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‘The Garden of Seven Twilights’ by Miquel de Palol

…upon its publication in 1989, Garden of Seven Twilights was hailed as a masterpiece and showered with accolades—the Serra d’Or Critics prize, the National Prize for Catalan Literature, and many others. Critics blessed Palol with comparisons to Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, and Georges Perec, dubbing his work “the postmodern Decameron.” Garden especially earns this last epithet—it is a frame-narrative monolith, a monstrously pregnant matryoshka doll of nested stories, and a cerebral, ludic, and unapologetically pulpy affair. Read more

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French author Alice Zeniter has won the eye-popping €100,000 Dublin Literary Award

The Art of Losing by French novelist Alice Zeniter has won the prestigious Dublin Literary Award, a prize which comes with a handsome glass trophy and the world’s largest purse for a single novel published in English—a whopping €100,000. Read more

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Vincent Kling Wins the 2022 Wolff Translator’s Prize for ‘The Strudlhof Steps’

Vincent Kling has been announced as this year’s winner of the Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize for his NYRB Classics translation of Heimito von Doderer’s novel The Strudlhof Steps. Administered each spring by the Goethe-Institut, the award comes with a prize of $10,000. Read more

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“Jawbone” by Mónica Ojeda

Interweaving pop culture references and horror concepts drawn from Herman Melville, H. P. Lovecraft, and anonymous “creepypastas,” Jawbone is an ominous, multivocal novel that explores the terror inherent in the pure potentiality of adolescence and the fine line between desire and fear. Read more

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Jhumpa Lahiri developed her voice for new novel ‘Whereabouts’ by first writing it in Italian

Writing is delicate work, perhaps doubly so when you are writing in a language that is not your native tongue. But Jhumpa Lahiri is no ordinary writer, and her latest novel, “Whereabouts” – an English translation of a story she originally wrote and published in Italian – requires the sort of deft hand so few can properly wield without it becoming boring and unobservant. Read more

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The star Japanese crime novelist almost too good to translate

Imagine yourself, over a 30-year career, being considered a modern master of both crime and literary fiction. You’ve sold millions of copies, won every major mystery award, seen several books adapted for the screen and earned the sobriquet “Queen of Mysteries.” But here’s the catch: Your work has never been translated outside your home country. Read more

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