or spine. No skull fractures observed.” The doctor fell silent and again cursed angrily. “A concussion!” He said this loudly for some reason and in Russian, then pulled a handkerchief from the pocket of his trousers, slowly wiped the sweat from his brow, and added in Russian, “A brutal beating!”

After every word the doctor said, the face of the man who’d brought the patient reflected all his feelings, all his pain and suffering. With difficulty, he held himself together, so as not to burst out sobbing. When the doctor had finished his exam, the man’s self-possession was also at an end. He wept violently, like an aggrieved child.

The eyes of one of the women in the white lab coats standing beside the operating table (the younger one) filled with tears. The elderly nurse was also upset and shook her head woefully. And the doctor was very sorry for the man. He began to calm him.

“There, there, this isn’t good . . . It’s nothing terrible. In fifteen days your friend will be like new, I’ll make a beauty out of him.” Lowering his head, he thought a bit and then again lifted his head and asked cautiously, “So, you say this man is Armenian?”

The eyes of our comic hero bulged in surprise.

“Really, you don’t know him?! You don’t know Sadai Sadygly? The pride of Azerbaijani theater! Our number one artist! You really don’t know this great master, Doctor? You haven’t even seen him on television? You’ve even seen me on television more than once, Doctor. Maybe you just don’t remember—Nuvarish Karabakhly, a well-known actor of comic roles. Maybe you don’t know me. I’m not offended by that. But there’s no one who doesn’t know Sadai Sadygly. You see, no one else in the world has played Hamlet, Othello, Aidyn, and Kefli Iskender like he has.”

Link to the rest at Words Without Borders

From Publishing Perspectives:

As Publishing Perspectives readers will remember, the 38th Scuola per Librai Umberto e Elisabetta Mauri program, a “School of Booksellers,” was held at the end of last month in a digital format rather than in its customary venue at Venice’s Fondazione Giorgio Cini in the former San Giorgio Monastery.

Titled “The State of the Book in Europe,” the event on January 29 drew as many as 1,200 attendees from many parts of the world, an unusual chance for many to get a look at this normally much more exclusive symposium.

. . . .

Host Nana Lohrengel, secretary-general of the Umberto and Elisabetta Mauri Foundation, opened the day and handed off to the foundation’s chief, Achille Mauri. He described what’s normally the boat ride to “the most beautiful island in the world–Palladio and Brunelleschi’s San Giorgio Maggiore—with “a breakfast of warm pastries” and “a drink of Grignolino,” the red varietal of the Piedmont, “by the labyrinth early in the morning.”

One of the most gracious comments of the entire day came in this brief welcome from Achille Mauri when he explained the special value of the symposium’s traditional, opulent setting. “Luxury,” he said, “is so therapeutic. Zoom can’t compete with that experience.”

. . . .

As the early lockdowns hit, bookseller Linzalone says “We succeeded by drawing not only on our internal resources but also by using the Libri da Asporto service [a book delivery company] in the beginning. That allowed us to keep selling at a level we never expected,” even while applying for supplemental small-business support.

“We realized it was possible and we kept selling, not just in the store but also by visiting the customers at home.”

He adds with a smile, “I wouldn’t call it clandestine selling, but we were literally selling books in the street.”

. . . .

And while the top-line news there was that the Italian book industry saw sales grow by some 2.4 percent last year, Prometeia’s Tantazzi does warn in his new presentation that “It’s virtually impossible to say how 2021 is going to pan out.”

Levi, speaking for AIE, makes the interesting point in his comments that in 2020, while fiction accounted for a third of the market, foreign fiction fared slightly better than Italian fiction. And yet, as has been reflected in many world markets, “The biggest increase during the pandemic year was seen in specialist nonfiction—law, management, literary criticism.”

What may be contrary to many other markets’ experience is the fall tracked in Italy’s children’s book sales in 2020. But Levi notes that this decline had been underway for several years prior to the pandemic.

Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives

PG loved the quintessentially Italian observation that “Luxury is so therapeutic.”

He’s not certain exactly when he and Mrs. PG will be able to corral the funds and energy for a long flight to Italy, but Venice and Florence are certainly powerful incentives to do so.

From Publishing Perspectives:

The annual conference produced by Beijing OpenBook—familiar to our readers for its research in our China bestsellers series—this year has reflected, predictably, on the instability of a unique year.
Titled “Crisis and Changes,” the 2020 report on China’s book market was released in a lengthy broadcast with more than 19,000 viewers at the time and at least 25,000 more following its original airing.

. . . .

(F)or the first time since OpenBook began its tracking in 2001, it saw China’s huge book market take a step back. Growth charts showed a -5.08-percent downturn in 2020, especially striking by comparison to 2019’s rise of 14.4 percent.

. . . .

Our colleague Rainy Liu at OpenBook points out that between 2015 and 2019, the Chinese retail market had been growing at more than 10 percent annually, making the 2020 retreat felt especially sharp.

Echoing what we hear from many of the world markets we cover, online retail channels saw a jump of 7.27 percent in book sales, amounting to 76.7 billion yuan RMB (US$11.8 billion), while physical bookstores experienced a plunge of -33.8 percent.

Indeed, the Chinese digital retail channels, while landing in positive rather than negative territory, did see their growth rate struggle, which in fact does not follow the pattern seen in some world markets in which digital retail surged under lockdown pressures on print.

. . . .

One early observation during 2020 from OpenBook was that the “super-size” bookstores in the sprawling Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities of China were experiencing the most daunting downturns in business under pandemic pressure.

. . . .

And in terms of what was being read, the normally robust self-help nonfiction category was seen to suffer most heavily, with a 33.2-percent dive in sales, year-over-year.

While children’s books and school study books saw positive growth, engineering and technology, computer science, medical, economics and management, education, agriculture, and natural sciences went into negative territory in 2020.

Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives

From Public Books:

We begin, as usual, with a dead body. In April 2020 an 84-year-old Swedish woman died in the happily unsuspicious circumstances of old age. Her name was Maj Sjöwall. But to readers of a certain dark bent, she was “the godmother of Nordic noir,” beloved for her creation of a new kind of detective novel. With her partner Per Wahlöö (who died in 1975), Sjöwall wrote the 10-volume Martin Beck series: a set of novels, published between 1965 and 1975, that attempted to map the whole of Swedish society through the ostensibly conservative form of the police procedural.

These were crime novels that dared to be boring. The protagonist Martin Beck—unlike the cynical demigod detectives of American hard-boiled noir—suffered from constant colds, worked on a team rather than alone, and spent most of his time on the job combing through stacks of paper. Patiently realist and sociologically astute, the Martin Beck books presented crime as emanating not from individual pathology but from rips in Sweden’s tightly stitched social fabric. Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s Beck series laid the foundations for one of contemporary literature’s most dominant popular forms: the Scandinavian crime novel.

The Martin Beck books were thoughtful works of art disguised as mass entertainment. In the novels, political critique drew warmth from lovable characters; passages of austere description heightened suspense. This marriage of the realistic and the thrilling, the political and the popular, turns out to have been a fragile achievement. Much has changed since Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s idealistic beginnings. The Scandinavian crime novel has all but abandoned the artistic and political aspirations that once served as the genre’s bedrock.

When “Nordic noir” exploded onto the global literary scene around the time of the financial crisis, the genre did so not in the mode of Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s realism but in a new key of ultraviolence. In the atmosphere of ambient unrest that accompanied the plunging markets, an inked-up, chain-smoking hacker named Lisbeth Salander burst into world literature, her face piercings glinting. Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2008) inaugurated a hunger among readers for tales featuring torture chambers, comeuppance against rapists, and snowy landscapes drenched in gore. Publishers, too, smelled blood. A wave of translations ensued, primarily from Sweden but quickly encompassing writers from Norway, Denmark, and (less so) Iceland and Finland.

. . . .

The time has come to ask what lies ahead for Scandinavian noir, and whether Sjöwall’s passing marks the end of an era. Since its origins in the 1960s, the genre’s visibility and violence have increased. Yet its excellence has faded, and its commercial success seems to be falling off. No great artistic practitioner of Nordic noir has emerged since Henning Mankell, whose 1990s-era series following the moody, introspective policeman Kurt Wallander offers both intelligent rumination on Swedish national identity and a complex portrait of the protagonist’s troubled interior. As for sales, Larsson has come to look like an anomalously titanic figure, with more than 100 million copies of his Salander books sold worldwide. Jo Nesbø, the most successful living author in this genre, has by comparison sold about 40 million copies across more than a dozen novels—spectacular numbers on the order of Mankell, but trending downward; Nesbø’s latest installment, Knife (2019), has sold just over 30,000 print copies in the United States since coming out a year and a half ago.

A mystery of our own, then. Is the Scandinavian crime novel alive and well, at large in some modest disguise—flinging chum and straining at the ropes on a fishing vessel beyond the fjords? Or is it lying dead, tongue swollen, behind a locked door? And if the latter: Who killed Nordic noir?

Link to the rest at Public Books