Junot Diaz is good!

He is so good that he won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. If you have not read this book, you should.

Last Night at the Lobster

I am almost done with Last Night at the Lobster by Stewart O’Nan, but I have to review it now in case I don’t have time later.

This book surprised me with its force, not a smashing force that bowls you over, but an slow-moving force that refuses to budge under your own expectations. I expect that working at a Red Lobster is not exciting. O’Nan does not make this life exciting, but he gives it the depth that a casual diner would never think to give it. Manny, the manager of a Red Lobster, in his thirties, doing everyone else’s job and being positive about it, hardly seems like the stuff of literary novels. Nothing extraordinary happens to him or anyone else. It is a quiet story about admirable and not-so-admirable people. There is something in the way O’Nan tells it, in the credit he gives to each character for their actions, that makes you pause.

We’ve all worked jobs with managers like Manny, who have insisted on getting the details right, who take the time to manage their employees, and who constantly get let down by these employees and by the corporations they work for. Pathetic? Admirable? This book leads you to both conclusions. This short novel is well worth the read.

The Rapture of Junot Diaz

I finished The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao last night and laid in bed thinking about it for a long time. It was a true moment of literary rapture. These moments hit you suddenly and unexpectedly. You simply fall headfirst into and come out the other side still thinking about the characters. Oscar de Leon, the protagonist, is one for the record books. He is the kind of character that you will carry around with you in your head long after you read the last page. Now I am going out to read Drown, Junot Diaz’ fist novel.

Ror Wolf Review

Chad Post over at Three Percent has just posted my review of Two or Three Years Later, a wild short story collection by German author Ror Wolf. He links to a sample translation by Anthea Bell here.

In other German book news, Sasa Stanisic has just been awarded the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize a.k.a 15,000 euros (found via Liisas Litblog). This prize is awarded by the Robert Bosch Stiftung and honors authors writing in German whose native language is not German. Stanisic’s novel, How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, is coming out this spring with Grove Atlantic, and translated by none other than Anthea Bell. Publishers Weekly featured the book in a Januray article, New Fiction New Worlds. Stanisic will participate in this year’s PEN World Voices Festival.

Sleeper Hit of 2007

This season’s unexpected hit has to be The Rest is Just Noise by Alex Ross. By New York Times music critic, this book investigates tracks common sounds throughout twentieth century music and how different genres are related to one another. Despite the high level of musical analysis, Ross’s book is ultimately quite readable for music enthusiasts and average readers. This book is one of the NY Times “10 Best Books of 2007″ (egregious self-promotion) and number 8 on Amazon.com’s “Best of 2007″ list.

Preliminary investigation reveals that this book is already difficult to get. Two B&N locations in the NYC area are out of stock, and Amazon.com sold out, too. More copies will be available on December 20. Same for Borders. Books-a-Million is out of stock with no word on when they will get more. On Powells.com, only the audio version is available. Barnes & Noble seems to be the only place to get this book of the big online retailers. Good luck, intrepid shoppers!

Best Translations of 2007

Get ready to revise your holiday shopping lists. Books are good presents, and these are some good books. From Three Percent, here is an end-of-the-year list of the best translations:

• How I Became a Nun by Cesar Aira, translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews (New Directions)

• Amulet by Roberto Bolano, translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews (New Directions)

• The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano, translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer (FSG)

• Christ versus Arizona by Camilo Jose Cela, translated from the Spanish by Martin Sokolinsky (Dalkey Archive Press)

• Autonauts of the Cosmoroute by Julio Cortazar, translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean (Archipelago)

• Ravel by Jean Echenoz, translated from the French by Linda Coverdale (New Press)

• Guantanamo by Dorothea Dieckmann, translated from the German by Tim Mohr (Soft Skull)

• The Little Girl and the Cigarette by Benoit Duteurtre, translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell (Melville House)

• The Collected Poems: 1956-1998 by Zbigniew Herbert, translated from the Polish by Czeslaw Milosz, Peter Dale Scott, and Alissa Valles (Ecco)

• Today I Wrote Nothing by Daniil Kharms, translated from the Russian by Matvei Yankelevich (Overlook)

• Sunflower by Gyula Krudy, translated from the Hungarian by John Batki (New York Review Books)

• Montano’s Malady by Enrique Vila-Matas, translated from the Spanish by Jonathan Dunne (New Directions)

• The Flying Camel and the Golden Hump by Aharon Megged, translated from the Hebrew by Vivian Eden (Toby Press)

• In Her Absence by Antonio Munoz Molina, translated from the Spanish by Esther Allen (Other Press)

• Day In Day Out by Terezia Mora, translated from the German by Michael Henry Heim (HarperCollins)

• Lost Paradise by Cees Nooteboom, translated from the Dutch by Susan Massotty (Harcourt Inc.)

• The Unforeseen by Christian Oster, translated from the French by Adriana Hunter (Other Press)

• Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson, translated from the Norwegian by Anne Born (Graywolf Press)

• Ice by Vladimir Sorokin, translated from the Russian by Jamey Gambrell (New York Review Books)

• The Complete Poetry: A Bilingual Edition by Cesar Vallejo, translated from the Spanish by Clayton Eshleman (Univ. of California Press)

• The Assistant by Robert Walser, translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky (New Directions)

• I Have the Right to Destroy Myself by Young-ha Kim, translated from the Korean by Chi-Young Kim (Harcourt Inc.)

Last Five Books

Inspired by this post, Literary Rapture will consider the following hypothetical question: If you could only read five books for the rest of your life, which three books would you choose?

1) Moby Dick by Herman Melville. Aside from the ridiculously high page count and the large amount of content that goes along with that, Moby Dick explores the depths of human emotion, hope, and despair like no other book I’ve read. The book also dabbles in astronomy, anatomy, biology, history, religion, and sociology, among others. This book offers an outstanding page-value ratio.

2) Die Blechtrommel by Guenter Grass. This is the one German masterpiece that I want to read in the original language. The challenge here would be two-fold. The book is complicated in general, so even a translation is tough to understand. On top of that, I would have to master the German language. It presents a large and interesting enough challenge to last the rest of my life.

3) The largest German-English Dictionary I could find. See above.

4) Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. I fell in love with this book years ago and the shine never wears off. Woolf is able to extract the most poignant emotions and connections out of a single ordinary moment, and that never ceases to amaze me.

5) The BFG by Roald Dahl. Sometimes you need a little silliness in your life. Snozzcumbers and whizpoppers are just the ticket. And who doesn’t like the idea that someone out there is making sure you don’t have nightmares?

Mystery list

ZDF Television (German public television) and Bild am Sonntag magazine have allegedly created a list of the books most stolen from the 15 largest German publishers during the Frankfurt Book Fair, as reported by ABC News, Reuters, and the New York Post. However, extensive Google research has turned up no such list. So I guess we don’t actually get to see which books were stolen the most. This tantilizing tidbit has me on pins and needles. If anyone has this list, I want to see it!

The English-language reports say that among the top stolen books was the German version of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Instead of getting upset that their books are being stolen by sticky-fingered fair-goers, the German publishers rely on this as an indication of which books will become best-sellers. Among the other books mentioned as best-seller potentials were German Book Prize winner Julia Franck’s Die Mittagsfrau and Dan Brown’s Diabolus.