Hosts Daniel Medin and Scott Esposito return in the new year enthralled by the “absolutely insane” game of literary telephone in the latest issue of McSweeney’s, in which texts are translated in and out of English and by, among others, J.M. Coetzee, Enrique Vila-Matas, and Lydia Davis. They look forward to games of a slightly different nature in several forthcoming Oulipian works: the 65th anniversary edition of Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style; Georges Perec’s La Boutique Obscure, the dream journal that inspired much of his fiction; and Scott Esposito’s own The End of Oulipo?, a critical examination of the movement co-written with Lauren Elkin. Pierre Michon’s The Eleven promises to be one of the author’s best since his widely-respected Small Lives; Yasutaka Tsutsui’s Paprika is story of clinical dream-invaders from one of Japan’s premier science fiction writers. Daniel Medin also announces the launch of the eighteenth volume in The Cahiers Series, Elfriede Jelinek’s Her Not All Her, next month at the Goethe-Institut in Paris. Daniel Medin then interviews Nick Barley, the director of the Edinburgh International Book Festival, the largest and perhaps best-known literary festival in the world. He gives a lively account of Edinburgh’s literary heritage and the influence it still exerts on the atmosphere of the festival, and testifies to the continuing importance of such festivals for both authors and readers.

We're proud to present audio of renowned author, translator, and MacArthur "Genuis" Lydia Davis, who discussed her acclaimed new translation of Madame Bovary last week as part of the Center's Two Voices events series in San Francisco.

Whereas so many writers seem to fall neatly into categories, Davis's career has more often than not defied categorization . . .

Compared to Roberto Bolaño and the great Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard, Horacio Castellanos Moya has attracted a devoted following in English with his first translated novel, Senselessness, about an embattled, displaced journalist charged with editing a 1,100-page report on the military’s massacre of Guatemala’s indigenous people. In this Two Voices event audio, hear translator Katherine Silver explain how this testimony, recounted in the broken Spanish of the Cakchiquel people, “infects” the narrators own colonial Spanish. She further explains how both languages proceed to subversively “infect” her own English translation