“Fisk will continue to teach us and haunt our reports even after this death.” This is a fitting in epitaph to a great journalist and a man of remarkable moral probity and courage.
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Why am I bothering you with this? Mainly because I would like to suggest an idea or perhaps even pose a question to you: is it not precisely the differences in others that attract us to them?
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If Corrado Alvaro is known to the English-speaking world, it is for his most famous novel, Gente in Aspromonte, which was translated into English as Revolt in Aspromonte (the part of Calabria he came from – the very toe of the Italian peninsula). This successful title published in 1930, and strangely one of Mussolini’s favourites – led to him being categorised as a “regionalist” author.
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Translation is pretty invisible, but not as invisible as editing. People are now more aware that the words in a translation are not the author’s ones.
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Today I want to examine briefly three books we’ve published which are very different but share one very important feature: they were by authors who were dead and had never been published in that particular way before.
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In this newsletter, I intend to promote my own novel, Cinico. Travels with a Good Professor at the Time of the Scottish Referendum, which was published in 2017.
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Cultural products – that, I suspect, is the proper term in the brave new world of the entrepreneurial that has reigned supreme for the last forty years – are profoundly different from one another in a way that other products aren’t.
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Readers of this newsletter are, I think, also interested in the process that brings a book to print. It will probably come as no surprise that it is a pretty haphazard affair. There are a great number of good books out there, and sadly some of them never get published. They are as nothing compared with the avalanche of less than good books. Hence it is not so easy to achieve the first and most crucial task: that of choosing the right novels. There are however things that can be ordered within the chaos of happenchance.
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I have never understood why people are surprised by the cultural achievements of small countries, given that small countries are just as much part of world culture as large countries, or possibly even more so as they are less likely than large countries to fall into the trap of cultural autarky
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Maxim Leo’s Red Love is, for me at least, one of those books you think you might like and, on reading, you love because it has opened up an understanding or further understanding of a reality and because it has integrity. The German Democratic Republic is usually one of those realities we cannot speak about without engaging our own ideological baggage, and often we speak about them with little or no knowledge.
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In 2009, I read The Swedish Book Review and came across the review of a novel concerning asylum-seekers drowning at sea.
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The news is that the number of independent bookshops went up last year, in 2018 by fifteen and in 2017 by one. That’s the good news, though the recovery is not spectacular. The bad news is that in 1995 there were 1,849 of them and in 2016 there were only 867. Is this “bottoming out” or the tanker slowly turning round and is the growth in the indies going to accelerate over the next decade back to previous levels – and beyond?
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