Yardenne Greenspan has an MFA in Fiction and Translation from Columbia University. In 2011 she received the American Literary Translators’ Association Fellowship. Her translation of Some Day by Shemi Zarhin (New Vessel Press, 2013), was chosen for World Literature Today’s 2013 list of notable translations. Her full-length translations also include Tel Aviv Noir, edited by…
Lydia Davis is the author of The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009), a translation of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (Viking Penguin, 2010), a chapbook entitled The Cows (Sarabande Press, 2011), and a poem entitled “Our Village” in Two American Scenes (New Directions, 2013). In 2013, she was awarded the Man Booker…
Osama Alomar was born in Damascus, Syria, in 1968. A well known writer of short stories, poetry, and essays in Arabic, Alomar published Fullblood Arabian (New Directions, 2014), his first volume in English translation. A Norwegian edition of Fullblood Arabian was published this year. His writing has been published in Coffin Factory, The Literary Review,…
Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation is getting a lot of attention. This retelling of Camus’ classic The Stranger imagines the eyes that stare down Meursault’s gun. The unnamed Arab from the original is given a name, Musa, and a brother, Harun, who tells the family’s story in a bar. Camus’ work is widely taught in…
One day eighteen years ago, a senior colleague at the small South Carolina college where I taught found more than $300,000 worth of stripped Penguin paperbacks at a local thrift shop. Other than the piece of each cover that had been sliced off, the books were in excellent condition, but the prison to which they…
The neutral corner is one of the two corners of the ring not used by boxers between rounds. It is also the corner a boxer must retreat to after he has floored his opponent. The Neutral Corner was also a bar in Saratoga Springs, New York, that I frequented when at Yaddo in the late…
Why is it that most American poets know very little about contemporary poetry from Britain and Ireland? A good number of them are published in Britain; they give readings at festivals in the UK and Ireland where they’re able to meet and hear the work of their British and Irish counterparts. Many of the poets…
In the fall of 2012, I received a call from my friend, the painter Pat de Groot. She told me that Neil Astley was visiting her in Provincetown with the artist and filmmaker, Pamela Robertson-Pearce, and she asked if I wanted to meet them. Of course I did. I had admired Bloodaxe books for years,…
original Gaelic poem with English translation by the author mo chasan a’ leughadh leabhar-cumha ruadh an fhoghair my feet reading the russet elegy-book of autumn eòlas nan dùil sgrìobhte ann an làmh rèimeil nan tùs ag innse dhomh gu’n d’fhiach an sgeul ath-aithris, nach eil anns an lobhadh ach bruadar knowledge of hopes written in…
Spring 1999 - Digital