Tag: world literature blogs

BookBlasts® | Top 5 Reads for Independent Minds | October 2018

Much excitement, relief and exhaustion here at BookBlast as the 10×10 tour of superb #indiepubs around the regions of England is drawing to a close, as we approach Liverpool and finally Manchester. You can buy tickets HERE

Our monthly round up features five eclectic reads coming to you from France, Italy, New York and the Indian Ocean @BelgraviaB @maclehosepress  @pushkinpress

Little by Edward Carey (Gallic/Aardvark Bureau) buy here

“In the same year that the five-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote his Minuet for Harpsichord, in the precise year when the British captured Pondicherry in India from the French, in the exact same year in which the melody for ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ was first published, in that very year, which is to say 1761, whilst in the city of Paris people at their salons told tales of beasts in castles and men with blue beards and beauties that would not wake and cats in boots and slippers made of glass and youngest children with tufts in their hair and daughters wrapped in donkey skin, and whilst in London people at their clubs discussed the coronation of King George III and Queen Charlotte, many miles away from all this activity, in a small village in Alsace, in the presence of a ruddy midwife, two village maids, and a terrified mother, was born a certain undersized baby.” Continue reading BookBlasts® | Top 5 Reads for Independent Minds | October 2018

Interview | Christina Pribićević-Zorić, translator

Meet Christina Pribićević-Zorić in person at the 10×10 Tour event, Waterstones, Nottingham 6.30 p.m. Thursday 27 SEPT. Theme: The End of the World? How the Balkans writes the Holocaust. Book focus: The House of Remembering and Forgetting by Filip David (Serbia) and Doppelgänger by Daša Drndić (Croatia). With Susan Curtis, a translator and founding director of Istros Books, chair, translator Christina Pribićević-Zorić and Georgia de Chamberet (currently translating The Disappearance of Josef Mengele for Verso Books).

Tell us a little bit about yourself
I am from New York. My mother was Irish and my father was from the former Yugoslavia so I had a smattering of Serbo-Croatian when I went to Belgrade on a post-graduate scholarship. I went for a year and stayed for over twenty. Apart from translation, I have worked as a broadcaster and headed the Conference and Language Services Section at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague. I now live in London.
 Continue reading Interview | Christina Pribićević-Zorić, translator

Interview | Yan Ge | Author of the Week

Where were you born, and where did you grow up?
I was born in a small town outside of Chengdu, a major city in the southwest of China. And I grew up there. As a teenager, all I wanted was to get out of this place, this muddy, tiny, sleepy town. Years later, when I actually left and lived in Ireland, all I wanted is to go back and to live in the small town where I spent my adolescence. That small town has been lost. It has changed so much. There have been lots of constructions, new buildings, the industrial and high-tech parks and tones of immigrants. The government renamed it last year, making it a district of Chengdu city. My hometown is officially being archived in the history book — there’s no way I can go back now. So I write about it all the time in my stories.

What sorts of books were in your family home?
Both of my parents were Chinese teachers so we have a sizeable collection of Chinese classics, contemporary Chinese fiction, and translated books. I can’t remember I read The Journey to the West for how many times. And I cried a lot when I read Su Tong’s books as a teenager. My parents love Russian writers and I read Gogol and Gorky with them.

Continue reading Interview | Yan Ge | Author of the Week

Review | Larry Tremblay, The Orange Grove | Peirene Press

BookBlast®  reviews Peirene No. 23 The Orange Grove.

UNICEF estimates that child soldiers are currently employed in thirty conflicts around the world. How are they swept up into a life of violence and used as instruments of war? [1]

“Ahmed and Aziz found their grandparents in the ruins of their house. Their grandmother’s skull had been smashed in by a beam. Their grandfather was lying in his bedroom, his body ripped apart by the bomb that had come from the side of the mountain where every evening the sun disappeared.”

Continue reading Review | Larry Tremblay, The Orange Grove | Peirene Press

Interview | Lawrence Scott | Author of the Week

Lawrence Scott is a prize-winning Caribbean novelist and short-story writer from Trinidad & Tobago.

Where were you born, and where did you grow up?
I was born on Petit Morne Estate, a sugarcane estate in southern Trinidad which my father managed for the Usine Sainte Madeleine Sugar Company owned at one time by Tate & Lyle.  I went to primary school in the nearby town of San Fernando.  I went north into the mountains for my secondary school with the Benedictine monks of Mount Saint Benedict. Before leaving Trindad, I had been in a Junior Seminary from the age of 15. I left Trinidad at 19 to go to England to join the Benedictine Abbey at Prinknash in Gloucestershire.

What sorts of books were in your family home? Who were early formative influences?
My father read books like The Ascent of Everest by John Hunt. He had been educated in England at Shrewsbury Public School and was very attached to that story, especially as Hunt was himself from Shropshire.   My mother was educated by nuns in Port of Spain and was a pillar of the Catholic Church; however, she read Graham Greene and loved to discuss the controversies over his writing. She particularly loved Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter. She was aware of the fiction of the 1940’s and 1950’s  and a great storyteller herself.

Continue reading Interview | Lawrence Scott | Author of the Week

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