Three Percent Podcast

This week, Chad W. Post and Kaija Straumanis talk with Philip Graham--a co-founder and current nonfiction editor of Ninth Letter, author of several books, including The Moon, Come to Earth: Dispatches from Lisbon about Portuguese culture and literature, specifically the works of Gonçalo Tavares, whose book The Neighborhood is coming out this month with Philip's introduction. (Which will appear here on Three Percent in the near future.)

There's a lot of references included in the podcast this week, the main ones being to Sintra, an amazing town just outside of Lisbon that was once the playground of the aristocracy. It's LOADED with castles and palaces and other intriguing estates. 

This week's podcast features special guest Kaija Straumanis to help preview the upcoming American Literary Translators Conference. Every fall, approx. 350 translators get together for three days of panels, discussions, readings, movies, and drinking. (Oh, and mechanical bull riding. Unless your name is Scott Esposito.) 

This week's podcast features freelance book critic Jacob Silverman, who stirred up a lot of discussion last month when Slate published his piece, "Against Enthusiasm" about "the epidemic of niceness in online book culture." Basically, Jacob argued that online book culture has lead away from legit discussion to a series of endorsements and "+1s." Shortly after he wrote this, William Giraldi trashed Alex Ohlin's recent publications, setting off another Twitter firestorm. And of course, the day we recorded this, Giraldi published a long piece in The Daily Beast explaining his beliefs about book criticism. Anyway, this week we talk about all of that . . . 

This week's podcast--the last before Tom goes off to visit the good people of Carolina--is a bit of a surprise. Tom told me he had a topic, but wanted to spring it on me and get my unprepared reaction. So, to share in the spirit of surprises, I'm not going to say anything about what we talked about, except to mention that it wasn't about baseball or Arsenal's post-RVP lack of firepower. It does involve Canadians, though. And the New York Times Book Review. Enjoy!

I'm just back from family vacation, so this week we decided to take things easy and talk about The Dark Knight Rises (which we sort of spoil for anyone who either hasn't seen it, or thinks it's great), the Olympics, books we've read recently, and J. K. Rowling and her misguided attempt to prevent piracy of her new book.

This week, Will Evans joins us to talk about contemporary Russian literature (READ THIS BOOK) and the Read Russia initiative at this year's BEA. (Sidenote: click on that link just to see the section at the bottom left corner where you can share the page via "Socialist Media." Seriously.) We talk about Zakhar Prilepin, Mikhail Shishkin, Dmitry Danilov (who looks a bit like Ignatius J. Reilly, see below), and Oleg Kashin. We also talk a bit about Will's plan to start a new publishing company in Dallas that's focused on literature in translation . . .

This week's podcast (which was actually recorded weeks ago) features Ryan Chapman of The Penguin Press, who came on with us to discuss the fun marketing campaign Penguin put on to celebrate the release of the ebook versions of all of Thomas Pynchon's books. As usual the conversation swerves from that to discussing American literature in general, the Euro Cup (SPAIN!) and sundry odds and ends, such as making up blurbs for catalogs . . .

In this week's podcast, Tom and I talk about BookExpo America and its parties, in particular the rocking one that took place at the New Directions offices. I also rant (a bit) about why I didn't get to go to Cape Town to present my speech, "The Long Term Is the Only Race Worth Winning." There's also a bit of baseball talk related to a bet that the two of us made, and we throw out ideas for a few future podcasts.

In this week's podcast, Tom and I talk about two related subjects: a New Yorker article about the translation of the first line of Camus' The Stranger, and the PEN World Voices panel about "Reviewing Translations." There are also some digressions, mostly involving me apologizing for all sorts of things (offending people, swearing, being silly, etc.), and baseball. Naturally.

This week's podcast is a special Eurovision edition featuring resident Eurovision expert, Kaija Straumanis. We go through a bunch of the videos/songs participating in this year's competition and make fun of almost everything while also trying to come to understand why Eurovision is so compelling in its bizarreness. To follow along with our comments, I highly recommend watching the videos below as you listen to the podcast--it will greatly enhance your listening experience.