I haven't been posting much have I? But there's a good reason, honest. It's Oxygen Books. It was all started off by a posting on the British Council's sadly rather abandoned Literary Translation website. What Oxygen do is make travel books about cities, calling the series city-lit - and featuring "the cream of fiction and non-fiction, literary and popular, contemporary and classic, including journalism and blogs, with a big emphasis on translated writing." And they're doing one about Berlin. And they want people to send them suggestions and translations.
So. You can imagine I've been wallowing in Berlin literature ever since I read that. And what fun it is too, indulging one of my favourite pleasures - not just German books but books set in Berlin. Two of my favourite things rolled into one. Maybe I can find a passage somewhere in a German book set in Berlin where people eat loads and loads of cake and wash it down with coke zero. I think I'd probably die on the spot.
If anyone has any tips of their own, do contact the people at Oxygen Books (see the second link above for details). They not only have very good taste, they're also very friendly. And just think of the fun we'll all have when the book comes out!
4 comments:
I can't imagine why the BC abandoned that site- it was rather good wasn't it.
Book about Berlin? Surely Richard Zimler, The Seventh Gate? - its even got a rather nice map of the city at the start. OK, its not a translation, but its infused with the city from start to finish.
Hi Tom,
I'm not sure it was the BC that abandoned it directly, maybe more the readership. But the Booktrust Translated Fiction site is a more than worthy ersatz.
I didn't know Richard Zimler but it looks just right, thanks!
I've asked them to include Phillip Kerr's Berlin Noir trilogy.
Hooray! I just bought the follow-up, A Quiet Flame.
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