 |
|
Hi—
It seems a bit weird to be talking about a fall book (a November book, in fact!) in the middle of summer (but hey, after the All-Star Game, it might as well be Labor Day), but we recently launched a special blog to celebrate the forthcoming release of The Wall in My Head: Words and Images from the Fall of the Iron Curtain. This is a Words Without Borders anthology that marks the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall (November 9, 1989).
By itself, it's a stunning book with an amazing mix of authors (the complete table of contents can be found here, as Keith Gessen states in his intro:
This is a fascinating and useful book. There are some old masters working at the top of their form here, and you can spot them from approximately the first sentence, but there are also some writers who are young and unheard of outside the cities where they live. The collection is full of curious cross-border exchanges: Wladimir Kaminer is a Russian-born writer living in Germany, writing a story in German (but in the spirit of Victor Pelevin) about a fake Paris built in Kazakhstan by the Soviets; Cărtărescu is a Romanian who in "Nabokov in Brasov" has written a story that reminds me of nothing so much as Milan Kundera's great first novel, The Joke, about the ways in which sex and memory are more powerful than Communism (and anti-Communism)—though not at all in the way that one would like. This collection has Poles traveling to Vienna, Georgians to Moscow, East Berliners to West Berlin, capturing one of the essential novelties of the post-Soviet period: The sudden access to everywhere else, including the East. For a few years there it seemed like the entire continent was in motion, back and forth, and not just because they had a meeting at the European Parliament in Brussels—or, later, at the International Tribunal for War Crimes in The Hague.
And in addition to these pieces, there are dozens and dozens of interesting images in this collection: photos from people like Brian Rose, images of various government documents, pictures from the fall of the wall.
This is a unique Open Letter project, and a fantastic opportunity to work together with Words Without Borders—both on the book itself and the aforementioned blog. The blog just launched last week, so there are only a few pieces up there right now (including a great one from Oana Sanziana Marian about meeting the Romanian author Dan Sociu), but this will be expanding greatly over the next couple months and will include a "on this day in 1989" feature, excerpts from the book, some of the images we couldn't use, and other insightful pieces from journalists around the world.
So please do check it out, and if you want to pre-order The Wall in My Head, you can do so by clicking here.
*
Usually these newsletters only have one item, but as a special bonus, I want to draw your attention to this list of recommended books in translation that we posted on Three Percent today. This is a list of titles that the panelists for the Best Translated Book Award have recommended to each other. Think of it as a list of "titles in the running" for the Best Translated Book longlist . . .
Best,
Chad
|
|
|
