Readuxology

Two new and exciting announcements from your favourite publisher of teeny books, Readux:

Series Five will be on sale from March 2, with four teeny books all about urban voids in Paris and Berlin. They all look fascinating but the one I know best is the one I translated and can recommend most wholeheartedly, Annett Gröschner's City Spaces. I'm really pleased that a taste of her work will soon be available in English. There'll be a launch event in early March – watch this space.

And they're also running their writing competition again, this time with no age limit. Hooray for New German Fiction! You just have to write in German and not have previously published anything; in other words, you have to be a new writer of German fiction. The winners get their teeny book published in e-book format and in English translation.

New Readux Series/Arthur Eloesser

Readux Books have announced their new series of teeny tiny literary treats. The four titles this time are Cities and City People: Berlin 1919 by Arthur Eloesser, trans. Isabel Cole, essays documenting the city on the cusp of change; Berlin Triptych by David Wagner, trans. Katy Derbyshire (that's me), more recent pieces on change in Berlin; Where the Hollyhocks Come From by Amanda Svensson, trans. Saskia Vogel, a coming-of-age story from Sweden; and Hong Kong Buffet by Brittani Sonnenberg – Americana and sweet-and-sour pork in many voices.

Lisa Schweizer designed the beautifully textured covers, and there'll be a launch party featuring all the (living) writers at the Vagabund Brauerei on 2 July. That's correct, Readux are organizing a piss-up at a brewery. Books are available to pre-order now and will be delivered from 20 June.

For a special advance treat, you can read one of Isabel's Eloesser translations at B O D Y magazine.

Things My Friends and I Are Doing, Part I

Can you read that? It's the invitation to the launch of Readux series 2. The event will be in Berlin on 19 March. There'll be free vodka.

Readux Announces New German Fiction Competition

Amanda DeMarco has announced an exciting new opportunity for German writers aged 30 and under – a competition with publication in German literary magazine Edit as a prize, and also publication in book form in English translation by Readux. And €500. And subscriptions to Edit and Readux. And events in Berlin and Leipzig.

It really is quite extraordinary.

Books, Covers, Posters

The world is full of so much stuff! Posters of book covers. You can get posters of book covers! In the UK, some people called the Literary Gift Company do a range of posters made of original cover art from novels and plays. In case you want to ruin your eyes with that Bell Jar cover, for example. Then there are some people called Standard Designs, who sell totally groovy posters of album track listings made out of manipulated paperback spines. My favourite is this Björk one. And speaking of albums, someone I know now sells truly fabulous notebooks made out of recycled vinyl records, called Phonoboy.

But the reason I'm telling you this is that if you're in Germany, you can now order the covers of the teeny-tiny books from Readux's first series, only as A1-size posters! Beautiful cover artwork by André Gottschalk to hang on your very own wall. You're welcome.

Berlin Book Issue

The December issue of Exberliner magazine ("Berlin in English since 2002") is about books, although it doesn't include any reviews. There is a feature on "publishing heroes" though, profiling the literary agent Karin Graf, bookseller Frithjof Klepp, me, e-publisher Nikola Richter, nano-publisher Amanda DeMarco and literary connector Sharmaine Lovegrove. I would like an embroidery of the phrase "publishing hero" to hang on my kitchen wall.

The magazine is available from newsagents and bookshops in Berlin.

Berlin Translation Events

Lots and lots of things are happening in Berlin right now, just to make you envious instead of me, for a change. Starting tomorrow with Adam Thirlwell at the Berliner Ensemble with Cees Nooteboom, talking about Thirlwell's big thick book Miss Herbert, which is out in German now. It's about novels and translation and the strange paths between the two, and I hope to learn how to pronounce Cees Nooteboom's name. If you can't catch that you have another chance for added Adam Thirlwell admiration at the Dialogue Literary Lounge on Wednesday - make sure you rsvp.

Then on Friday it's Tatwort - die Übersetziade. It's the same as Translation Idol only the other way around - at Privatwirtschaft, Immanuelkirchstraße 21 in Prenzlauer Berg. Featuring poet Donna Stonecipher.

Next week, there are two more thrilling things for translation fans: on Tuesday (the best night of the week to go out, in my opinion) the long-awaited annual no man's land reading! Featuring translator Donna Stonecipher...

with Liane Dirks, Steffen Popp and Tom Schulz
The bilingual launch of no man's land Issue # 8 features authors Liane Dirks, Steffen Popp and Tom Schulz with their translators Laura Radosh, Bradley Schmidt and Donna Stonecipher.
Liane Dirks will read from her acclaimed novel Krystyna about the unlikely romance between a Holocaust survivor and the son of a Nazi filmmaker. Experimental poets Steffen Popp and Tom Schulz are central figures in the young Berlin literary scene, and their widely divergent approaches offer a sense of its exhilarating diversity.
Issue # 8 will appear early December at www.no-mans-land.org, with fiction by Jörg Bernig, Mirko Bonné, Michael Buselmeier, Astrid Dehe & Achim Engstler, Liane Dirks, Franz Fühmann, Margarita Iov, Francis Nenik, Christoph Ransmayr, Ralf Rothmann and Carmen Stephan, and poetry by Helwig Brunner, Martin Jankowski, Steffen Popp, Utz Rachowski, Tom Schulz and Volker Sielaff.
As usual, drinks will be available from the Saint Georges bar, Christmas cookies are in the offing, and we hope you'll linger to chat and celebrate with us after the reading!

December 3, 2013
8 p.m.
Saint Georges Bookshop
Wörther Str. 27
Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg

And on Thursday it's Fiction Canteen number two!!

The Fiction Canteen is a series of networking events, readings and discussions that takes place on a sporadic basis at the alte Kantine Wedding. On 5 December at 20.00, the next Fiction Canteen event invites authors, translators and everyone interested in the discussion to take part in an informal discussion in English and German on the subject of:
–types of payment model for authors and translators in the era of digital publishing, and their pros and cons
–working for Amazon as an author and translator: the possible pitfalls
–Amazon seen from an epublishing perspective
–alternative sources of financing for events, books, readings such as crowdfunding.
On the panel will be:
Volker Oppmann, founder of the platform  LOG.OS and publisher at Onkel and Onkel in Berlin.
Nikola Richter, founder of mikrotext, a digital publisher specialising in short digital texts.
Amanda De Marco, founder of Readux, a publisher of (mostly) translated literature based in Berlin and a contributing editor for Publishing Perspectives.
Zoe Beck, thriller writer, (www.zoebeck.net) and co-founder of CulturBooks, (www.culturbooks.de/), an ebook publisher of both original works and translations.
Nerys Hudson, former bookseller and project coordinator at Dialogue Books (www.dialoguebooks.org), an online space for literature, specialising in connecting stories and readers.
We are looking forward to a lively discussion. If there are any questions you’d like to raise in particular, please forward your questions to: contact (@) transfiction.eu. Equally, if you are keen on suggesting an event for the Fiction Canteen in the future, drop us a line. Thanks!

I know you're bursting with either envy or excitement. You see, all that hype about Berlin and it's even true.

Readux Launched

On Thursday we launched the good ship Readux Books. The ceremony involved some rather good wine, a lot of people in a smallish space, and readings. Saskia Vogel read from her translation of Fantasy and spoke to her Swedish translatee Malte Persson. The story, he told us, was his attempt to come up with a new hit genre between Scandicrime and Fantasy, because everyone's so tired of all that crime now. But rather than writing a whole novel, he kind of parceled a treatment of a novel up in a short story about an artist who meets all these strange fantasy people. I think. It sounded rather odd, in a good way. Apparently he was inspired by Borges, and apparently a lot of Swedish writers are. He told us he's not only tired of crime writing, but also of Swedish writing in which middle-class people sit around tables and nothing much happens. Luckily, his story was a self-fulfilling prophecy and fantasy now really is the next big thing in Sweden. You heard it here first.

Then Alistair Noon and I read from Francis Nenik's The Marvel of Biographical Bookkeeping. Alistair is a British poet - currently on a mini-tour of English cities beginning with the letter L. I like his poems a lot. He takes himself just seriously enough but is happy to play games with his work. I asked him to read with me because he's an excellent reader and I was aware he's quite interested in one of the two poets the book is about. Anyway, we just read from the book because it's quite a remarkable thing.

Then there was some standing around drinking, during which people bought a number of books. Then I went home and plunged into the apparently obligatory 24-hour depression that follows every public appearance I make. I wish I knew how to stop that happening but I fear it's one of those chemical reactions in the brain that you can't do anything about. Anyway, official apologies to all the people I bombarded with self-obsessed crap while on adrenaline at the event and to all the others I bombarded with either accusatory or apologetic emails while on my adrenaline comedown yesterday. Amanda DeMarco calls this "womanpologizing" - analogue to mansplaining - but it makes me feel better so I won't apologize for apologizing for apologizing.

SuKuLTuR and the book vending machine

The SuKuLTuR Years by Marc Degens (trans. Tess Lewis) tells the true story of the rise of a publishing empire. From a chapbook about a ganglion cyst to vending machine industry trade fairs to innovation awards, SuKuLTuR (yes, that is quite hard to type) has conquered the market for very small books in snack vending machines, especially in Berlin.

The publishing house puts out a delightful list of mainly contemporary German writing - poetry and prose by writers you've never heard of and a few you have (my favourite being David Wagner), either 16 or 24 pages long, called Schöner Lesen. The English translation is no. 125, soon to be followed by a couple of books in Spanish. If you're in Berlin, you've probably noticed the bright yellow books, inspired by those small-format Reclam bargain paperbacks, alongside the peanuts and waffles in vending machines on station platforms. Or if you're on Sylt you may have noted they have a whole machine to themselves. There's also a vending machine entirely for paperbacks, including SuKuLTuR's, somewhere in the caverns of Alexanderplatz station. I'd like to encourage anyone learning German to insert the €1 in the slit, because the books offer good quality writing and I almost guarantee you'll get them finished. Or buy the e-books.

If you're in Hamburg, you could look out for the Hamburger Automatenverlag, a newish venture selling small books, mainly non-fiction I believe, in refurbished cigarette vending machines. At €4 a pop, they're cheaper than fags but still make you look cool.

I looked into the history of selling books in vending machines, and found the Penguincubator - a machine apparently invented by Allen Lane to sell Penguin's paperbacks in unusual locations at some point after 1934. But I also found the Reclam Buchautomat, a vending machine for those German classics in affordable editions originally published out of Leipzig. The first one was set up in 1912 and contained about 80 different books, although only 12 were displayed at any one time. By 1917 there were 2000 of these machines around Germany, which stayed in operation until about 1940.

I love the whole thing, especially the design of the machines (click the various links for pictures). And I like the fact that these small books adapt so perfectly to electronic formats. Of course, if you like your teeny books in English, you can now get them from Readux. Come to the launch tomorrow! I have a rather many copies of The SuKuLTuR Years to get rid of.

Making of... The Marvel of Biographical Bookkeeping

I mentioned I'd been thinking of ways to write about my own translations without just banging on about how fab they are. So I thought I'd try out something like a translator's note, only separate from the book itself. In this case, anything I write has to be separate from the book itself, because The Marvel of Biographical Bookkeeping is a very small book. Here's how it came about.

I first heard about Francis Nenik's essay "Vom Wunder der doppelten Biografieführung" in March 2012. It was at an event that called itself an award ceremony for Edit magazine's essay prize. I'd spoken to one of the magazine's editors in October 2011, at a translation workshop in Leipzig. He was very keen on American essays and felt that the Germans weren't very good at essay-writing. I wasn't so sure but I wasn't aware of many German essay-writers either. Anyway, by that point Edit had launched their essay competition and it turned out they were fairly swamped with entries, so everyone was happy. Back to the event: it was rather late at night at the Leipzig book fair, in one of the medieval cellars rooms of the Moritzbastei. And two of the competition's four judges were there, then-DuMont publisher Jo Lendle, whom I met there for the first time, and Michael Angele from the newspaper Freitag. But the other two judges weren't, so I can't remember who they were but they were both women. So after their rather long day, one of the judges made the rather tactless announcement that although he hadn't actually won because the other two judges thought his essay was too macho (I think that was the gist of it), Francis Nenik was their actual favourite. And his essay was printed in the Freitag shortly later. Nenik wasn't actually at the award ceremony, however, because he doesn't make public appearances, but his publisher accepted the second prize on his behalf. I'm told people suspected the publisher was actually Nenik, but he wasn't (the publishing house ed.cetera is very small but not quite that small).

Anyway, I read the essay and admired it hugely, and wrote about it here. And somehow or other Francis Nenik got my address, or in fact I think his publisher did because it turned out the two of us had met previously but I'd forgotten, and Francis asked me if I'd translate his essay. He'd pay. I said yes, I'd love to, and I did love doing it, and then Francis started submitting my translation to English literary magazines.

Meanwhile, my friend Amanda DeMarco was coming up with a plan to set up her own small publishing house. She and I met when we ran a reading group together, scouting out possible German titles for translation for And Other Stories. Amanda's idea was to publish very short books of fiction and essays, some translated, some with a link to Berlin, some specially commissioned original English writing. Thus, after months and months of advice-seeking and talking and planning and working, working, working, Readux Books was born. Amanda asked me whether I'd like to translate something for her. She'd pay. I said yes, I'd love to, and we started talking about what to choose. I sent her the German version of Francis's essay, but for some reason I didn't tell her I'd already translated it. And she'd heard about it but not read it, but when she did she liked it as much as I did, so she got in touch with Francis. And then Francis told her there was already a translation, by me, and Amanda must have thought I was crazy, but anyway everybody was happy and Francis got back the money he'd paid me for the translation from Amanda. I assume.

So what's it about? The first half of the book is an essay about the poets Nicholas Moore and Ivan Blatny, who lived in and around London during the 1950s and 60s and were both down on their luck. Moore simply went out of fashion, while Blatny went into a mental institution. And the bookkeeping marvel is that the essay is in two columns, because it turns out their lives were strangely parallel, if you look at them through Nenik's eyes. It was tricky to translate because the columns had to be more or less the same length, but Nicholas Moore has more letters in his name than Ivan Blatny so there's minutely more information about Blatny than there is about Moore, which meant that one or other side was always too long. Also because things written in German about England always require rather a lot of research to find the correct formulations, because if you get it wrong everyone will notice. But as it turned out, Nenik had done a lot of research of his own and provided me with a number of useful sources.

The second half arrived later. I shall quote from the author's note:

It was originally my intention to include a short prose piece about Ivan Blatny at this point. In the course of my research, however, in February 2011, I came across previously unknown material in the London Metropolitan Archives, to be precise an exchange of letters between Blatny and Nicholas Moore dating from 1962/63. As these documents have not been published to date and both poets are now widely forgotten or almost unknown, I would like to take this opportunity to reproduce the letters in full.

We could hardly turn them down, so the letters were squeezed into the tiny book.

In the meantime, Amanda and I had the rare privilege of actually meeting Francis Nenik in person, a year along the line at the Leipzig book fair in March. He was quite a remarkable person, and kindly agreed to be my guinea pig for the Going Dutch with German Writers blog. I do feel proud of the way Francis and Amanda and I have made this book happen.

I still adore this adventurous little piece of writing. Please buy it and read it for yourself - it comes out tomorrow. It costs $4.99 or €3.99 or a small number of pounds for the little 64-page print book, which is worth it. Or less for the e-book, which is also worth it. The beautiful cover was designed by André Gottschalk (as were the other three covers in this series). Amanda DeMarco being Amanda DeMarco (in other words, a woman with a huge amount of energy and passion and a strong sense of ethics), the book has my name on the cover. This is what it looks like:

There'll be a launch party for Readux Books in Berlin on 24 October. I think you should all come but I'm not sure whether you need an invitation or not.

That Very Exciting Thing: Readux!

The big day has come: the yummy new Readux website is live! Feast your eyes on the first four teeny books to go on sale in October. There's an original essay by Gideon Lewis-Krauss, whom I once accidentally called a nerd to his face. There's Swedish fiction from Malte Persson (trans. Saskia Vogel). And there are two classic 1929 pieces on Berlin by Franz Hessel (trans. Amanda DeMarco). Yes, he was indeed Stéphane's father but he was also a fabulous writer and flaneur.

Most exciting for me, as you might imagine, is my translation of Francis Nenik's The Marvel of Biographical Bookkeeping. It has been so very hard not to splurge this all over the internet, but now I can. Hooray! I absolutely adore this little book and I hope you will too. It's an award-winning piece of writing that will melt the hearts of all those who care about poets and also confuse you, I very much hope. I went out drinking with Francis Nenik in March, by the way.

Please join me in being very excited about this new venture to publish great writing in small packages, focusing on translation. 

(Full disclosure: Amanda DeMarco of Readux Books is sitting opposite me right now. But you should still go to the website and you should still buy all four books in October and also all the later books she publishes. I am biased but I do have good taste.)

Introducing Readux Books

My lovely friend Amanda DeMarco is an awe-inspiring person. Not only has she very recently introduced me to bourbon, she's also just announced she's launching a publishing house, Readux Books. Come October you'll be able to read the first four teeny books (small format, 32–64 pp.) either in beautiful print editions or electronically. And most of them will be translations! Including from German!

I'm very excited indeed about this. I actually know what most of the books will be but I don't think I'm supposed to tell you. What I'm sure I am allowed to say is that they're going to be fantastic and you'll be licking your literary lips at the very thought of them. I know I am.