Nov 25 2018
The Washington Post reports on why translated literature is gaining ground in the USA:
In the two disharmonious decades of the 21st century, American society has grown less homogeneous and more interactive. Americans have expanded their engagement with other cultures. Smartphones and social media accompanied the war against terrorism, and the distance between Over Here and Over There shrank. Chad Post, the founder of Open Letter and the creator of the translation blog Three Percent (the name comes from an old statistic for the percentage of all literary books published in the United States in a given year that are translations), suggests that 9/11 sparked "sudden interest in foreign countries, and new awareness of the general connectedness of the world." But even if that interest and awareness began with the Middle East, it quickly spread to Central America, South America, China, Europe and Japan. The houses that sought out foreign titles were the advance guard of a quiet revolution in publishing, which has been attended by new academic programs, certificates and degrees that are equipping the next generation of translators to bring foreign literature to readers who find it "enticing," as Post puts it.
The Funeral Cryer by Wenyan Lu
Debut novelist Wenyan Lu brings us this witty yet profound story about one woman's midlife reawakening in contemporary rural China.
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